"I am afraid I must go," he said gravely at length.

"Must--a prince?"

"It is on that account," he replied.

"Then I am to conclude that you are more devoted to your peasants than to--me?"

He assured her to the contrary. She tried once again, but nothing could move him from his decision. Etta was perhaps a small-minded person, and as such failed to attach due importance to this proof that her power over him was limited. It ceased, in fact, to exist as soon as it touched that strong sense of duty which is to be found in many men and in remarkably few women.

It almost seemed as if the abrupt departure of her lover was in some sense a relief to Etta Sydney Bamborough. For, while he, lover-like, was grave and earnest during the small remainder of the evening, she continued to be sprightly and gay. The last he saw of her was her smiling face at the window as her carriage drove away.

Arrived at the little house in Upper Brook Street, Maggie and Etta went into the drawing-room, where biscuits and wine were set out. Their maids came and took their cloaks away, leaving them alone.

"Paul and I are engaged," said Etta suddenly. She was picking the withered flowers from her dress and throwing them carelessly on the table.

Maggie was standing with her back to her, with her two hands on the mantel-piece. She was about to turn round when she caught sight of her own face in the mirror, and that which she saw there made her change her intention.

"I am not surprised," she said, in an even voice, standing like a statue. "I congratulate you. I think he is--nice."

"You also think he is too good for me," said Etta, with a little laugh.

There was something in that laugh--a ring of wounded vanity, the wounded vanity of a bad woman who is in the presence of her superior.

"No!" answered Maggie slowly, tracing the veins of the marble across the mantel-piece. "No--o, not that."

Etta looked up at her. It was rather singular that she did not ask what Maggie did think. Perhaps she was afraid of a certain British honesty which characterized the girl's thought and speech. Instead she rose and indulged in a yawn which may have been counterfeit, but it was a good counterfeit.

"Will you have a biscuit?" she said.

"No, thanks."

"Then shall we go to bed?"

"Yes."

CHAPTER IX

THE PRINCE

The village of Osterno, lying, or rather scrambling, along the banks of the river Oster, is at no time an exhilarating spot. It is a large village, numbering over nine hundred souls, as the board affixed to its first house testifieth in incomprehensible Russian figures.

A "soul," be it known, is a different object in the land of the Czars to that vague protoplasm about which our young persons think such mighty thoughts, our old men write such famous big books. A soul is namely a man--in Russia the women have not yet begun to seek their rights and lose their privileges. A man is therefore a "soul" in Russia, and as such enjoys the doubtful privilege of contributing to the land-tax and to every other tax. In compensation for the first-named impost he is apportioned his share of the common land of the village, and by the cultivation of this ekes out an existence which would be valueless if he were a teetotaller. It is melancholy to have to record this fact in the pages of a respectable volume like the present; but facts--as the orator who deals in fiction is ever ready to announce--facts cannot be ignored.

And any man who has lived in Russia, has dabbled in Russian humanity, and noted the singular unattractiveness of Russian life--any such man can scarcely deny the fact that if one deprives the moujik of his privilege of getting gloriously and frequently intoxicated, one takes away from that same moujik the one happiness of his existence.

That the Russian peasant is by nature one of the cheeriest, the noisiest, and lightest-hearted of men is only another proof of the Creator's power; for this dimly lighted "soul" has nothing to cheer him on his forlorn way but the memory of the last indulgence in strong drink and the hope of more to come. He is harassed by a ruthless tax-collector; he is shut off from the world by enormous distances over impracticable roads. When the famine comes, and come it assuredly will, the moujik has no alternative but to stay where he is and starve. Since Alexander II. of philanthropic memory made the Russian serf a free man, the blessings of freedom have been found to resolve themselves chiefly into a perfect liberty to die of starvation, of cold, or of dire disease. When he was a serf this man was of some small value to some one; now he is of no consequence to any one whatsoever except himself, and, with considerable intelligence, he sets but small store upon his own existence. Freedom, in fact, came to him before he was ready for it; and, hampered as he has been by petty departmental tyranny, governmental neglect, and a natural stupidity, he has made very small progress toward a mental independence. All that he has learnt to do is to hate his tyrants. When famine urges him, he goes blindly, helplessly, dumbly, and tries to take by force that which is denied by force.

With us in England the poor man raises up his voice and cries aloud when he wants something. He always wants something--never work, by the way--and therefore his voice pervades the atmosphere. He has his evening newspaper, which is dear at the moderate sum of a halfpenny. He has his professional organizers, and his Trafalgar Square. He even has his members of Parliament. He does no work, and he does not starve. In his generation the poor man thinks himself wise. In Russia, however, things are managed differently. The poor man is under the heel of the rich.

