BY NEVA’S WATERS

“REMAIN HERE,” SAID THE DUCHESS, ADDRESSING HER TWO ATTENDANTS.

“By Neva’s Waters.” ([Page 146]) Frontispiece.

BY
NEVA’S WATERS

Being an Episode in the Secret History of
Alexander the First, Czar of All the Russias

BY
JOHN R. CARLING
AUTHOR OF
“THE SHADOW OF THE CZAR,” “THE VIKING’S SKULL”
“THE WEIRD PICTURE,” ETC.

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1907

Copyright, 1907,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published October, 1907

Alfred Mudge & Son, Inc., Printers,
Boston. Mass., U. S. A.

TO
MY DAUGHTER, WINIFRED

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

BY NEVA’S WATERS

CHAPTER I
A MODERN FREE-LANCE

On a cold January night in the first year of the nineteenth century, a state ball, given by command of the fair young queen, Louisa, was held in the Royal Palace at Berlin.

Of those who attended this fête, many, chiefly of the masculine sex, were indifferent to polonaise or waltz, finding their entertainment in the galleries where, somewhat after the fashion of a modern restaurant, stood little tables, at which parties of two or more, while glancing at the dancers, could at the same time regale themselves with a supper and converse upon the topics of the day. This was a feature recently introduced by the Russian Count Wengersky, and though Court fossils stood aghast at the innovation, it had met with the approval of Queen Louisa and had brought immense popularity to the Count.

In one of these balconies sat round a table some officers, who, though of youthful aspect, were more interested in politics than in the charms of the ladies. Their talk, which was extremely animated, turned chiefly upon the question whether their sovereign lord, Frederick William III., would permit himself to be drawn into the confederacy formed by the four Powers, France, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark—a confederacy whose object was to resist by armed force the right claimed by Great Britain of searching on the high seas all vessels suspected of carrying contraband of war.

As these fire-eaters talked, they cast cautious glances in the direction of Viscount Courtenay, an Englishman, who sat alone at a table sipping his wine. A member of a famous historic house and patriotic to the backbone, the quick-spirited viscount was not the man to allow any disparagement of his country to pass unchallenged, and as his reputation for swordsmanship was such as not to be disputed even by “Fighting Fitzgerald,” then in the height of his glory, the Prussian officers took good care that any remark uncomplimentary to his native land should be spoken in a low tone.

Wilfrid Courtenay’s life should have been cast in the Middle Ages. He was a romantic freelance, whose ideas were more akin to the age of chivalry than to the nineteenth century. The spirit that finds a zest in danger, the spirit that made the vikings the terror of all coasts from the North Cape to Sicily, the spirit that sent the Crusaders forth to do battle with the Paynim beneath the blazing sun of Syria, the spirit that has caused Englishmen to plant colonies in the very teeth of hostile savages—that spirit still ran strong in the blood of the Courtenays. Accordingly, on the attainment of his majority, Wilfrid, leaving to his widowed mother the care of his patrimonial acres, had set out like a knight-errant to wander over Europe in search of adventure, in which quest he had fleshed his sword in more than one campaign, earning thereby from no less a personage than the Count d’Artois, himself a pattern of chivalry, the proud title of Le Bayard de l’Angleterre.

To this taste for fighting was added another, in singular contrast with it. Just as Frederick the Great, in the intervals of campaigning, found a strange pleasure in writing what his admirers called poetry, so Wilfrid was wont to devote some of his leisure to the study of painting, but whereas Frederick in his art never rose above mediocrity, Wilfrid, in his, succeeded in attaining a high degree of excellence.

For the rest he was tall, with fair hair, blue eyes, and that indefinable air that is always the accompaniment of aristocratic birth: shapely and muscular in limb; a giant in strength; a stranger to fear; chivalrous in his dealings. Among his faults was that of acting upon impulse rather than upon the cooler dictates of reason. But where would be the great deeds of history if their authors had always paused to weigh consequences?

Now as Viscount Courtenay sat alone toying with his wine glass, a familiar voice suddenly broke in upon his reverie.

“Wilfrid, that our respective countries, or shall we say our stupid cabinets, are at war with each other, is surely no ground for breaking off our personal friendship?”

“Prince Ouvaroff! You in Berlin!” exclaimed Wilfrid, his face brightening; and, somewhat apprehensive lest the other should salute him, continental-fashion, with a hearty kiss, he quickly extended his hand, and was relieved to find Ouvaroff content with the English mode of greeting.

“‘Prince’ do you say?” returned Ouvaroff in a tone of quasi-reproach. “It was ‘Serge’ in the old days.”

“Then let it be Serge still. I am glad to see a familiar face.”

The new-comer was of Russian nationality, with a countenance decidedly unhandsome, a genuine Kalmuck physiognomy, though its ugliness was redeemed by the mild expression of the dark eyes. But however unprepossessing in face, his figure was tall and well proportioned, and arrayed in the blue uniform of the Preobrejanski Guards, who formed, in 1801 at least, the corps d’élite of the Czar’s army.

During his term of service as attaché to the Russian Embassy in London, the Prince had become well-known in West End salons, where he had met Wilfrid, who, in spite of an unreasoning prejudice against Muscovites, made an exception in favour of Prince Ouvaroff, appreciating his sterling qualities. The two had, therefore, become fast friends.

There was a mystery attending Ouvaroff. He had been brought up by a boyar of high rank, who would never, even on his deathbed, reveal to his adopted son the secret of his parentage.

“Your father lives and knows of your existence. ’Tis for him to speak—not me,” were almost the last words of his guardian.

The matter troubled Ouvaroff a good deal. He had often talked it over with his English friend, and now, their first greetings over, that friend reverted to the old theme.

“Any nearer to—to the discovery?”

The Prince’s face assumed a somewhat sombre look.

“No nearer, and, truth to tell, I hope I may never be any nearer than I am at present.”

Wilfrid lifted his eyebrows in genuine surprise.

“Do you remember,” continued the Prince, “that old gipsy fortune-teller, whom you and I once met near your place in Surrey? She predicted that my father would become known to me in the very moment of my killing him.”

“My dear Serge, surely you don’t attach any importance to her words?”

“I do, and—fear. Her prophecies were three—first, that on my return to Russia I should be created a prince; second, that I should become aide-de-camp to the Czarovitch Alexander. Both these have come to pass. Why should I refuse to believe the third?”

“Why? Because the old sibyl assured me that within a year I should save the life of the fairest princess in Europe, gaining her love by that act. Eight years have passed since then, and so far I haven’t saved the life of any woman, whether princess or peasant. Since she can prophesy falsely as well as truthfully, dismiss your gloomy forebodings.”

Ouvaroff changed the conversation.

“What’s this I hear you’ve been doing at Paris?” he observed. “I am told that a picture of yours exhibited there last Christmas almost created a riot.”

“A riot? Nonsense!”

“I see you do not like to—what do you say in England?—blow your own trumpet. But for once lay aside your modesty, and let me have this story.”

“Well, since you insist on being bored. You are referring, I suppose, to my picture, ‘The Last Moments of Marie Antoinette?’ Despite what French newspapers may say, I had no political motive. The work was done merely to please my own fancy. When finished my poor old drawing master saw it, and begged for the loan of it, to place it among a small exhibition of his own pictures. I consented. The result was marvellous. Thousands came to view the picture. Republicans who had once yelled for the head of ‘The Austrian,’ and had gleefully seen her perish on the scaffold, now melted to tears at sight of her image on the canvas. Bonaparte got wind of the affair, and, on the ground that it was creating a sentiment in favour of Royalism, ordered the picture to be destroyed. The gendarmerie were stoutly opposed. Shouts of A bas Napoleon were raised, a struggle ensued, and the gallery had to be cleared with fixed bayonets.”

“And is it true that you challenged Napoleon to a duel?”

“I demanded compensation for the loss of my picture or—satisfaction at the sword’s point.”

Ouvaroff could not help smiling at his friend’s colossal audacity.

“And General Bonaparte’s answer——?”

“Was a police order to cross the frontier within forty-eight hours.”

“You went?”

“I stayed. You see, the First Consul’s sister, the dark-eyed Pauline, with whom I had had some love passages—platonic, of course—had invited me to a ball a fortnight later. My dear Serge, how could I refuse? On the evening of the dance I presented myself, greatly to the dismay of my friends, who were aware that the First Consul was expected. I had purposely arranged to take my departure at the moment of his arrival.”

“He saw you?”

“Certainly. Figure his rage as he saw me raising Pauline’s hand to my lips as I took my leave! The music, the dancing, the conversation—all stopped. The stillness was painful. ‘Did you not receive an order to quit France a fortnight ago?’ he thundered. ‘Why have you not gone?’ ‘And did you not receive a challenge to fight a fortnight ago?’ I answered. ‘Why have you not fought?’

“He couldn’t speak for passion.

“‘As to quitting France, Citoyen Bonaparte,’ I continued, ‘in such matters as coming and going, we Courtenays are accustomed to please ourselves. I had fixed upon to-night as the time of my departure, and, as you now perceive, I—er—depart. Adieu, citoyen.’

“With that I passed, by preconcerted arrangement, through a circle of friends, and before he had time to order my arrest I had reached a private gateway, where a carriage was awaiting me. As I had taken the precaution to have relays of horses in readiness, I succeeded in crossing the Eastern frontier a few hundred yards ahead of the pursuing carabineers.”

“And so General Bonaparte declined to measure swords with you?”

“Bonaparte is a Corsican—that is to say an Italian bravo, who prefers darker methods. Listen to the sequel. A few days later, as I was sitting at the card table in the kursaal at Homburg, a man suddenly rose, accused me of cheating, and ended his remarks by flinging the contents of his wine glass in my face. Of course, a meeting was inevitable. It was to be a duel to the death. Later that night my second came to me in great distress, advising me to cry off. He had discovered that my adversary was a secret agent of the First Consul—none other, in fact, than the famous, or infamous, Abbé Spada.”

“I have heard of him. The first swordsman of France?”

“So-called. Well, we met, and considering the many men whom Spada has killed in his day, I felt justified in giving him his passport to Gehenna.”

“You killed him!”

“Within three minutes.”

Ouvaroff regarded the speaker with admiration.

“That’s Bonaparte’s way of dealing with the objects of his displeasure,” concluded Wilfrid. “But I’ll be even yet with the Little Corsican for destroying my picture.”

Now, as Wilfrid gazed down upon the dancers swaying rhythmically to the sound of the music, his eye was caught by a lofty figure standing, solitary and contemplative, within an arched entrance that opened upon the ballroom. It was a middle-aged man with silvering hair, whose cold, handsome face wore a somewhat sombre expression. He was clad in Court costume, carried his hat under his arm, and sparkled all over with diamonds from his powdered queue to his shoe buckles. It was the diamonds that attracted Wilfrid’s attention; he did not like to see a man so bedizened.

“Do you know that gentleman, Serge?” asked Wilfrid, indicating the magnate in question. “His face seems familiar to me.”

“Count Arcadius Baranoff, one of the Czar’s ministers. You must have seen him in London, for he was formerly ambassador at the Court of St. James’s. As rich as Crœsus. One of the men,” the Prince went on in tones of contempt, “who in the last reign climbed to power through the bedroom of the Empress Catharine. He is a proof of the power of the personal equation in international politics.”

“How so?”

“He is a rank barbarian, whose polish is but skin deep. When he was in London his brusquerie offended the men, his coarseness the women, and he left England burning with a desire to do her hurt, and now the time has come, he thinks.”

“Thinks!”

“You are aware that, after fighting each other for a year or more, the Czar Paul and Consul Bonaparte are now fast friends. This is mainly due to the diplomacy of Count Baranoff, who was sent to Paris as the Czar’s envoy: it was his hand that signed the Franco-Russian treaty. While in the French capital he tickled the Parisian fancy with a pamphlet, ‘Is it possible for an Englishman to possess sense?’”

“Oh, indeed!” muttered Wilfrid, with a glance at the distant pamphleteer.

“And now, on his way back to St. Petersburg, he tarries at Berlin in the hope of persuading the Prussian King to join the league against England.”

“Humph! Is he likely to succeed?”

“There’s no telling. He has had two interviews with the King. Frederick William is an amiable, weak-minded man. Were it not that Queen Louisa insists upon being present at these interviews, Baranoff might have carried his point. He is to have a final interview on the fourth day from this, and—mark this significant point—the Queen knows nothing of this intended meeting.”

“And Prince Ouvaroff as a Muscovite patriot,” smiled Wilfrid, “hopes that Baranoff will gain his ends?”

“By no means,” responded the other quickly. “Personally, I am opposed to the war, and—but let this be kept secret—so is the Czarovitch. Why should we give an opportunity to your Nelson to earn fresh laurels at Russia’s expense? But a truce to politics—I shall be letting out more than I ought,” he continued with a laugh, and then, by way of changing the subject, he added—

“You are not married yet?”

“No, nor likely to be. Waiting for the promised princess,” said Wilfrid mockingly. “But you—? What of the lady you loved five years ago?”

“I love her still,” replied the Prince moodily.

“She remains unwed?”

“So far. But she is ice to me.”

“Take heart. The Neva is not always frozen. That she does not marry should encourage you to continue your suit.”

“Give me your face and figure and I might succeed. Is it likely that she, confessedly the most beautiful woman in Moscow, will marry an ugly fellow like me?”

“What have looks to do with love? What says your own Russian proverb: ‘I do not love thee because thou art pretty, but thou art pretty because I love thee.’”

These words failed to arouse Ouvaroff.

“I have discovered of late that I have a rival, and a successful one. There is peril in aspiring to her hand.”

Before Wilfrid had time to ask the meaning of these mysterious words a liveried attendant approached, carrying a silver salver, upon which lay a sealed envelope. This with a bow he presented to the Prince, who, upon opening it, found therein a card inscribed with the words:—

“He who now speaks with you is the man.

Arcadius Baranoff.”

CHAPTER II
BARANOFF’S PROPOSAL

For a moment Ouvaroff fastened his gaze upon the card which he so held as to be seen by none but himself; then, raising his eyes, he looked at Wilfrid. There was a sudden coldness in the Prince’s demeanour, and Wilfrid intuitively felt that the writing on the card had something to do with it.

“The next dance is a Hungarian waltz, I perceive,” said Ouvaroff in a changed voice. “I am reminded by this card that a lady is waiting for me. Excuse my absence for a few minutes. I am so ugly, you see,” he added with an uneasy smile, “that when I do obtain the favour of a dance I cannot afford to miss it.”

As honest a fellow as ever lived was Ouvaroff, but the words he had just spoken were a “white lie,” as Wilfrid quickly proved; for, upon looking down during the whole course of the waltz, he did not see the Prince among the dancers.

While Wilfrid was puzzling himself to account for Ouvaroff’s conduct, he saw Count Baranoff coming along the gallery, smilingly exchanging a word here and there with those to whom he was known.

Wilfrid watched him and took the measure of the man. His eyes, more oval in shape than those seen in Western Europe, had the deceitful, furtive glance of the Asiatic.

“Were I a Czar, that is not the sort of man I should choose for my minister,” was Wilfrid’s comment.

“Do I address Viscount Courtenay?” said the Count with a bow as he drew near to Wilfrid.

Yes, he did address Viscount Courtenay. This somewhat bluntly. Wilfrid had not asked for the diplomatist’s acquaintance, nor was he disposed to be over polite to an enemy of England.

But the envoy was not to be rebuffed by Wilfrid’s frigid manner. He sat down in the chair lately occupied by Ouvaroff. The little group of Prussian officers stared at the pair, wondering what there could be in common between the Czar’s representative and the eccentric young Englishman.

As Baranoff seated himself a diamond dropped from his coat. Wilfrid picked it up and presented it to its owner, who gracefully waved it off.

“It is beneath the dignity of a Baranoff to resume what he has once let fall.”

“And beneath that of a Courtenay to accept it,” replied Wilfrid, placing the gem in the exact spot where it had fallen.

This diamond-dropping was an old trick of Baranoff’s whenever he wished to gain the good graces of a stranger. He had always found the method very successful—with Russians. It didn’t seem to answer with an Englishman.

The Count called for a bottle of Chartreuse and helped himself to a glass, first pouring in from a phial that he produced a few drops of a liquid that Wilfrid knew to be “diavolino,” one of those Italian nostrums much in vogue a century ago, as warranted to keep in tone the constitutions of those given to dissipation.

Wilfrid’s dislike of the man increased.

“You have business with me, sir?”

“Ah, how delightfully English! You come to the point at once. Business? Yes, we may call it that. At any rate I have an offer—a magnificent offer to make.”

He eyed Wilfrid curiously, dubious as to how his words would be received. And indeed it was on Wilfrid’s tongue to tell the envoy to take himself and his offer to Samarcand, or further, but he refrained for the moment, thinking that he might as well hear what the offer was.

“I wish,” continued the Count, “to give you the opportunity of earning three hundred thousand roubles. Such is the price I am willing to pay for a service to be done by you.”

Three hundred thousand roubles, or, roughly speaking, £50,000 in English money, would be a welcome gift to Wilfrid, whose family estate had a heavy mortgage upon it. But, mindful of the character of the speaker, he determined to learn first whether the proposal could be honourably entertained by an English gentleman and a patriot.

“Three hundred thousand roubles! It must be a very substantial service to be worth so much.”

“You speak truth. It is a substantial service.”

“There are thousands of suitable men in Europe. Why select me for the purpose?”

“Thousands of men—true. But only one Courtenay.”

Wilfrid did not controvert a remark so obviously just.

“The work,” continued the Count, “is one requiring a spirit that will dare great things.”

“Then, who more qualified for the task than Count Baranoff?”

“You are very good,” smiled the envoy. “But I was not at Saxony in the summer of 1792—you were.”

“So, too, were many other men in the year you mention.”

“True, but you were the central figure in a certain affair, forgotten by you, perhaps, but remembered by others. I will explain anon.”

The summer of 1792 was about eight and a half years back. Wilfrid hurriedly reviewing his brief sojourn in the kingdom of Saxony, could recall nothing to explain Baranoff’s words.

“What I require for my three hundred thousand roubles is that you shall make love—successful love, mark you—to a certain lady.”

