"Our master went to J----" (the government town some fifty miles off) "the day before yesterday."
"There are only two horses in the stables. Where are the others?"
"Our master always travels with his own horses" (meaning: not by post).
"He will be away a week or more. He was pleased to mention to me that he had to attend to some business in the Civil Court."
While the servant was speaking the officer looked about the hall.
There was a door facing him, a door to the right, and a door to the left. The officer chose to enter the room on the left, and ordered the blinds to be pulled up. It was Mr. Nicholas B."s study, with a couple of tall bookcases, some pictures on the walls, and so on. Besides the big centre-table, with books and papers, there was a quite small writing-table, with several drawers, standing between the door and the window in a good light; and at this table my granduncle usually sat either to read or write.
On pulling up the blind the servant was startled by the discovery that the whole male population of the village was ma.s.sed in front, trampling down the flower-beds. There were also a few women among them. He was glad to observe the village priest (of the Orthodox Church) coming up the drive. The good man in his haste had tucked up his ca.s.sock as high as the top of his boots.
The officer had been looking at the backs of the books in the bookcases.
Then he perched himself on the edge of the centre table and remarked easily:
"Your master did not take you to town with him, then?"
"I am the head servant, and he leaves me in charge of the house. It"s a strong, young chap that travels with our master. If--G.o.d forbid--there was some accident on the road, he would be of much more use than I."
Glancing through the window, he saw the priest arguing vehemently in the thick of the crowd, which seemed subdued by his interference. Three or four men, however, were talking with the Cossacks at the door.
"And you don"t think your master has gone to join the rebels maybe--eh?"
asked the officer.
"Our master would be too old for that, surely. He"s well over seventy, and he"s getting feeble, too. It"s some years now since he"s been on horseback, and he can"t walk much, either, now."
The officer sat there swinging his leg, very quiet and indifferent. By that time the peasants who had been talking with the Cossack troopers at the door had been permitted to get into the hall. One or two more left the crowd and followed them in. They were seven in all, and among them the blacksmith, an ex-soldier. The servant appealed deferentially to the officer.
"Won"t your honour be pleased to tell the people to go back to their homes? What do they want to push themselves into the house like this for? It"s not proper for them to behave like this while our master"s away and I am responsible for everything here."
The officer only laughed a little, and after a while inquired:
"Have you any arms in the house?"
"Yes. We have. Some old things."
"Bring them all here, onto this table."
The servant made another attempt to obtain protection.
"Won"t your honour tell these chaps. . . ?"
But the officer looked at him in silence, in such a way that he gave it up at once and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to help him collect the arms. Meantime, the officer walked slowly through all the rooms in the house, examining them attentively but touching nothing. The peasants in the hall fell back and took off their caps when he pa.s.sed through.
He said nothing whatever to them. When he came back to the study all the arms to be found in the house were lying on the table. There was a pair of big, flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry swords, one of the French, the other of the Polish army pattern, with a fowling-piece or two.
The officer, opening the window, flung out pistols, swords, and guns, one after another, and his troopers ran to pick them up. The peasants in the hall, encouraged by his manner, had stolen after him into the study.
He gave not the slightest sign of being conscious of their existence, and, his business being apparently concluded, strode out of the house without a word. Directly he left, the peasants in the study put on their caps and began to smile at each other.
The Cossacks rode away, pa.s.sing through the yards of the home farm straight into the fields. The priest, still arguing with the peasants, moved gradually down the drive and his earnest eloquence was drawing the silent mob after him, away from the house. This justice must be rendered to the parish priests of the Greek Church that, strangers to the country as they were (being all drawn from the interior of Russia), the majority of them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the cause of peace and humanity. True to the spirit of their calling, they tried to soothe the pa.s.sions of the excited peasantry, and opposed rapine and violence, whenever they could, with all their might. And this conduct they pursued against the express wishes of the authorities. Later on some of them were made to suffer for this disobedience by being removed abruptly to the far north or sent away to Siberian parishes.
The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had got into the house. What sort of conduct was that, he asked them, toward a man who was only a tenant, had been invariably good and considerate to the villagers for years, and only the other day had agreed to give up two meadows for the use of the village herd? He reminded them, too, of Mr.
Nicholas B."s devotion to the sick in time of cholera. Every word of this was true, and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch their heads and look irresolute. The speaker then pointed at the window, exclaiming: "Look! there"s all your crowd going away quietly, and you silly chaps had better go after them and pray G.o.d to forgive you your evil thoughts."
This appeal was an unlucky inspiration.
In crowding clumsily to the window to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows overturned the little writing-table. As it fell over a c.h.i.n.k of loose coin was heard. "There"s money in that thing," cried the blacksmith. In a moment the top of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed and there lay exposed in a drawer eighty half imperials.
Gold coin was a rare sight in Russia even at that time; it put the peasants beside themselves. "There must be more of that in the house, and we shall have it," yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith. "This is war-time." The others were already shouting out of the window, urging the crowd to come back and help. The priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate, flung his arms up and hurried away so as not to see what was going to happen.
In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in the house, ripping with knives, splitting with hatchets, so that, as the servant said, there were no two pieces of wood holding together left in the whole house. They broke some very fine mirrors, all the windows, and every piece of gla.s.s and china. They threw the books and papers out on the lawn and set fire to the heap for the mere fun of the thing, apparently. Absolutely the only one solitary thing which they left whole was a small ivory crucifix, which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany, and splintered boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B."s bedstead. Detecting the servant in the act of stealing away with a j.a.panned tin box, they tore it from him, and because he resisted they threw him out of the dining-room window. The house was on one floor, but raised well above the ground, and the fall was so serious that the man remained lying stunned till the cook and a stable-boy ventured forth at dusk from their hiding-places and picked him up. But by that time the mob had departed, carrying off the tin box, which they supposed to be full of paper money.
