Steinmetz shook his shaggy head.
“No. No position is impossible in this country—except the Czar’s—if one only keeps cool. For men such as you and I any position is quite easy. But these Russians are too romantic—too exaltés—they give way to a morbid love of martyrdom: they think they can do no good to mankind unless they are uncomfortable.”
Alexis turned in his saddle and looked keenly into his companion’s face.
“Do you know,” he said, “I believe you founded the Charity League?”
Steinmetz laughed in his easy, stout way.
“It founded itself,” he said; “the angels founded it in heaven. I hope a committee of them will attend to the eternal misery of the dog who betrayed it.”
“I trust they will, but in the meantime I stick to my opinion that it is unnecessary for me to leave the country. What have I done? I do not belong to the League; it is composed entirely of Russian nobles; I don’t admit that I am a Russian noble.”
“But,” persisted Steinmetz quietly, “you subscribe to the League. Four hundred thousand rubles—they do not grow at the roadside.”
“But the rubles have not my name on them.”
“That may be, but we all—they all—know where they are likely to come from. My dear Paul, you cannot keep up the farce any longer. You are not an English gentleman who comes across here for sporting purposes; you do not live in the old Castle of Osterno three months in the year because you have a taste for medieval fortresses. You are a Russian prince, and your estates are the happiest, the most enlightened in the empire. That alone is suspicious. You collect your rents yourself. You have no German agents—no German vampires about you. There are a thousand things suspicious about Prince Pavlo Alexis if those that be in high places only come to think about it. They have not come to think about it—thanks to our care and to your English independence. But that is only another reason why we should redouble our care. You must not be in Russia when the Charity League is picked to pieces. There will be trouble—half the nobility in Russia will be in it. There will be confiscations and degradations: there will be imprisonment and Siberia for some. You are better out of it, for you are not an Englishman; you have not even a Foreign Office passport. Your passport is your patent of nobility, and that is Russian. No, you are better out of it.”
“And you—what about you?” asked Paul, with a little laugh—the laugh that one brave man gives when he sees another do a plucky thing.
“I! Oh, I am all right! I am nobody; I am hated of all the peasants because I am your steward and so hard—so cruel. That is my certificate of harmlessness with those that are about the Emperor.”
Paul made no answer. He was not of an argumentative mind, being a large man, and consequently inclined to the sins of omission rather than to the active form of doing wrong. He had an enormous faith in Karl Steinmetz, and, indeed, no man knew Russia better than this cosmopolitan adventurer. Steinmetz it was who pricked forward with all speed, wearing his hardy little horse to a drooping semblance of its former self. Steinmetz it was who had recommended quitting the travelling carriage and taking to the saddle, although his own bulk led him to prefer the slower and more comfortable method of covering space. It would almost seem that he doubted his own ascendency over his companion and master, which semblance was further increased by a subtle ring of anxiety in his voice while he argued. It is possible that Karl Steinmetz suspected the late Princess Natásha of having transmitted to her son a small hereditary portion of that Slavonic exaltation and recklessness of consequence which he deplored.
“Then you turn back at Tver?” enquired Paul, at length breaking a long silence.
“Yes; I must not leave Osterno just now. Perhaps later, when the winter has come, I will follow. Russia is quiet during the winter, very quiet. Ha, ha!”
He shrugged his shoulders and shivered. But the shiver was interrupted. He raised himself in his saddle and peered forward into the gathering darkness.
“What is that,” he asked sharply, “on the road in front?”
Paul had already seen it.
“It looks like a horse,” he answered—“a strayed horse, for it has no rider.”
They were going west, and what little daylight there was lived on the western horizon. The form of the horse, cut out in black relief against the sky, was weird and ghostlike. It was standing by the side of the road, apparently grazing. As they approached it, its outlines became more defined.
“It has a saddle,” said Steinmetz at length. “What have we here?”
The beast was evidently famishing, for, as they came near, it never ceased its occupation of dragging the wizened tufts of grass up, root and all.
“What have we here?” repeated Steinmetz.
And the two men clapped spurs to their tired horses.
The solitary waif had a rider, but he was not in the saddle. One foot was caught in the stirrup, and as the horse moved on from tuft to tuft it dragged its dead master along the ground.
II
By the Volga
“This is going to be unpleasant,” muttered Steinmetz, as he cumbrously left the saddle. “That man is dead—has been dead some days; he’s stiff. And the horse has been dragging him face downward. God in heaven! this will be unpleasant.”
Paul had leaped to the ground, and was already loosening the dead man’s foot from the stirrup. He did it with a certain sort of skill, despite the stiffness of the heavy riding-boot, as if he had walked a hospital in his time. Very