Wilfrid gave a scornful laugh.

“I thought the enterprise was one demanding a high degree of courage!”

“And so it does. There’s great danger in it.”

“That makes it interesting. Where is this Lady Perilous to be found?”

“In the city of St. Petersburg.”

“Is the lady young or old?”

“She is in her twenty-third year.”

“Seven years my junior. Ill-favoured, perhaps, and therefore unable to obtain a suitor?”

“She has the loveliest face in St. Petersburg.”

“Not ill-favoured? The daughter of a vulgar merchant, or of some wealthy serf desirous of obtaining a nobleman for his son-in-law?”

“On the contrary, her father is a prince.”

Wilfrid started. He thought of the gipsy’s prophecy.

“Is the lady of fallen fortunes?”

“She can command millions of roubles.”

“A prisoner immured within a fortress from which you would have me rescue her?”

“Nothing of the sort.”

“A cloistered nun, repentant of her vows?”

“Not at all. She moves freely in Court circles.”

“Demented, or that way inclined?”

“As sane as women in general.”

“Subject to some hereditary taint? Epileptic or the like?”

“As sound in physique as yourself.”

“Then by all that’s holy!” cried Wilfrid, in a paroxysm of perplexity, “explain why a lady of princely birth, beautiful, and rich, can lack suitors among her own nation? Why must a foreigner from distant England play the lover?”

“Because there is no one in St. Petersburg bold enough to take upon himself that rôle, since discovery means certain death to the lover, death perhaps to her.”

“Death!” queried Wilfrid, somewhat startled at the word.

“At the hands of the State.”

“Ah!” said Wilfrid, beginning to receive a glimmer of light. “She is a lady important politically?”

“Very much so,” replied the diplomatist with a look that confirmed his statement.

“What prospect have I of winning this lady’s affections?”

“I have discovered, no matter how, that you are the only man in Europe who can succeed.”

“Really! That’s very flattering to my vanity,” laughed Wilfrid. “The lady did not send you on this mission, I trust?”

“She is modesty itself, and would die rather than commission any one on such an errand.”

“I ask her pardon for wronging her in thought. Have you got her portrait?”

The Count hesitated for a moment, and then drew forth an ivory miniature.

“Painted three months ago. It scarcely does her justice.”

As Wilfrid’s eyes fell on the miniature he fairly held his breath. It was a face more beautiful than any he had ever seen. The soft violet eyes and the lovely delicate features, with their sweet grave expression that spoke of a nature, pensive and spirituelle, might well inspire love in the heart even of the coldest; much more then in that of a romantic character like Wilfrid.

“Well, what do you think of it?” asked Baranoff.

“It is the face of an angel,” replied Wilfrid as he returned the miniature. “What is her name?” he added.

“You do not recognise her?”

“No.”

“I thought perhaps you might have recognised the face. Her name? Pardon me, I will give it if you are prepared to undertake the rôle of lover—if not, ’twere best, in the lady’s interests, to keep it secret.”

Wilfrid reflected. A lady of political consequence, Baranoff had called her, threatened by the State with death if she listened to love-vows! Wilfrid was sufficiently versed in Russian history to know that the reigning dynasty was a younger branch of the House of Romanoff, and that a return to the rights of primogeniture would deprive the present Czar of his crown. Was the lady with the angel-face a descendant of the elder line, and thus so nearly related to the throne that, in the Court of the gloomy and suspicious Paul the First, it would be perilous for any man, even the highest among Russia’s nobility, to aspire to her hand? Imbued with this idea Wilfrid began to weave a whole political romance around the person of the beautiful unknown. Was she, though nominally at liberty, a virtual prisoner at the Czar’s Court, watched by a hundred suspicious eyes—pining for affection, yet forbidden to marry?

To try to set her free from such gloomy environment was no more than his duty.

And Wilfrid, if Baranoff had spoken truly, was certain of gaining her love! To woo and carry off a fair princess from the power of a jealous Czar was just the sort of enterprise that appealed to his knightly and romantic character. He could no longer hesitate.

“Do you assent?”

“Assent!” echoed Wilfrid. “Is it possible to dissent? You say that provided I succeed in marrying this lady you will add to the pleasure by paying me the sum of three hundred thousand roubles! Really, your proposal is so extraordinary, so captivating, that I am almost inclined to think that you are trifling with me. And,” he added in a graver tone, “it is not wise, sir, to trifle with a Courtenay.”

“No trifling is intended. But, pardon me, I have not, it seems, made my meaning quite clear. You are labouring under a slight misapprehension. I spoke of love: I did not speak of marriage.”

Wilfrid stared hard at the speaker, upon whose lips there now appeared a sinister smile. Then, vivid as fire upon a dark night, the full meaning of the proposal flashed upon him. He was deliberately to set to work to corrupt a woman’s innocence! The lady in question had given some offence to the powerful diplomatist, who chose this diabolical method of revenge. The fall from purity, the shame that is worse than death, would destroy whatever influence she possessed in Court circles, and probably at the same time remove a political obstacle from Baranoff’s path.

Now whatever sins might be imputed to Wilfrid, he had not yet played the rake. In an age when gallantry was considered one of the marks of a gentleman, and even the clergy were not conspicuous for purity of morals, he had kept his name stainless, thanks to the influence of a good mother, who had bidden him see in every woman a saint.

His anger, then, can be imagined. He blamed himself for holding converse with so cold-blooded a barbarian.

“I deserve this insult,” he muttered. “What else could I expect? Can one meddle with pitch and not be defiled?”

“You must not talk of marriage,” resumed Baranoff. “What I require is that the lady shall be induced to compromise herself.”

“So that all the world shall hear of her fall?” said Wilfrid, smiling dangerously.

“Why, truth to tell, ’twill not avail me much if the amour remain secret.”

The candour with which Baranoff spoke showed that he was quite convinced that Wilfrid had consented to his scheme.

“But you have said,” commented Wilfrid, “that the affair, if discovered, may bring upon her the penalty of death.”

“So it may, if it be discovered while she is on Russian ground. But I will so arrange matters that both you and she shall have every facility for escape. Once over the frontier you are safe. As I have said, the danger is great. But so, too, is the reward. Think! Three hundred thousand roubles!”

“Your Excellency,” said Wilfrid with the air of one who has formed an irrevocable decision, “I will at once depart for St. Petersburg.”

“Good!”

“I will seek out the lady.”

“Excellent!”

“And I will warn her of your damnable designs.”

“Ha!” muttered Baranoff, looking thunderstruck.

As he caught the angry sparkle of Wilfrid’s eye, it suddenly dawned upon him that he had mistaken his man. Reared in the atmosphere of Catharine’s Court, in its day the most licentious in Europe, Baranoff had become dead to all sense of honour, and failed to understand how a man could resist the twin temptation of a pleasant amour and a rich bribe.

“Do I take it that you refuse my offer?”

“To the devil with your offer!”

Baranoff elevated his eyebrows and affected the extreme of amazement.

“I hold out to you the prospect of an amour with a beautiful and charming woman, to be followed by a free gift of three hundred thousand roubles, and you refuse!”

“Repeat your infamous offer, and I’ll—yes, by heaven! I’ll fling you over the rails of this balcony!”

Unconsciously Baranoff backed a little from the table, for Wilfrid looked quite capable of putting his threat into execution.

There was a brief silence. Then Baranoff spoke.

“So you will visit St. Petersburg and put the lady on her guard,” sneered he, mightily pleased that he had withheld her name. “I fear that if you seek to enter Russia at this present juncture you will be taken for a spy of Pitt’s. As minister of the Czar it would be my duty to order your arrest.”

“Oh, indeed! Do you really entertain the hope of returning to Russia?”

“What is to prevent me?”

“Myself.”

“You!” exclaimed Baranoff disdainfully.

Wilfrid laughed pleasantly.

“I shall certainly do my best to provide you with a grave in Brandenburg’s sand. In seeking to make me the agent of an infamous deed you have offered an insult not to be passed over by an English gentleman. You will have to defend your conduct with the sword.”

There was a very palpable start on the part of Baranoff, and his face paled. Though well versed in the art of fencing he durst not measure swords with the man who, inside of three minutes, had transfixed the Abbé Spada, the champion duellist of France.

He sought to shield himself behind the privileges of his high offices.

“It would be contrary to etiquette,” he remarked loftily, “for a chargé d’affaires to accept a challenge. My imperial master would never forgive me for putting my life to the hazard of a duel while engaged in conducting a diplomatic mission, otherwise——”

“Now you are talking nonsense,” interrupted Wilfrid, bluntly. “The Czar loves a duel, for only a few weeks ago he invited all the sovereigns of Europe to his Court to settle their international disputes by single combat.”

And Baranoff, well knowing that the eccentric Czar had so acted, felt himself deprived of his argument.

“Fight me you must! I will force you.”

“Force me? indeed!” said the Count. “In what way?”

“By publicly branding you as a coward; by putting affronts upon you in every assembly you frequent. For example, if you are among men I shall walk up to you with a pair of scissors, and after asking, ‘Why do these Muscovites wear their beards so long?’ I shall proceed to clip yours. If you are sitting with ladies I shall relate in their hearing and in yours the story of how you propose to deal with one of their sex. It may be that through fear of me you will keep within your hotel, in which case I shall have to affix a notice at the chief entrance, stating the reason of your enforced seclusion! In short, sir, I shall make your life at Berlin so abominably unpleasant that for very shame you will have to fight. There must be a meeting unless you wish to see the name of Baranoff turned into a byword for a coward.”

The Count listened with secret consternation, feeling certain that this obstinate pig of an Englishman would keep his word. A man who had not shrunk from defying the First Consul to his face was not likely to pay much respect to the status of a diplomatic envoy.

And to whom could he look for protection? Not to Frederick William. So long as Queen Louisa was by his side that monarch would avow, rightly or wrongly, that he was powerless to control the actions of one who was not a native-born subject. Not to the British Ambassador at Berlin. That magnate, in view of the hostile relations between Great Britain and Russia, would be highly amused at the mortification of the Muscovite envoy.

While he was thinking of all this Wilfrid, too, was thinking, and it suddenly occurred to him that there was another and better way of punishing Baranoff—one that would likewise strike a blow at Bonaparte.

“As your Excellency seems to have no liking for the duel, I give you the alternative of quitting Berlin within twenty-four hours.”

An instant feeling of relief swept over Baranoff. Here was a way of escape. Then he began to reflect that if he should depart within the time prescribed he must sacrifice the promised interview with King Frederick, and go back to St. Petersburg without gaining the adhesion of Prussia to the Northern Confederacy—a sad blow to his hopes!

Disposed to take a favourable view of matters, he had that very day sent off a despatch to the Czar stating that King Frederick seemed slowly coming over to Russian views. He must now return to report the failure of his mission, and, if he should speak the whole truth, to confess that he had been frightened from Berlin by a single Englishman! The neutrality of Prussia meant the loss of so many war vessels to the Confederacy, and was practically equivalent to a bloodless naval victory on the part of Wilfrid.

Some such thought as this caused Wilfrid to smile. Baranoff, quick to read his thoughts, was consumed with secret rage.

No, he would not withdraw from Berlin at Wilfrid’s bidding, and he said as much.

“Go you shall,” retorted Wilfrid. “As General Bonaparte, your dear ally, banished me from France, so I in turn do banish you from Prussia. ‘Tit for tat,’ as our English children say.”

Baranoff gave a scowl of baffled hatred.

“How much has Louisa paid you for this business?” he sneered.

With disdain on his face Wilfrid rose.

“When next you take to pamphleteering let the theme be, ‘Is it possible for a Russian to be a gentleman?’ My present address is the Hôtel du Nord. If by to-morrow evening at six of the clock you have neither left Berlin nor sent me your second, you may prepare for humiliation. I take my leave. Adieu, or Au revoir, whichever you please.”

And so saying Wilfrid withdrew to the quietude of his room in the hotel to think over matters.

It was a fascinating thought that during a brief stay in Saxony he had been seen by a girlish and beautiful princess, upon whose imagination he had made an impression so powerful that after the lapse of eight years she still retained him in mind. True, Baranoff was a person upon whose statements little reliance could be placed, but in the present instance Wilfrid was convinced that he had not spoken falsely.

“The lady has a real existence,” he muttered. “Now how ought I to act in this affair?”

It was hard that a princess who cherished his memory with affection should meet with no return. Yet, on the other hand, it would be embarrassing for both if he should be unable to requite her love.

If he went it was doubtful whether he would find her, so slight were the clues he held.

Would his friend Ouvaroff be able to identify her? The thought had no sooner entered Wilfrid’s mind than he recalled the Prince’s strange saying in connection with his own love suit. “There is deadly peril in aspiring to her hand.” This could scarcely be a coincidence—Ouvaroff’s lady must be Baranoff’s princess.

“Humph! if Serge were first in the field,” thought Wilfrid, “it seems unfair to cut him out. But, if the princess won’t have him——”

Early on the following morning he called at Ouvaroff’s quarters. To his extreme disappointment he found that the Prince had taken his departure, leaving a note to the effect that he had been hastily summoned to St. Petersburg by command of the Czarovitch. “Pardon my running off without a farewell,” he wrote, “but Alexander’s service brooks no delay.”

Ouvaroff was not the only Muscovite to leave Berlin that day, for in the evening the political circles were surprised, and probably relieved, by the news that Count Baranoff had suddenly departed for St. Petersburg, thus relinquishing his attempt to make Prussia a member of the Armed Neutrality.

And now was Wilfrid continually haunted by the lovely face in the miniature. It filled his mind by day; by night it mingled with his dreams. Sometimes he saw the face, its lips curved into a witching smile as if inviting a kiss; sometimes the eyes would assume a sad, wistful look, as if appealing to him for aid.

To visit St. Petersburg, or not to visit it? was the question to which for a long time he could discover no answer. Still in doubt he looked one night from his hotel window, and saw the face of the sky as one dark cloud. But while he gazed, there presently came a rift, and through the rift one planet sparkling bright.

Hesperus, the star of Love!

It seemed like an answer to his thoughts. Love in the shape of a fair princess was beckoning to him. His mind was made up—he would go to her!

CHAPTER III
THE INN OF THE SILVER BIRCH

A winter night, frosty and still. The northern stars, set in a sky of steely blue, twinkled over a plain of frozen snow—a plain so vast that its visible border touched the horizon. In all the wide landscape no town, no hamlet, not even a solitary dwelling was to be seen; the view, a monotonous blank, relieved here and there by clumps of dark firs, the darker by contrast with the surrounding white.

Lofty posts, painted with alternate bands of black and white, and situated a verst distant from one another, indicated the ordinary line of route over the wintry waste, and along this route a hooded sledge was moving with all the speed that three gallant mares could supply, the bells upon the duga, or wooden arch, ringing out musically over the crisp snow.

Two persons occupied this sledge, one, the yamchik or driver, Izak by name, an active little Russian, who sat partly upon the shaft, in order when necessary to steady the vehicle by thrusting out a leg upon the snow; the other, Wilfrid Courtenay, who, voluminous in fur wrappings, sat, or rather reclined at the rear under cover of the hood.

It was over Russian ground that the car was speeding, its goal being St. Petersburg, distant now about one hundred miles.

Wilfrid had met with considerable difficulty in entering the Czar’s dominions. Twenty days had he been detained at the frontier-town of Kowno for no reason whatever as far as he could see, save the caprice of petty officials, whose insolence and greed had so galled the spirit of the Englishman that several times he was on the point of turning back. However, he thought better of it, and when at last leave was granted him to go forward, forward he went. Having learned by experience that travelling in one’s own equipage is more convenient, and, in the end more economical, than the ordinary method of posting, Wilfrid had purchased at Kowno a covered car, together with three steeds to draw it, accepting at the same time the proffered services of a yamchik, who boasted that he knew every verst of the way from Kowno to St. Petersburg.

And here he was speeding along at the rate of twelve miles an hour. The keen cold air, combined with the rapid swaying of the car, caused him to fall into a semi-slumber, from which he was roused by the voice of Izak.

“If the little father will condescend to look, he will see the village of Gora,” he cried, pointing with his whip to a light shining far off like a star.

Welcome news to the cold and hungry Wilfrid. Gora should be his stopping-place for the night.

Fifteen minutes more and they reached the silent, sleeping village, which, like most of its kind in Russia, consisted merely of a line of wooden cabins on each side of the post-road with a row of trees in front.

At one end of the village stood its only house of entertainment, the Inn of the Silver Birch—an inn very different externally from the generality of its class. As a matter of fact, it had originally been the seat of a rich boyar, the lord of the village and of the surrounding land. It was a large and handsome structure of timber, pillared and balconied, and with much carving about its eaves and gables. On three sides grew lofty birch trees with silvery bark; the fourth side lay open to the gaze of the travellers.

“This is the twentieth inn I’ve seen painted red,” remarked Wilfrid.

“’Tis the will of the Czar,” answered the yamchik. “Some weeks ago he gave a ball, and to it came a lady wearing a red dress. ‘What a pretty colour!’ said Paul. And lo! at once a law that all post-houses and bridges shall be painted red. Great is the word of the Czar! He wills, and—pouf! ’tis done.”

“A pity he doesn’t will a spell of warm weather, then,” growled Wilfrid, as he set his half-frozen feet upon the hard ground.

As was the village, so was the inn, still and silent as the tomb. Wilfrid’s summons, however, soon brought to the door the landlord, a somewhat melancholy-looking man. He was accompanied by a tall and pretty girl of about eighteen, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter.

Though wrapped in sheepskins they shivered as the keen, icy air from without, chilling the warmer air within, produced an instant fall of sleet, a phenomenon which, familiar enough to the four, was witnessed without surprise.

Now as the girl caught sight of Wilfrid there came into her eyes a sudden light. It was not the light of recognition, for she could never previously have seen Wilfrid, but it was a look that seemed to say she had been expecting him, and was glad he had come. Such at least was the impression that Wilfrid derived from her odd manner.

Turning from her to the landlord Wilfrid requested accommodation for the night, but at this the landlord put on a lugubrious look of refusal, explaining that it was neither for lack of room nor of victuals that he was compelled to turn the little father away, but the fact was the whole inn had been hired for the night by a small party, now fast asleep, whose grandeur was such that they had insisted that no other traveller should be received, lest the noise, however light, which must necessarily accompany his presence, should disturb their slumbers.

