the normally law-abiding masses now helped to finance, hide and abet the Nihilists, who succeeded in murdering scores of police and officials.
The Government won, at least to the extent that, when a third Duma was summoned in the autumn of 1907, Stolypin had at last secured the tame assembly he desired. This enabled him to introduce such reforms as he could persuade the Tsar to agree to, and to prepare the way for the measures on which his heart was set. These were designed to substitute private for communal ownership, so that the peasants might own the land on which they worked; for it was his very sensible belief that the possession of private property would prove the best bulwark against revolution.
But matters were not moving swiftly enough for the Socialists and Marxists. They continued their underground warfare with unabated vigour. Not a day passed but shots were fired or a bomb thrown at some relative of the Tsar, one of his Ministers, a General, a Police Chief, or some high official and innumerable police agents were knifed or slugged on the head. And it was in a bomb outrage that de Richleau's father had lost his life.
The old Duke had held no official position of any kind, and had never taken Russian nationality; so he was still technically a Frenchman. He had left his estate only to attend a centenary celebration in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, as the guest of the Governor, Count Boris Plackoff, a cousin of his dead wife. As so often happened, the bomb had been badly aimed. None of its splinters even grazed the Governor, but they killed or wounded a dozen soldiers and spectators standing a few yards away from him, the Duke among them.
That both de Quesnoy's wife and father should have met their deaths in the same way was not, in fact, a particularly strange coincidence. Anyone in the vicinity of royalty or a Governor making a public appearance at that time was liable to fall a victim to an assassin; so it was no more surprising than if two people, both of whom at times climbed mountains, should both die as a result of mountaineering accidents. Yet the murder of his father re- aroused in the new Duke all the emotions to which he had been subject two and a half years earlier.
The facts that he had never regarded his father with more than respectful affection, that he had seen very little of him during the past fifteen years, and that he had benefited through his death by coming into a considerable fortune, hardly entered his mind. They were submerged under the salient fact that his parent, while an innocent bystander, had been violently and painfully done to death by a small criminal minority which sought to impose its will by acts of terror upon a vast law-abiding majority.
The news of the assassination had brought back to him vivid memories of Angela, and the way in which their happiness had been terminated with such appalling suddenness. For some days, he was afflicted with periods of bitter brooding, as he thought of what his life might have been were she still alive, and what it had become owing to her death. He would have had a permanent home with the woman who had been his earliest and greatest love, a child now two years old to cherish, the enjoyment of a circle of friends with whom to pass their time in civilized surroundings. As it was, he had been forced to become a soldier of fortune, rootless, without family, and only circles of acquaintances which changed every month as he moved from one appointment to another, engaged in jungle warfare or countering the intrigues of unscrupulous Central American politicians.
Thinking back, it gave him some consolation to recall that, by undertaking his secret mission to Barcelona, he had succeeded in ensuring that Ferrer and his vile crew had been brought to book for the backstage part they had played in Angela's murder, and had been put out of the way for good; but that did not alter the fact that the hydra- headed monster, militant anarchism, was still taking its toll almost daily of innocent victims, and that his father's life had been cut short by Russians of the poisonous Ferrer breed.
For a while he had contemplated offering to serve the Tsar in the same way as he had Don Alfonso, and under an alias seeking to penetrate the inner circles of the Russian Nihilists. But on consideration, he had recalled that the circumstances in Spain and Russia were very different. Don Alfonso had been anxious to employ him because the strongly Liberal element in his own police, especially in Catalonia, made them unreliable. To the Tsar's Secret Police, the
By the time he reached New Orleans, he had decided that there was no place for him in the secret war that the
The standard of the music had certainly not improved while the Duke had been in America, and in the past year the players, large and small, had got so out of tune that for a while it had looked as if they meant to break their instruments over one another's heads.
The Entente Cordiale still held, in spite of some discordant notes. between the Anglo-French partners, and Russia, largely owing to a visit by King Edward to the Tsar at Revel in the summer of 1908, had since been drawn away from Germany into what was now a triple Entente. Germany and Austria-Hungary, with Italy as an unenthusiastic third, formed the Triple Alliance, which led by the bellicose Kaiser, was opposing the Entente countries on every major issue.
For the past quarter of a century the ancient sprawling Turkish Empire had been falling to pieces, and it was a further stage in its disintegration which had nearly set the Great Powers at one another's throats. Early in the previous year the Young Turks had deposed the Sultan. Recent memories of the massacre of the Armenians and other horrors perpetrated by the
Crete, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro had already thrown off the Turkish yoke. Now Bulgaria also proclaimed her independence and Austria, without consultation with the other powers, annexed the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the two provinces were mainly populated by Serbs, Serbia had hoped to absorb them and demanded compensation. Russia, as the natural protector of the Slav races in the Balkans, backed her up, while Germany backed her ally Austria. All through the autumn and winter heated notes had volleyed back and forth between the Great Powers; but a month ago the Kaiser had openly declared his intention of supporting Austria by force of arms if the matter of her annexation of the provinces was further questioned, and Russia had climbed down.
Now, the 'Concert' was playing in reasonably fair harmony again, but in view of the violently nationalistic ambitions animating the several newly-created Balkan States, de Richleau found himself wondering for how long it would continue to do so. He was far too conscious of the appalling consequences which would result from a major war to wish to see all Europe go up in flames; but as a soldier of fortune he regarded with speculative interest the possibility of a war in the Balkans, and that another might break out either in North Africa, owing to Italian ambitions in Tripoli, or North-West Africa, where France had recently seized the Casablanca territories in the teeth of German opposition.
At the moment he was definitely looking forward to taking over and administering the great estate that had been left to him; but instinct told him that his new form of occupation would not satisfy him for very long, and that in a year or so he would once more feel a compelling urge again to use his talents as a soldier. If so, perhaps, after all, he might yet achieve his ambition to command a Cavalry Division in Tripoli, Morocco or the Balkans.
On April 2nd he sailed for Europe, to reach Hamburg after a pleasant but uneventful voyage. From Hamburg he went straight to Vienna and there, in his favourite city, he broke his journey for a week to get the feel of Europe again into his bones.
Frau Sacher, who had known him since his boyhood, received him with delight. In the lofty rooms of her exclusive hotel, with their tall double doors of baize that shut out all sound, he put from him the last unpleasant memories of his time in Latin America - the greedy half-breed politicians and generals, the sweltering heat of the jungle, the constant danger from disease and snake or tarantula bite, the stench of unwashed humanity, and the incessant pestering by flies and mosquitoes - while luxuriating in a huge bed or in the vast marble bath, as big as a Roman sarcophagus.
No sooner had he made known his presence in Vienna than he received a dozen callers and a score of invitations. Friends made in his youth, now Majors and Colonels in crack cavalry regiments, delighted to receive him again into the joyous carefree life of 'wine, women and song' that formed the very heart of Vienna's existence. He