Some distance from the house, in the middle of a field, they broke it open. They found in side doc.u.ments engrossed on parchment and the two crosses of the Legion of Honour and For Valour. At the sight of these objects, which, the blacksmith explained, were marks of honour given only by the Tsar, they became extremely frightened at what they had done. They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily.
On learning of this particular loss Mr. Nicholas B. broke down completely. The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect him much. While he was still in bed from the shock, the two crosses were found and returned to him. It helped somewhat his slow convalescence, but the tin box and the parchments, though searched for in all the ditches around, never turned up again. He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour Patent, whose preamble, setting forth his services, he knew by heart to the very letter, and after this blow volunteered sometimes to recite, tears standing in his eyes the while. Its terms haunted him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an extent that he used to repeat them to himself. This is confirmed by the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more intimate friends. "What makes my heart heavy is to hear our master in his room at night walking up and down and praying aloud in the French language."
It must have been somewhat over a year afterward that I saw Mr. Nicholas B.--or, more correctly, that he saw me--for the last time. It was, as I have already said, at the time when my mother had a three months" leave from exile, which she was spending in the house of her brother, and friends and relations were coming from far and near to do her honour.
It is inconceivable that Mr. Nicholas B. should not have been of the number. The little child a few months old he had taken up in his arms on the day of his home-coming, after years of war and exile, was confessing her faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn. I do not know whether he was present on the very day of our departure.
I have already admitted that for me he is more especially the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any remembered scene.
A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily b.u.t.toned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his grandnephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all those he had seen in the course of his taciturn life.
But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-horses, standing before the long front of the house with its eight columns, four on each side of the broad flight of stairs. On the steps, groups of servants, a few relations, one or two friends from the nearest neighbourhood, a perfect silence; on all the faces an air of sober concentration; my grandmother, all in black, gazing stoically; my uncle giving his arm to my mother down to the carriage in which I had been placed already; at the top of the flight my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a small princess attended by the women of her own household; the head gouvernante, our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty years in the service of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compa.s.sionate expression, and the good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows meeting over a short, thick nose, and a complexion like pale-brown paper. Of all the eyes turned toward the carriage, her good-natured eyes only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that broke the silence with an appeal to me: "_N"oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri_." In three months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not only to speak French, but to read it as well. She was indeed an excellent playmate. In the distance, half-way down to the great gates, a light, open trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn up on one side, with the police captain of the district sitting in it, the vizor of his flat cap with a red band pulled down over his eyes.
It seems strange that he should have been there to watch our going so carefully. Without wishing to treat with levity the just timidites of Imperialists all the world over, I may allow myself the reflection that a woman, practically condemned by the doctors, and a small boy not quite six years old, could not be regarded as seriously dangerous, even for the largest of conceivable empires saddled with the most sacred of responsibilities. And this good man I believe did not think so, either.
I learned afterward why he was present on that day. I don"t remember any outward signs; but it seems that, about a month before, my mother became so unwell that there was a doubt whether she could be made fit to travel in the time. In this uncertainty the Governor-General in Kiev was pet.i.tioned to grant her a fortnight"s extension of stay in her brother"s house. No answer whatever was returned to this prayer, but one day at dusk the police captain of the district drove up to the house and told my uncle"s valet, who ran out to meet him, that he wanted to speak with the master in private, at once. Very much impressed (he thought it was going to be an arrest), the servant, "more dead than alive with fright,"
as he related afterward, smuggled him through the big drawing-room, which was dark (that room was not lighted every evening), on tiptoe, so as not to attract the attention of the ladies in the house, and led him by way of the orangery to my uncle"s private apartments.
The policeman, without any preliminaries, thrust a paper into my uncle"s hands.
"There. Pray read this. I have no business to show this paper to you. It is wrong of me. But I can"t either eat or sleep with such a job hanging over me."
That police captain, a native of Great Russia, had been for many years serving in the district.
My uncle unfolded and read the doc.u.ment. It was a service order issued from the Governor-General"s secretariat, dealing with the matter of the pet.i.tion and directing the police captain to disregard all remonstrances and explanations in regard to that illness either from medical men or others, "and if she has not left her brother"s house"--it went on to say--"on the morning of the day specified on her permit, you are to despatch her at once under escort, direct" (underlined) "to the prison-hospital in Kiev, where she will be treated as her case demands."
"For G.o.d"s sake, Mr. B., see that your sister goes away punctually on that day. Don"t give me this work to do with a woman--and with one of your family, too. I simply cannot bear to think of it."
He was absolutely wringing his hands. My uncle looked at him in silence.
"Thank you for this warning. I a.s.sure you that even if she were dying she would be carried out to the carriage."
"Yes--indeed--and what difference would it make--travel to Kiev or back to her husband? For she would have to go--death or no death. And mind, Mr. B., I will be here on the day, not that I doubt your promise, but because I must. I have got to. Duty. All the same my trade is not fit for a dog since some of you Poles will persist in rebelling, and all of you have got to suffer for it."
This is the reason why he was there in an open three-horse trap pulled up between the house and the great gates. I regret not being able to give up his name to the scorn of all believers in the right of conquest, as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian of Imperial greatness. On the other hand, I am in a position to state the name of the Governor-General who signed the order with the marginal note "to be carried out to the letter" in his own handwriting. The gentleman"s name was Bezak. A high dignitary, an energetic official, the idol for a time of the Russian patriotic press.
Each generation has its memories.
IV