“Her Highness, whom I saw in the Palace an hour ago, told me to say that she sent you her best wishes for a speedy recovery. She is greatly grieved over the death of her father, and, of course, the Court has gone into mourning for sixty days. She told me to tell you that as soon as you are able to return to the Embassy she wishes to see you on a very important matter.”
“Tell her that I am equally anxious to see her, and that she has all my sympathy in her sad bereavement,” I replied.
“Terrible, wasn’t it?” the Imperial equerry exclaimed. “The poor girl looks white, haggard and entirely changed.”
“No wonder—after such an awful experience.”
“There were, I hear, twenty more arrests to-day. Markoff had audience with His Majesty at ten o’clock this morning, and eight of the prisoners of yesterday have been sent to Schusselburg.”
“From which they will never emerge,” I said, with a shudder at the thought of that living tomb as full of horrors as was the Bastille itself.
“Well, I don’t see why they should, my dear friend,” the Captain replied. “If I had had such an experience as yours, I shouldn’t feel very lenient towards them—as you apparently do.”
“I am not thinking of the culprit,” I said. “He certainly deserves a death-sentence. It is the innocents who, here in Russia, suffer for the guilty, with whom I deeply sympathise. Every day unoffending men and women are arrested wholesale in this drastic, unrelenting sweeping away of prisoners to Siberia. I tell you that half of them are loyal, law-abiding subjects of the Tzar.”
The elegant equerry-in-waiting only grinned and shrugged his shoulders. He was too good a Russian to adopt such an argument. As personal attendant upon His Majesty, he, of course, supported the Imperial autocracy.
“This accursed system of police-spies and agents-provocateurs manufactures criminals. Can a man wrongly arrested and sent to the mines remain a loyal subject?”