THE GRAND DUCHESS PASSES
I've heard it said that sick or wounded people always die if they have
no wish to live, but that's not true. I wanted to die as badly as any
one ever did, but yet I lived. I suppose I must have a lot of
recuperative energy; anyhow, next time I woke up I felt pretty much as
usual, except for the dull throb of the wound across my forehead, which
some one had scientifically strapped up. My physical pain counted as
nothing compared with the agony of shame and grief I suffered in my
soul, as, bit by bit, I recollected all that had happened. I had failed
in my trust, failed utterly. I was left to guard her; I ought to have
forbidden--prevented--her going out into the street at all; and, when
the worst came, I ought to have died with her.
I tried to say something of this to Loris when I was face to face with
him once more, in the room where Anne and I had been working when that
ill-omened woman, Marie Levinska, interrupted us; but he stopped me with
an imperative gesture.
"Do not reproach yourself, my friend. All that one man could do, you
did. I know that well, and I thank you. One last service you shall do,
if you are fit for it. You shall ride with us to-night when we take her
away. Mishka has told you of the arrangements? That is well. If we get
through, you will not return here; that is why I have sent for you now."
"Not return?" I repeated.
"No," he answered quietly but decisively. "Once before I begged you to
leave us, now I command you to do so; not because I do not value you,
but because--she--would have wished it. Wait, hear me out! You have done
noble service in a cause that can mean nothing to you, except--"
"Except that it is a cause that the lady I served lived,--and died--for,
sir," I interrupted.
More than once before I had spoken of her to him as the woman we both
loved; but now the other words seemed fittest; for not half an hour back
I had learned the truth, that, I think, I had known all along,--that she
who lay in her coffin in the great drawing-room yonder was, if her
rights had been acknowledged, the Grand Duchess Loris of Russia. It was
Vassilitzi who told me.
"They were married months ago, in Paris,--before she went to England,"
he had said, and for a moment a bitter wave of memory swept over me,
though I fought against it. Hadn't I decided long since that the queen
could do no wrong, and therefore the deception she had practised counted
for nothing? All that really mattered was that I loved her in spite of
all; asked nothing more than to be allowed to serve her.
"You served her under a delusion," he rejoined with stern sadness. "And
now it is no longer possible for you to serve her even so. I cannot
discuss the matter with you; I cannot explain it,--I would not if I
could. Only this I repeat. I request--command you, to make your way out
of this country as soon as possible, and rejoin your friends in England,
or America,--where you will. It may mean more to you than you dare hope
or imagine. You will have some difficulty probably, though some of the
trains are running again now. I think your safest plan will be to ride
to Kutno--or if necessary even to Alexandrovo. Here is a passport,
permitting you to leave Russia; it is made out in the name you assumed
when you returned as 'William Pennington Gould,' and is quite in order.
And I must ask you, for the sake of our friendship, to accept these"--he
took a roll of notes out of the drawer of the writing-table--"and, as a
memento,--this. It is the only decoration I am able to confer on a most
chivalrous gentleman."
He held out a little case, open, and I took it with an unsteady hand. It
contained a miniature of Anne, set in a rim of diamonds. I looked at
it,--and at him,--but I could not speak; my heart was too full.
"There is no need of words, my friend; we understand each other well,
you and I," he continued, rising and placing his hands on my shoulders.
"You will do as I wish,--as I entreat--insist--?"
"I would rather remain with you!" I urged. "And fight on, for the
cause--"
He shook his head.
"It is a lost cause; or at least it will never be won by us. The
manifesto, the charter of peace! What is it? A dead letter. Nicholas
issued it indeed, but his Ministers ignore it, and therefore he is
helpless, his charter futile and the reign of terror continues,--will
continue. Therefore I bid you go, and you must obey. So this is our
parting, for though we shall meet, we shall be alone together no more.
Therefore, God be with you, my friend!"
When next I saw him he stood with drawn sword, stern and stately,
foremost among the guard of honor round the catafalque in the great
drawing-room, where all that remained of the woman we both loved lay in
state, ere it fared forth on its last journey.
The old house was full of subdued sounds, for as soon as darkness fell,
by ones and twos, men and women were silently admitted and passed as
silently up the staircase to pay their last homage to their martyr.
Nearly all of them had flowers in their hands,--red flowers,--sometimes
only a single spray, but always those fatal geranium blossoms that were
the symbol of the League. They laid them on the white pall, or scattered
them on the folds that swept the ground, till the coffin seemed raised
above a sea of blood.
