“He is not to be bought, Bátiushka,” was the answer.
“Absurd, Peter Michailowitch!” said the autocrat. “All men are to be bought. This one as well as the others.” He added, as a stray gleam of light from a wind-blown lamp in the great courtyard evoked no responsive twinkle from the Prince’s spectacle-glasses: “Unless you mean that he is dead?”
“Look, Sire, when there is light, at the signature to the later document,” said Gortchakoff. “It is the feeble scrawl of a dying man. This officer had undergone many hardships in the past three years—surveying and traveling alone—or with only a peasant to guide him—he knew the country from the Balkans to the Sea of Azov—he had the Danubian Principalities at his fingers’ ends—he was, as Bátiushka says, a man worth any price. But—the day after the last contract was signed he left Kustendje for the delta of the Dobrudja. He had made his way up there from Varna on foot—and he had the fever of the country upon him”—Gortchakoff shrugged—“but he did not stay for that. He pushed on into the Dobrudja, taking the road that goes by the Chain of Lakes—and then the wilderness opened and swallowed him. And—that is now three months ago, and he has not been spit up yet.”
“Akh!” said Nicholas, who was to lose thousands of men in the poisonous marshes, as on the waterless steppes of that same region. “But I should not make sure that he is dead, even now. Men who do not value life are difficult to kill. My Russian soldiers hold it cheap when it comes to a question of obeying the orders of their Emperor.... They will prove themselves in 1854 what they were in 1812. And though Austria desert me and Prussia play the knave, I have Three Allies,” boomed the great bull-voice through the chilly darkness. “Pestilence, and Hunger, and Cold—that never yet failed to serve a Russian Tsar. As for England—I tell you, Peter Michailowitch!—between Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and her Army Contractor”—it would appear that this remarkably well-informed Barbarian had even heard of Jowell—“she will yet climb her Calvary with her Cross upon her shoulders—we shall see her crucified between two thieves!” He rose, and said, clapping his General-in-Chief quite genially upon the shoulder: “This room is cold, and I have a deputation from the Peace Society of England waiting to address me. Come and listen to these Quakers—they seem very honest men!...”
He received the three representatives of the English Society of Friends courteously and kindly. He heard the Address with tolerance and patience. Somewhat after this fashion he replied:
“I do not desire War, but since England and France have sided with the enemies of Christianity; and, without warning to Russia have sent their fleets to Constantinople and thence into the Black Sea—to encourage the Turks and impede our battleships in the protection of our coasts—it would appear that both these Western Powers seek War. I will not attack—but I shall act in self-defense! Now, since I think you have not met my wife and daughter, will you come and be introduced to them? It will give them very great pleasure, you may be assured.”
LXXV
In August and September a marvelous comet flamed over the British Isles. There were great strikes in the Cotton Districts of the North, and haggard eyes of starving idlers, and hot and steaming faces of begrimed and furious rioters were lifted to the wonder at great open-air meetings; or from the crush that thronged the yards about the burning mills, and kept the engines back.
Livid sufferers, writhing in the deadly grip of Cholera in foul uncleanly tenements of provincial towns, or squalid garrets and reeking cellars of common lodging-houses in great sooty London, would raise themselves upon their beds of noisome rags—in some brief respite from hideous spasms—to stare at that strange menace through the broken skylight or the iron street-grating. But Mrs. Joshua Horrotian never lifted her head from her work. For little Josh and the baby Sally were both dead and buried, and their mother was stitching her fingers to the bone to pay for the mourning and the tiny double funeral; and never even glanced up, when Moggy Geogehagan—who in defiance of Barrack Rules was hanging half out of the window—bade her come and look at the quare ould kind of gazabo did be hangin’ up in the sky.
It was not the Blue Gripes—as the rank-and-file had learned to call it, out at Buenos Ayres and on Service in East India—it was not the Cholera that had left this mother’s arms empty and in her heart a vast and dreadful blank. It was something you called with a shudder and under your breath—“The Bad Throat”—an invisible, impalpable Something that rose up in the night beside the crowded cots in the damp, foul, insanitary, whitewashed sepulchers that were called Barracks—and gripped little children oftenest, yet sometimes grown men and women—in a strangling clutch so that—with awful suddenness—they died.