Suddenly she stopped and leaped to her feet. She did not go to the window, but stood listening beside the piano. The beat of a horse’s hoofs on the narrow road was distinctly audible, hollow and sodden as is the sound of a wooden road. It came nearer and nearer, and a certain unsteadiness indicated that the horse was tired.
“I thought he might have come,” she whispered, and she sat down breathlessly.
When the servant came into the room a few minutes later Catrina was at the piano.
“A letter, mademoiselle,” said the maid.
“Lay it on the table,” answered Catrina, without looking round. She was playing the closing bars of a nocturne.
She rose slowly, turned, and seized the letter as a starving man seizes food. There was something almost wolf-like in her eyes.
“Steinmetz,” she exclaimed, reading the address. “Steinmetz. Oh! why won’t he write to me?”
She tore open the letter, read it, and stood holding it in her hand, looking out over the trackless pinewoods with absorbed, speculative eyes. The sun had just set. The farthest ridge of pine-trees stood out like the teeth of a saw in black relief on the rosy sky. Catrina Lanovitch watched the rosiness fade into pearly gray.
“Madame the Countess awaits mademoiselle for tea,” said the maid’s voice suddenly, in the gloom of the doorway.
“I will come.”
The village of Thors—twenty miles farther down the river Oster, twenty miles nearer to the junction of that river with the Volga—was little more than a hamlet in the days of which we write. Someday, perhaps, the three hundred souls of Thors may increase and multiply—someday when Russia is attacked by the railway fever. For Thors is on the Chernozem—the belt of black and fertile soil that runs right across the vast empire.
Karl Steinmetz, a dogged watcher of the Wandering Jew—the deathless scoffer at our Lord’s agony, who shall never die, who shall leave cholera in his track wherever he may wander—Karl Steinmetz knew that the Oster was in itself a Wandering Jew. This river meandered through the lonesome country, bearing cholera germs within its waters. Whenever Osterno had cholera it sent it down the river to Thors, and so on to the Volga.
Thors lay groaning under the scourge, and the Countess Lanovitch shut herself within her stone walls, shivering with fear, begging her daughter to return to Petersburg.
It was nearly dark when Karl Steinmetz and the Moscow doctor rode into the little village, to find the starosta, a simple Russian farmer, awaiting them outside the kabak.
Steinmetz knew the man, and immediately took command of the situation with that unquestioned sense of authority which in Russia places the barin on much the same footing as that taken by the Anglo-Indian in our eastern empire.
“Now, starosta,” he said, “we have only an hour to spend in Thors. This is the Moscow doctor. If you listen to what he tells you, you will soon have no sickness in the village. The worst houses first—and quickly. You need not be afraid, but if you do not care to come in, you may stay outside.”
As they walked down the straggling village-street the Moscow doctor told the starosta in no measured terms, as was his wont, wherein lay the heart of the sickness. Here, as in Osterno, dirt and neglect were at the base of all the trouble. Here, as in the larger village, the houses were more like the abode of four-footed beasts than the dwellings of human beings.
The starosta prudently remained outside the first house to which he introduced the visitors. Paul went fearlessly in, while Steinmetz stood in the doorway, holding open the door.
As he was standing there he perceived a flickering light approaching him. The light was evidently that of an ordinary hand-lantern, and from the swinging motion it was easy to divine that it was being carried by someone who was walking quickly.
“Who is this?” asked Steinmetz.
“It is likely to be the Countess Catrina, Excellency.”
Steinmetz glanced back into the cottage, which was dark save for the light of a single petroleum lamp. Paul’s huge form could be dimly distinguished bending over a heap of humanity and foul clothing in a corner.
“Does she visit the cottages?” asked Steinmetz sharply.
“She does, God be with her! She has no fear. She is an angel. Without her we should all be dead.”
“She won’t visit this, if I can help it,” muttered Steinmetz.
The light flickered along the road toward them. In the course of a few minutes it fell on the stricken cottage, on the starosta standing in the road, on Steinmetz in the doorway.
“Herr Steinmetz, is that you?” asked a voice, deep and musical, in the darkness.
“Zum Befehl,” answered Steinmetz, without moving.
Catrina came up to him. She was clad in a long dark cloak, a dark hat, and wore no gloves. She brought with her a clean aromatic odor of disinfectants. She carried the lantern herself, while behind her walked a manservant in livery, with a large basket in either hand.
“It is good of you,” she said, “to come to us in our need—also to persuade the good doctor to come with you.”
“It is not much that we can do,” answered Steinmetz, taking the small outstretched hand within his large soft grasp; “but that little you may always count upon.”
“I know,” she said gravely.
She looked up at him, expecting him to step aside and allow her to pass into the cottage; but Steinmetz stood quite still, looking down at her
