"You understand, Trewinnard. There must be no scandal. What I have
just revealed to you is in strictest confidence--an inviolable secret--a
personal secret of my own."
"I understand Your Majesty's commands perfectly."
"There is already a lot of uncharitable chatter in the Court circle
regarding the other matter, I hear. Has anything reached you at the
Embassy?"
"Not a whisper, as far as I am aware. Indeed, Your Majesty's words have
greatly surprised me. I did not believe the affair to be so very
serious."
"Serious!" echoed the Emperor Alexander, speaking in English, his dark,
deep-set eyes fixed upon me. "I tell you it is all too serious, now
that I find myself completely isolated--oh! yes, Trewinnard, isolated--
with scarce one single friend. God knows! I have done my best for the
nation, but, alas! everyone's hand is raised against me." And his firm
mouth hardened behind his full, dark beard, and he drew his hand wearily
across his broad, white brow.
The room in the Winter Palace in which we sat was cosy and luxuriantly
furnished, the two windows looking forth upon a grey, cheerless
quadrangle whence came the tramp of soldiers at drill.
Where we sat we could hear the sharp words of command in Russian, and
the clang of the rifle-butts striking the stones.
The room was essentially English in its aspect, with its rich china-blue
Axminster carpet, and silk upholstery with curtains to match, while the
panelling from floor to ceiling was enamelled dead white, against which
the fine water-colour drawings of naval scenes stood out in vivid
relief. Upon a buhl table was a great silver bowl filled with Marshal
Niel roses--for His Majesty was passionately fond of flowers--and beside
it, large framed panel photographs of the Tzarina and his children. And
yet those dead white walls and the shape of those square windows struck
a curious incongruous note, for if the actual truth be told, those walls
were of steel, and that private cabinet of the Emperor had been
constructed by the Admiralty Department with armour-plates which were
bomb-proof.
That apartment in the west angle of the Palace quadrangle was well-known
to me, for in it His Majesty had given me private audience many times.
That long white door which had been so silently closed upon me by the
Cossack sentry when I entered was, I knew, of armour-plate, four inches
in thickness, while beside the windows were revolving shutters of
chilled steel.
There, at that great littered roll-top writing-table, upon which was the
reading-lamp with its shade of salmon-pink silk with the loaded revolver
beside it, the Emperor worked, attending to affairs of State. And in
his padded chair, leaning back easily as he spoke to me, was His Majesty
himself, a broad-shouldered, handsome man just past middle-age, dressed
in a suit of navy blue serge. He was a big-faced, big-limbed,
big-handed man of colossal physique and marvellous intelligence. Though
haunted by the terror of violent death, he was yet an autocrat to the
finger-tips, whose bearing was ever that of a sovereign; yet his eyes
had a calm, sympathetic, kindly look, and those who knew him intimately
were well aware that he was not the monster of oppression which his
traducers had made him out to be before the eyes of Europe.
True, with a stroke of that grey quill pen lying there upon his
blotting-pad he had sent many a man and woman without trial to their
unrecorded doom, either in the frozen wastes of Northern Siberia, to the
terrible mines of Nerchinsk, to the horrors of the penal island of
Sakhalin, or to those fearful subterranean _oubliettes_ at Schusselburg,
whence no prisoner has ever returned. But, as an autocrat, he dealt
with his revolutionary enemies as they would deal with him. They
conspired to kill him, and he retaliated by consigning them to a
lingering death.
On the other hand, I myself knew how constant was his endeavour to
ferret out abuses of administration, to alleviate the sufferings of the
poor, to give the peasantry education and all the benefits of modern
civilisation as we in England know them, and how desperate, alas! were
his constant struggles with that unscrupulous camarilla which ever
surrounded him, constantly preventing him from learning the truth
concerning any particular matter.
Thus, though striving to do his best for his subjects and for his
nation, yet, surrounded as he was by a corrupt Ministry and a more
corrupt Court, this big, striking man in blue serge was, perhaps, next
to the Sultan of Turkey, the best-hated man in all Europe.
My own position was a somewhat singular one. A few months after my
appointment to Petersburg from Brussels I had been able to render His
Majesty a slight personal service. In fact, I had, when out one evening
with two other attaches of the German Embassy, learned by mere accident
of a desperate plot which was to be put into execution on the following
day. My informant was a dancer at the Opera, who had taken too much
champagne at supper. I sought audience of the Emperor early next day,
and was fortunately just in time to prevent him from passing a certain
spot near the Michailovski Palace, where six men were stationed with
bombs of picric acid, ready to hurl. For that service His Majesty had
been graciously pleased to take me into his confidence--a confidence
which, I hope, I never abused. From me he was always eager to ascertain
what was really happening beyond that high wall of untruth which the
camarilla had so cleverly built up and preserved, and more than once had
he entrusted me with certain secret missions.
I was not in uniform, as that audience was a private one; but as His
Majesty, ruler of one hundred and thirty millions of people, passed me
his finely-chased golden box full of cigarettes--and we both lit one, as
was our habit--his brow clouded, and with a sigh he said:
"To tell the truth, Trewinnard, I am also very anxious indeed concerning
the second matter--concerning the little rebel."
"I know that Your Majesty must be," I replied. "But, after all, Her
Imperial Highness is a girl of exceptional beauty and highest spirits;
and even if she indulges in--well, in a little harmless flirtation, she
surely may be forgiven."
