THE SOWERS
BY
HENRY SETON MERRIMAN
1895
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. A WAIF ON THE STEPPE
II. BY THE VOLGA
III. DIPLOMATIC
IV. DON QUIXOTE
V. THE BARON
VI. THE TALLEYRAND CLUB
VII. OLD HANDS
VIII. SAFE!
IX. THE PRINCE
X. THE MOSCOW DOCTOR
XI. CATRINA
XII. AT THORS
XIII. UNMASKED
XIV. A WIRE-PULLER
XV. IN A WINTER CITY
XVI. THE THIN END
XVII. CHARITY
XVIII. IN THE CHAMPS ÉLYSÉES
XIX. ON THE NEVA
XX. AN OFFER OF FRIENDSHIP
XXI. A SUSPECTED HOUSE
XXII. THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
XXIII. A WINTER SCENE
XXIV. HOME
XXV. OSTERNO
XXVI. BLOODHOUNDS
XXVII. IN THE WEB
XXVIII. IN THE CASTLE OF THORS
XXIX. ANGLO-RUSSIAN
XXX. WOLF!
XXXI. A DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT
XXXII. A CLOUD
XXXIII. THE NET IS DRAWN
XXXIV. AN APPEAL
XXXV. ON THE EDGE OF THE STORM
XXXVI. À TROIS
XXXVII. À DEUX
XXXVIII. A TALE THAT IS TOLD
XXXIX. HUSBAND AND WIFE
XL. STÉPAN RETURNS
XLI. DUTY
XLII. THE STORM BURSTS
XLIII. BEHIND THE VEIL
XLIV. KISMET
THE SOWERS
CHAPTER I
A WAIF ON THE STEPPE
"In this country charity covers no sins!"
The speaker finished his remark with a short laugh. He was a big, stout
man; his name was Karl Steinmetz, and it is a name well known in the
Government of Tver to this day. He spoke jerkily, as stout men do when
they ride, and when he had laughed his good-natured, half-cynical laugh,
he closed his lips beneath a huge gray mustache. So far as one could
judge from the action of a square and deeply indented chin, his mouth
was expressive at that time--and possibly at all times--of a humorous
resignation. No reply was vouchsafed to him, and Karl Steinmetz bumped
along on his little Cossack horse, which was stretched out at a gallop.
Evening was drawing on. It was late in October, and a cold wind was
driving from the north-west across a plain which for sheer dismalness of
aspect may give points to Sahara and beat that abode of mental
depression without an effort. So far as the eye could reach there was no
habitation to break the line of horizon. A few stunted fir-trees,
standing in a position of permanent deprecation, with their backs
turned, as it were, to the north, stood sparsely on the plain. The grass
did not look good to eat, though the Cossack horses would no doubt have
liked to try it. The road seemed to have been drawn by some Titan
engineer with a ruler from horizon to horizon.
Away to the south there was a forest of the same stunted pines, where a
few charcoal-burners and resin-tappers eked out a forlorn and obscure
existence. There are a score of such settlements, such gloomy forests,
dotted over this plain of Tver, which covers an area of nearly two
hundred square miles. The remainder of it is pasture, where miserable
cattle and a few horses, many sheep and countless pigs, seek their food
pessimistically from God.
Steinmetz looked round over this cheerless prospect with a twinkle of
amused resignation in his blue eyes, as if this creation were a little
practical joke, which he, Karl Steinmetz, appreciated at its proper
worth. The whole scene was suggestive of immense distance, of countless
miles in all directions--a suggestion not conveyed by any scene in
England, by few in Europe. In our crowded island we have no conception
of a thousand miles. How can we? Few of us have travelled five hundred
at a stretch. The land through which these men were riding is the home
of great distances--Russia. They rode, moreover, as if they knew it--as
if they had ridden for days and were aware of more days in front of
them.
The companion of Karl Steinmetz looked like an Englishman. He was young
and fair and quiet. He looked like a youthful athlete from Oxford or
Cambridge--a simple-minded person who had jumped higher or run quicker
than anybody else without conceit, taking himself, like St. Paul, as he
found himself and giving the credit elsewhere. And one finds that, after
all, in this world of deceit, we are most of us that which we look like.
You, madam, look thirty-five to a day, although your figure is still
youthful, your hair untouched by gray, your face unseamed by care. You
may look in your mirror and note these accidents with satisfaction; you
may feel young and indulge in the pastimes of youth without effort. But
you are thirty-five. We know it. We who look at you can see it for
ourselves, and, if you could only be brought to believe it, we think no
worse of you on that account.
