Now a deep silence reigned. Blanden examined the pieces of amber; the dealer looked at him with a keen glance, and once started back as if startled, when Blanden's features were illumined by a sharp flash of lightning. It seemed as if some sudden recollection had dawned within him. The keen glances with which from henceforth he regarded the other, however, bore no tokens of amity about them.
"You come from Russia?" the nobleman began his enquiries, while he weighed a large piece of amber in his hands.
"From Wilna, my Herr."
"But you are no Russian?"
"I am an Italian."
"I took you for one. I love the Italians! They are a gifted people! What a pity that many years of oppression keeps their noble fire in subjection, so that it only finds vent for itself in petty, malicious outbreaks, like the flames of their Solfatara! An Italian--and how do you come to Russia?"
"Business connections. A merchant remains there where he has most prospect of gain."
"Then the amber trade between these coasts and Russia is probably flourishing?"
"It depends," said the stranger, with a cunning smile, "whether a man succeeds in bringing his wares cheaply across the frontier. Besides, the peasants, who have farmed their royalty from Government, are not exactly reasonable with their amber, let them dig it out of the earth with spades, or rescue it from the sea-weed, or obtain it with dragnets from the sea."
"What reflections might it not awake," said Blanden to himself, and hardly noticing the others. "The forests of other days have sunk beneath the earth, and still offer their treasures to the living race--but what becomes of our sunken hopes? They have nothing, nothing more to give us! Ah! if any one could dream so deeply, so utterly deeply, he might hear the rustling of the trees in the submarine forests, and see sitting there the amber nymph in magnificent jewels of the deep, in those pale-yellow halls, and singing a song of the old splendours of the never-penetrated forests, into which the complaints of men have never yet taken refuge."