“There is already a lot of uncharitable chatter in the Court circle regarding the other matter, I hear. Has anything reached you at the Embassy?”
“Not a whisper, as far as I am aware. Indeed, Your Majesty’s words have greatly surprised me. I did not believe the affair to be so very serious.”
“Serious!” echoed the Emperor Alexander, speaking in English, his dark, deep-set eyes fixed upon me. “I tell you it is all too serious, now that I find myself completely isolated—oh! yes, Trewinnard, isolated—with scarce one single friend. God knows! I have done my best for the nation, but, alas! everyone’s hand is raised against me.” And his firm mouth hardened behind his full, dark beard, and he drew his hand wearily across his broad, white brow.
The room in the Winter Palace in which we sat was cosy and luxuriantly furnished, the two windows looking forth upon a grey, cheerless quadrangle whence came the tramp of soldiers at drill.
Where we sat we could hear the sharp words of command in Russian, and the clang of the rifle-butts striking the stones.
The room was essentially English in its aspect, with its rich china-blue Axminster carpet, and silk upholstery with curtains to match, while the panelling from floor to ceiling was enamelled dead white, against which the fine water-colour drawings of naval scenes stood out in vivid relief. Upon a buhl table was a great silver bowl filled with Marshal Niel roses—for His Majesty was passionately fond of flowers—and beside it, large framed panel photographs of the Tzarina and his children. And yet those dead white walls and the shape of those square windows struck a curious incongruous note, for if the actual truth be told, those walls were of steel, and that private cabinet of the Emperor had been constructed by the Admiralty Department with armour-plates which were bomb-proof.
That apartment in the west angle of the Palace quadrangle was well-known to me, for in it His Majesty had given me private audience many times. That long white door which had been so silently closed upon me by the Cossack sentry when I entered was, I knew, of armour-plate, four inches in thickness, while beside the windows were revolving shutters of chilled steel.
There, at that great littered roll-top writing-table, upon which was the reading-lamp with its shade of salmon-pink silk with the loaded revolver beside it, the Emperor worked, attending to affairs of State. And in his padded chair, leaning back easily as he spoke to me, was His Majesty himself, a broad-shouldered, handsome man just past middle-age, dressed in a suit of navy blue serge. He was a big-faced, big-limbed, big-handed man of colossal physique and marvellous intelligence. Though haunted by the terror of violent death, he was yet an autocrat to the finger-tips, whose bearing was ever that of a sovereign; yet his eyes had a calm, sympathetic, kindly look, and those who knew him intimately were well aware that he was not the monster of oppression which his traducers had made him out to be before the eyes of Europe.
True, with a stroke of that grey quill pen lying there upon his blotting-pad he had sent many a man and woman without trial to their unrecorded doom, either in the frozen wastes of Northern Siberia, to the terrible mines of Nerchinsk, to the horrors of the penal island of Sakhalin, or to those fearful subterranean oubliettes at Schusselburg, whence no prisoner has ever returned. But, as an autocrat, he dealt with his revolutionary enemies as they would deal with him. They conspired to kill him, and he retaliated by consigning them to a lingering death.
On the other hand, I myself knew how constant was his endeavour to ferret out abuses of administration, to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, to give the peasantry education and all the benefits of modern civilisation as we in England know them, and how desperate, alas! were his constant struggles with that unscrupulous camarilla which ever surrounded him, constantly preventing him from learning the truth concerning any particular matter.