The Price of Power

“Ah, my dear Trewinnard, she is so sweet, so very charming, so exquisite, so entirely unlike the other girls at Court – so delightfully unconventional.”

“A little too unconventional to suit some – if all I hear be true,” I remarked with a smile.

“You know her, of course. She’s an intimate friend of yours. I overheard her one day telling the Emperor what an excellent tennis player you were.”

“Well, I don’t fancy His Majesty interests himself very much in tennis,” I laughed. “He has other, and far more important, matters to occupy his time – the affairs of his great nation.”

“Natalia, or Tattie, as they call her in the Imperial circle, is his favourite niece. Nowadays she goes everywhere with him, and does quite a lot of his most private correspondence – that which he does not even trust to Calitzine.”

“Then the Emperor is more friendly towards Her Imperial Highness than before – eh?” I asked, for truth to tell I was very anxious to satisfy myself upon this point.

“Yes. She has been forgiven for that little escapade in Moscow.”

“What escapade?” I asked, feigning surprise.

“What escapade?” my friend echoed. “Why, you know well enough! I’ve heard it whispered that it was owing to your cleverness as a diplomat that the matter was so successfully hushed up – and an ugly affair it was, too. The suicide of her lover.”

“That’s a confounded lie!” I said quickly. “He did not commit suicide at all. At most, he left Russia with a broken heart, and that is not usually a fatal malady.”

“Well, you needn’t get angry about it, my dear fellow,” complained my friend. “The affair is successfully hushed up, and I fancy she’s got a lot to thank you for.”

“Not at all,” I declared. “I know that you fellows have coupled my name with hers, just because I’ve danced with her a few times at the Court balls, and I’ve been shooting at her father’s castle away in Samara. But I assure you my reputation as the little Grand Duchess’s intimate friend is entirely a mythical one.” Captain Stoyanovitch only smiled incredulously, stretched out his long legs and shrugged his shoulders.

“Well,” I went on, “has she been very terrified about all these reports of conspiracies?”

“Frightened out of her life, poor child! And who would not be?” he asked. “We didn’t know from one hour to another that we might not all be blown into the air. Everywhere the railway was lined by Cossacks, of course. Such a demonstration is apt to lend an air of security, but, alas! there is no security with the very Ministry undermined by revolution, as it is.”

I sighed. What he said was, alas! too true. Russia, at that moment, was in very evil case, and none knew it better than we, the impartial onlookers at the British Embassy.

The warm June sun fell across the rather faded carpet of that sombre old-fashioned room with its heavy furniture, which was my own sanctum, and as the smart captain of the Imperial Guard lolled back picturesquely in the big armchair I looked at him reflectively.

They were strange thoughts which flooded my brain at that moment – thoughts concerning that pretty, high-born young lady whom we had just been discussing, the girl to whom, he declared, His Majesty entrusted the greatest secrets of the throne.

Stoyanovitch was an extremely elegant and somewhat irresponsible person, and the fact that the Emperor had allowed the Grand Duchess Natalia to write his private letters did not strike me as the actual truth. The Tzar was far too cautious to entrust the secrets of a nation to a mere girl who was certainly known to be greatly addicted to the gentle pastime of flirtation.

Whatever the equerry told us, we at the Embassy usually added the proverbial grain of salt. Indeed, the diplomat at any post abroad learns to believe nothing which he hears, and only half he actually sees.

But the Emperor had sent me, by the mouth of that smart young officer, the word “Bathildis” – which was an ancient woman’s Christian name – and to me it conveyed a secret message, an announcement which held me in surprise and apprehension.

What could have happened?

I dreaded to think.

Chapter Two.

An Audience of the Emperor

“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 attachés 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.”