The man who rode beside Karl Steinmetz with gloomy eyes and a vague
suggestion of flight in his whole demeanor was, like reader and writer,
exactly what he seemed. He was the product of an English public school
and university. He was, moreover, a modern product of those seats of
athletic exercise. He had little education and highly developed
muscles--that is to say, he was no scholar but essentially a
gentleman--a good enough education in its way, and long may Britons seek
it!
This young man's name was Paul Howard Alexis, and Fortune had made him a
Russian prince. If, however, anyone, even Steinmetz, called him prince,
he blushed and became confused. This terrible title had brooded over him
while at Eton and Cambridge. But no one had found him out; he remained
Paul Howard Alexis so far as England and his friends were concerned. In
Russia, however, he was known (by name only, for he avoided Slavonic
society) as Prince Pavlo Alexis. This plain was his; half the Government
of Tver was his; the great Volga rolled through his possessions; sixty
miles behind him a grim stone castle bore his name, and a tract of land
as vast as Yorkshire was peopled by humble-minded persons who cringed at
the mention of his Excellency.
All this because thirty years earlier a certain Princess Natásha Alexis
had fallen in love with plain Mr. Howard of the British Embassy in St.
Petersburg. With Slavonic enthusiasm (for the Russian is the most
romantic race on earth) she informed Mr. Howard of the fact, and duly
married him. Both these persons were now dead, and Paul Howard Alexis
owed it to his mother's influence in high regions that the
responsibilities of princedom were his. At the time when this title was
accorded to him he had no say in the matter. Indeed, he had little say
in any matters except meals, which he still took in liquid form. Certain
it is, however, that he failed to appreciate his honors as soon as he
grew up to a proper comprehension of them.
Equally certain is it that he entirely failed to recognize the
enviability of his position as he rode across the plains of Tver toward
the yellow Volga by the side of Karl Steinmetz.
"This is great nonsense," he said suddenly. "I feel like a Nihilist or
some theatrical person of that sort. I do not think it can be necessary,
Steinmetz."
"Not necessary," answered Steinmetz in thick guttural tones, "but
prudent."
This man spoke with the soft consonants of a German.
"Prudent, my dear prince."
"Oh, drop that!"
"When we sight the Volga I will drop it with pleasure. Good Heavens! I
wish I were a prince. I should have it marked on my linen, and sit up in
bed to read it on my nightshirt."
"No, you wouldn't, Steinmetz," answered Alexis, with a vexed laugh. "You
would hate it just as much as I do, especially if it meant running away
from the best bear-shooting in Europe."
Steinmetz shrugged his shoulders.
"Then you should not have been charitable--charity, I tell you, Alexis,
covers no sins in this country."
"Who made me charitable? Besides, no decent-minded fellow could be
anything else here. Who told me of the League of Charity, I should like
to know? Who put me into it? Who aroused my pity for these poor beggars?
Who but a stout German cynic called Steinmetz?"
"Stout, yes--cynic, if you will--German, no!"
The words were jerked out of him by the galloping horse.
"Then what are you?"
Steinmetz looked straight in front of him, with a meditation in his
quiet eyes which made a dreamy man of him.
"That depends."
Alexis laughed.
"Yes, I know. In Germany you are a German, in Russia a Slav, in Poland a
Pole, and in England any thing the moment suggests."
"Exactly so. But to return to you. You must trust to me in this matter.
I know this country. I know what this League of Charity was. It was a
bigger thing than any dream of. It was a power in Russia--the greatest
of all--above Nihilism--above the Emperor himself. Ach Gott! It was a
wonderful organization, spreading over this country like sunlight over a
field. It would have made men of our poor peasants. It was God's work.
If there is a God--bien entendu--which some young men deny, because God
fails to recognize their importance, I imagine. And now it is all done.
It is crumbled up by the scurrilous treachery of some miscreant. Ach! I
should like to have him out here on the plain. I would choke him. For
money, too! The devil--it must have been the devil--to sell that secret
to the Government!"
"I can't see what the Government wanted it for," growled Alexis moodily.
"No, but I can. It is not the Emperor; he is a gentleman, although he
has the misfortune to wear the purple. No, it is those about him. They
want to stop education; they want to crush the peasant. They are afraid
of being found out; they live in their grand houses, and support their
grand names on the money they crush out of the starving peasant."
"So do I, so far as that goes."
"Of course you do! And I am your steward--your crusher. We do not deny
it, we boast of it, but we exchange a wink with the angels--eh?"
Alexis rode on in silence for a few moments. He sat his horse as English
foxhunters do--not prettily--and the little animal with erect head and
scraggy neck was evidently worried by the unusual grip on his ribs. For
Russians sit back, with a short stirrup and a loose seat, when they are
travelling. One must not form one's idea of Russian horsemanship from
the erect carriage affected in the Newski Prospect.
