The word soon spread that a carriage was coming along the road from Tver. All the villagers came to the doors of their dilapidated wooden huts. Even the kabaks were emptied for a time. As the vehicle approached it became apparent that the horses were going at a great pace; not only was the loose horse galloping, but also the pair in the shafts. The carriage was an open one, an ordinary North Russian travelling carriage, not unlike the vehicle we call the victoria, set on high wheels.

Beside the driver on the box sat another servant. In the open carriage sat one man only, Karl Steinmetz.

As he passed through the village a murmur of many voices followed him, not quite drowned by the rattle of his wheels, the clatter of the horses' feet. The murmur was a curse. Karl Steinmetz heard it distinctly. It made him smile with a queer expression beneath his great gray mustache.

The starosta, standing in his door-way, saw the smile. He raised his voice with his neighbors and cursed. As Steinmetz passed him he gave a little jerk of the head toward the castle. The jerk of the head might have been due to an inequality of the road, but it might also convey an appointment. The keen, haggard face of Michael Roon showed no sign of mutual understanding. And the carriage rattled on through the stricken village.

Two hours later, when it was quite dark, a closed carriage, with two bright lamps flaring into the night, passed through the village toward the castle at a gallop.

"It is the prince," the peasants said, crouching in their low door-ways.

"It is the prince. We know his bells--they are of silver--and we shall starve during the winter. Curse him--curse him!"

They raised their heads and listened to the galloping feet with the patient, dumb despair which is the curse of the Slavonic race. Some of them crept to their doors, and, looking up, saw that the castle windows were ablaze with light. If Paul Howard Alexis was a plain English gentleman in London, he was also a great prince in his country, keeping up a princely state, enjoying the gilded solitude that belongs to the high-born. His English education had educed a strict sense of discipline, and as in England, and, indeed, all through his life, so in Russia did he attempt to do his duty.

The carriage rattled up to the brilliantly lighted door, which stood open, and within, on either side of the broad entrance-hall, the servants stood to welcome their master. A strange, picturesque, motley crew: the majordomo, in his black coat, and beside him the other house-servants--tall, upright fellows, in their bright livery. Beyond them the stable-men and keepers, a little army, in red cloth tunics, with wide trousers tucked into high boots, all holding their fur caps in their hands, standing stiffly at attention, clean, honest, and not too intelligent.

The castle of Osterno is built on the lines of many Russian country seats, and not a few palaces in Moscow. The Royal Palace in the Kremlin is an example. A broad entrance-hall, at the back of which a staircase as broad stretches up to a gallery, around which the dwelling-rooms are situated. At the head of the staircase, directly facing the entrance-hall, high folding doors disclose the drawing-room, which is almost a throne room. All gorgeous, lofty, spacious, as only Russian houses are. Truly this northern empire, this great white land, is a country in which it is good to be an emperor, a prince, a noble, but not a poor man.

Paul passed through the ranks of his retainers, himself a head taller than the tallest footman, a few inches broader than the sturdiest keeper. He acknowledged the low bows by a quick nod, and passed up the staircase. Steinmetz--in evening dress, wearing the insignia of one or two orders which he had won in the more active days of his earlier diplomatic life--was waiting for him at the head of the stairs.

The two men bowed gravely to each other. Steinmetz threw open the door of the great room and stood aside. The prince passed on, and the German followed him, each playing his part gravely, as men in high places are called to do. When the door was closed behind them and they were alone, there was no relaxation, no smile of covert derision. These men knew the Russian character thoroughly. There is, be it known, no more impressionable man on the face of God's earth. Paul and Steinmetz had played their parts so long that these came to be natural to them as soon as they passed the Volga. We are all so in a minor degree. In each house, to each of our friends, we are unconsciously different in some particular. One man holds us in awe, and we unconsciously instil that feeling. Another considers us a buffoon, and, lo! we are exceedingly funny.

Paul and Steinmetz knew that the people around them in Osterno were somewhat like the dumb and driven beast. These peasants required overawing by a careful display of pomp--an unrelaxed dignity. The line of demarcation between the noble and the peasant is so marked in the land of the Czar that it is difficult for Englishmen to realize or believe it. It is like the line that is drawn between us and our dogs.

If we suppose it possible that dogs could be taught to act and think for themselves; if we take such a development as practicable, and consider the possibilities of social upheaval lying behind such an education, we can in a minute degree realize the problem which Prince Pavlo Alexis and all his fellow-nobles will be called upon to solve within the lifetime of men already born.

CHAPTER X

THE MOSCOW DOCTOR

"Colossal!" exclaimed Steinmetz, beneath his breath. With a little trick of the tongue he transferred his cigar from the right-hand to the left-hand corner of his mouth. "Colossal--l!" he repeated.

