She laughed, and it was such an unpleasant laugh that I saw the goldsmith wipe the perspiration off his forehead. There were torture rooms in the Kremlin, and he knew it.
“If I may be permitted to return to my lodgings,” he said, “I will undertake to restore the miniature to your highness—to rectify the mistake.”
“You are under arrest,” she replied shortly, and stood looking at him much as I have seen a cat watch a mouse.
“Perhaps she will let me go,” I suggested in French.
“Will your highness allow my apprentice to go for the miniature?” Le Bastien asked, in a dignified tone.
She hesitated. I think she began to suspect me more than the grave, elderly goldsmith, but she was determined, and she did not believe in the story of the mistake. She took two short turns across the room, stopping once to look out of the window, and then she touched a bell on the table. Immediately my fat friend, the chamberlain, appeared, as if she had conjured him from the subterranean regions.
“Vasili Ivanovitch,” she said to him, “you will accompany this goldsmith,” she pointed at me, “back to his lodgings; you will wait there until he makes a search for a picture of me; you will bring him back, with or without the picture. You will not let him escape.”
“It is well, Sophia Alexeievna,” replied the chamberlain, bowing profoundly.
She turned a strangely malicious glance upon me. “You may go,” she said calmly.
I made my obeisance, but I could have laughed at the irony of fate. The miniature was in the keeping of the Princess Daria, and what in the world could I do with this fat old fool at our quarters? Verily, my falsehood seemed likely enough to stick in my throat and be the ruin both of Maître le Bastien and of me. I cast a look at him and saw that he was as pale as ashes, but I could give him no comfort,—there was none to give,—though I went out behind my portly friend, with thoughts of such a nature that, had he divined them, he would scarcely have walked in front of me, even on the Red Staircase.