“Did they look under their pillow for a rose-leaf?” asked Wilfrid.

But this classical allusion was lost upon the landlord. It grieved him, he continued, to refuse a traveller at so late an hour of the night, but what could he do? He had given his word. There was another inn some twenty versts farther on; would not his Excellency——?

No, his Excellency wouldn’t, especially when he noticed on the face of the pretty girl a look of disappointment, evidently occasioned by her father’s words.

“Your name?” asked Wilfrid, addressing the landlord.

“Boris, son of Peter.”

“Good Boris, your guests’ command applies only to noisy and drunken roysterers, not to a gentleman so orderly and quiet as myself. Lead on—I’ll not disturb their slumbers.”

Boris hesitated, but a whisper from the girl seemed to decide him.

“His Excellency may enter,” said he.

The girl’s eyes danced; she could not have looked more glad had she herself, and not Wilfrid, been the traveller. While Boris conducted the yamchik with the car and horses across a courtyard to the stables, Wilfrid followed the girl—whose name she told him was Nadia—to a large room on the ground floor, a room not warmed by the ugly-looking closed-up stove, the usual accompaniment of a Russian room, but by a fire of pine-logs blazing upon the stone hearth, the ruddy glow forming a cheerful contrast to the snowy prospect without, which could be dimly discerned through the panes of the double lattice.

In one corner of the apartment hung a small painting of the Madonna, before which a taper was burning.

Wilfrid was passing this negligently by when Nadia gave a little scream.

“Ah! you are a heretic!” she cried. “Come, you must bow before the picture—so.” She showed him how to do it, and, to please her, Wilfrid bowed. “Now you make the sign of the cross, with your fingers bent thus.” Wilfrid imitated her action. “That’s right. Now you are a member of the True Church.”

She smiled so prettily that Wilfrid could not help smiling too.

Throwing a huge bearskin over the back and seat of a chair, Nadia drew it to the fire, and bidding her guest be seated, she began to bustle about, saying that all the servants were asleep and that it would be a pity to awaken them, so she herself would prepare his supper.

As Wilfrid seated himself, the innkeeper entered from the kitchen, where he had left the yamchik, who, when his meal was over, would curl himself up and sleep, peasant-fashion, upon the stove.

“Your Excellency has travelled far to-day?” asked Boris. His manner was in striking contrast with Nadia’s free and lively style. He stood in humble fashion, as if not liking, even in his own house, to sit down in the presence of his guest; but, invited by Wilfrid to a seat near the fire, he sat down, mentally contrasting the Englishman’s affability with the hauteur of the Russian grandees sleeping above.

“You have come far to-day?” he repeated.

“From,” replied Wilfrid, as he set to work with knife and fork, “from a place called—let me think—Via—Via—”

“Viaznika?” interjected Nadia.

“Ah! that’s the name—Viaznika.”

“You set off late in the day?” pursued the innkeeper.

“About noon.”

Boris looked as if Wilfrid had made a very puzzling statement.

“Your horses seem fleet enough,” he murmured.

“Have you any reason to doubt their fleetness?” smiled Wilfrid.

“Why, see here, gospodin. It is now midnight, and since you say you set off at noon, you have taken twelve hours to come thirty-six versts.”

Reckon a verst at about two-thirds of the English mile, and it will thus be seen that Wilfrid had been travelling at the magnificent rate of about two miles an hour! But how could this be when the horses had been kept going at a fair trot the whole of the time? Nadia sat silent, her eyes fixed upon the ground. Odd, but Wilfrid somehow derived the impression that the talk had taken a turn distasteful to her. Why should this be?

“Have you mistaken the distance between Viaznika and here?” said Wilfrid to the innkeeper.

Now whatever faults English travellers may have to find with Russia and her ways, all will bear witness to the excellence of her posting-maps. One of these, placed before Wilfrid, quickly convinced him that Boris was right. The distance by the post-road between Viaznika and Gora was a little more than twenty-four miles. The three-horse car had occupied twelve hours over a journey that a pedestrian could have performed in half the time. It was clear that the yamchik had not followed the ordinary route; in fact, Wilfrid had known thus much at the time, for on pretext of taking a short cut, Izak had frequently deviated, now to the right and now to the left. Wilfrid’s suspicions being thus aroused he began to study the map, and found that the preceding day’s journey could have been accomplished in a considerably less space of time than that actually taken by the yamchik. That worthy’s conduct was certainly puzzling. His motive could hardly be a pecuniary one since Wilfrid, alive to the disadvantages of paying by the day, had by mutual arrangement fixed upon a definite sum for the whole journey, so that manifestly it was to Izak’s interest not to retard, but to accelerate, Wilfrid’s progress.

“Where did you pick up the man?” asked Boris.

“At Kowno. He came to me of his own accord, saying that as he had heard I was about to make the journey to St. Petersburg would I accept his services? According to his own account he has performed the journey from Kowno to St Petersburg more than a hundred times during the past ten years.”

“His face is strange to me. He has never stopped at the Silver Birch.”

“Nay, father,” interposed Nadia. “I remember him on two or three occasions.”

She caught Wilfrid’s eye as she spoke, and coloured. Wilfrid wondered why.

“Let’s have the fellow in here, and we’ll question him,” said he.

“He’ll be asleep by this time,” said Nadia gently. “’Twill be a pity to disturb him.”

Thus advised, Wilfrid put off his cross-examination of the yamchik till the morning, and the conversation flowed into other channels.

“Are you a vitch or an off?” asked Nadia, suddenly.

“I am not quite sure that I understand.”

“Why, look you, my father being the son of one Peter, is Boris Petroff. Now if he were a boyar he would be Boris Petrovitch.”

“I see. Well, I suppose I must put myself down among the vitches, for I am a nobleman in my own country.”

Nadia’s face fell when she heard this. In a voice that seemed to savour of resentment, she asked:—

“How many souls have you?”

“We in England are limited to one. Is it different in Russia?”

“One!” echoed Nadia. “Some of our great boyars have ten thousand souls.”

“They must take an unconscionable time in dying! And how many has Nadia?”

“None,” replied the girl with a flash of her eyes as if detecting some hidden insult in the question. “We are souls ourselves, my father and I.”

“It is the fashion of our boyars,” explained Boris, “to call their serfs ‘souls.’”

“A good name,” added Nadia in a bitter tone, “for they have us, body as well as soul.”

“And there are twenty million like us,” said Boris.

It came upon Wilfrid as a painful shock to learn that this dignified innkeeper and his pretty daughter were serfs. That serfage existed in Russia was, of course, no news to him, but it had existed as something remote, and therefore as shadowy as the helotry of ancient Sparta. It was a very different thing to be brought vividly face to face with the system, to know that Boris, head man of the village, the lessee of a government post-house, and therefore himself a master of servants and the owner of many roubles, was of no account in the eye of the law. He and Nadia could be summoned back at any time to their lord’s estate, clothed in peasant attire, put to degrading tasks, and, like domestic animals, could be whipped or sold at the pleasure of their owner.

No wonder, with such fears as these always present to their mind, that Boris should wear an habitual look of melancholy, and that Nadia’s flashes of liveliness should alternate with moods of gloom!

Now if Wilfrid had been some blockhead of a Russian boyar he would have disdained all further conversation with the innkeeper and his daughter, but being an English gentleman it never occurred to him that he was losing caste by conversing with a serf, and so he continued to talk on, and under his sympathetic words Nadia seemed to brighten again.

“Do you know,” she remarked, looking up with a half-smile, “that you have been talking treason? You have used the word ‘free’ several times. It’s a prohibited word.”

“Prohibited?”

“I do not jest, gospodin. The Czar Paul would regulate the language of his people, so he has issued a ukase forbidding the utterance of certain words. Among such come ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’”

“The devil!” muttered Wilfrid.

“You may say that. That’s not a prohibited word.”

“’Twere well, Nadia, to give me a list of these forbidden vocables.”

“I don’t know them all. However, you mustn’t use the word ‘revolution.’”

Wilfrid began now to understand why the officials of Kowno had confiscated from his small travelling library a book bearing the title of “The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies.” Evidently it was regarded as a dangerous political work!

“Anything more?”

“Well, ‘snub’ is forbidden.”

“Heavens! what treason lurks in that simple word?”

“It will be taken as a reflection on the Czar, whose nose has a skyward tendency.”

“Anything more?”

“Beware of the word ‘bald.’”

“Ah!”

“Because if the Czar were to swear by the hair of his head the oath would not be binding. Do you know he once had a soldier knouted to death for speaking of him as the ‘baldhead?’”

To the truth of Nadia’s remarks history can bear witness. The last of them was not very encouraging to Wilfrid, for if the Czar could put a man to death far an offence so slight, he would surely do the like with one who had defeated his envoy at Berlin. And Wilfrid’s coming to St Petersburg would quickly become known to Baranoff’s underlings, since it was required of every stranger that he should report himself at the Police Bureau. Was it likely, then, that Count Baranoff would neglect the opportunity of exposing him to the vengeance of the Czar? But though Wilfrid began to realize more vividly than before the dangerous character of his enterprise, he was still resolute to go on with it, trusting that as he had emerged triumphantly from previous perils, so, too, he would from this.

He sought to turn the conversation from politics by making inquiries as to the other guests in the house.

The innkeeper, with a shake of his head, gave it as his opinion that there was something mysterious about them, since one and all had declined to disclose their names, a statement that did but serve to stimulate Wilfrid’s curiosity.

“To-day about noon,” said Boris, proceeding to tell all he knew, “there drove up to the inn door a troika containing four persons, two equerries attired in blue and silver livery, and two women, who——”

“Who,” interposed Nadia, “from their dress might have been taken for grand-duchesses, but who proved in the end to be only ladies’ maids.”

“The four had been sent on to prepare for the coming of their mistress, a boyarine, so they said, of the highest rank. They wished to engage the whole inn for the night. They insisted that the time of their lady’s sleep must be free from the slightest noise, to ensure which they stipulated that I must exclude all other visitors, and to this I agreed, as they promised to pay well. They then went the round of the inn, selecting such rooms as they deemed suitable.”

“And the airs and graces of the maids!” said Nadia. “They strutted about with their noses held high. Nothing was good enough for them.”

“They selected the Tapestried Chamber as the bedroom of their lady,” continued Boris.

“Yes, and grumbled because there was no room communicating directly with it. They wished to be near their lady, and actually wanted us to connect the Tapestried Chamber with the adjoining room by there and then cutting a doorway through the wall.”

“And when I refused,” pursued Boris, “on the ground that I could not make any alteration in government property without the consent of the government, I thought they would never cease laughing, though for my part I could see nothing to laugh at. In the evening about seven of the clock the boyarine and her party arrived.”

“And how sweet and gracious she was!” commented Nadia. “Different altogether from her retinue. Do you mind that ugly haughty man in uniform, with the long spurs and the fierce moustaches. He’s a fire-eater, if you like! He spent an hour after dinner in fencing with another officer, as lordly as himself. One of the maids so far condescended to me as to say that he practised this sword-play every day in order to be able to kill a certain Englishman.”

“He must take care that the Englishman doesn’t kill him,” smiled Wilfrid.—“They have all gone to bed, I suppose?”

“All,” replied Boris. “The boyarine in the Tapestried Chamber; in the room on her right the two maids, in that on the left the—the——”

“The Ugly One,” interjected Nadia.

“And the rest here and there in different rooms.”

“And they are staying for the night only?” asked Wilfrid.

“For the night only. They set off at ten in the morning for St Petersburg.”

“You didn’t hear the boyarine’s name?”

“We didn’t hear the names of any of them. They wish to remain unknown. ‘The name,’ said the officer with the spurs, who seems to be the boyarine’s right-hand man, ‘the name by which we choose to be known is Pay-well. Ask questions and it shall be Pay-not.’”

“It is the fashion,” remarked Nadia, “with some of our noble ladies to spend a week or two of religious seclusion in some convent. From a few words let fall by one of the party I believe the boyarine is returning from some such a visit.”

“It may be,” responded Wilfrid. “Is she young or old?”

“Not much past twenty,” replied Nadia.

“And her appearance?”

“Her appearance!” repeated Nadia with enthusiastic warmth. “Her appearance! Ah! gospodin, how can one describe what is indescribable? I am told that there lives a German duchess so beautiful that once, when passing through a certain village of Italy, the simple-minded peasants knelt, believing her to be the Madonna. I think our boyarine must be that duchess, so sweet and beautiful is she.”

“Dark or fair?”

“As fair as the day, with golden hair and blue eyes.”

“Then she resembles you.”

Nadia gave a scornful little laugh.

“My eyes are light blue; hers are of a lovely, dark azure and shine like stars. At a distance our hair may seem alike, but look closer. Mine is straw-coloured tow; hers woven sunbeams and as soft as silk. But the way she arranges it! She must be very much afraid of the Czar.”

“Why so?”

“Her coiffure shows it.”

“What! has that old autocrat been dictating in what way ladies shall wear their hair?”

“That is so, gospodin.” And here Nadia, twisting her long hair into a number of thick plaits, disposed them in ludicrous fashion around her head, saying with a smile, “This is Paul’s ideal coiffure, and this is how ladies must appear at Court. But we, who do not go to Court, may wear it as we please.” And with that she let her hair fall around her like a shower of golden threads, and pushing some aside, looked smilingly at Wilfrid.

CHAPTER IV
IN THE PRINCESS’S BED-CHAMBER

A few more words passed and then Wilfrid, with a glance at his watch, opined that it was high time for him to go to bed.

“Will you show the gospodin to his room, Nadia?” said the innkeeper.

“He had better pull off those heavy boots first,” suggested the girl.

And Wilfrid, knowing her reason, good-humouredly complied.

“And you’ll not get up till after ten?” pleaded Boris. “The boyarine must not know that I have broken my word. And I must keep your yamchik out of the way till she has taken her departure.”

“Very good. To please you I’ll prolong my slumbers,” assented Wilfrid, “though I confess I should like to have a peep at the fair boyarine.” And bidding the innkeeper “good-night,” Wilfrid followed Nadia, who led the way with lighted lamp.

“Tread softly,” she said with a subdued laugh. “Don’t disturb the repose of the Ugly One, whatever you do. So savage-looking is he that he’ll think nothing of running you through the body with his long sword if he should be waked before his time.”

Mindful more of the boyarine than of the Ugly One, Wilfrid stepped with noiseless tread.

“Your room,” said Nadia, as they ascended a staircase, “is exactly over the boyarine’s bed-chamber, so you must move about as silently as a ghost.”

Conversing thus in whispers she turned down the corridor that led from the second landing.

“This is your room,” she said, pausing before a closed door.

Wilfrid, taking the lamp from her hand, wished her “good night.”

“The last Englishman parted from me very differently.” There was no mistaking the saucy invitation of her eye and lip. Pretty faces were made to be kissed, and Wilfrid did what any other sensible fellow would have done similarly situated, in which pleasing business the lamp became accidentally extinguished.

“There now! You yourself must re-light it,” she said, thrusting a tinder-box into his hand. “I cannot stay longer,” and pushing him into the room, she closed the door upon him and hurried away.

Wilfrid’s first act on finding himself alone was to lock the door, his practice always at a strange inn; his next, the room being in total darkness, was to obtain a light, a somewhat difficult feat, owing to the dampness of the rag in the tinder-box. Not till after the lapse of ten minutes did he succeed in producing a flame sufficient for the rekindling of the lamp.

While kneeling on the floor at this task he more than once fancied that he caught a sound like a sigh, and at the moment of obtaining the light he became convinced of the reality of the sounds.

A regular succession of light breathings gave audible proof that he was not the only person in the room. Rising to his feet and holding the lamp on high, Wilfrid looked about him, and discovered that the breathings came from a bed a little distance off. Curtains hanging around the bed prevented him from seeing the sleeper. It was clear that through some strange blunder Nadia had shown him to the wrong room.

Then——

“By Jove!” muttered Wilfrid.

His eyes had fallen upon a startling sight—startling, that is, in the sense of being unexpected.

There, orderly disposed upon a chair by the dressing-table was a pile of fair undergarments, while beneath the same chair there peeped forth a pair of satin shoes formed only for the smallest of feet.

RISING TO HIS FEET AND HOLDING THE LAMP ON HIGH, WILFRID LOOKED ABOUT HIM.

“By Neva’s Waters.” [Page 34.]

The person behind the curtains was not a man!

Fortunately Wilfrid’s movements had been so noiseless as not to disturb the occupant. His obvious course, then, was immediate retirement.

He was on the point of stealing off when his eye was caught by sparkles of light coming from a jewel-case that lay upon the dressing-table. It did not require the knowledge of a lapidary to pronounce that the rich gems and the wrought gold represented a very large amount of money. The owner was, obviously a lady of wealth, and—Shrine of Venus!—there could not be a doubt about it; he was standing in the very bed-chamber of the fair boyarine!

Nadia, paying too much attention, perhaps, to Wilfrid’s talking, had not noticed that instead of ascending to the third landing and taking the corridor that led from that, she had mistakenly stopped and turned when upon the second landing, with the result that Wilfrid, instead of being in the room immediately above that of the boyarine, was in the boyarine’s room itself!

“What would the Ugly One with the spurs and moustaches think,” muttered Wilfrid grimly, “if he knew of my presence here?”

The sooner he withdrew the better. He had already been in the room more than ten minutes. If Nadia should recall her error, and should come flying back with clamour, the issue might be awkward, both for the lady and himself.

Just as he was about to make for the door his ear detected a movement in the bed.

His heart almost leaped to his throat. Some instinct told him that the movement was not an unconscious stirring in slumber; the lady was wide awake, and remembering that she had gone to sleep in the dark, was doubtless puzzling herself to account for the light now shining through her bed-curtains.

His first impulse, to extinguish the light, was checked by the thought that the fear occasioned by the sudden darkness might elicit a scream from her. Better to stand still and be openly seen than to glide, a terrifying black shape, from the room.

A glance toward the bed showed him a hand coming forth from between the curtains—a hand as white as the sleeve of the nightdress that clothed the arm of the wearer.

