"Steady, friend Louis!" said Prince Ivan in his ear, and passed his arm about his waist.
He began to fear lest he should have frightened his dupe too thoroughly.
"See how he loves her!" murmured the doctors of healing, still conferring with their heads together. "Who would have believed it possible?"
"Nay, he is only much afraid," said Alexis the Deacon, the Muscovite doctor; "and small blame to him, now that the Black Death has come to Courtland. In half an hour we shall hear the death-rattle!"
"Then there is no need of us staying," said more than one learned doctor, and they moved softly towards the door. But Ivan had possessed himself of the key, and even as the hand of the first was on the latchet bar the bolt was shot in his face. And the eyes of Alexis the Deacon glowed between his narrow red lids like sparks in tinder as he glanced at the whitening faces of the learned men of Courtland.
Without the door Ivan fixed Prince Louis with his will.
"Now," he said, speaking in low trenchant tones, "if this be indeed the Black Death (and it is like it), there is no safety for us here. We must get without the walls. In an hour there will be such a panic in the city as has not been for centuries. I offer you a way of escape. My Cossacks stand horsed and ready without. Let us go with them. But the Princess Margaret must come also!"
"She cannot—she cannot. I will not permit it. She may already be infected!" gasped Prince Louis.
"There is no infection till the crisis of the disease is passed," said Prince Ivan firmly. "We have had many plagues in Holy Russia, and know the symptoms."
("Indeed," he added to himself, "my physician, Alexis the Deacon, can produce them!")