“Go on,” she said. “What have I been doing now? How you do hate me, Herr Steinmetz!”
“Perhaps it is safer than loving you,” he answered, with his grim humor.
“I suppose,” she said, with a quaint little air of resignation which was very disarming, “that you have come here to scold me—you do not want any tea?”
“No; I do not want any tea.”
She turned the wick of the spirit-lamp, and the peaceful music of the samovar was still. In her clever eyes there was a little air of sidelong indecision. She could not make up her mind how to take him. Her chiefest method was so old as to be biblical. Yet she could not take him with her eyelids. She had tried.
“You are horribly grave,” she said.
“The situation,” he replied, “is horribly grave.”
Etta looked up at him as he stood before her, and the lamplight, falling on the perfect oval of her face, showed it to be white and drawn.
“Princess,” said the man, “there are in the lives of some of us times when we cease to be men and women, and become mere human beings. There are times, I mean, when the thousand influences of sex die at one blow of fate. This is such a time. We must forget that you are a beautiful woman; I verily believe that there is none more beautiful in the world. I once knew one whom I admired more, but that was not because she was more beautiful. That, however, is my own story, and this”—he paused and looked round the little room, furnished, decorated for her comfort—“this is your story. We must forget that I am a man, and therefore subject to the influence of your beauty.”
She sat looking up into his strong, grave face, and during all that followed she never moved.
“I know you,” he said, “to be courageous, and must ask you to believe that I exaggerate nothing in what I am about to tell you. I tell it to you instead of leaving Paul to do so because I know his complete fearlessness, and his blind faith in a people who are unworthy of it. He does not realize the gravity of the situation. They are his own people. A sailor never believes that his own ship is unseaworthy.”
“Go on!” said Etta, for he had paused.
“This country,” he continued, “is unsettled. The people of the estate are on the brink of a revolt. You know what the Russian peasant is. It will be no Parisian émeute, half noise, half laughter. We cannot hope to hold this old place against them. We cannot get away from it. We cannot send for help because we have no one to send. Princess, this is no time for half-confidences. I know—for I know these people better even than Paul knows them—I am convinced that this is not the outcome of their own brains. They are being urged on by someone. There is someone at their backs. This is no revolt of the peasants, organized by the peasants. Princess, you must tell me all you know!”
“I—I,” she stammered, “I know nothing!”
And then suddenly she burst into tears, and buried her face in a tiny, useless handkerchief. It was so unlike her and so sudden that Steinmetz was startled.
He laid his great hand soothingly on her shoulder.
“I know,” he said quietly, “I know more than you think. I am no saint, princess, myself. I too have had my difficulties. I have had my temptations, and I have not always resisted. God knows it is difficult for men to do always the right thing. It is a thousand times more difficult for women. When we spoke together in Petersburg, and I offered you my poor friendship, I was not acting in the dark. I knew as much then as I do now. Princess, I knew about the Charity League papers. I knew more than any except Stépan Lanovitch, and it was he who told me.”
He was stroking her shoulder with the soothing movements that one uses toward a child in distress. His great hand, broad and thick, had a certain sense of quiet comfort and strength in it. Etta ceased sobbing, and sat with bowed head, looking through her tears into the gay wood fire. It is probable that she failed to realize the great charity of the man who was speaking to her. For the capacity for evil merges at some point or other into incapability for comprehending good.
“Is that all he knows?” she was wondering.
The suggestion that Sydney Bamborough was not dead had risen up to eclipse all other fear in her mind. In some part her thought reached him.
“I know so much,” he said, “that it is safest to tell me more. I offered you my friendship because I think that no woman could carry through your difficulties unaided. Princess, the admiration of Claude de Chauxville may be pleasant, but I venture to think that my friendship is essential.”
Etta raised her head a little. She was within an ace of handing over to Karl Steinmetz the rod of power held over her by the Frenchman. There was something in Steinmetz that appealed to her and softened her, something that reached a tender part of her heart through the coating of vanity, through the hardness of worldly experience.
“I have known De Chauxville twenty-five years,” he went on, and Etta deferred her confession. “We have never been good friends, I admit. I am no saint, princess, but De Chauxville is a villain. Someday you may discover, when it is too late, that it would have been for Paul’s happiness, for your happiness, for everyone’s good to have nothing more to do with Claude de Chauxville, I want to save you that discovery. Will you act upon my advice? Will you make a stand now? Will you come to me and tell me all that De Chauxville knows about you that he could ever use against you? Will you give yourself into my hands—give me your battle