The drapery parted, revealing a beautiful face and figure—the living original of the miniature!

Overwhelmed with surprise Wilfrid stood, as breathless and as still as if he had suddenly fallen under a spell of enchantment.

He had loved her from the first moment of setting eyes upon her portrait, but now the actual sight of the living princess increased that love tenfold. Could it be true that he, and he only, held a place in her heart, and that for a space of more than eight years? If eight years previously in Saxony he had exercised so powerful an impression upon her girlish imagination, she should surely know him again? But though he hoped and looked for it, she betrayed no sign of recognition. Indeed, the only emotion expressed in her widening eyes was wonder.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Her voice—and one more soft and musical had never fallen upon Wilfrid’s ear—seemed to have the effect of breaking the spell that had held him.

He bowed with all the grace he was capable of.

“I am an English traveller, a midnight arrival, who has been erroneously led to believe that this was his bedroom. I cannot sufficiently express my regret at having disturbed you in this unceremonious fashion.”

There was about Wilfrid that air of good breeding that marked him as a gentleman, and gave to his words the stamp of truth.

Her suspicions, if she had had any, were gone in a moment.

“Then, sir, please to withdraw,” she said, in a tone of gentle dignity.

“At once,” replied Wilfrid, turning to the door, “trusting I may be permitted to pay my respects to you in the morning, and to apologise more at length.”

Just the faintest shade of fear passed over her face.

“No, no, you must not do that! As you love your life keep this meeting a secret! I speak with good reason. Go! But stay—one moment. Your name?”

“Wilfrid, Lord Courtenay.”

A faint cry escaped the Princess as Wilfrid so held the lamp that its light fell clearly upon his face.

She knew at least his name, if she did not recognise him; that much was certain. Equally certain was it that his name or his presence filled her with some deep emotion. She caught her breath; her colour came and went. If these symptoms were due to love it was a love mingled with dismay, and the dismay seemed to predominate.

Though prudence told Wilfrid that it was high time to go, he could not resist the temptation of lingering to ask,

“Have we met before?”

“Once,” answered the Princess in a softened voice, “and once only, when you saved me from death!”

It must have been in his sleep, then, for he had no recollection of it! Adventures he had known in plenty, but to save the life of either woman or girl was a pleasure that had never yet fallen to his lot, and he said so.

The Princess gave a half-smile.

“It was an event so strange that I do not wonder at your failing to connect me with it.”

A more puzzling statement, this, since the very strangeness of the affair should surely be an additional reason for stamping it upon his memory.

As Wilfrid looked intently at her in the vain attempt to discover her meaning, he saw an awful change pass over her face. Dilated eyes, lips drawn apart, and cheeks perfectly bloodless—all showed her to be seized by a sudden sense of fear.

A moment more and Wilfrid, too, felt fear, not on his own account, but on hers.

A murmuring of voices and the sound of footsteps were audible on the other side of the bedroom door. A little crowd was congregating in the corridor without. What was the cause of the gathering? His striking of the flint had been accompanied by very little noise. The voices of both the Princess and himself had been scarcely loud enough to penetrate beyond the room. Why, then, was attention becoming drawn to the Princess’s bed-chamber? Had Nadia become aware of her error? Was she outside, testifying to others that she had mistakenly conducted an English traveller to this chamber? Had the Princess’s retinue gone to the bedroom intended as his and found it empty? Had they then decided to search the Princess’s bed-chamber? The discovery of a man at the dead of night in the bedroom of a lady, who had let fifteen minutes elapse without raising an alarm, would certainly place her in a compromising situation.

The confused murmur outside ceased. Then came a gentle tapping upon the panels of the door.

Now if Wilfrid had followed his own impulse he would at once have opened the door, and explained the matter precisely as it had happened, being of opinion that the truthful way is always the best way, but on glancing at the Princess he saw her with her finger upon her lips, which action he took as a sign that he was not to speak.

In the silence of that trying moment he could almost hear the beating of her heart.

The knocking was renewed, being followed this time by a turning of the handle and a pressure against the door, which did not yield since, as previously stated, Wilfrid upon entering had locked it.

“What is it?” cried the Princess, striving to subdue the tremors of her voice.

“Did not your highness call us?” was the reply, delivered in a deep bass voice, which Wilfrid immediately recognised to be that of Prince Ouvaroff, or, as Nadia had impolitely called him, the Ugly One.

The voice came both as a surprise and a pleasure to Wilfrid—a pleasure, because his present position would now admit an explanation, certain to be received by the Prince, who would not be likely to impute dishonourable motives to his old friend. Indeed, Wilfrid was almost on the point of answering, but thought it more prudent to await the pleasure of the Princess.

“I did not call, Prince. I would have rung had I wanted anything.”

Wilfrid groaned in spirit. The deed was done. If the Princess were not compromised before she certainly was now, and by her own action. Her words were tantamount to saying that nothing unusual was occurring—in effect, a tacit denial of his presence.

“But had you rung we could not have come to you,” said a feminine voice, belonging evidently to one of the Princess’s maids, “since your Highness has locked the door against us.”

“A wise precaution in a strange house. I did not call, nor do I want anything. Return to bed, silly ones. You—you are interrupting my rest.”

There was a brief whispering, followed by the sound of receding footsteps, and though all became silent in the corridor again, Wilfrid was troubled with the horrible suspicion that the speakers had merely moved off to some distant place of observation, there to wait for his appearing. If so, how was it possible for him to escape discovery?

The only other exit from the room lay through the window, but Wilfrid was well aware that Russian windows are, at the beginning of winter, so firmly secured against the cold without as to be opened with extreme difficulty. Moreover, if he should succeed in crawling through the lattice and in dropping to the ground below—honourable doings for a Courtenay!—his footprints in the snow would betray him. And how was he to re-enter the inn without attracting notice? It was impossible for him to remain all night in the bed-chamber, even if the Princess, yielding to necessity, should permit it, for in the morning discovery must ensue upon the entering of the maids. He could leave only by the door, but again came the disquieting thought that there might be watchers in the corridor without, determined to see the end of the matter, even though they should have to wait all night. If this last were the case, then each moment of his stay would but deepen—nay, confirm—suspicion.

He was still standing in the place where he had first stood after lighting the lamp, hesitating to stir lest the moving of the light or the sound of his feet should lead to his betrayal. But now the Princess beckoned him to approach. She wished to speak, and for obvious reasons to speak in a whisper. Wilfrid moved forward in silence. The Princess pointed to a chair by the bedside, and Wilfrid, sitting down, placed the lamp upon the dressing-table, and bent his head to listen.

What the Princess said was almost inaudible to Wilfrid: it was more by the motion of her lips than by the actual sound proceeding from them that he understood her to say:—

“I said what I did”—alluding to her implied denial of his presence, surely a pardonable evasion considering the circumstances—“to save you from being cut to pieces before my eyes—your fate if found here. Do not go—till—till they have had time to fall asleep again.”

With that she sank back upon her pillow.

To be sitting by the bedside of a fair and youthful princess was a very charming situation, but it had its drawbacks. Should discovery ensue, then, unless the Princess had the nature of an angel, how could she ever forgive the man who had made her innocence appear as guilt? From her, whose love he was so anxious to win, what could he now look for but resentment? The endearing impression made on her mind by his saving of her life, though confessedly he had no recollection of the event, would now be completely effaced by this unfortunate blundering into the wrong room at night.

As Baranoff’s face, with its sneering smile, rose vividly before him, Wilfrid turned cold at the thought that he had done the very thing the minister had wanted him to do! Should this affair come to his ears how he would triumph in the Princess’s shame! How quick he would be to reveal it to the world! Wilfrid recalled his words: “Death at the hands of the State for the Princess as well as for her lover.” That there was truth in this utterance seemed evidenced by the words of the Princess herself; that he would be slain before her eyes if found in her bed-chamber. Such a fear spoke but too plainly of her position, for if she were powerless to prevent her retinue from butchering him, it was clear that she was not really their mistress. She was, in fact, a sort of honourable prisoner of State, free to travel if she chose, but attended by an escort, told off to watch for any suspicious act. In forecasting his probable doom she had not touched upon her own. Was it possible that he was really bringing upon her a like fate?

He ventured to steal a glance at her face. How beautiful it was, with its soft violet eyes shaded by long dark lashes? Whatever may have been the arrangement of her hair earlier in the evening, it now lay upon the pillow like a bright aureole around her face, one golden tress twining about her white throat like a vine tendril clasping a marble column.

If ever woman had cause to be angry with Wilfrid that woman was this princess, and yet her face betrayed not the faintest sign of resentment; on the contrary, there was something in her look assuring him that, come what might, she would be the last person in the world to reproach him for an act unwittingly committed, a forgiving tenderness of spirit on her part that, while it endeared her the more to Wilfrid, at the same time enhanced, rather than lessened, his despair.

Half an hour passed without a word spoken on either side. Then the Princess bent forward till her golden hair was so close to his own that he could feel her warm breath on his cheek.

“Lord Courtenay,” she said in the faintest of whispers, “before you go, a few words. You have heard me called ‘Highness.’ Do you know my name and rank?”

“I regret to answer no,” replied Wilfrid, speaking in a tone similarly subdued.

As she did not seek to enlighten him it was clear that she preferred to remain unknown.

“You will keep this meeting a secret?”

Wilfrid bowed assent.

“When you have found the right room let me entreat you to remain there till after ten in the morning.”

Ten o’clock, he remembered, was the time arranged for the resumption of her journey.

“My meaning is that if a certain one among my suite should learn that you have passed a night at this inn, the consequences to me may be,” she hesitated as to the choice of a word, finally selecting “hurtful.”

Wilfrid had no doubt that the person she meant was Ouvaroff, and for the moment he felt that he would like to do for Ouvaroff what he had done for the Abbé Spada.

“Your Highness, say no more. I stir not from my room till after the hour named.”

“What other persons besides myself know that you are here?”

“The innkeeper and his daughter, but for their own sake they will not speak of me to your suite. There is my yamchik, too, but they will take good care to keep him out of the way.”

Though the Princess had hinted that it was time for him to go, she did not seek to hasten his departure.

“Why do you, an Englishman, travel in Russia at a time so perilous as the present?” An embarrassing question, but before he had time to consider what answer he should give, the Princess spoke again.

“Lord Courtenay,” she said in a grave earnest tone, “I am glad in one sense to have met you, for I can give you a warning. It has become known to me that your life is not safe in Russia. Leave the country with all speed. Take another name; assume a disguise; forge a fresh passport; go anywhere rather than to St. Petersburg, where you have an enemy who will not spare you.”

“You allude to Count Baranoff?”

“To one greater than Baranoff.”

But when Wilfrid asked for the name of this person, the Princess shrank back with a strange and troubled look, so that Wilfrid refrained from repeating the question, for he could very well guess who was meant, though why she should hesitate at naming him was a mystery.

One greater than Baranoff? Who but the Czar could be greater than the Czar’s minister? And the cause of the Czar’s enmity was doubtless to be found in the defeat at Berlin of his policy, a defeat due to Wilfrid alone. And yet it seemed improbable that Baranoff would have the courage to tell the story of his own cowardice and flight. It might be, however, that he had related the matter in such a way as to exculpate himself, representing that his triumph would have been certain but for a secret emissary of Pitt’s, Lord Courtenay by name, who, insinuating himself into the confidences of Frederick William, had induced that monarch to side with Great Britain.

The warning given by the Princess more than ever convinced Wilfrid that his journey to St. Petersburg was likely to end in his arrest. Yet turn back he would not, now that he had once met with the Princess, whose whole manner showed that she moved in an environment of suspicion and peril, from which, if possible, he would deliver her.

“You will not go to St. Petersburg?” she said in a soft pleading tone that vibrated to his heart.

Wilfrid felt that to say he was bent on going would but increase the look of sadness on her fair face. He therefore temporised.

“I will think over the matter.”

“I have warned you. If you will not take my warning you are lost. I have no more to say,” she added—words that Wilfrid interpreted as a hint to go.

“Your Highness,” he said, rising, “you know my name. Will you not favour me with yours ere I go?”

She shook her bright flowing hair in tantalising fashion.

“What good will it do you?” she said with a sad smile. “Let me remain unknown. Now go, and Heaven watch over you!”

“And over you, too, Princess!”

Wilfrid bowed, took up the lamp, and walked to the door. Arrived there, he cast one last lingering glance at the Princess. She was sitting up in bed watching him, her hand pressed to her side as if to repress the accelerated beating of her heart. Was its quickening due to fear, or to love, or to a mingling of both?

He extinguished his lamp, conscious that even in the darkness the Princess’s eyes were upon him.

He cautiously turned the key of the door, the steel tongue of the lock moved back almost silently. Wilfrid paused a few moments, fearing lest the sound, faint though it was, should have attracted attention.

Finding that all remained still, he ventured to open the door and to look forth. By aid of a faint light shed by a lamp hung from the ceiling, he saw that the corridor was empty. His trained hearing caught neither the hasty movement of feet nor the sound of closing doors; nothing whatever occurred to suggest that any of the Princess’s retinue had been on the watch.

Thus assured, he stepped out into the passage, quietly closing the door behind him.

It was a new thing for Wilfrid to be stealing along a corridor at night like a thief, fearful of being seen or heard—an altogether humiliating experience, made endurable only by the thought that it was necessary for the honour, the safety, perhaps even the life, of the Princess. Twenty paces—he had a reason for taking accurate measurement—brought him to a landing, whence a short staircase led to the floor above, where was a corridor, similar in all respects to the one he had just left.

Moving forward twenty paces along this, Wilfrid paused before a certain door.

“Directly above the Princess’s room, Nadia said. Then this should be it. Now, pray Heaven, I am not disturbing some other person’s sleep.”

He cautiously opened the door, and quietly exploring his way through the darkness, reached the bed. It was empty. Re-lighting the lamp he found himself in a room whose appointments seemed to show that it was intended for the use of a male visitor.

Whether or not it was the room that Nadia had meant for him mattered little; he was not going to look for any other; so locking the door he went to bed, and was soon sound asleep.

CHAPTER V
DISCOVERED, OR NOT DISCOVERED?

“It is past ten o’clock, gospodin.”

The words came from Nadia, who, having tried for some time to arouse Wilfrid by knocking at his bedroom door, had at last succeeded.

“Past ten o’clock!” echoed Wilfrid, realising what these words meant. “Then the Prin—I mean the boyarine and her party have gone?”

“Half an hour ago.”

It was with considerable mortification that Wilfrid heard this news. It had been his intention to secrete himself at some loophole of observation in order to watch the departure of the Princess and her train. Prolonged slumber, however, had debarred him from this pleasure.

On coming down to breakfast his mortification soon yielded to a new feeling, namely, curiosity as to whether Nadia was aware of the blunder she had made. Had she discovered her error shortly afterwards, but, overcome with confusion and fear, had left him to extricate himself from the difficulty as he best might?

If she were not aware of her mistake it would be better to let her continue in ignorance of it—so much the safer would be the Princess’s secret. But in what way was he to question Nadia without revealing what he wanted to hide? A lawyer might be equal to the task, but Wilfrid wasn’t a lawyer, for he was too impulsive in speech, which is a fault, and too transparent in motive, which is a virtue.

As he sat down to breakfast he eyed Nadia keenly, who coloured on observing his gaze as any maiden might, whose last parting from a man had been marked by a kiss, so that her sudden blush told him nothing of what he wished to know. She was the sole attendant at table, her father at that moment being engaged in superintending the delivery of a wagon-load of fagots.

“The gospodin slept well?” she asked.

“Excellently. Five minutes after leaving you,” said Wilfrid, fixing his eyes intently upon her face, “five minutes after leaving you I was fast asleep.”

If she had been among the little gathering outside the Princess’s bedroom she must have known that he was not keeping to the truth. If she knew it she did not betray her knowledge by any change in her manner.

“There is nothing like a long drive in the frosty air for making one sleep,” was her quiet remark.

“By the way,” added Wilfrid with a careless air, “just as I was dropping off I fancied I heard a disturbance on the floor beneath me—a talking, or a moving of feet—muffled sounds of some sort. Was I dreaming?”

“The floor directly beneath yours would be the boyarine’s room,” said Nadia, opening her eyes wide with surprise. “Do you say the noise came from there?”

“There or near it, so at least it seemed to me. Did you hear the noise?”

“I! I was down in the kitchen getting ready some nice things for the boyarine’s breakfast.”

“Did any of the boyarine’s party complain of a noise during the night?”

“None.”

“Ah! Then I must have been dreaming.”

During this brief dialogue Wilfrid had kept his eyes on Nadia’s face, and became convinced by her natural and artless manner that she was unconscious of her blunder of the previous night.

That she was looking somewhat pale was nothing to the point, seeing that she had been up all night preparing with her own hand dainty dishes for the boyarine and her party.

At this point, having finished with his timber, Boris entered to see what services he could render. Naturally enough Wilfrid was desirous of learning all he could about the Princess.

“You waited on the boyarine at breakfast, I presume?” he said, addressing the pair. “How was she looking?”

“Rather pale and anxious,” replied Boris. “She scarcely spoke. In fact, her lively manner of last night was altogether gone.”

“And Ouva—I mean him whom Nadia calls the Ugly One? He breakfasted too, I suppose?”

“Sitting opposite to the boyarine,” replied Boris, who seemed to have kept a keen eye on his visitors. “He, too, looked rather grave. I caught him more than once watching her curiously. Her eyes would droop when she became conscious of it.”

“In short,” said Wilfrid with a mirthless laugh, “she might have been taken for a child that has done wrong, and he for a parent that had been scolding her.”

The innkeeper with some surprise murmured that Wilfrid’s words exactly hit off the situation.

For appearance’s sake Wilfrid went on eating, but his appetite had gone. He was possessed by a horrible sinking of heart; he suspected, nay, he felt sure, that his long stay in the Princess’s bed-chamber had become known, and that Prince Ouvaroff was disposed to put the worst construction upon the event.

The picture of the fair and innocent Princess, sitting mute and wretched amid her escort, exposed to coldness and suspicion, and unable to vindicate herself, filled Wilfrid with almost intolerable anguish.