Every detail of that scene is photographed on my memory. The great room,
hung with black draperies and brilliantly lighted by a multitude of tall
wax candles; the air heavy with incense and the musky odor of the
flowers; the two priests in gorgeous vestments who knelt on either side,
near the head of the coffin, softly intoning the prayers for the dead;
the black-robed nuns who knelt at the foot, silent save for the click of
their rosaries; and the ghostly procession of men and women, many of
them wounded, all haggard and wan, that passed by, and paused to gaze on
the face that lay framed, as it were, beneath a panel of glass in the
coffin-lid, from which the pall was drawn back. Many of them, men as
well as women, were weeping passionately; some pressed their lips to the
glass; others raised their clenched hands as if to register a vow of
vengeance; a few,--a very few,--knelt in prayer for a brief moment ere
they passed on.
I stood at my post, as one of the guard, and watched it all in a queer,
impersonal sort of way, as if my soul was somehow outside my body.
Although I stood some distance away, the quiet face under the glass
seemed ever before my eyes; for I had looked on it before this solemn
ceremonial began. How fair it was,--and yet how strange; though it was
unmarred, unless there was a wound hidden under the strip of white
ribbon bound across the forehead and almost concealed by the softly
waving chestnut hair. But even the peace of death had not been able to
banish the expression of anguish imprinted on the lovely features. Above
the closed eyelids, with their long, dark lashes, the brows were
contracted in a frown, and the mouth was altered, the white teeth
exposed, set firmly in the lower lip. Still she was beautiful, but with
the beauty of a Medusa. I could not think of that face as the one I had
known and loved; it filled me with pity and horror and indignation,
indeed; but--it was the face of a stranger.
Why had I not been content to remember her as I had known her in life!
She seemed so immeasurably removed from me now; and that not merely
because I could no longer think of her as Anne Pendennis,--only as "The
Grand Duchess Anna Catharine Petrovna, daughter of the Countess Anna
Vassilitzi-Pendennis, and wife of Loris Nicolai Alexis, Grand Duke of
Russia," as the French inscription on the coffin-plate ran,--but also
because the mystery that had surrounded her in life seemed more
impenetrable than ever now that she was dead.
Where was her father, to whom she had seemed so devotedly attached when
I first knew her? Even supposing he was dead, why was he ignored in that
inscription, save for the mere mention of his surname, the only
indication of her mixed parentage. She had never spoken of him since
that day at the hunting-lodge when she had said I must ask nothing
concerning him. I had obeyed her in that, as in all else, and had even
refrained from questioning Vassilitzi or any other who might have been
able to tell me anything about Anthony Pendennis. Besides, there had
been no time for queries or conjectures during all the feverish
excitement of these days in Warsaw. But now, in this brief and solemn
interlude, all the old problems recurred to my mind, as I stood on guard
in the death-chamber; and I knew that I could never hope to solve them.
The ceremony was over at last. As in a dream I followed the others, and,
at a low-spoken word of command, filed past the catafalque, with a last
military salute, though I was no longer in uniform, for Mishka had
brought me a suit of civilian clothes.
In the same dazed way I found myself later riding near the head of the
procession that passed through the dark silent streets, and out into the
open country. I didn't even feel any curiosity or astonishment that a
strong escort of regular cavalry--lancers--accompanied us, or when I
recognized the officer in command as young Mirakoff, whom I had last
seen on the morning when I was on my way to prison in Petersburg. He
didn't see me,--probably he wouldn't have known me if he had,--and to
this day I don't know how he and his men came to be there, or how the
whole thing was arranged. Anyhow, none molested us; and slowly, through
the sleeping city, and along the open road, the cortege passed,
ghostlike, in the dead of night. The air was piercingly cold, but the
sky was clear, like a canopy of velvet spangled with great stars.
Mishka rode beside me, and at last, when we seemed to have been riding
for an eternity, he laid his hand on my rein, and whispered hoarsely,
"Now."
Almost without a sound we left the ranks, turned up a cross-road, and,
wheeling our horses at a few paces distant, waited for the others to go
by; more unreal, more dreamlike than ever. Save for the steady tramp of
the horses' feet, the subdued jingle of the harness and accoutrements,
they might have been a company of phantoms. I saw the gleam of the white
pall above the black bulk of the open hearse,--watched it disappear in
the darkness, and knew that the Grand Duchess had passed out of my life
forever.
Still I sat, bareheaded, until the last faint sounds had died away, and
the silence about us was only broken by the night whisper of the bare
boughs above us.
"Come; for we have yet far to go," Mishka said aloud, and started down
the cross-road at a quick trot.