Moreover he battled successfully, and before the moon was well up drew rein outside the village of Osterno, to accede at last to the oft-repeated prayer of the driver that he might return to his task.
“It is not meet,” the man had gruffly said, whenever a short halt was made to change horses, “that a great prince should drive a yamshchik.”
“It is meet,” answered Paul simply, “for one man to help another.”
Then this man of deeds and not of words clambered into the sleigh and drew up the windows, hiding his head as he drove through his own village, where every man was dependent for life and being on his charity.
They were silent, for the ladies were tired and cold.
“We shall soon be there,” said Paul reassuringly. But he did not lower the windows and look out, as any man might have wished to do on returning to the place of his birth.
Maggie sat back, wrapped in her furs. She was meditating over the events of the day, and more particularly over a certain skill, a quickness of touch, a deft handling of stricken men which she had noted far out on the snowy steppe a few hours earlier. Paul was a different man when he had to deal with pain and sickness; he was quicker, brighter, full of confidence in himself. For the great sympathy was his—that love of the neighbor which is thrown like a mantle over the shoulders of some men, making them different from their fellows, securing to them that love of great and small which, perchance, follows some when they are dead to that place where a human testimony may not be all in vain.
At the castle all was in readiness for the prince and princess, their departure from Tver having been telegraphed. On the threshold of the great house, before she had entered the magnificent hall, Etta’s eyes brightened, her fatigue vanished. She played her part before the crowd of bowing servants with that forgetfulness of mere bodily fatigue which is expected of princesses and other great ladies. She swept up the broad staircase, leaning on Paul’s arm, with a carriage, a presence, a dazzling wealth of beauty, which did not fail to impress the onlookers. Whatever Etta may have failed to bring to Paul Howard Alexis as a wife, she made him a matchless princess.
He led her straight through the drawing-room to the suite of rooms which were hers. These consisted of an anteroom, a small drawing-room, and her private apartments beyond.
Paul stopped in the drawing-room, looking round with a simple satisfaction in all that had been done by his orders for Etta’s comfort.
“These,” he said, “are your rooms.”
He was no adept at turning a neat phrase—at reeling off a pretty honeymoon welcome. Perhaps he expected her to express delight, to come to him, possibly, and kiss him, as some women would have done.
She looked round critically.
“Yes,” she said, “they are very nice.”
She crossed the room and drew aside the curtain that covered the double-latticed windows. The room was so warm that there was no rime on the panes. She gave a little shudder, and he went to her side, putting his strong, quiet arm around her.
Below them, stretching away beneath the brilliant moonlight, lay the country that was his inheritance, an estate as large as a large English county. Immediately beneath them, at the foot of the great rock upon which the castle was built, nestled the village of Osterno—straggling, squalid.
“Oh!” she said dully, “this is Siberia; this is terrible!”
It had never presented itself to him in that light, the wonderful stretch of country over which they were looking.
“It is not so bad,” he said, “in the daylight.”
And that was all; for he had no persuasive tongue.
“That is the village,” he went on, after a little pause. “Those are the people who look to us to help them in their fight against terrible odds. I hoped—that you would be interested in them.”
She looked down curiously at the little wooden huts, half-buried in the snow; the smoking chimneys; the twinkling, curtainless windows.
“What do you expect me to do?” she asked in a queer voice.
He looked at her in a sort of wonderment. Perhaps it seemed to him that a woman should have no need to ask such a question.
“It is a long story,” he said; “I will tell you about it another time. You are tired now, after your journey.”
His arm slipped from her waist. They stood side by side. And both were conscious of a feeling of difference. They were not the same as they had been in London. The atmosphere of Russia seemed to have had some subtle effect upon them.
Etta turned and sat slowly down on a low chair before the fire. She had thrown her furs aside, and they lay in a luxurious heap on the floor. The maids, hearing that the prince and princess were together, waited silently in the next room behind the closed door.
“I think I had better hear it now,” said Etta.
“But you are tired,” protested her husband. “You had better rest until dinnertime.”
“No; I am not tired.”
He came toward her and stood with one elbow on the mantelpiece, looking down at her—a quiet, strong man, who had already forgotten his feat of endurance of a few hours earlier.
“These people,” he said, “would die of starvation and cold and sickness if we did not help them. It is simply impossible for them in the few months that they can work the land to cultivate it so as to yield any more than their taxes. They are overtaxed, and no one cares. The army must be kept up and a huge Civil Service, and no one cares what happens to the peasants. Someday the peasants must turn, but not yet. It is a question for all Russian landowners to face, and nobody faces it. If anyone tries to improve the condition of his peasants—they were happier a thousand times as serfs—the bureaucrats
