“Listen,” said the Frenchman. “I once knew a man into whose care was given the happiness of a fellow-being. There is a greater responsibility, by-the-way, than the well-being of a whole nation, even of one of the two greatest nations in the world. And that is a care which you and I have had upon our shoulders for a brief hour here and there. It was the old story; for it was the happiness of a woman. God knows the man meant well! But he bungled it. Bon Dieu—how he bungled it! He said too little. Ever since he has talked too much. She was a Polish woman, by-the-way, and that has left a tenderness, nay, a raw place, in my heart, which smarts at the sound of a Polish word. For I was the man.”
“Well,” asked Cartoner, “what do you want to know?”
“Nothing,” answered the other, quick as thought. “I only tell you the story as a warning. To you especially, who take so much for said that has not been said. You are strong, and a man. Remember that a woman—even the strongest—may not be able to bear such a strain as you can bear.”
Cartoner was listening attentively enough. He always listened with attention to his friend on such rare occasions as he chose to be serious.
“You know,” went on Deulin, after a pause, during which the waiter had set before him a battered silver dish from which he removed the cover with a flourish full of promise—“you know that I would give into your care unreservedly anything that I possessed, such as a fortune, or—well—a daughter. I would trust you entirely. But any man may make a mistake. And if you make a mistake now, I shall never forgive you—never.”
And his eyes flashed with a sudden fierceness as he looked at his companion.
“Is there anything I can do for you, my friend?” he asked, curtly.
“You have already promised to do the only thing I would ask you to do in Warsaw,” replied Cartoner.
Deulin held up one hand in a gesture commanding silence.
“Not another word—they cost you so much, a few words—I understand perfectly.”
Then with a rapid relapse into his gayer mood he turned to the dish before him.
“And now let us consider the railway beef. It promises little. But it cannot be so tough and indigestible as the memory of a mistake—I tell you that.”
XXX
The Quiet City
The most liberal-minded man in Russia at this time was the Czar. He had chosen his ministers from among the nobles who were at least tolerant of advance, if they did not actually advocate it. Much as he hated to make a change, he had in one or two instances parted with old and trusted servants—friends of his boyhood—rather than forgo one item of his policy. In other cases he had appealed to the memory of their long friendship in order to bring his nobles not to his own way of thinking, for he could not do that, but to his own plan of action.
“I do not agree with you, but I will serve you,” had answered one of these, and the Czar, who did not know where to turn to find the man he needed, accepted such service.
For a throne stands in isolation, and no man may judge another by looking down upon him, but must needs descend into the crowd, and, mingling there on a lower level, pick out for himself the honest man or the clever man—or that rare being, the man who is both.
Kings and emperors may not do this, however. Despots dare not. Alexander II acted as any ordinary man acts when he finds himself in a position to confer favors, to make appointments, to get together, as it were, a ministry, even if this takes no more dignified a form than a board of directors. He suspected that the world contained precisely the men he wanted, if he could only let down a net into it and draw them up. How, otherwise, could he select them? So he did the usual thing. He looked round among his relations, and, failing them, the friends of his youth. For an emperor, popularly supposed to have the whole world to choose from, has no larger a choice than any bourgeois looking round his own small world for a satisfactory executor.
Coming to the throne, as he did, in the midst of a losing fight, his first task was to conclude a humiliating peace. He must needs bow down to the upstart adventurer of France, who had tricked England into a useless war in order to steady his own tottering throne.
Alexander II, moreover, came to power with the avowed intention of liberating the serfs, which intention he carried out, and paid for with his own life in due time. Russia had been the only country to stand aloof on the slave question, thus branding herself in two worlds as still uncivilized. The young Czar knew that such a position was untenable. “Without the serf the Russian Empire must crumble away,” his advisers told him. “With the serf she cannot endure,” he answered. And twenty-two millions of men were set free. In this act he stood almost alone; for hardly a single minister was with him heart and soul, though many obeyed him loyally enough against their own convictions. Many honestly thought that this must be the end of the Russian Empire.
It is hard to go against the advice of those near at hand; for their point of view must always appear to be the same as one’s own, while counsel from afar comes as the word of one who is looking at things from another standpoint, and may thus be more easily mistaken.
Alexander II, called suddenly to reign over one-tenth part of the human race,