"Other girls may be forgiven, but not those of the blood-royal," he said
in mild rebuke. "The Empress is quite as concerned about her as I am.
Why, even upon this last journey of ours I found her more than once
flirting with Stoyanovitch, my equerry. True, he's a good-looking young
fellow, and of excellent family, yet she ought to know that such a thing
is quite unwarrantable; she ought to know that to those of the
blood-royal love is, alas! forbidden."
I was surprised at this. I had no idea that she and Ivan Stoyanovitch
had become friends. He had never hinted at it.
"The fact is, Trewinnard," the Emperor went on, blowing a cloud of
cigarette smoke from his lips, "if this continues I shall be reluctantly
compelled to banish her to the Caucasus, or somewhere where she will be
kept out of mischief."
"But permit me, Sire, to query whether flirting is really mischief," I
exclaimed with a smile. "Every girl of her age--and she is hardly
nineteen--fancies herself in love, mostly with men much older than
herself."
"Our women, Trewinnard, are, alas! not like women of the people," was
the Sovereign's calm reply, his deep, earnest eyes upon mine. "It is
their misfortune that they are not. They can never enjoy the same
freedom as those fortunate ones of the middle-class; they seldom are
permitted to marry the man they love, and though they may live in
palaces and move amid the gay society of Court, yet their ideas are
warped from birth, and broken hearts, alas! beat beneath their
diamonds."
"Yes, I suppose what Your Majesty says is, alas! too true. Ladies of
the blood-royal are forbidden freedom, love and happiness. And when one
of them happens to break the iron bonds of conventionality, then scandal
quickly results; the Press overflows with it."
"In this case scandal would already have resulted had you not acted as
promptly as you did," His Majesty said. "Where is that lad Geoffrey
Hamborough now?" asked the autocrat suddenly.
"Living on his father's estate in Yorkshire," I replied. "I hope I have
been able to put an end to that fatal folly; but with a girl of the
Grand Duchess's type one can never be too certain."
"Ah! the mischievous little minx!" exclaimed the Emperor with a kindly
smile. "I've watched, and seen how cunning she is--and how she has
cleverly misled even me. Well, she must alter, Trewinnard, she must
alter--or she must be sent away to the Caucasus."
"Where she would have her freedom, and probably flirt more outrageously
than ever," I ventured to remark.
"You seem to regard her as hopeless," he said, looking sharply into my
eyes as he leaned back in his chair.
"Not entirely hopeless, Sire, only as a most interesting character
study."
"I have been speaking to her father this morning, and I have suggested
sending her to Paris, or, perhaps, to London; there to live _incognito_
under the guardianship of some responsible middle-aged person, until she
can settle down. At present she flirts with every man she meets, and I
am greatly concerned about her."
"Every man is ready to flirt with Her Imperial Highness--first, because
of her position, and, secondly, because of her remarkable beauty," I
assured him.
"You think her beautiful--eh, Trewinnard?"
"I merely echo the popular judgment," I replied. "It is said she is one
of the most beautiful girls in all Russia."
"Ah!" he laughed. "Next we shall have her flirting with you,
Trewinnard. You are a bachelor. Do beware of the little dark-eyed
witch, I beg of you!"
"No fear of such _contretemps_, Sire," I assured him with a smile. "I
am double her age, and, moreover, a confirmed bachelor. The Embassy is
expensive, and I cannot afford the luxury of a wife--and especially an
Imperial Grand Duchess."
"Who knows--eh, Trewinnard? Who knows?" exclaimed the Sovereign
good-naturedly. "But let's return to the point. Am I to understand
that you are ready and willing to execute this secret commission for me?
You are well aware how highly I value the confidential services you
have already rendered to me. But for you, remember, I should to-day
have been a dead man."
"No, Sire," I protested. "Please do not speak of that. It was the
intervention of Providence for your protection."
"Ah, yes!" he said in a low, fervent tone, his brows contracting. "I
thank God constantly for sparing me for yet another day from the hands
of my unscrupulous enemies, so that I may work for the good of the
beloved nation over which I am called to rule."
There, in that room, wherein I had so often listened to his words of
wisdom, I sat fully recognising that though an Emperor and an autocrat,
he was, above all, a Man.
With all the heavy burden of affairs of State--and not even a road could
be made anywhere in the Russian Empire, or a bridge built, or a gas-pipe
laid, without his signature--with all the onus of the autocratic
Sovereign-power upon his shoulders, and with that constant wariness
which he was compelled to exercise against that cunning camarilla of
Ministers, yet one of his chief concerns was with that pretty little
madcap Natalia, daughter of his brother, the Grand Duke Nicholas.
He wished to suppress her superabundance of high spirits and stamp out
her tomboy instincts.
"I am reading your thoughts, Trewinnard," the Emperor remarked at last,
pressing his cigarette-end slowly into the silver ashtray to extinguish
it. "My request has placed you in a rather awkward position--eh?"
"What Your Majesty has revealed to me this afternoon has utterly amazed
me. I feel bewildered, for I see how dire must be the result if the
truth were ever betrayed."
"It will never be. You are the only person who has suspicion of it
besides myself."
"And I shall never speak--never!" I assured him gravely.
"I know that you are entirely loyal to me. I am Emperor, it is true,
but I am, nevertheless, a man of my word, just as you are," he replied,
his intelligent face dark and grave. "Yes. I thought you would realise
the seriousness of the present situation, and I know that you alone I
can trust. I have not even told the Empress."
"Why not?"
"For obvious reasons."