Upon the woman whose love it was the one desire of his life to gain he had brought cruel reproach. Already in imagination Wilfrid heard the mocking laugh and ribald jest directed against the Princess by the immoral circle at the Court of the Czar. “She is only like the rest of us.”

Second thoughts, however, induced Wilfrid to believe that perhaps after all he was disquieting himself without reason.

The apparent lack of cheerfulness on the part both of the Princess and of Ouvaroff might be due to an entirely different cause. It came suddenly upon Wilfrid that the Princess was none other than the lady to whom Ouvaroff himself had once aspired, till a State warning had bidden him put a check upon his presumption. Perhaps, regardless of the State’s inderdict, Ouvaroff had once more ventured—it might even have been on the previous night—to renew his suit with the same result as heretofore. Hence the meeting between her and him this very morning would necessarily be quiet and somewhat embarrassing.

There could be no doubt that the Englishman who had so roused the deadly ire of Ouvaroff was none other than Wilfrid himself, though it was somewhat difficult to see how the Prince could have learned that his former friend had become his rival, since if the Princess really cherished a secret affection for Wilfrid, she would be the last person in the world to divulge it.

There was one circumstance which disposed Wilfrid to think that his interview with the Princess had escaped observation, and that was the peculiar forbearance of Ouvaroff. Surely, if the Prince had suspected anything he would have sought Wilfrid out and have demanded an explanation of the nocturnal incident. But the Prince had done nothing of the kind; on the contrary, he had set off next morning apparently ignorant that his old friend was beneath the roof of the Silver Birch.

But no sooner did this favourable view present itself than it vanished. Ouvaroff, aware of Wilfrid’s destination, was perhaps leaving him to the vengeance of the authorities at St. Petersburg.

The breakfast over, Boris, who took considerable pride in his hostelry, made the suggestion that perhaps his Excellency would like to be shown over the building; if so, Nadia would be pleased to take him round.

Wilfrid readily fell in with this offer, moved solely by the wish to see again the chamber in which the Princess had passed the night. He accordingly accompanied Nadia through the various rooms, listening, it must be confessed, with very little interest to her remarks, till at last they reached the Tapestried Chamber. And a daintily furnished little chamber it was; but now, void of its fair occupant, how desolate it seemed!

Wilfrid’s eyes roved reminiscently and mournfully around. Here was the dressing-table upon which he had set his lamp, and there the chair over which her fair attire had been cast; here, the seat in which he had sat by her bedside, and there the pillow still retaining the hollow made by the nestling of her golden head.

The faint perfume that Wilfrid had noticed on the previous night still hovered around the pillow. Moved by a sudden impulse, he lifted it, and with surprise and delight saw beneath a folded handkerchief.

On the principle of “Findings, keepings,” as children say, Wilfrid took possession of the article, which was of the finest cambric, delicately perfumed, and edged with beautiful lace.

Now, although the title of princess is sometimes borne—in Russia, at least—by persons of doubtful station, Wilfrid had felt that this was not the case with his princess; and on unfolding the handkerchief he received a startling proof of the correctness of his opinion, for the centre of the cambric exhibited the figure of a double-headed eagle wrought in gold thread.

“The Imperial Arms!” muttered Wilfrid.

His look of blank surprise was as nothing compared with that of Nadia’s. She, indeed, seemed not only amazed, but quite frightened by the discovery.

“The Czar’s Arms!” she gasped. “Is she a member of the Imperial house—A Grand Duchess?”

It seemed so, if the handkerchief were to be taken as proof, but how near to the throne there was no means of telling. She might be a very distant relative of the Czar; on the other hand, she might be a niece, or even a daughter! Wilfrid’s head swam at the thought. No wonder he ran the risk of being slaughtered by her suite if found in her bedroom!

That eagle in gold thread was not only a startling sight, but an unwelcome one to Wilfrid; it seemed to put a sudden stop to his love-dream. For him to think of mating with a princess of the Imperial house of Romanoff would indeed be the height of audacity; and yet, if the lady herself were willing—and the tender glance of her dark-blue eyes had given him a lover’s hope—he was quite ready to brave all risks on her behalf. If she were a Romanoff, was he not a Courtenay, with imperial blood in his veins, descended from the Byzantine emperors and permitted by the Garter king-at-arms to bear the proud title of Æquus Cæsaribus—equal to Cæsars?

But soon his thoughts took a lower flight.

“We have jumped to conclusions too hastily,” he said to Nadia. “The possession of the handkerchief doesn’t necessarily prove that she is a Grand Duchess. It may have been a gift of the Czar.”

This way of looking at the matter seemed to relieve Nadia’s mind somewhat, though why she should look so troubled over the discovery was a puzzle to Wilfrid.

“Besides,” he continued, “if she were an Imperial Duchess, her suite would select, as her stopping-place for the night, the castle of some grand boyar, rather than a wayside hostelry.”

But Nadia opined there was no force in this argument, seeing that the great Catharine herself had on one occasion stopped at the Silver Birch, and had slept in that very chamber. And Wilfrid was forced to admit to himself that it was an argument in favour of the Imperial theory that the chief of her escort was no less a personage than the Czarovitch’s own aide-de-camp, namely, Prince Ouvaroff. If she were not a Grand Duchess she must at least be some one of distinguished rank.

Folding the handkerchief, now the most precious of all his belongings, he placed it carefully within his breast, and descended again to the breakfast-room.

“And now,” said he, “send me my yamchik, and I’ll ask the scoundrel what he means by taking twelve hours to drive twenty-four miles.”

Nadia departed, and presently returned, leading in the yamchik, who stood, cap in hand, smiling and fawning.

Yes, shame to him, he had taken a long time in coming from Viaznika to Gora. Ah! why did he ever deviate from the post-road, thinking to take a shorter cut? He didn’t like to tell the gospodin so at the time, but he knew he had lost his way, and he had wandered, and wandered—oh! how he had wandered!

“Just as you are doing now,” interrupted Wilfrid. “And yet you say you have performed this same journey a hundred times?”

Yes, that was the most wonderful part of it—that he, who had travelled this route one hundred times, should go wrong at the one hundred and first. But there, man must make a certain number of mistakes in his life-time; even the mighty Czar sometimes made mistakes, much more, then, a poor yamchik.

But when it was pointed out by means of the map that he had similarly lengthened the stages on other days, the yamchik, while venturing to deny the impeachment, became less glib of tongue; professed that, being unable to read, he could not understand the condemnatory map, and finally grew so dense that Wilfrid, despairing of getting any clear ideas into the fellow’s thick skull, bade him go and harness the horses for the next stage.

Was the fellow a fool or a knave?

Wilfrid was disposed to rank him among the latter class, having a suspicion that all these manœuvrings on the part of the yamchik had been prompted by some interested motive, a motive, however, that Wilfrid was utterly unable to fathom.

It was hardly worth while now to dismiss the fellow, when only three or four days’ journey from St. Petersburg; but, while retaining him, Wilfrid determined not to leave these final stages to his judgment. So, after a brief study of the map, he selected both the route and the stages; and since, from motives of prudence, he did not wish either to overtake the Princess or to appear as if following immediately upon her track, he chose a somewhat circuitous road to the capital in lieu of the direct one.

And now, from without, came a jingle of bells and neighing of steeds to tell him that his car was in waiting.

Wilfrid rose, called for his bill, and paid it with a liberal overplus. Boris and his daughter accompanied him to the inn door, where a little crowd of servants had assembled to watch the departure of the rich Englishman.

Wilfrid turned to say “Good-bye” to Nadia. Her manner plainly showed that she was sorry to part with her guest, who, moved by a generous impulse, drew the pretty serf-maiden to one side.

“Nadia,” he whispered, “take heart. How long I shall be in St. Petersburg, I know not; but when I return again this way I will redeem you and your father from serfdom—yes, if it cost me fifty thousand roubles.”

He had thought to see her cheek colour with delight, her eyes to sparkle, and her lips to quiver with thankfulness; it was all the reward he wanted.

But, to his surprise, her emotion took a very different shape. She shrank back, staring at him, her cheek as white as the dead; in her eyes a look of wild, haunting horror.

“Isn’t that promise worth a kiss?” smiled Wilfrid.

She did not give him one; instead, she presented her cheek, and on touching it with his lips he found it as cold as marble.

Somewhat mortified by this strange reception of his offer, an offer made in all good faith, Wilfrid waved his hand to Boris, sprang into the sledge, and the next moment was speeding off along the frozen highway.

Nadia staggered, rather than walked, to her own little sitting room.

“What did the Anglisky say to you?” asked Boris, somewhat suspiciously.

“Say?” gasped Nadia, who seemed scarcely able to speak for emotion—“words that he meant to be words of hope, but to me they are words of despair. I would rather he had stabbed me. And he looked at me, oh! so pityingly. My God! if he only knew the truth!”

A shudder shook her from head to foot.

Her wondering father repeated his question.

“He promised to buy us our freedom, yours and mine.”

“Glory to God!” cried Boris, clasping his hands fervently together. “Glory to God who has put this thought into the heart of the Englishman! My prayer for you, Nadia, my prayer day and night for years, is answered at last. He’ll keep his word, this Englishman. An Englishman always does. And he shall not lose by his goodness. I will work, work night and day, till I have paid him our ransom twice, yea, three times over. But, Nadia, Nadia, why do you grieve? Is this a thing to grieve about?”

“The offer comes a day too late, my father.”

“A day too late?”

“We are already free,” she replied, with a laugh dreadful in its want of mirth. “Free by the grace of the nether fiend, who is now mocking me with a deed that need not have been done.”

CHAPTER VI
HEIRESS TO THE THRONE!

On the fifth morning after leaving Gora, Wilfrid and his yamchik were speeding over a landscape that presented to the eye little more than a vast expanse of virgin white, sparkling beneath the rays of a pale, northern sun, that gave light, but not warmth.

“St. Petersburg!” cried the yamchik suddenly, pointing with his whip to the far-off northern horizon, which, presenting hitherto a smooth line, began now to have its continuity broken by a series of irregularities.

As the horses raced onwards, higher and ever higher out of the illimitable sea of white, there rose to view a curious and, to an occidental eye, fantastic mingling of palaces and minarets, of cupolas and crosses, each gradually becoming more clearly defined against the pale lilac of the Arctic sky.

Now, more than ever, did Wilfrid realise the madness of his enterprise.

He was hastening to a city that held two at least of his enemies, namely, Count Baranoff and the recently alienated Ouvaroff; to whom must probably be added a third, in the shape of the Czar Paul—which was tantamount to saying that he had a whole empire against him.

Now with the aid of friends, a man has often succeeded, despite police and spies, in eluding the vigilance of the Government; but no such hope sustained Wilfrid, seeing that in all the wide city there was not one man to whom he could look for refuge.

“I am entering St. Petersburg,” he mused. “Shall I ever leave it? ’Tis doubtful. I feel, for all the world, like a prisoner riding to the guillotine. No matter! Honour forbids me to go back. That my princess is to be found here is a sufficient reason for going forward. If her life is threatened, let them take mine as well.”

And he consoled himself with that aphorism of the desperate, “What is to be, will be.”

They were now leaving the silence and monotony of the steppe. Wooden cabins, with blue smoke rising from them, began to appear by the roadside, few at first, but by-and-by increasing in number, till they formed a continuous line. Soon the appearance of stone houses and handsome shops, of vehicles and pedestrians, told Wilfrid that he had entered upon the suburbs of the city.

“Hôtel d’Angleterre,” was his reply to the yamchik’s question as to whither the gospodin would be driven.

The hotel in question, a palatial structure, was kept by an Englishman, who bore the homely name of John Smith, a rosy-cheeked, rotund little personage, but having at this time a most lugubrious air, due to the bad state of business. His hotel, he remarked to Wilfrid, was mainly patronised by English visitors, all of whom had taken to flight on the declaration of war, leaving the vast building almost empty.

It was doubtless a very fine thing for patriotic Britons at home to read of their victories by sea and land, but the war fell hard on the English resident in St. Petersburg.

All this, and much more, was detailed by John Smith, whose gloomy prospects Wilfrid tried to brighten with the assurance that it was simply a game of bluff on the part of Paul, who, as soon as he should learn that the tall sails of Nelson’s fleet were coming up the Gulf of Finland, would quickly make peace.

Having paid and dismissed the yamchik, Wilfrid asked for a file of daily newspapers that should cover the period of the previous three weeks. He had found it impossible to procure a newspaper at any of the post-inns on the way; and hence he was in a state of ignorance as to how the world had wagged.

Going out, the landlord soon returned with a file of Russian journals, and, looking cautiously around, said: “If your lordship cares for news fourteen days old, I have here a file of the English Times, and that’s what you won’t find in any other hotel in St. Petersburg. I get them from the English Club, who contrive to have them introduced into Russia without their being seen and ‘blacked’ by the censor. Say nothing about this, or I shall be having a domiciliary visit from the police.”

Taking the papers, Wilfrid sat down and began with the file of the Times, skimming the contents with a quick eye, in the course of which operation he came across a paragraph that caused him for the space of a full minute to sit dumbfounded with surprise.

The paragraph which the Russian censor would certainly have “blacked” out, had the journal in question fallen into his hands, purported to come from the Times correspondent in St. Petersburg, and was worded as follows:—

“A strange story, to be received with some caution, is being whispered among political circles here, to the effect that the unfortunate Czar, Ivan VI., whose life, it will be remembered, was spent wholly in a dungeon, contracted a secret marriage with his gaoler’s daughter, a girl of exquisite beauty.

“The sole descendant of this union is a grand-daughter, now in her twenty-third year, and said to be of surpassing grace and loveliness. Till lately she has been living at Moscow, carefully concealing the secret of her romantic origin; but, through no act of her own, the story, by some means or other, has transpired.

“The Czar Paul is said to be convinced by documentary evidence of her legitimacy and Imperial lineage, a matter to him of grave import, since, as there is no Salic law in Russia, if the rule of primogeniture be followed, this grand-daughter of Ivan VI., as the eldest surviving representative of the House of Romanoff, should now be wearing the diadem of the Czars.

“With a view of keeping a watch over her, Paul some months ago removed her from Moscow to his Court at St. Petersburg, conferring upon her the title of Grand Duchess, and placing her among the ladies in immediate attendance upon the Czarina. Assuming that this story is true, he would be a bold prophet who, in view of the gloomy and suspicious nature of Paul, would venture to predict length of days to a lady so dangerous politically to him and his heirs.”

The paper fluttered from Wilfrid’s hands. He had no desire to read anything more that day. The political and military affairs of the Continent sank into insignificance beside this startling paragraph. The English readers of The Times might regard the story as a romantic fabrication; Wilfrid had reasons for believing otherwise.

The newspaper paragraph had closed with a sinister prediction, a prediction that had sent a thrill of fear to his mind. The only way of preventing its fulfilment was the removal of the duchess from Russia; but how could he, single-handed, effect the escape of a lady watched day and night as she undoubtedly must be?

“Matters are growing interesting,” he muttered. “A grand-daughter of a Czar! Lineal heiress to the throne! So that is why the lady must have no suitors; she must be prevented from transmitting her rights. And Ouvaroff and I, and all would-be lovers are to be ‘warned off.’ Well, for my part, I decline to take the warning. Having more than a liking for the lady, I intend to carry on my suit; for, if her eyes said anything the other night, they said love.”

A few questions to his host elicited the fact that the Czarina Mary, the Czarovna Elizavetta, the Grand Duchesses, and the ladies of the Imperial Household, were accustomed to take a drive every afternoon at two o’clock along the Nevski Prospekt.

Thinking that his grand duchess—the Times correspondent had, unfortunately, forgotten to name her—might form one of this party, Wilfrid resolved to take his stand near the entrance of the Michaelhof, in the hope of obtaining a fleeting glimpse of her.

Aware that in St. Petersburg a man in civilian attire is deemed of little account, Wilfrid resolved to don the uniform of a certain Austrian regiment in which he held the honorary rank of colonel, a reward conferred upon him by the Viennese Court for his bravery at the battle of the Devil’s Bridge, where he had fought side by side with Russians, as well as with Austrians.

The picturesque uniform of dark blue, rich with gold braiding, was admirably adapted to set off his graceful figure to advantage, and when, after assuming his cloak and a jewel-hilted sabre, he took a glance in the mirror, he was satisfied that he had made the best of himself.

Thus attired, he set off on foot to view the Michaelovski Palace, the new residence of the Czar Paul.

The building, when seen, proved quite a revelation to Wilfrid, whose very brief acquaintance with the city had hitherto shown him but two main styles of architecture, the barbaric, semi-oriental style, seen chiefly in its churches, and the façades copied from the boulevards of Paris, seen chiefly in its hotels and mansions.

But the Michaelhof differed from both styles. Here, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, was a feudal castle, with donjon and towers, battlements and loopholes, portcullises and drawbridges; and, finally, a surrounding moat, which, however, just then availed little for defensive purposes, inasmuch as it was frozen over.

Wilfrid had seen numerous fantastic castles in his time, but none to compare with this bizarre-looking pile. One might have fancied that a mediæval architect, given to wine, had fallen asleep and dreamed; and that this palace was the petrifaction of his dream-fortress, although the bristling cannon and sentinels with their bayoneted rifles comported somewhat incongruously with this relic of a bygone age.

The building had for Wilfrid a fascination due not so much to its strange character as to the fact of its being the residence of his princess. Which of those gloomy towers did she inhabit? Over which drawbridge would the Czarina and her ladies come forth?

“An Englishman, I perceive,” said a voice close to Wilfrid’s ear. He turned and saw beside him a cloaked and sworded figure, wearing the uniform of a general in the Preobrejanski Guards; a man tall and strong, broad and burly, with somewhat vulgar-looking features, and with a rich, florid complexion, evidently due to a liking for ardent spirits; as a matter of fact, his breath exhaled an aroma at that very moment. He had eyes of a light blue, a snub nose, and a truculent tawny moustache, and he carried himself with a kind of bluff swagger, probably mistaken by him for ease.

Wilfrid might well wonder how so commonplace a man should be wearing a general’s uniform; yet the man was to be a history-maker; in the time to come he was to surprise Europe, and perhaps himself, by the brilliancy of his campaigns against the invading French.

