“What do you mean?” asked Peter.
Croy lifted his shoulders.
“Oh, go on with your wars and your politics and your reforms,” he said cynically. “You are a strong man—but stronger is Holy Russia!”
Peter looked at him with a certain eagerness entirely devoid of anger; though he was so haughtily autocratic with his boyars he would take even insolence from these men whom he had put in the position of his masters; for a long while Croy and his like had represented European civilization to Peter.
But Mentchikoff resented on his master’s behalf this speech made so sharply by the German.
“The Czar holds the Russias in the palm of his hand,” he said haughtily.
“Oh, la, la!” cried the Duke.
Peter smiled grimly; he was thinking of the little chapel a few yards away, from the window of which his uncle had been hurled out on to the pikes of the soldiery below, and of his own boyhood of flight, and peril, and hiding; not far away in this same fierce fortress was the Red Staircase where Ivan the Terrible had stood to watch the cross-formed comet that had predicted his own ghastly end, that staircase where, one blood-stained June, Feodor Borisvitch, strangled by the sheltsi, had been flung down, this but in revenge for another murdered Czar; the history of his predecessors might indeed teach Peter that Holy Russia was not so easily governed or so rapidly subdued.
“The House of Romanoff has had its misfortunes but also its greatness,” he said simply.
“And yet may give a lesson to the impertinent Swede,” said Mentchikoff haughtily.