"I wish," he said abruptly, "that I had never attempted to do any good;
doing good to mankind doesn't pay. Here I am running away from my own
home as if I were afraid of the police! The position is impossible."
Steinmetz shook his shaggy head.
"No. No position is impossible in this country--except the Czar's--if
one only keeps cool. For men such as you and I any position is quite
easy. But these Russians are too romantic--too exaltés--they give way to
a morbid love of martyrdom: they think they can do no good to mankind
unless they are uncomfortable."
Alexis turned in his saddle and looked keenly into his companion's face.
"Do you know," he said, "I believe you founded the Charity League?"
Steinmetz laughed in his easy, stout way.
"It founded itself," he said; "the angels founded it in heaven. I hope a
committee of them will attend to the eternal misery of the dog who
betrayed it."
"I trust they will, but in the meantime I stick to my opinion that it is
unnecessary for me to leave the country. What have I done? I do not
belong to the League; it is composed entirely of Russian nobles; I don't
admit that I am a Russian noble."
"But," persisted Steinmetz quietly, "you subscribe to the League. Four
hundred thousand rubles--they do not grow at the roadside."
"But the rubles have not my name on them."
"That may be, but we all--_they all_--know where they are likely to come
from. My dear Paul, you cannot keep up the farce any longer. You are not
an English gentleman who comes across here for sporting purposes; you do
not live in the old Castle of Osterno three months in the year because
you have a taste for mediaeval fortresses. You are a Russian prince, and
your estates are the happiest, the most enlightened in the empire. That
alone is suspicious. You collect your rents yourself. You have no German
agents--no German vampires about you. There are a thousand things
suspicious about Prince Pavlo Alexis if those that be in high places
only come to think about it. They have not come to think about
it--thanks to our care and to your English independence. But that is
only another reason why we should redouble our care. You must not be in
Russia when the Charity League is picked to pieces. There will be
trouble--half the nobility in Russia will be in it. There will be
confiscations and degradations: there will be imprisonment and Siberia
for some. You are better out of it, for you are not an Englishman; you
have not even a Foreign Office passport. Your passport is your patent of
nobility, and that is Russian. No, you are better out of it."
"And you--what about you?" asked Paul, with a little laugh--the laugh
that one brave man gives when he sees another do a plucky thing.
"I! Oh, I am all right! I am nobody; I am hated of all the peasants
because I am your steward and so hard--so cruel. That is my certificate
of harmlessness with those that are about the Emperor."
Paul made no answer. He was not of an argumentative mind, being a large
man, and consequently inclined to the sins of omission rather than to
the active form of doing wrong. He had an enormous faith in Karl
Steinmetz, and, indeed, no man knew Russia better than this cosmopolitan
adventurer. Steinmetz it was who pricked forward with all speed, wearing
his hardy little horse to a drooping semblance of its former self.
Steinmetz it was who had recommended quitting the travelling carriage
and taking to the saddle, although his own bulk led him to prefer the
slower and more comfortable method of covering space. It would almost
seem that he doubted his own ascendency over his companion and master,
which semblance was further increased by a subtle ring of anxiety in his
voice while he argued. It is possible that Karl Steinmetz suspected the
late Princess Natásha of having transmitted to her son a small
hereditary portion of that Slavonic exaltation and recklessness of
consequence which he deplored.
"Then you turn back at Tver?" enquired Paul, at length breaking a long
silence.
"Yes; I must not leave Osterno just now. Perhaps later, when the winter
has come, I will follow. Russia is quiet during the winter, very quiet.
Ha, ha!"
He shrugged his shoulders and shivered. But the shiver was interrupted.
He raised himself in his saddle and peered forward into the gathering
darkness.
"What is that," he asked sharply, "on the road in front?"
Paul had already seen it.
"It looks like a horse," he answered--"a strayed horse, for it has no
rider."
They were going west, and what little daylight there was lived on the
western horizon. The form of the horse, cut out in black relief against
the sky, was weird and ghostlike. It was standing by the side of the
road, apparently grazing. As they approached it, its outlines became
more defined.
"It has a saddle," said Steinmetz at length. "What have we here?"
The beast was evidently famishing, for, as they came near, it never
ceased its occupation of dragging the wizened tufts of grass up, root
and all.
"What have we here?" repeated Steinmetz.
And the two men clapped spurs to their tired horses.
The solitary waif had a rider, but he was not in the saddle. One foot
was caught in the stirrup, and as the horse moved on from tuft to tuft
it dragged its dead master along the ground.