“An Englishman, I perceive,” he repeated smilingly.

“What is the evidence?” asked Wilfrid.

“You go on foot. A Russian gentleman never walks when he can ride.”

“By the same rule you are not a Russian—ah—gentleman.”

“You are right. I am a Hanoverian—General Benningsen. At your service, sir,” replied the other, raising his hand in military salute.

The name might well strike Wilfrid with surprise, for Benningsen was a man great in his family connections, if in nothing else. As a youth, he had wandered forth from Hanover to seek his fortune, and entering the Russian military service, had the good fortune to attract the notice of the great Catharine, ultimately marrying a natural daughter of that Empress.

But though a sort of brother-in-law to the Czar, Benningsen was not in favour at Court. As a matter of fact, he had been exiled for a time, and though recalled and restored to his rank as general, he was excluded from the Council of the Empire, the membership of which his Imperial family connections might naturally entitle him to expect. It was openly whispered that this exclusion, together with his banishment, had made Benningsen disposed to favour a change of Government, no matter what, so long as it was a change. Indeed, it was even asserted that he had been heard to say he would have his revenge on the “little orang-outang,” his name for the Czar Paul.

“As an Englishman and a soldier, you are my brother,” exclaimed the Hanoverian theatrically.

The Czar being at variance with England, it pleased Benningsen to patronise everything and everybody coming from that country. On learning the name of his new “brother,” Benningsen was loud in his admiration and delight at meeting with one who had shown the Russian troops how to pass the Devil’s Bridge by scaling the rocks above it, leading the way in the very fire of the enemy.

“Your gallant feat of arms,” he assured Wilfrid, “is remembered with gratitude and admiration by every officer in St. Petersburg.”

It was characteristic of Wilfrid that he thought, not of the effect that his deed might have upon the Czar, but upon—some one else. If his feat of arms had given pleasure to the Princess, it mattered little to him how Paul and others viewed it.

Benningsen, with a sweep of his arm, directed Wilfrid’s attention to the Michaelhof.

“‘In my father’s house are many mansions,’” he remarked. “And that’s the style of them,” he continued pointing to the palace. “Truly the angels have curious ideas respecting architecture.”

As Wilfrid’s face showed that he was quite in the dark as to the other’s meaning, the General proceeded to explain.

“Evidently you are not aware that my august brother-in-law received a visit one night from the Archangel Michael, who, showing him the plans and elevation of a palace, bade him build one like it. Fact! At least,” he added with a side glance at Wilfrid, “it’s a fact that Paul says so, and it is never prudent to doubt the word of a Czar.”

“You speak freely.”

“Why, one may speak freely with an Englishman. With a Grand Duke ’twere otherwise. To return to Paul. As soon as he had received the Archangel’s commission he was in a devil of a hurry to carry it out. Five thousand men were at work daily. To dry the walls more quickly red-hot plates were affixed to them. All to no purpose. The place is so damp that the dear Czar, the Empress, and the Grand Duchesses, are in a continual state of coughing. And the price of all this?—Eighteen million roubles!”

Wilfrid let him rattle on without interruption, perceiving that he was one of those men who are never better pleased than when hearing the sound of their own voice.

“You see that window facing us on the third story,” continued Benningsen, pointing it out. “What sort of room do you suppose lies behind it?”

“A prison, if one must judge by its numerous crossbars.”

“Wrong. Paul’s bedroom. Difficult to enter from the outside, eh?”

“Are you contemplating the feat?” smiled Wilfrid, for Benningsen really looked as if he had some such idea in his head.

“The window barred,” murmured the General, as if following out some train of thought rather than addressing Wilfrid, “and the bedroom-door difficult of access, since to reach it one must traverse a network of corridors so like a maze that to find one’s way requires the thread of Ariadne.”

“Are such precautions necessary?”

“The dear Czar thinks so.”

On learning for what purpose Wilfrid had come to the Michaelovski Square, Benningsen made the disappointing announcement that a distressing cough on the part of the Empress—“due to the damned palace”—prevented her and the Imperial ladies from driving forth that afternoon.

Benningsen, who was a member of the English Club situated on the Minerva Prospekt, suggested that Wilfrid should accompany him thither, to which proposal Wilfrid assented, moved more by the hope of there getting rid of the General than by any other reason. So the two set off, on foot, because, as Benningsen remarked, it was “so English.”

The Minerva Prospekt, when reached, turned out to be a wide and noble boulevard, alive with pedestrians of the lower orders and with the sleighs of the wealthier classes. The barbaric, yet handsome, costume of the boyars, the gay dresses and rich furs of the ladies, with their bright eyes and laughing voices, the furious galloping of steeds and the jingling of silver bells made a scene of colour, movement, and sound, that offered a striking contrast to the stillness, the emptiness, the monotony of the Michaelovski Square.

Then, in a moment, all was changed!

“Gossudar zdes! Gossudar zdes!”

Such was the cry—“The Czar is coming!”—that flew from mouth to mouth along the Prospekt.

Pedestrians stopped short in their walk; vehicles were hastily reined in, and dismay appeared on the faces of all, as with a crash of military music there suddenly debouched upon the Minerva Prospekt a regiment of footguards, in front of whom, and keeping time to the music with the waving of his cane, strutted an odd little figure, who was evidently taking a huge delight in the soldiers, in the marching, in the music.

CHAPTER VII
WILFRID DEFIES THE CZAR

“The orang-outang, confound him!” muttered Benningsen savagely, catching sight of the odd little figure. “Run, before he sees us. Quick! This way!”

“Why should I run?” demanded Wilfrid haughtily. He received no answer. Benningsen, holding his cloak over his face as if to prevent recognition, was running down a side street as fast as his legs could carry him. Wilfrid watched him in amazement.

“Afraid to face the Czar, his brother-in-law! Is the fellow an impostor, assuming the name of Benningsen for the purpose of fooling me?”

But as Wilfrid turned again he saw in a moment why Benningsen with some few others had vanished down the side streets; saw, too, why the square in front of the Michaelovski Palace had been deserted by all but the sentinels and those officials whose duty took them there.

For the truth was that even loyal Muscovites had come to regard a meeting with the Czar as little short of a calamity, since it was required by him that whenever he passed through a street all traffic must be suspended, pedestrians must cease their promenading, the occupants of vehicles must dismount, and everybody, from the serf to the boyar, must kneel bareheaded, be the wind never so cutting or the snow never so deep, till the “Little Father”—the expression is not meant to be ironic—had passed by. This practice, an old usage belonging to the barbarous days of the Empire, had been abolished by the good sense of Peter the Great; but Paul, on his accession, had revived the custom in all its rigour, so that Wilfrid, glancing along the Prospekt, saw two lines of kneeling people, some of whom even, with a servility truly Oriental, were touching the slush with their foreheads.

Close to Wilfrid was a landau from which there had alighted two ladies, the one aged and feeble, the other young and delicate, both obviously of noble blood since the panels of their carriage bore an armorial device; yet there they were, side by side with their coachmen and footmen, kneeling in the roadway upon a horrible mixture of snow and mud that chilled their limbs and stained their fur cloaks.

And woe to them and to any other person who should rise too quickly after the Czar had gone by! If detected by a backward glance of the Imperial eye it was well for the offenders if they escaped the knout or Siberia.

As Wilfrid beheld the obvious discomfort of these two ladies, a fierce anger flamed in his breast against the sovereign who required such humiliating obeisance. During all this time the regiment, marching twelve abreast, was drawing nearer to the place where Wilfrid stood.

Some of the kneeling throng, conjecturing from his attitude that he was a foreigner, ventured to give him good-natured advice.

“Kneel to the Czar, little father!” they cried. “Kneel if you would escape the knout. See! his eye is upon you.”

That fact made no difference in Wilfrid’s attitude. Determined to assert his English manhood he stood erect as a palm.

Other Englishmen besides Wilfrid had declined to bow the knee, but they had been strong in the knowledge that they could obtain the protection of Lord Whitworth, the British Ambassador. Wilfrid had no such hope to sustain him, since the withdrawal of that minister, on the outbreak of the war, had left Paul free to do as he liked with those obstinate Englishmen who refused to acknowledge his divinity.

“Halt!” yelled the little figure, who, for his size, possessed marvellous lung power. “Halt! Stop that music!”

The regiment ceased its marching, the band its playing. There was a terrible silence as the Czar, with a glare in his eye, marched straight up to Wilfrid. A shiver of expectancy ran through the throng. Some wriggled forward upon their knees with a view of getting into a better position for watching the sequel.

Wilfrid, who had seen not a few kings in his day, thought that the being now advancing towards him was the sorriest specimen of sovereignty he had ever met with—a very Caliban of royalty. He could scarcely bring himself to believe that the grotesque creature to whom all were kneeling as to a god could really be the crowned head of a vast empire.

He beheld a man, short of stature, bald and wrinkled, with a leaden complexion and large, glaring, dark eyes. The countenance was of the true Kalmuck type, so frightfully ugly that, if history speak truly, its owner shrank from looking into a mirror. (His wife, it is said, fainted at the first sight of him.) Certain it is that, differing from his predecessors, he forbade his likeness to be stamped on the coinage, with the result that since his time the Czar’s head has not figured on the Russian currency.

As if he were some character in a comic opera, whose part it was to burlesque royalty, he wore a shabby old military surtout reaching down to his heels, jack-boots with immense spurs, and an enormous cocked hat carried beneath his arm. No matter how many degrees of frost the thermometer might register, that hat was never seen upon his head. It seemed as if he had set himself to contradict the current opinion that St. Petersburg is the coldest capital in Europe. Cold? when a man can walk about in the open air without furs and without a hat! Pooh, don’t talk such stuff as that, sir!

Thus arrayed he was accustomed to play at soldiering by parading through the streets at the head of a regiment of footguards, flourishing a baton, marching on tip-toe with mincing air, and looking so like a little bantam that if he had flapped his arms and cried, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” one would have felt little surprise.

The regiment that accompanied him was the famous Paulovski Guards, a creation of his own and worthy of him. The face of every soldier, like that of his Imperial master, carried the ornament of a snub, upturned nose; and, as if to render the face still more grotesque, the moustaches were brushed upwards to the ears.

Not only did Wilfrid’s erect attitude give displeasure, but his six feet of handsome and athletic manhood was likewise an affront to a ruler, who, on account of his diminutive and ugly appearance, had been so sneered at by his mother’s tall and shapely courtiers that he had come at last to hate the sight of a well-favoured person, and was jealous even of his own son’s stature and beauty.

Directing a terrible glance at Wilfrid, the Czar spoke, and by that act, Wilfrid, did he but know it, had become a very illustrious character. “There are but two great men in Russia,” Paul had once said, “myself, and he to whom I happen to be speaking at the moment.”

“Why,” demanded the Czar—and though Wilfrid had never before seen or heard him, there seemed something oddly familiar, both in his face and voice—“why do you refuse to us the homage of the knee?”

“Because, Sire,” replied Wilfrid, bringing his hand up to the salute, “I revere the memory of the great Peter, who was wont to employ his stick upon the bodies of those who knelt to him!”

This was hitting Paul full in the teeth, for if there was one thing upon which he prided himself it was the imitating of his great-grandfather.

“We follow,” frowned the Czar, “a custom more ancient than the reign of Peter.” And then, confident that Wilfrid’s boldness could spring from but one nationality, he added, “You are an Englishman?”

“A man cannot choose his own parents, Sire.”

“Your name?” cried Paul, growing more angry.

“Wilfrid, Lord Courtenay.”

The Czar closed his eyes in thought. He seemed as if trying to recollect something. Wilfrid wondered whether the Emperor was connecting his name with that of the Princess. Suddenly opening his eyes again sharply, Paul said—“We have heard of you from Baranoff. You are the artist who tried by a picture to create an outbreak against established order?”

“I painted a picture portraying the murder of that royal lady, whose daughter till lately was under your protection, Sire.”

Paul winced, recalling first with what state he had welcomed the daughter of Marie Antoinette, and then, how he had sent her packing at a moment’s notice, merely to please his new ally Napoleon.

“We have heard of you,” he repeated. “A spy of Pitt’s, with whose gold you bribed Frederick William to hold aloof from the Russian alliance.”

The charge of being a spy came with a good grace, Wilfrid thought, from the very head and front of the spy system.

“No Courtenay was ever a spy. Question your own officers, Sire, and they will tell you that I have shed my blood in the service of Russia.”

“The more effectually to disguise your calling. A spy of Pitt’s. Silence! Do you brave the Czar to his face? On your knees, rascal, or——”

And up went the stick that had been often applied to the bodies of his subjects.

Wilfrid, his face somewhat pale, stepped back and half unsheathed his sword, and thus the two stood looking at each other. There was in Wilfrid’s eye a gleam which seemed to say that, if struck, he would strike back, and strike hard. As if realising this the miserable little man slowly lowered his stick, and just as slowly Wilfrid’s blade went down into its scabbard again, finishing its descent with a little clang.

During this episode no man moved, whether among soldiers or civilians—not a hand was put forth to defend the Czar. The significance of this fact, which did not escape Paul’s notice, served only to increase his fury.

“You would see your Czar murdered?” he cried, turning upon his regiment. “Lieutenant Voronetz, arrest this man.”

A young officer, motioning four men to follow him, approached Wilfrid.

“You are my prisoner,” he said, with a look that entreated the captive to give as little trouble as possible.

For one moment Wilfrid hesitated. The wild blood of his viking ancestors danced in his veins, urging him to defy his enemies. He was convinced now that in any case death would be his lot; then why not die heroically, with his trenchant blade whirling round his head?

“Give me his sword,” cried Paul, who had taken a fancy to the weapon. He was a collector of swords, and kept a little store of them in his bedroom.

“This sword,” said Wilfrid, drawing forth the blade, “the gift of the Prussian Queen, shall never be handled by a Muscovite barbarian.”

And ere his guards could stop him, Wilfrid snapped the blade in half, and flung the two fragments upon the snow.

“An honourable way of treating a Queen’s gift,” sneered Paul; and then, addressing the officer, he added, “To the Citadel with him. To be brought to the Red Square at the first parade to-morrow. Your life for his, if he escapes. Forward,” he cried, addressing the regiment and waving his cane.

The band struck up a march, and the grotesque Paulovski Guards, with the Czar at their head, moved onward again; and as they passed the wearied Petersburgers rose and straightened their stiffened limbs. They took care to keep at a respectful distance from Wilfrid, and to maintain silence. It was dangerous to express sympathy.

At a signal from Voronetz, the four soldiers fell into position, two before Wilfrid and two behind, the lieutenant taking his place at the prisoner’s right hand.

“Draw sabres. March.”

Four swords flashed simultaneously from their scabbards; and, as the guard moved forward, Wilfrid mechanically moved forward with them, scarcely able to realise that he was a prisoner, so quickly had the event happened.

“Gospodin,” said Voronetz, “when the monkey plays the flute you should dance. You have acted foolishly.”

“Wisely; for I have maintained the dignity of an Englishman.”

“And put yourself into prison.”

“No more in prison than yourself, good Voronetz. Russia is a prison.”

“’Tis a pretty large one, then. Gospodin, if one is not prepared to obey the laws of Russia, one should keep out of Russia.”

“There’s something in that argument,” laughed Wilfrid. “Whither are you taking me?” he asked presently.

“To the Petropaulovski Fortress.”

“The Pet—? ’Tis a melodious name.”

“’Tis called the Citadel for shortness.”

“Where situated?”

“On the other side of the Neva.”

“Far or near?”

“Three versts away. If the gospodin likes, he may hire a vehicle to take us thither.”

“Thanks; but I’m in no particular hurry to reach your polysyllabic fortress. Who is the governor of it?”

“Count Arcadius Baranoff.”

“The devil!”

“I believe he is, or a near relative. The post was given him as a sort of reward for his successful mission to France. There’s a fine salary attached to it.”

The thought that he was to be put into the power of his enemy, Baranoff, was a somewhat disquieting one to Wilfrid. A dark cell and irons was the least merciful punishment he could expect from the malignant governor.

Wilfrid’s position seemed to weigh little with the chatty lieutenant; for, as they marched along, he took upon himself to point out to his prisoner various buildings of note, thinking, perhaps, that as Wilfrid was not long for this world, it would be a pity for him to pass out of it without taking with him some knowledge of so fine a city. “See Petersburg, and then die,” was evidently his motto. And as it is better to be cheerful than gloomy, Wilfrid tried to take an interest in the proffered remarks.

“And what place is this?” he asked, as they passed by a wide, open space.

“This is known as the Red Square.”

“And that hillock in the centre——?”

“Is where the condemned criminal stands.”

“And the wooden pillar——?”

“The post to which he is tied while receiving the knout.”

“The knout. What is that?” asked Wilfrid with assumed innocence.

“Now you jest, gospodin. ’Tis a whip.”

“Does it—ah!—hurt?”

“You’ll soon be in a position to judge.”

“How so?”

“You heard the Czar say that you are to be brought to the Red Square at the first parade in the morning.”

“You mean that I am to be knouted?”

“As surely as the sun will rise to-morrow. If the gospodin has any money or jewelry upon him, he had better entrust them to me.”

“For what purpose?”

“To bribe the executioner, so that he may accommodate you according to your taste.”

“I fail somewhat to grasp your meaning.”

“Why, look you, knouted you must be in some way or other, for the Czar will be present to see his orders carried out. Now, there are three ways of swinging the lash.”

“Really? You interest me.”

“First, there is the merciful way. The strokes are made to descend upon the back only; in which case one has a chance of surviving the lash, even though gunpowder be rubbed into the wounds and set on fire.”

“Is that one of the features of the merciful way?”

“The people sometimes demand it; it pleases them, and need not hurt you.”

“How is the pain to be avoided?”

“A bribe to the knouter, and he will, before beginning business, administer to you unseen a stupefying drug.”

“Good! And the second way——?”

“Ah, that is terrible, gospodin, terrible! The executioner causes the lash to coil entirely round the body, cutting the flesh as with the edge of a razor, laying the very bones and bowels bare. No one can survive this method, which is the one he’ll adopt, unless bribed to act otherwise.”