Some day there will be in Russia a Terror, but not yet. Some day the moujik will erect unto himself a rough sort of a guillotine, but not in our day. Perhaps some of us who are young men now may dimly read in our dotage of a great upheaval beside which the Terror of France will be tame and uneventful. Who can tell? When a country begins to grow, its mental development is often startlingly rapid.

But we have to do with Russia of to-day, and the village of Osterno in the Government of Tver. Not a "famine" Government, mind you! For these are the Volga Provinces--Samara, Pensa, Voronish, Vintka, and a dozen others. No! Tver the civilized, the prosperous, the manufacturing centre.

Osterno is built of wood. Should it once fairly catch alight in a high wind, all that will be left of this town will be a few charred timbers and some dazed human beings. The inhabitants know their own danger, and endeavor to meet it in their fatalistic manner. Each village has its fire organization. Each "soul" has his appointed place, his appointed duty, and his special contribution--be it bucket or rope or ladder--to bring to the conflagration. But no one ever dreams of being sober and vigilant at the right time, so the organization, like many larger such, is a broken reed.

The street, bounded on either side by low wooden houses, is, singularly enough, well paved. This, the traveller is told, by the tyrant Prince Pavlo, who made the road because he did not like driving over ruts and through puddles--the usual Russian rural thoroughfare. Not because Prince Pavlo wanted to give the peasants work, not because he wanted to save them from starvation--not at all, although, in the gratification of his own whim, he happened to render those trifling services; but merely because he was a great "barin"--a prince who could have any thing he desired. Had not the other barin--Steinmetz by name--superintended the work? Steinmetz the hated, the loathed, the tool of the tyrant whom they never see. Ask the "starost"--the mayor of the village. He knows the barins, and hates them.

Michael Roon, the starosta or elder of Osterno, president of the Mir, or village council, principal shopkeeper, mayor and only intelligent soul of the nine hundred, probably had Tartar blood in his veins. To this strain may be attributed the narrow Tartar face, the keen black eyes, the short, spare figure which many remember to this day, although Michael Roon has been dead these many years.

Removed far above the majority of his fellow-villagers in intelligence and energy, this man administered the law of his own will to his colleagues on the village council.

It was late in the autumn, one evening remembered by many for its death-roll, that the starosta was standing at the door of his small shop. He was apparently idle. He never sold vodka, and the majority of the villagers were in one of the three thriving "kabaks" which drove a famous trade in strong drink and weak tea. It was a very hot evening.

The sun had set in a pink haze which was now turning to an unhealthy gray, and spreading over the face of the western sky like the shadow of death across the human countenance.

The starosta shook his head forebodingly. It was cholera weather.

Cholera had come to Osterno. Had come, the starosta thought, to stay. It had settled down in Osterno, and nothing but the winter frosts would kill it, when hunger-typhus would undoubtedly succeed it.

Therefore the starosta shook his head at the sunset, and forgot to regret the badness of the times from a commercial point of view. He had done all he could. He had notified to the Zemstvo the condition of his village. He had made the usual appeal for help, which had been forwarded in the usual way to Tver, where it had apparently been received with the usual philosophic silence.

But Michael Roon had also telegraphed to Karl Steinmetz, and since the despatch of this message had the starosta dropped into the habit of standing at his doorway in the evening, with his hands clasped behind his back and his beady black eyes bent westward along the prince's high-road.

On the particular evening with which we have to do the beady eyes looked not in vain; for presently, far along the road, appeared a black speck like an insect crawling over the face of a map.

"Ah!" said the starosta. "Ah! he never fails."

Presently a neighbor dropped in to buy some of the dried leaf which the starosta, honest tradesman, called tea. He found the purveyor of Cathay's produce at the door.

"Ah!" he said, in a voice thick with vodka. "You see something on the road?"

"Yes."

"A cart?"

"No, a carriage. It moves too quickly."

A strange expression came over the peasant's face, at no time a pleasing physiognomy. The bloodshot eyes flared up suddenly like a smouldering flame in brown paper. The unsteady, drink-sodden lips twitched. The man threw up his shaggy head, upon which hair and beard mingled in unkempt confusion. He glared along the road with eyes and face aglow with a sullen, beast-like hatred.

"A carriage! Then it is for the castle."

"Possibly," answered the starosta.

"The prince--curse him, curse his mother's soul, curse his wife's offspring!"

"Yes," said the starosta quietly. "Yes, curse him and all his works.

What is it you want, little father--tea?"

He turned into the shop and served his customer, duly inscribing the debt among others in a rough, cheap book.