When they reached their hotel the countess unburdened herself to her son’s tutor of certain memories which interested her now far more than did her unexpected rupture with the Polish woman. She described a court ball at St. Petersburg at which the present Czar, then still Czarowitz, conversed for five minutes with her. She treated the gymnasium teacher partly as she would her priest, partly as if he were her butler, and now, in her burst of reminiscence, she overhauled her past to him with the whole-hearted, childlike abandon which is characteristic of her race and which put the humble old teacher ill at ease. “He told me to take good care of my ‘pretty eyes and golden eyebrows,’ ” she said. “And yet it was for these very eyebrows that Pavel’s father disliked me.”
She had been the pet daughter of a wealthy nobleman, high in the service of the ministry for foreign affairs, but Pavel’s father, and her living husband, from whom she was now practically separated, had almost convinced her that to be disliked was her just share in life. Her parents and sisters were dead. She had a little boy by her second marriage, but she was still in love with the shadow of her first husband, and the son he had left her was the one passion of her life. Having spent her youth in the two foreign countries to which her father’s diplomatic career took the family, she deprecated, in a dim unformulated way, many of the things that surrounded her in her native land. She was unable to reconcile her luminous image of the Emperor with the mediæval cruelties that were being perpetrated by his order. She was at a loss to understand how such a gentle-hearted man could send to the gallows or to the living graves of Siberia people like the Polish patriots. The compulsory religion of the Orthodox Russian Church, too, with its iron-clad organisation and grotesque uniforms, impressed her as a kind of spiritual gendarmerie. Yet she accepted it all as part of that panorama of things which whispered the magic word, “Russia.” And now the sight of the Czar had rekindled memories of her better days and stirred in her a submissive sense of her cheerless fate.
Pavel was meanwhile putting the case of the Polish woman to Onufri, one of the two servants who accompanied them in their present travels—a retired hussar with a formidable moustache in front of a pinched hollow-cheeked face.
“Her highness, your mother, is good as an angel, sir,” was Onufri’s verdict.
“And you are stupid as a cork,” Pavel snarled. His sense of the desecration to which the person of his Czar was being subjected by mingling with people like the widow of a hanged rebel rankled in his heart. He worked himself up to a state of mind in which the very similarity in physical appearance between the untitled people with whom the Czar and born aristocrats like himself and his mother were compelled to mingle at a place like this resort struck him as an impertinence on the part of the untitled people.
Later when he lay between two German featherbeds and Onufri brought him his book and a candle he asked him to take a seat by his bedside.
“Why are you such a deuced fool, Onufri?”
“If I am it is God’s business, not mine, nor your highness’.”
“Look here, Onufri. How would you like to have all common people black like those darkies?”
The servant spat out in horror and made the sign of the cross.
“For shame, sir. What harm have the common people done you that you should wish them a horrid thing like that? And where does your highness get these cruel thoughts? Surely not from your mother. For shame, sir.”
“Idiot that you are, it’s mere fancy, just for fun. There ought to be some difference between noble people and common. There is in some countries, you know.” He told him about castes, the slave trade in America and passed to the days of chivalry, his favourite topic, until the retired hussar’s head sank and a mighty snore rang out of his bushy moustache. Pavel flew into a passion.
“Ass!” he shouted, getting half out of bed and shaking him fiercely. “Why don’t I fall asleep when you tell me stories?”
Onufri started and fell to rubbing one eye, while with his other eye he looked about him, as though he had slept a week. The stories he often told young Boulatoff mostly related to the days of serfdom, which had been abolished when Pavel was a boy of five. Onufri’s mother had been flogged to death in the presence of her master, Pavel’s grandfather, and the former hussar would tell the story with a solemnity that reflected his veneration for the “good old times” rather than grief over the fate of his mother.
That night Pavel dreamed of a pond full of calves that were splashing about and laughing in the water. He carried them all home and on his way there they were transformed into one pair, and the two calves walked about and talked just like Onufri and the transformation was no transformation at all, the calves being real calves and negroes at the same time. When he awoke, in the morning, and it came over him that the dream had had something to do with Onufri, he was seized with a feeling of self-disgust. He thought of the Polish woman and his treatment of her, and this, too, appeared in a new light to him.
Two or three hours later, when the countess returned from her morning walk Pavel, dressed to go out, grave and mysterious, solemnly handed her a sealed note from himself.
“Don’t open it until I have left,” he said. “I am going out for a stroll.”
“What you said yesterday about my being hard-hearted and incapable of sympathy,” the letter read, “left a deep impression on me. I thought of it almost the first thing this morning as I opened my eyes, and it kept me thinking all the morning. I looked deep into my soul, I overhauled my whole ego. I turned it inside out, and—well, I must say I have come to the conclusion that what you said was not devoid of foundation. Not that I am prepared to imagine ourselves as having anything to do with a woman whose family is a family of rebels and who has the audacity to pass our emperor without bowing; but she is a human being, too, and her sufferings should have aroused some commiseration in me. I envy you, mother. Compared to you I really am a hard-hearted, unfeeling brute, and it makes me very, very unhappy to think of it. My heart is so full at this moment that I am at a loss to give expression to what I feel, but you will understand me, darling little mother mine. I do not want to be hard and cruel, and I want you to help me.
“Your struggling son,
“Pavel.”
When Anna Nicolayevna laid down the letter her large meek grey eyes first grew red and then filled with tears. She sat with her long slim arms loosely folded on a davenport, weeping and smiling at once. There was much charm in her smile, but, barring it and her mass of fine auburn hair, she was certainly not good looking. She was small, ungainly, flat-chested, with a large thin-lipped mouth and, in spite of her beautiful gowns, with a general effect of rustiness.
When Pavel and his mother met at dinner he felt so embarrassed he could not bring himself to look her in the face.
CHAPTER II.
THE WHITE TERROR.
MIROSLAV was trisected longitudinally by a clear, cheerful river and by Kasimir Street, its principal thoroughfare, which contained most of its public buildings and best shops. The middle one of the three sections thus formed was the home of the higher nobility and the official class; the district across the bridge from here was inhabited by Christian burghers and workmen, with here and there a clay hovel, the home of a peasant family, gleaming white in the distant outskirts; while the hilly quarter