For a moment Paul looked up from the papers spread out on the table before him--looked with the preoccupied air of a man who is adding up something in his mind. Then he returned to his occupation. He had been at this work for four hours without a break. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning. Since dinner Karl Steinmetz had consumed no less than five cigars, while he had not spoken five words. These two men, locked in a small room in the middle of the castle of Osterno--a room with no window, but which gained its light from the clear heaven by a shaft and a skylight on the roof--locked in thus they had been engaged in the addition of an enormous mass of figures. Each sheet had been carefully annotated and added by Steinmetz, and as each was finished he handed it to his companion.

"Is that fool never coming?" asked Paul, with an impatient glance at the clock.

"Our very dear friend the starosta," replied Steinmetz, "is no slave to time. He is late."

The room had the appearance of an office. There were two safes--square chests such as we learn to associate with the name of Griffiths in this country. There was a huge writing-table--a double table--at which Paul and Steinmetz were seated. There were sundry stationery cases and an almanac or so suspended on the walls, which were oaken panels. A large white stove--common to all Russian rooms--stood against the wall. The room had no less than three doors, with a handle on no one of them. Each door opened with a key, like a cupboard.

Steinmetz had apparently finished his work. He was sitting back in his chair, contemplating his companion with a little smile. It apparently tickled some obtuse Teutonic sense of humor to see this prince doing work which is usually assigned to clerks--working out statistics and abstruse calculations as to how much food is required to keep body and soul together.

The silence of the room was almost oppressive. A Russian village after nightfall is the quietest human habitation on earth. For the moujik--the native of a country which will some day supply the universe with petroleum--cannot afford to light up his humble abode, and therefore sits in darkness. Had the village of Osterno possessed the liveliness of a Spanish hamlet, the sound of voices and laughter could not have reached the castle perched high up on the rock above.

But Osterno was asleep: the castle servants had long gone to rest, and the great silence of Russia wrapped its wings over all. "When, therefore, the clear, coughing bark of a wolf was heard, both occupants of the little room looked up. The sound was repeated, and Steinmetz slowly rose from his seat.

"I can quite believe that our friend is able to call a wolf or a lynx to him," he said. "He does it uncannily well."

"I have seen him do so," said Paul, without looking up. "But it is a common enough accomplishment among the keepers."

Steinmetz had left the room before he finished speaking. One of the doors of this little room communicated with a large apartment used as a secretary's office, and through this by a small staircase with a side entrance to the castle. By this side entrance the stewards of the different outlying estates were conducted to the presence of the resident secretary--a German selected and overawed by Karl Steinmetz--a mere calculating machine of a man, with whom we have no affairs to transact.

Before many minutes had elapsed Steinmetz came back, closely followed by the starosta, whose black eyes twinkled and gleamed in the sudden light of the lamp. He dropped on his knees when he saw Paul--suddenly, abjectly, like an animal, in his dumb attitude of deprecation.

With a jerk of his head Paul bade him rise, which the man did, standing back against the panelled wall, placing as great a distance between himself and the prince as the size of the room would allow.

"Well," said Paul curtly, almost roughly, "I hear you are in trouble in the village."

"The cholera has come, Excellency."

"Many deaths?"

"To-day--eleven."

Paul looked up sharply.

"And the doctor?"

"He has not come yet, Excellency. I sent for him--a fortnight ago. The cholera is at Oseff, at Dolja, at Kalisheffa. It is everywhere. He has forty thousand souls under his care. He has to obey the Zemstvo, to go where they tell him. He takes no notice of me."

"Yes," interrupted Paul, "I know. And the people themselves, do they attempt to understand it--to follow out my instructions?"

The starosta spread out his thin hands in deprecation. He cringed a little as he stood. He had Jewish blood in his veins, which, while it raised him above his fellows in Osterno, carried with it the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood; it is part of what the people who stood without Pilate's palace took upon themselves and upon their children.

"Your Excellency," he said, "knows what they are. It is slow. They make no progress. For them one disease is as another. 'Bog dal e Bog vzial,'

they say. 'God gave and God took!'"

He paused, his black eyes flashing from one face to the other.

"Only the Moscow doctor, Excellency," he said significantly, "can manage them."

Paul shrugged his shoulders. He rose from his seat, glancing at Steinmetz, who was looking on in silence, with his queer, mocking smile.

"I will go with you now," he said. "It is late enough already."

The starosta bowed very low, but he said nothing.

Paul went to a cupboard and took from it an old fur coat, dragged at the seams, stained about the cuffs a dull brown--doctors know the color.

Such stains have hanged a man before now, for they are the marks of blood. Paul put on this coat. He took a long, soft silken scarf such as Russians wear in winter, and wrapped it round his throat, quite concealing the lower part of his face. He crammed a fur cap down over his ears.

"Come," he said.

Karl Steinmetz accompanied them down stairs, carrying a lamp in one hand. He closed the door behind them, but did not lock it. Then he went upstairs again to the quiet little room, where he sat down in a deep chair. He looked at the open door of the cupboard from which Paul Alexis had taken his simple disguise, with a large, tolerant humor.

"El Senor Don Quixote de la Mancha," he said sleepily.