His Majesty passed—a tall, commanding figure in a white uniform covered with the stars, crosses and many-coloured ribbons of the various European orders. Beneath the thousand lights the bare shoulders of the beautiful women inclined profoundly.
Then again the loud chatter recommenced.
The Emperor’s presence, tall, erect, muscular, was indeed a regal one. He looked every inch a ruler and an autocrat as he advanced to the alcove, where the whole Court had risen to receive him, and with a quick gesture he gave the signal for dancing to commence.
I retreated to the wall, being in no humour to dance, and stood gazing at him. He seemed, indeed, a different person to that deep-eyed, earnest man in dark-blue serge who had sat chatting with me so affably six hours ago. He was in that hour a man, but now the centre of that gay patrician throng, he was ruler, the autocrat who by a stroke of the grey quill could banish to the mines or the oubliettes any of those of his subjects who bowed before him—sweep them out of existence as completely as though the grave had claimed them; for every exile lost his identity and became a mere number; his estate was administered as though he were dead, and apportioned, with the usual forfeiture to the State, among his heirs. So that it was impossible for an exile to be traced.
I thought of Madame Marya de Rosen and of poor little Luba. Ah! I wondered how many delicate women and handsome, intelligent men who had danced over that polished floor were now dragging out their weary lives in those squalid, filthy Yakut yaurtas of Eastern Siberia. How many, alas! had, in innocence, fallen victims to that corrupt bureaucracy which always concealed the truth from His Majesty.
To the camarilla, a dozen or so men who were present there in brilliant uniforms and wearing the Cross of St. Andrew, with the pale-blue ribbon, the highest Order of the Empire, bestowed upon them for their “fidelity,” that present reign of terror was solely due. It was to the interests of those men that the Emperor should be perpetually terrorised. Half those so-called conspiracies were the work of the Secret Police themselves and their agents-provocateurs; and hundreds of innocent persons were being spirited away without trial to the frozen wastes of Northern and Eastern Siberia, upon no other charge than the trivial one that they were “dangerous” persons!
Madame de Rosen and her pretty daughter had fallen victims of the bitter unscrupulousness of that short, stout, grey-moustached man, who at that moment was bowing so obsequiously before his Sovereign, the man who was one of the greatest powers in the Empire, General Serge Markoff, Chief of Secret Police.
The first dance was in progress. Pretty women, with their smart, good-looking cavaliers, were whirling about me to the slow, tuneful strains of one of the latest of Strauss’s waltzes, when Colonel Mellini, the Italian military attaché, halted before me to chat. He had just returned from leave, and had much Embassy gossip to relate to me from the Eternal City, where I had served for two years.
“I hear,” he remarked at last, “that another plot was discovered early this morning—a desperate one in the Nevski. Markoff really seems ubiquitous.”
I looked into his dark eyes and smiled.