“I will go with you down to the village now,” said Paul. “Is there any excuse—any illness?”
“Ah, Excellency,” replied the chief, “there is always that excuse.”
Paul looked at the clock.
“I will go now,” he said. He began his simple preparations at once.
“There is dinner to be thought of,” suggested Steinmetz, with a resigned smile. “It is half-past seven.”
“Dinner can wait,” replied Paul in English. “You might tell the ladies that I have gone out, and will dine alone when I come back.”
Steinmetz shrugged his broad shoulders.
“I think you are a fool,” he said, “to go alone. If they discover your identity they will tear you to pieces.”
“I am not afraid of them,” replied Paul, with his head in the medicine cupboard, “any more than I am afraid of a horse. They are like horses; they do not know their own strength.”
“With this difference,” added Steinmetz, “that the muzhik will one day make the discovery. He is beginning to make it now. The starosta is quite right, Paul. There is something in the air. It is about time that you took the ladies away from here and left me to manage it alone.”
“That time will never come again,” answered Paul. “I am not going to leave you alone again.”
He was pushing his arms into the sleeves of the old brown coat reaching to his heels, a garment which commanded as much love and respect in Osterno as ever would an angel’s wing.
Steinmetz opened the drawer of his bureau and laid a revolver on the table.
“At all events,” he said, “you may as well have the wherewithal to make a fight of it, if the worst comes to the worst.”
“As you like,” answered Paul, slipping the firearm into his pocket.
The starosta moved away a pace or two. He was essentially a man of peace.
Half an hour later it became known in the village that the Moscow doctor was in the house of one Ivan Krass, where he was prepared to see all patients who were now suffering from infectious complaints. The door of this cottage was soon besieged by the sick and the idle, while the starosta stood in the doorway and kept order.
Within, in the one dwelling-room of the cottage, were assembled as picturesque and as unsavory a group as the most enthusiastic modern “slummer” could desire to see.
Paul, standing by the table with two paraffin lamps placed behind him, saw each suppliant in turn, and all the while he kept up a running conversation with the more intelligent, some of whom lingered on to talk and watch.
“Ah, John the son of John,” he would say, “what is the matter with you? It is not often I see you. I thought you were clean and thrifty.”
To which John the son of John replied that the winter had been hard and fuel scarce, that his wife was dead and his children stricken with influenza.
“But you have had relief; our good friend the starosta—”
“Does what he can,” grumbled John, “but he dare not do much. The barins will not let him. The nobles want all the money for themselves. The Emperor is living in his palace, where there are fountains of wine. We pay for that with our taxes. You see my hand—I cannot work; but I must pay the taxes, or else we shall be turned out into the street.”
Paul, while attending to the wounded hand—an old story of an old wound neglected, and a constitution with all the natural healing power drained out of it by hunger and want and vodka—Paul, ever watchful, glanced round and saw sullen, lowering faces, eager eyes, hungry, cruel lips.
“But the winter is over now. You are mistaken about the nobles. They do what they can. The Emperor pays for the relief that you have had all these months. It is foolish to talk as you do.”
“I only tell the truth,” replied the man, wincing as Paul deliberately cut away the dead flesh. “We know now why it is that we are all so poor.”
“Why?” asked Paul, pouring some lotion over a wad of lint and speaking indifferently.
“Because the nobles—” began the man, and someone nudged him from behind, urging him to silence.
“You need not be afraid of me,” said Paul. “I tell no tales, and I take no money.”
“Then why do you come?” asked a voice in the background. “Someone pays you; who is it?”
“Ah, Tula,” said Paul, without looking up. “You are there, are you? The great Tula. There is a hardworking, sober man, my little fathers, who never beats his wife, and never drinks, and never borrows money. A useful neighbor! What is the matter with you, Tula? You have been too sparing with the vodka, no doubt. I must order you a glass every hour.”
There was a little laugh. But Paul, who knew these people, was quite alive to the difference of feeling toward himself. They still accepted his care, his help, his medicine; but they were beginning to doubt him.
“There is your own prince,” he went on fearlessly to the man whose hand he was binding up. “He will help you when there is real distress.”
An ominous silence greeted this observation.
Paul raised his head and looked round. In the dim light of the two smoky lamps he saw a ring of wild faces. Men with shaggy beards and hair all entangled and unkempt, with fierce eyes and lowering glances; women with faces that unsexed them. There were despair and desperation and utter recklessness in the air, in the attitude, in the hearts of these people. And Paul had worked among them for years. The sight would have been heartbreaking had Paul Howard Alexis been the sort of man to admit the possibility of a broken heart. All that he had done had been frustrated by the wall of heartless bureaucracy
