“Tomorrow,” was his answer.
She did not speak at once. Should she try the extent of her power over him? Never was lover so chivalrous, so respectful, so sincere. Should she gauge the height of her supremacy? If it proved less powerful than she suspected, she would at all events be credited with a very natural aversion to parting from him.
“Paul,” she said, “you cannot do that. Not so soon. I cannot let you go.”
He flushed up to the eyes suddenly, like a girl. There was a little pause, and the color slowly left his face. Somehow that pause frightened Etta.
“I am afraid I must go,” he said gravely at length.
“Must—a prince?”
“It is on that account,” he replied.
“Then I am to conclude that you are more devoted to your peasants than to—me?”
He assured her to the contrary. She tried once again, but nothing could move him from his decision. Etta was perhaps a small-minded person, and as such failed to attach due importance to this proof that her power over him was limited. It ceased, in fact, to exist as soon as it touched that strong sense of duty which is to be found in many men and in remarkably few women.
It almost seemed as if the abrupt departure of her lover was in some sense a relief to Etta Sydney Bamborough. For, while he, lover-like, was grave and earnest during the small remainder of the evening, she continued to be sprightly and gay. The last he saw of her was her smiling face at the window as her carriage drove away.
Arrived at the little house in Upper Brook Street, Maggie and Etta went into the drawing-room, where biscuits and wine were set out. Their maids came and took their cloaks away, leaving them alone.
“Paul and I are engaged,” said Etta suddenly. She was picking the withered flowers from her dress and throwing them carelessly on the table.
Maggie was standing with her back to her, with her two hands on the mantelpiece. She was about to turn round when she caught sight of her own face in the mirror, and that which she saw there made her change her intention.
“I am not surprised,” she said, in an even voice, standing like a statue. “I congratulate you. I think he is—nice.”
“You also think he is too good for me,” said Etta, with a little laugh. There was something in that laugh—a ring of wounded vanity, the wounded vanity of a bad woman who is in the presence of her superior.
“No!” answered Maggie slowly, tracing the veins of the marble across the mantelpiece. “No—o, not that.”
Etta looked up at her. It was rather singular that she did not ask what Maggie did think. Perhaps she was afraid of a certain British honesty which characterized the girl’s thought and speech. Instead she rose and indulged in a yawn which may have been counterfeit, but it was a good counterfeit.
“Will you have a biscuit?” she said.
“No, thanks.”
“Then shall we go to bed?”
“Yes.”
IX
The Prince
The village of Osterno, lying, or rather scrambling, along the banks of the river Oster, is at no time an exhilarating spot. It is a large village, numbering over nine hundred souls, as the board affixed to its first house testifieth in incomprehensible Russian figures.
A “soul,” be it known, is a different object in the land of the Czars to that vague protoplasm about which our young persons think such mighty thoughts, our old men write such famous big books. A soul is namely a man—in Russia the women have not yet begun to seek their rights and lose their privileges. A man is therefore a “soul” in Russia, and as such enjoys the doubtful privilege of contributing to the land-tax and to every other tax. In compensation for the first-named impost he is apportioned his share of the common land of the village, and by the cultivation of this ekes out an existence which would be valueless if he were a teetotaller. It is melancholy to have to record this fact in the pages of a respectable volume like the present; but facts—as the orator who deals in fiction is ever ready to announce—facts cannot be ignored. And any man who has lived in Russia, has dabbled in Russian humanity, and noted the singular unattractiveness of Russian life—any such man can scarcely deny the fact that if one deprives the muzhik of his privilege of getting gloriously and frequently intoxicated, one takes away from that muzhik the one happiness of his existence.
That the Russian peasant is by nature one of the cheeriest, the noisiest, and lightest-hearted of men is only another proof of the Creator’s power; for this dimly lighted “soul” has nothing to cheer him on his forlorn way but the memory of the last indulgence in strong drink and the hope of more to come. He is harassed by a ruthless tax-collector; he is shut off from the world by enormous distances over impracticable roads. When the famine comes, and come it assuredly will, the muzhik has no alternative but to stay where he is and starve. Since Alexander II of philanthropic memory made the Russian serf a free man, the blessings of freedom have been found to resolve themselves chiefly into a perfect liberty to die of starvation, of cold, or of dire disease. When he was a serf this man was of some small value to someone; now he is of no consequence to anyone whatsoever except himself, and, with considerable intelligence, he sets but small store upon his own existence. Freedom, in fact, came to him before he was ready for it; and, hampered as he has been by petty departmental tyranny, governmental neglect, and a natural stupidity, he has made very small progress toward