“And the third way?”

“Is the happy despatch; he kills at the very first stroke by breaking the spine. You have but to say which method you prefer and Vladimir will oblige. You’ll always find the friends of the condemned at Vladimir’s door on the eve of a knouting.”

Wilfrid had no fear of death, as such, provided it should come in swift and painless guise. But death by knouting! To stand half-naked, on a grey, wintry morning in sight of a gaping crowd, his flesh hanging in strips from ribs and spine, was an end so dreadful that it might well have shaken the iron nerves of Zeno himself.

Just as he was preparing to make a dash for liberty at some side street, gateway, or any other convenient opening, and was looking keenly ahead of him with a view to this contingency, he noticed, not far off, and on his side of the road, a man wearing the livery of some nobleman; a man who commanded attention by reason of his stature, for he was fully seven feet high and proportionately broad. He stood smoking a cigar, and lounging at the foot of a flight of steps that led up to the door of a stately mansion. Though attentive, apparently, to nothing but his cheroot, this man was in reality keeping a watchful eye upon the advancing escort, whose lieutenant was walking on the side remote from the steps.

Though struck somehow by the man’s manner, Wilfrid was not prepared for his action.

As the little party came up and was in the act of passing, the hitherto listless giant displayed a sudden and remarkable activity. Putting forth his mighty hands, he grasped the two near guards, namely, the one who marched before Wilfrid, and the one who marched behind, and hurled them, each against his neighbour, with such force that all four went sprawling to the ground, their sabres flying with them. At the same moment, Wilfrid found his wrist clasped by the hand of a young lady, clad in a handsome set of sables.

“Quick,” she said, her eyes dancing with excitement. “Up these steps, and you are safe. Quick!”

Wilfrid required no second bidding. Pulled by the lady upon one side, and by the giant upon the other, he was swung up the steps towards the door; it opened at a touch, and the three disappeared before the very eyes of the astonished escort. The rapidity of the feat was the most astonishing part of it: the affair had not taken more than six seconds.

Recovering from his surprise, Voronetz called upon his men to follow him, and flourishing his sabre he sprang up the steps, bent on forcing his way into the mansion, when he suddenly stopped short at sight of some letters upon the glass lamp above the door.

“We cannot enter here,” he said, his sword-arm dropping limply to his side; and then, realising the consequences of Wilfrid’s escape, he muttered, “Holy St. Nicholas! I shall lose my head for this.”

While Voronetz stood there, irresolute and despairing, Wilfrid, having passed the double doors of the mansion, found himself in a stately entrance-hall with a gilt gallery supported on marble pillars. The tapestries and mirrors, the statues and pictures, rivalled the splendour of Versailles.

Four lackeys in gold-laced liveries, stationed at different points, gave an additional touch of grandeur to the scene. Two well-dressed gentlemen, conjectured by Wilfrid to be secretaries, passing through the hall at this moment, glanced curiously in his direction.

The lady who had rescued Wilfrid was about twenty-five years of age, with dark hair and dark eyes. Wilfrid, who, it must not be forgotten, was an artist, contemplated her tall and graceful person with secret pleasure. He had seen only one face more beautiful; and it was quite possible that if his princess and this stranger were to stand side by side, an impartial judge might have awarded the palm for beauty to the latter.

She laughed with all the gaiety of a schoolgirl at the feat she had just performed.

“I was a witness of your arrest,” she said, “and hurried on before you. I knew your guards would take the Nevski Prospekt, because it is the direct route to the Citadel; and I knew, too, they would take this side of the Prospekt, as being the sunnier. So I stationed François at the foot of the steps with orders to snatch you from their hands. And we have succeeded. You are safe here. The Czar and all his armies dare not enter.”

“What place is this, then?”

“Monsieur le vicomte,” she said, with a graceful little curtsey, “welcome to the French Embassy.”

Wilfrid’s face clouded at these words.

“I thank you, mademoiselle,” said he, folding his cloak around him, and taking a step towards the entrance, “but I must wish you adieu. An enemy to France, I cannot in honour accept this asylum.”

“Stay a moment,” she replied, raising her forefinger with a pretty air. “There is a twofold France, royalist and republican. For which are you?”

“For royalist France, undoubtedly.”

“You hate Bonaparte?”

“I do not love him.”

“Let me whisper a secret. I hate Bonaparte; yes, that is the word—hate. Is not this a dreadful confession to come from the daughter of the Ambassador that represents him? Mon père is a republican, a servant of the Consulate; but as for me—‘Vive le roi’ is my motto. Now, if I, a foe of the Republic, do not scruple to reside under the roof of the French Embassy, why should you not accept its hospitality, at least for a day or two?”

“Will you let me see Monsieur l’Ambassadeur?”

“At present he is out. He will return shortly.”

“It is generous of you to offer me an asylum, but—your father may object. My presence here is certain to bring trouble upon him. The Czar will demand my surrender, and——”

The young lady drew herself up proudly.

“You are my guest, for I invite you here. Mon père is a gentleman, and will not hand his daughter’s guest over to death merely because he has had the manliness not to kneel to a tyrant.”

Wilfrid began to waver. Why should he not accept her invitation? Not only would he be escaping a terrible fate, but there would be in this new situation a piquant charm that appealed to his love of mischief. He pictured the First Consul’s rage on learning that the Englishman who had defied him to his face, slain his fencing-master, and defeated his policy at Berlin, had now put the finishing touch to his audacity by taking refuge for a few days under the very roof of the French Embassy! “It will turn his hair grey,” thought Wilfrid.

“Come, you must not go from here. Will you deprive me of your society, when I have been expecting it these many days?”

“The deuce you have,” thought Wilfrid.

The young lady here drew forth a letter, and directed Wilfrid’s attention to the signature, “Louisa R.”

“Do you know this handwriting?” she asked.

“I think I recognise the autograph signature of my friend, the Queen of Prussia.”

“As children we were friends together,” said the Ambassador’s daughter, “and though our lives now lie far apart, we still correspond with each other. In this letter she bids me exercise surveillance over a favourite knight of hers, Lord Courtenay, now on his way to Russia; for, to quote her very words, ‘If I have rightly gauged his character, he will not be twenty-four hours in St. Petersburg without coming into collision with the authorities.’ See how excellently she has judged you,” smiled the young lady, as she folded up the letter and put it away. “You haven’t been a day in the capital, and yet you have already got, as you English say, into hot water. The good queen having charged me to watch over you, it is my intention to fulfil the trust.”

Her smile was so arch and her manner altogether so charming that Wilfrid could no longer resist. He would accept her hospitality, conditional, of course, on its being sanctioned by her father, the Ambassador.

“That is well,” said the young lady on hearing his decision.

She now informally introduced herself as Pauline de Vaucluse, daughter of Henrion, the Marquis de Vaucluse.

“But you mustn’t give him his title,” she added. “He is a çi-devant, that is, an ex-noble, a Republican. He has dropped the ‘de,’ and must be addressed as Citoyen Henrion.”

“And you are the Citoyenne Pauline,” smiled Wilfrid.

“My faith, no!” replied the young lady, with a flash of energy. “I am the Baroness de Runö in my own right; and claim the title due to my rank.” Then, turning to Wilfrid’s rescuer, who, during this dialogue, had been standing near by, but out of earshot, she said, “François, conduct Viscount Courtenay to the Porphyry Suite. My lord,” she added, with a graceful inclination of her head, “I hope to see you again within half an hour.”

“Truly, my lines have fallen in pleasant places,” thought Wilfrid, as he followed François to the apartments assigned him.

CHAPTER VIII
A CHARMING TÊTE-À-TÊTE

As Pauline was about to leave the entrance-hall, the double doors leading from the street suddenly opened, and in walked her father, the Citoyen Henrion, Ambassador of the Republic.

He was a man close upon his sixtieth year, with silver hair and a dignified presence. His countenance expressed mildness and amiability, rather than force of character or diplomatic subtlety; in truth, his appointment was due more to his polished manners than to anything else. The parvenu ambassadors of the Republic had often, from lack of dignity and ignorance of etiquette, excited the sneers and laughter of foreign courts. The Marquis de Vaucluse was sent to St. Petersburg to show that the race of gentlemen was not extinct in France, and that the new government could count among its sons men distinguished both by birth and manners. He conscientiously strove to do his duty to the Republic, and when reproached for relinquishing the traditions of his order, he was wont to say, “I serve France, not Napoleon: a nation, and not a government.”

There was at this moment a cloud on his brow, and Pauline perceived its cause in the shape of Lieutenant Voronetz, who, with a very lugubrious face, followed hard upon the heels of the Ambassador.

“This may be fun to you, Baroness,” he remarked, “but it means death to me.”

“And, naturally, you don’t want to die,” answered Pauline. “But, then, neither does Lord Courtenay.”

“So the story this lieutenant tells me is true?” said the Ambassador, looking in perplexity from one to the other.

“Quite true, mon père.”

“Where is the man?” said the Marquis, casting a look around.

“Probably at this moment admiring the Gobelins in the Porphyry Suite, where he must abide till this storm be blown over.”

“You have lodged him in the suite kept only for our illustrious visitors!”

“Well, he’s an illustrious visitor. Comes of one of the oldest families in Europe. Counts the Greek emperors among his ancestors. Can Napoleon say as much?”

“He must be surrendered to Lieutenant Voronetz.”

“He shall not be surrendered,” said Pauline firmly.

The Marquis grew uneasy. When his daughter assumed that look and that tone, he knew full well that she would have her way in spite of him. Has he been the only man to be ruled by his daughter?

“Why did you do this thing?” he asked, smiting his gloves together in a helpless fashion.

“To teach a tyrant that liberty is not yet dead in St. Petersburg.”

The Marquis gave her a glance intended as a caution not to speak too freely in the presence of the Czar’s lieutenant. Then, after a moment’s pause, he drew her aside out of the hearing of Voronetz.

“Of course, matiushka,” he said, using the endearing term which the foreigner in Russia soon learns to apply indiscriminately to all women, “of course, little mother, we know, between ourselves, that this kneeling to the Czar is a degrading piece of servility, and I can quite sympathise with Lord Courtenay in his attitude. But your action, Pauline, has put us all in the wrong. If you desired him to be set free it should have been done in proper form. A joint note from the ambassadors would have procured his release. As matters now stand, Paul will be justified in demanding Lord Courtenay’s surrender. The meekest ruler in the world cannot submit to have his authority flouted as you have flouted it. Nom de Dieu! Pauline, what were you thinking of?”

“Not of the niceties of diplomatic observance, you may be sure. But do not look so troubled, mon père. The Czarovitch shall get us out of our difficulty. Go and lay the matter before him. Ask him to persuade his father to pardon the Englishman. He is sure to succeed. You know how Paul—it’s his only good point—respects the judgment of Alexander. ‘I must consult the Grand Duke,’ he says, when in a state of doubt. ‘He has a fine sense of justice.’ Go at once, before Paul has had time to learn that his prisoner has been rescued. The work of persuading him will be easier then.”

“Alexander certainly could effect this for us,” said the Marquis musingly. “The question is, will he?”

“He will, if you say that it is the wish of Pauline.”

The Ambassador gave her a sharp, penetrating look, as if he would fain learn the reason for this belief of hers.

“Was he not present at our ball here last week?” remarked Pauline, answering her father’s unspoken question. “He danced with me four times, and was extremely gracious; nay, did he not say if ever I should have a grievance that he could set right, I was not to hesitate to apply to him? Mon père, we’ll make him redeem that promise. Tell him that Pauline de Vaucluse is a prisoner in her father’s Embassy, unable to stir out, because she has made herself amenable to arrest by thwarting the Czar’s will. He’ll soon set matters right, and you’ll return with a free pardon both for Lord Courtenay and your mischievous daughter. But first you’ll see our visitor?”

Her father assented, and bidding the lackeys supply Voronetz with wine he requested the lieutenant to await his return.

Then, with old-fashioned courtesy, he offered his arm and conducted his daughter to the daintily-furnished chamber that served as her boudoir.

“Now, remember,” cautioned Pauline, “that Lord Courtenay will require delicate handling, for he is patriotically proud and quick to take fire. If he should come to believe that his presence here, though personally agreeable to us, is from a political point of view embarrassing, he’ll make his congé at once. As soon as he learned that this was the French Embassy, he was for walking out again, his honour forbidding him to take refuge here. He required some persuading to remain. So, mon père, be careful.”

“Now, Heaven forbid,” said the Marquis, “that I should say aught to embarrass him.”

And the Ambassador was as good as his word, for upon Wilfrid’s entering, he greeted him in a manner so courteous and affable that Wilfrid was at once placed at his ease. Pauline looked at her visitor with a smile that plainly said, “Did I not say my father would take your part?”

“Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” said Wilfrid, “our respective countries being at war, my position beneath the roof of the French Embassy is certainly a singular one.”

“And for me a happy one,” replied the Marquis, with a bow. “Still, whatever the situation, it is not of your creating, but of Pauline’s. You are her guest and mine; and here you must remain till we have persuaded the Czar to see matters in another light.”

After a few more words of gracious import, De Vaucluse, taking Voronetz with him, went off on his conciliatory errand, leaving his daughter to entertain the stranger.

And a charming entertainer she made, quite fascinating Wilfrid with the vivacity and intelligence of her conversational powers. Part of the time was spent in showing her guest the various objects of interest contained in her boudoir, among them being a piece of silk embroidery wrought by her own hand and set as a picture in a silver frame. It represented a castle, quaint, yet pretty.

“Castle Runö,” explained Pauline. “Built upon one of the islands of the Neva by Peter the Great, to satisfy a fancy of his wife, Catharine. I hope to have the honour of entertaining you there some day, for castle and island are both mine, my very own, inherited from my Russian mother. Its possession carries with it a title that makes me a baroness in my own right.”

“Then you are half a Russian?” smiled Wilfrid.

Though by her own showing this must be so, the Baroness nevertheless seemed to resent the idea.

“No, indeed, I am wholly French, as I can soon prove. Vera, come here a moment,” she said, addressing her maid.

The girl came forward, and at her mistress’s request knelt upon the hearth.

“Vera is a pure Muscovite,” said the Baroness. “Now, look at her ear,” she continued, touching it caressingly. “You see it? Look at mine, and tell me the difference.”

“Her ear has no lobe,” remarked Wilfrid, in some surprise.

“True. Have you not noticed the like before?” asked Pauline. “No? O, unobservant man! Well, after this take due note, and you will find that every true-born Russ is without a lobe to his ear.”

Wilfrid wondered whether his grand duchess was distinguished by this peculiarity. He hoped not, for Pauline’s pearly little shell of an ear was prettier than Vera’s.

“I suppose,” he observed, “that all the members of the Imperial Family bear this Muscovite mark?”

“Not so, for the dynasty has scarcely a drop of true Russian blood, and is rather proud of the fact. ‘I am a German, not a Russian,’ said the Czar Ivan; and so have all his descendants said.”

Pauline hitherto had been bright and lively, but all her brightness and liveliness went in a moment when she saw Wilfrid open a small album that lay upon the table.

“You may look,” she said, with a heavy sigh, for Wilfrid, on seeing the nature of its contents, had closed the book.

“Indeed, I would rather that you read it.”

Wilfrid opened the album again, and found it to contain melancholy souvenirs of the Reign of Terror in the shape of private letters written by some of Pauline’s friends, who had fallen victims to the guillotine; written, many of them, on the very eve of execution. Their style, direct from the heart, as was natural with persons at the point of death, gave to these letters a pathos that would have touched the heart of the least emotional.

“Those letters are dear to me,” said Pauline. “They are the fuel that keeps the fire of my patriotism burning. Every day I read them, in order to prevent me from ever loving the Republic, that Republic that put my friends to death.”

With somewhat melancholy feelings, Wilfrid closed the album, admiring, as he did so, the creamy white of the binding.

“Is this the famous Torjek leather,” he asked, passing his forefinger over its smooth surface.

Pauline’s answer took a singular shape. She bent forward, and laying hold of Wilfrid’s hand lifted it and drew the finger that had touched the book slowly down her cheek, accompanying her action with a weird smile.

“Is not the touch the same?” she asked; and, without giving him time to answer, she continued, “You have heard of the Princess Lamballe?”

“Good heavens! Do you mean that——?”

“Did you ever see her at the Tuileries in the days of the old régime?”

“No, but——”

“Well, from to-day you can say that you have had the honour of touching her skin!”

Knowing that among the eccentricities of horror produced by the French Revolution human tanneries had a place, Wilfrid had no need to ask more with that binding, white and lustrous, staring him in the face.

“There is all that is left of the Princess Lamballe,” said Pauline, her eyes set with a stony grief, a grief too deep for tears. “We were brought up from girlhood together. She was my dearest friend. She was young; she was beautiful; she was good. And you know her end? Taken to the prison of La Force, her only crime being that she was a friend of the Queen’s, she was flung forth from the prison-gate into the hands of a howling mob. And then.... My God! it will not bear thinking of.... Pieces of the body put on the end of pikes were paraded through the streets.... Some found their way to the tanyard....”

Overcome by the recollection, she was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again it was in a mood fierce and dark.

“Do you wonder now why I hate the Republic? Let my father serve it, if he will. For my part, I work for its downfall.”

It was clear to Wilfrid from this, as well as from previous remarks made by her, that the one passionate aim of Pauline’s life was the subversion of the Republic and the restoration of the Bourbons, an aim laudable enough in itself, were she any other than she was, but scarcely compatible with her position as the daughter of the Ambassador of the French Republic.

“To work for its downfall,” she repeated. “And I shall succeed,” she continued, with a smile as of coming triumph. “Mark me,” she added, “smile, doubt, call it vaunting, if you will, but when the secret history of to-day comes to be written, it will be found that I, Pauline de Vaucluse, Baroness of Runö, have been the chief cause of Bonaparte’s downfall.”

But when Wilfrid asked in what way she intended to accomplish this, he was met by a tantalising shake of her head.

However strange her words, there was in her manner something which led him to believe that they were no mere boast. Still, great as was his desire to witness the fulfilment of them, he did not like to see a daughter working in opposition to her father, especially if—he trusted he was not wronging her by the supposition—she should be availing herself of the political secrets acquired by her residence in the Embassy.

