Lord! how we had flattered and praised and quoted him—the huge hard man whom, for some occult reason, we now stigmatized as “The Northern Barbarian.” He had ceased to dance when he commenced to reign—unlike Sire my Friend, who gyrated for the admiration of his Court—as he made his charger caracole for the approval of his Army. The Emperor who, unarmed and unattended by even an aide-de-camp, had quelled an insurrection among his Guards by giving the order to pile arms in that bellowing Minotaur voice of his, would have ridden over—not before—those soldiers who did not cheer.
He had no reason to be pleased with the Ruler of the Ottoman Empire—whose tottering throne he had bolstered in 1833 and again—in alliance with England and the two leading Powers of Germany—in 1840. A Firman issued by the Sultan, according to the Latin Church the Key of the great door of the Church at Bethlehem, and a Key to each of the doors of the Altar of the Sacred Manger—and bestowing upon France the permission to inlay on the floor of the Grotto of the Divine Nativity an arrogant Silver Star,—doubtless emblazoned with the Imperial Eagle—had kindled the Autocrat of all the Russias—in his anointed character as Supreme Head of the Orthodox Church—to flaming indignation. Nor had the diplomatic representative of Great Britain at Constantinople—by terming the resulting dispute “a wordy war of denominational trivialities”—cast else but oil upon the roaring flame.
Later, when Moslem troops under Omar Pasha were dispatched by the Sublime Porte—acting under advice from a certain suspected quarter—to operate against the Greek Christian rayahs of Montenegro—a pretty euphemism for the plundering and burning of farms and villages—the torture of men—the violation of women and the cutting of children’s throats—the Barbarian of the North dispatched a small installment of fifty thousand troops into the Danubian Principalities—picketed the shaggy horses of his Cavalry with their noses against the frontiers of Moldavia—ascertained that upon a certain date the foundries of Rostof and Taganrog would infallibly carry out their contract to deliver a mere trifle of nine hundred thousand iron projectiles of all sorts and sizes—and sat down to play the game.
With movings of Divisions and Brigades, and marchings and counter-marchings. With Imperial Inspections, Reviews, and sham fights on a scale as colossal as himself. With repetitions of that effect of the vast market-garden of perambulatory beds of the most brilliantly-hued flowers, when a hundred thousand troops of all arms were maneuvered at the Camp of Krasnoé Sélo. Replying to great Naval Demonstrations at Spithead and Queenstown, Havre, and Brest and Toulon, culminating in combined visits of the French and English fleets to Turkish waters, with ominous increase of activity at Cronstadt and Revel, and menacing, ominous movements of steam and sailing-squadrons in the Baltic and on the Black Sea.
LXXIV
The well-oiled machinery of his Secret Intelligence Department—that kept him informed of every movement not only of those Powers who were his enemies, but of those who might one day become so—had long ago placed on the Barbarian’s table, proofs that the grain, forage, and salted-provision merchants of the Levant were finding a customer upon a Brobdingnagian scale in Sire my Friend at the Tuileries. That the freightage, railway charges, and import-duties upon these had been reduced to a mere nothing by Imperial Decree, and that immense cargoes were daily shipped to Marseilles and Toulon, to be stored in huge Government magazines that were being built on all sides as though in preparation for war. A little later came the news that the salted-provision, forage, and grain-merchants of Roumelia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, Transylvania and Galicia were basking in the patronage of the same liberal buyer; whose granaries and storehouses had sprung up like mushrooms on the Turkish coasts of the Black Sea. As also depots of horses, cattle, timber and wagons; the contractors who had supplied these things being bound by Secret Contracts under divers penalties....
“Not to supply grain, stores, requisites, and material to Us,” said the autocrat, shrugging a gentle shrug of calm, suave indifference, and blowing his nose in his copious, characteristic way. “Does this Bonaparte suppose the resources of my Empire to be so small that it would be possible to cripple Me by taking these precautions? Really, he lacks intelligence—or is very badly informed.”
And as a Barbarian may smile, knowing All the Russias, Poland, the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the vast grain-producing area of the Caucasus his to draw upon—(even had his State magazines and the huge storehouses upon the coasts of Mingrelia and Guria not been bursting with flour, groats, biscuits, hay, and straw) the Tsar smiled, leaning back in the big battered, chipped, ragged-armed chair that he liked best, and chewing at the feather-end of a disreputable old quill pen.
He was closeted with Gortchakoff in the Imperial study in the Winter Palace. You saw it as a big plain room, full of heavy writing-tables and bureaux. Laden bookcases full of works on Drill, Tactics, and Fortification climbed to the scagliola ceiling-frieze, and between these were stands, supporting glass cases containing colored wax models of Cavalry and Infantrymen, stiff as life, and fully accoutered, whilst battle-paintings executed by native artists—wherein the Russian Forces were depicted in the act of conquering enemies of various nationalities amidst seas of carmine blood and clouds of flake-white smoke—hung on the walls above. In an adjoining room, furnished with soldierly simplicity, the ruler of seventy-four and odd millions of men slept on a narrow camp-bedstead, with no other covering than a single rug, and in winter his fur-lined cloak. And—perhaps because his huge hereditary dignities came to him through the tainted blood of scrofulous, insane, and degenerate Romanoffs—the innumerable handkerchiefs with which the despot stanched his constitutional catarrh were scattered, thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa, on the tables, chairs, and floor.
Gortchakoff, ex-Imperial aide-de-camp and Governor-General of Western Siberia, diversely represented by our Illustrated Papers—much to the confusion of Mrs. Geogehagan—as a mild, plump, spectacled, smiling personage, and a gaunt, grim, trap-jawed Fee-Fo-Fum—had, as newly-appointed General-in-Chief of the Southern Forces—been summoned to take leave of his master before setting out—as simply as a junker returning from furlough—per telega and by relays of post-horses, for the frontiers washed by the Pruth. Now, at the close of the Imperial utterance recorded, to which he had listened in a bolt-upright attitude of respectful attention, he coughed dryly; and pulling a document from a sheaf of tied and docketed papers, placed it before the Tsar, whose head—even as its owner sat in his chair—overtopped his own.