‘I was just wishing, almost wishing,’ she answered, ‘that the trusty Kossack were of the new doctrines, and would take advantage of the opportunity to make away with his barina. I am not sure that I would have called out; it would have saved one a great deal of sameness. When my chocolate comes to my bedside I always think of Pierre Loti’s childish protest, “Toujours se lever, toujours se coucher, et toujours manger de la soupe qui n’est pas bonne!” Our soup is good, perhaps. It is rather the appetite which is lacking.’
‘Your generation is born tired,’ said Melville. ‘ Mine was happier; it believed in the possibility of enjoyment—an illusion, no doubt, but one which cheers life considerably. Princess, I wish you would pardon me an indiscretion; you are always so merciful to me, you make me over-bold; but I have always so much wanted to know whether a story that I heard, of a winter’s journey of yours across Russia, was true. It was in the newspapers, but one never knows what is true there, and I was in India at the time.’
She smiled. ‘Oh! I know what you mean. Yes, it was true enough. That was nothing; nothing at all. I had all kinds of people to help me. There was no difficulty of any sort. It was amusing——’
‘It was a very heroic thing to do,’ said Melville gravely.
‘Not at all,’ she interrupted quickly. ‘There was no heroism about it. The Tzar was always very kind to me. I had every assistance, every comfort on my journey. You, imaginative being, have a picture instantly in your mind of me as enduring all the dangers of poor Elizabeth in the French classic; on the contrary, I slept nearly all the way, and read a novel the rest.’
‘All the same,’ said Melville, ‘no one but yourself will deny that it was a very noble thing to travel in November, the most hideous part of the year, through mud and snow, right across Russia, to have a few facts reach the Emperor in their true aspect, and then post to Tobolsk with his pardon, that a dying mother might know her son was free before she died——’
Nadine Napraxine shrugged her shoulders slightly, with a gesture of indifference.
‘It amused me. I had a fancy to see Siberia in winter. The pity was that Fedor Alexowitch Boganof was an ugly and uninteresting fellow—with plenty of brains, indeed, which brought his ruin, but quite ugly, rather misshapen, and blessed with five children. If the hero of my journey had only been a fine officer of cuirassiers, or a romantic-looking revolutionist, the story would have been delightful, but poor Boganof no one could turn into a jeune premier; not even the gossips of Petersburg. He was only a clever writer, with a mother and a wife who idolised him. The truth is, I had read his novel and liked it; that is why, when his people came to me, I did what I could. Anybody who knew the Tzar as well as I could have done as much. As for going to Siberia—well, I went myself because I have a profound distrust of Russian officials. Even an Imperial pardon has a knack of arriving too late when it is desirable that it should do so. It was certainly a disagreeable season of the year, but behind strong horses one does not mind that. Very soon Siberia will have lost its terrors and its romance; there will be a railway across the Urals, and all chance of the little excitements attendant on such a journey as mine will be over. When the Governor saw me actually in Tobolsk, he could not believe his eyes. If his beard had not been dyed, it would have turned white with the extremity of his amazement. I think he could have understood my taking the trouble if it had been for a Tchin; but for a mere scribbler of books, a mere teller of stories! I told him that Homer, and Ariosto, and Goethe, and ever so many others had been only tellers of stories too, but that produced no impression on him. He was compelled to let Boganof go, because the Tzar ordered him, but he could not see any valid reason why Boganof should not be left to rot away, brain downwards, under the ice.’
She laughed a little at the recollection of it all; it had been called an eccentric hair-brained thing at the time by all her world, but she had taken Boganof back with her in triumph, and had not left him until she had seen him seated by the stove of his own humble house in Odessa.