However, being as yet not sufficiently advanced in her friendship, he refrained from taking upon himself the office of Mentor.

At a sign from the Baroness, her maid, Vera, withdrew, returning with a bright samovar or tea-urn.

“Do you take sugar?” asked Pauline, who seemed to have recovered from the gloom occasioned by her reminiscences. “Yes? I fear I can offer you none but Barth’s.”

“And who is Barth?”

“A man who is making his fortune out of beetroot. We have to rely upon him ever since Paul forbade the import of your colonial sugar.”

“It seems to me,” grumbled Wilfrid, “that this Paul lays his despotic finger upon every department of life.”

“Too true. And he treats his own family no more indulgently than he treats the public. He has kept his daughters under restraint for a week upon a diet of bread and water merely for yawning at church. And in the Greek Church, you must know, one has to stand, and not sit; and the service usually lasts three hours.”

“Who would be a grand duchess?” smiled Wilfrid.

“Times will be different when little Sasha comes to the throne.”

“And who is little Sasha?” asked Wilfrid absently.

“The Czarovitch, to be sure—Alexander.”

“Of course—called little because he is like his father in stature?”

This remark drew a laugh from the Baroness and a smile from her maid.

“‘Little’ is a term of endearment. He stands six feet two inches high in his boots.”

“My height exactly,” remarked Wilfrid.

Pauline paused with her cup half-way to her lips, and looked doubtfully at Wilfrid.

“I don’t think that you are quite as tall as Alexander.”

“Six feet two in my boots,” asseverated Wilfrid.

Pauline drank her tea thoughtfully. Presently she said:—

“You’ll think me silly, but I am quite curious to know which is the taller, you or Alexander.”

“How shall we settle this weighty matter?”

“Easily enough. Alexander’s exact height is to be seen on the panel behind that curtain. He called at the Embassy last week, and, mon père being out, it fell to me to entertain his Imperial Highness. He had tea here, just as you and I are having it now, and, if you’ll believe it, the conversation took a similar turn to ours—that is to say, we talked of his stature. I was actually so daring as to doubt the word of a Czarovitch, so just to convince me, he laughingly stood against yonder wall, like a recruit about to be measured, while I, with a piece of black crayon, marked his height upon a panel, and found it to be, as I have said, six feet two inches. See!” Walking to the place indicated, Pauline drew aside the tapestry, revealing upon the white panel behind a short black horizontal line, and something more as well that she had not mentioned, for the line rested upon the life-size silhouette of a human profile, drawn with black crayon, presumably the profile of Alexander.

“Now, if you want to measure yourself with little Sasha—?” said Pauline.

So, to please her, Wilfrid stood with his back against the panel, and Pauline saw that the crown of his head was on a level with the charcoal line, showing that his stature differed little, if at all, from that of the Czarovitch.

“And this, I presume, is his profile,” said Wilfrid, falling back to obtain a better view. “Drawn by—?”

“Your humble servant. As Alexander stood there, he said, ‘I wonder you don’t draw my profile also!’ ‘Why, so I will,’ was my reply, and placing a lamp on this column here, I made him stand in such a position that his side-face was silhouetted upon the panel, and—there you have it! Now, Lord Courtenay, you are an artist, that is to say, one who has, or ought to have, a keen eye for beauty. Don’t you think that Alexander’s profile is perfect?”

Wilfrid ventured to dissent, though with some diffidence, because it was clear that his fair hostess regarded it as an ideal head.

“Well, Sir Critic, what are the faulty points?”

“To meet the requirements of my ideal of beauty—and mine, of course, may be a wrong ideal—the line of the forehead should be brought slightly nearer to the perpendicular. The nose would be perfect but for this slight depression near the bridge, and the chin, in my opinion, recedes a little more than it ought.”

“And your opinion of his character, so far as it can be deduced from this silhouette?”

“An amiable and intellectual youth, disposed to do good, but likely to fail for want of a strong will. Of course,” laughed Wilfrid, “this opinion of mine is open to correction. One should see the whole face with its expression, before passing judgment.”

Pauline’s pout showed that she was not altogether pleased with Wilfrid’s views.

“Shall I criticise the critic?” she said, and calling upon Vera to place the lamp exactly where it had been during her sketching of Alexander, she adjusted Wilfrid’s position, little by little, till at last his profile—brow, nose, lip, chin—became coincident as far as was possible, with Alexander’s.

“That’s it; now don’t move,” she said. “Let us see how much difference there is, and whom the difference favours.”

Taking up a piece of black crayon, she outlined Wilfrid’s profile upon that of Alexander’s, with a result as surprising to Wilfrid as to herself.

The defects, or assumed defects, that he had pointed out in Alexander’s profile were remedied in his own. The line of the forehead had become vertical, imparting a more intellectual character to the face; the depression of the nose had vanished, and the chin had taken a firmer touch.

Though Wilfrid tried not to be conceited, his own judgment told him that the second profile was preferable to the first, and so thought Pauline.

“H’m, an improvement, certainly,” she said, holding her head upon one side and surveying her handiwork. “So I am to read your character thus,” she added quizzically. “Amiable and intellectual, herein running parallel with Alexander, but differing from Alexander in having a strong will. I trust that in Alexander’s case you are in error, for ’twill be a pity if weakness of will should prevent him from carrying out the good reforms he has in mind.”

They returned to their chairs and to their tea.

“Since you know the Czarovitch so well,” said Wilfrid, “I presume you know also his aide-de-camp, Prince Ouvaroff?”

“Do you know him?” she asked.

“Serge and I are friends of several years’ standing,” replied Wilfrid, very much doubting, however, whether the term “friends” was any longer applicable to the relationship between himself and Ouvaroff.

Pauline’s face assumed a somewhat whimsical expression. “Poor Ouvaroff!”

“Why that sigh?” smiled Wilfrid.

“Lovers may come, and lovers may go, but Ouvaroff remains faithful for ever.”

This to Wilfrid was a most surprising piece of news.

“When last we met the Prince spoke of a nameless lady who for some years past had been saying him nay. Can it be that——”

“He will not take my ‘No.’”

Her words showed Wilfrid that he had been holding a wrong opinion. Pauline, and not the nameless duchess, was Ouvaroff’s inamorata. So far, good! There was no rivalry in love between them. But why, then, was the Prince daily practising swordsmanship? Was the object of his resentment some other Englishman, and not Wilfrid at all? And what had he meant by saying he had recently discovered that it was death to court the lady of his choice, language identical with that used by Baranoff when speaking of the “Princess”? Were there, then, at St. Petersburg two ladies whom it was death to court? Now, though it might very well be that peril would befall the unauthorised suitor who should venture to make love to the grand-daughter of Ivan VI., yet why an aide-de-camp of the Czarovitch should not pay his addresses to an ambassador’s daughter without having the fear of death before his eyes was a question that set Wilfrid thinking.

It may seem strange that Wilfrid, being now tête-à-tête with one who knew Ouvaroff intimately, did not ask whether she was acquainted with the lady to whom the Prince had acted as escort, but the truth was, Pauline had so fascinating and seductive a manner that Wilfrid hesitated to touch upon this theme lest she should draw from him an account of the nocturnal incident at the inn of the Silver Birch, a disclosure which would have been a breaking of his word to the Princess. Upon that matter, therefore, he determined to keep a silent tongue.

“Another cup of tea, Lord Courtenay?” said Pauline, breaking in upon his reverie. “No? You really have finished? Well then——”

Taking the porcelain cup used by Wilfrid, she held it for a moment above the tiled hearth, and then let it fall. It was shivered to pieces.

Wilfrid wondered in what light he was to take this action.

“It means,” said Pauline, responsive to his thoughts, “that no one else shall ever drink from that cup. ’Tis a Muscovite way of honouring a guest. You see, I am half a Russian, after all. With our grand boyars it is often the practice after a feast to cast all the plate out at the windows upon the heads of the expectant crowd below, it being thought undignified to make use of the same dishes a second time. Paul has done his best by ukase to abolish this custom, chiefly with a view to the saving of his own plate.”

Wilfrid acknowledged the high honour conferred upon him, adding—

“This must be a somewhat expensive habit on your part?”

“Not so, my lord,” replied Pauline with a charming curtsey. “It is not every guest I treat in this way.”

CHAPTER IX
A DOCUMENT MISSING

While Wilfrid was thinking that if Pauline’s ways with Ouvaroff were as fascinating as her ways with him, it was no wonder that the poor Prince’s head was turned, the maid Vera, who had gone off on some errand for her mistress, now re-entered, bearing a salver, upon which lay two name-cards.

“Visitors, my lady.”

Just the trace of a frown appeared upon Pauline’s face as she took the cards in her hand. Wilfrid’s society was much more interesting than that of Count Baranoff and General Benningsen. She was on the point of feigning some excuse for not receiving them when Vera remarked,

“They say they have startling news.”

“In that case I’d better see them.”

And bidding Wilfrid excuse her absence for a short time she descended to that same entrance-hall in which she had held her first interview with him.

Baranoff and Benningsen had met by chance upon the steps of the Embassy, each bringing the same piece of news, the Count intending to communicate it to the Ambassador, the General to Pauline.

Though apprised of Wilfrid’s arrival, Baranoff knew nothing whatever of his arrest and escape, and it was only in the interval of waiting that he heard the story from Benningsen. The news filled the Count with secret rage. Hitherto hating Pauline a little, he now began to hate her more. To think that but for her he might this night have had Wilfrid a prisoner in the Citadel, subjecting him to insult and degradation! Instead of which Wilfrid had now found powerful champions in the Ambassador and his daughter!

Mingled with Baranoff’s ire was a high degree of fear. Self-interest had prompted him to withhold from Paul the reason of his failure at Berlin, and in thus hoodwinking the Czar he had committed a kind of treason. Now should Wilfrid have given Pauline the correct version of that affair, it would perhaps go the round of St. Petersburg society, bringing upon him ridicule and mortification, to say nothing of dismissal from office—or worse, should the matter reach the ears of the Czar.

Had he not sent in his card to the Ambassador’s daughter, he would now have retreated. A coward at heart, he glanced apprehensively at the door by which Pauline would enter. Supposing she should appear in company with Wilfrid, and he with taunting tongue should renew the challenge! Outside the Embassy Baranoff was a great man, a man to be feared, a man who, with a few strokes of his pen, could send an opponent to Siberia; but his power stopped at the door of the Embassy; inside it he was helpless, and no match for the mocking Baroness and the devil-may-care Englishman.

It was a relief to him when Pauline entered alone.

Pauline had no great liking for the coarse burly Benningsen, but was compelled by parity of political interests to keep on friendly terms with him.

Far different was the case with Baranoff: him she loathed, as every pure woman was bound to loathe the ex-lover of the dissolute Catharine. It always cost Pauline an effort to treat him with ordinary civility.

“Aha, Baroness!” cried Benningsen. “What is this you’ve been doing? Rescuing in broad daylight a prisoner of the Czar, and whisking him into the Embassy. By Heaven, you’re a bold one!”

“And you’re not,” replied Pauline, whose habit it was to speak her mind freely to the General, who was accustomed to speak freely to her. “I marked you, running from the face of Paul, putting life before honour.”

“Faith, my dear!” said he with a grin, and not a whit abashed by her reproach, “honour, when lost, may be recovered; one’s life, never.”

“You come with news, I understand?”

“Unpleasant news,” returned Baranoff, affecting a mournful air, in reality secretly delighted, as knowing that the tidings would alarm her. “Unpleasant news I regret to——”

“Hold! the Baroness must pay toll for our tidings. Toll,” added Benningsen, significantly. “You know what I want.”

“I do, but unfortunately the knout is not here, but at the Citadel. The Count will be but too pleased to accommodate you.”

The jest was a true one. Nothing would have pleased Baranoff more than to see Benningsen tied up to the knouting-post. Baranoff gloried in the fact that it was he, and he alone, that had persuaded Paul to make war with England. Benningsen was sneeringly confident that the Count would be the first to sign a peace as soon as ever the British fleet appeared in Finland waters.

“Toll!” repeated Benningsen. “A bottle of—what shall it be? Who was it that said, ‘Port for boys, claret for men, brandy for heroes’?”

“Louis, a bottle of port for the General,” said Pauline sweetly.

“Ach! but you’re down on me to-night,” grinned Benningsen.

However, the bottle when brought, was labelled cognac.

“A corkscrew? No,” said Benningsen, staying the hand of the servitor. And drawing his sabre, with one stroke he cut clean through the neck of the bottle, sending the glass fragments flying to the other end of the salon.

“That’s the way we do it in camp.”

The liqueur being poured out and watered to taste, Baranoff ventured to drink to the fair Pauline.

“You are guilty of treason,” said she. “You know that Little Paul claims the first toast.”

“O, damn Little Paul!” cried Benningsen savagely, and speaking with a recklessness that led Pauline to wonder whether he had not been taking brandy at other places besides the Embassy. “Little! Humph, that’s true, but what there is of him is quite enough! Damn the powers that be! Here’s to the powers that will be, eh?” he added, raising his glass with a significant wink at Pauline, who tried by a warning frown to check the license of his tongue.

“Your tidings?” she asked.

“The English consols are going up, and the Russian are going down,” answered the General.

“’Tis very like, thanks to the Count,” said Pauline, “but you didn’t come here merely to tell me that.”

“No. What think you is Little Paul’s latest craze? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you. This afternoon he put the Czarovitch under arrest!”

“Our little Sasha!” faltered Pauline, with concern in her looks.

“Ay, our little Sasha!” repeated Benningsen. “And Constantine also. Both brothers are prisoners, each in his own apartment. To-morrow they are to be sent to a fortress.”

“And mon père has just gone to the Michaelhof to have an interview with Alexander.”

“Faith, then, he’ll return without it!”

Alas for Pauline’s hope of obtaining pardon for Wilfrid and herself through the mediation of Alexander! Her father’s errand to the palace was like to end in failure.

Matters began to wear a serious look. Having done a deed certain to incense the Czar, she durst not leave the Embassy for fear of arrest. And what would happen to her father if he should defy the Czar’s command to surrender Lord Courtenay?

“What have the two youths done, or rather what does Paul say they have done?”

“No one knows his reason,” said Benningsen. “But this is what he said on giving orders for their arrest, ‘Before many days be past men will be astonished to see heads fall that once were very dear to me.’ It’s my belief he’ll keep his word,” continued the General. “He has a craze for imitating his great-grandfather, Peter. And Peter put his son to death, you know.”

Pauline’s look of concern deepened.

“Let the Russians reproach Paris for its Reign of Terror,” she said. “It was but a brief season. But at St. Petersburg life has now become one long reign of terror. One rises from bed of a morning with no certainty of returning to it at night. Our lives are made miserable by a series of vexatious edicts. Our commerce is destroyed; the national credit sinking; the treasury empty. Wars on all sides; Cossacks assembling at Astrakhan for an overland march to India; troops massing upon the Prussian frontier to compel King Frederick to join the Armed Neutrality. And ere long we shall have a foe in the Baltic, for I presume,” she added, turning to Baranoff, “the report is true that Nelson’s fleet has set sail.”

The Count, with a sour look, opined that it was correct.

“Then with the breaking-up of the ice will come the bombardment of Cronstadt.”

“Thousand devils!” cried Benningsen, “and I’ve just bought a villa at Oranienbaum. Right in the line of fire. Thirty thousand roubles clean thrown away! Count, this war is of your creation. Undo your work. Persuade Paul to make peace. This morning’s text ought to dispose him to it.”

“Text?” said Pauline inquiringly.

“Text!” repeated Benningsen. “His latest craze is to turn the Bible into a book of holy divination. Each morning he opens the Scriptures, and the first verse his eye lights upon is taken as a direct message from Heaven. To-day’s text was, ‘Thou shalt bruise his heel.’ Not quite seeing its application to himself straight he goes with the verse to Archbishop Plato. ‘The passage, Sire, is to be taken in connection with the preceding clause, “It shall bruise thy head.” The head is a vital part; not so the heel. The meaning, therefore, is that your enemies, the English, will do you more hurt than you will do them.’”

“Trust Plato for making the Scriptures speak his own views,” said Baranoff with a sneer.

“The text,” continued Benningsen, ignoring the Count’s remark, “has made our little Czar thoughtful. All day long he has been saying at intervals, ‘Thou shalt bruise his heel,’ so that—but here comes Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” he said, breaking off in the middle of a sentence. “Now, perhaps,” he whispered in Pauline’s ear, “I shall be able to have a word with you on—start not—on a matter touching our personal safety.”

The Marquis de Vaucluse had entered the reception-hall wearing a perturbed look, due to the discovery that the Czarovitch was a close prisoner in his own apartments, and forbidden to hold any communication with the outside world.

For a few moments the four discussed in common this latest phase of Imperial politics, and then Baranoff, desirous of conversing privately with De Vaucluse, drew him on one side, leaving Benningsen free to talk with Pauline.

“How long, think you,” said Baranoff to the Marquis, “shall we be able to keep the Czar alive?”

De Vaucluse, not understanding the other’s meaning, regarded him with a startled look.

“I am alluding, dear citoyen, to the privately-expressed opinion of Paul’s chief physician, Wylie.”

The Ambassador’s brow cleared. He had thought the other was about to announce the existence of a conspiracy for the assassination of the Czar.

“Physicians’ forecasts are not always right. What has the Scotsman been saying?”

“Paul has had of late several strokes of apoplexy, each one more serious than the last. In Wylie’s opinion the next is likely to prove fatal. Now, neither you nor I can afford to see Paul go, for Alexander’s accession will mean the end of the Franco-Russian Alliance.”

This was a fact as well-known to the Marquis as it was to Baranoff.

“Any undue excitement,” continued the Count, “any undue rage will carry him off.”

“The remedy is obvious,” smiled De Vaucluse. “His immediate entourage must take every precaution to prevent him from exciting himself.”

“That is very good counsel of yours,” said Baranoff in a dry tone, “but, unfortunately, your charming but too generously-impulsive daughter has this day done a deed likely to raise the Czar’s wrath to a dangerous point.”

“And, therefore,” said the Marquis, “he must be kept in ignorance of Pauline’s act.”