The Secret of the Night
little domovoi-doukh. See how much you are alike. He smokes just like
you. Nothing new, eh? You do not look very bright this morning. You are
worn out. I have just arranged the little guest-chamber for you, the
only one we have, just behind mine. Your bed is waiting for you. Is
there anything you need? Tell me. Everything here is at your service.”
“I’m not in need of anything, madame,” said the young man smilingly,
after this outpouring of words from the good, heroic dame.
“How can you say that, dear child? You will make yourself sick. I want
you to understand that I wish you to rest. I want to be a mother to you,
if you please, and you must obey me, my child. Have you had breakfast
yet this morning? If you do not have breakfast promptly mornings, I will
think you are annoyed. I am so annoyed that you have heard the secret of
the night. I have been afraid that you would want to leave at once and
for good, and that you would have mistaken ideas about the general.
There is not a better man in the world than Feodor, and he must have
a good, a very good conscience to dare, without fail, to perform such
terrible duties as those at Moscow, when he is so good at heart. These
things are easy enough for wicked people, but for good men, for good men
who can reason it out, who know what they do and that they are condemned
to death into the bargain, it is terrible, it is terrible! Why, I told
him the moment things began to go wrong in Moscow, ‘You know what to
expect, Feodor. Here is a dreadful time to get through--make out you are
sick.’ I believed he was going to strike me, to kill me on the spot.
‘I! Betray the Emperor in such a moment! His Majesty, to whom I owe
everything! What are you thinking of, Matrena Petrovna!’ And he did
not speak to me after that for two days. It was only when he saw I was
growing very ill that he pardoned me, but he had to be plagued with my
jeremiads and the appealing looks of Natacha without end in his own
home each time we heard any shooting in the street. Natacha attended the
lectures of the Faculty, you know. And she knew many of them, and even
some of those who were being killed on the barricades. Ah, life was not
easy for him in his own home, the poor general! Besides, there was also
Boris, whom I love as well, for that matter, as my own child, because I
shall be very happy to see him married to Natacha--there was poor Boris
who always came home from the attacks paler than a corpse and who could
not keep from moaning with us.”
“And Michael?” questioned Rouletabille.
“Oh, Michael only came towards the last. He is a new orderly to the
general. The government at St. Petersburg sent him, because of course
they couldn’t help learning that Boris rather lacked zeal in repressing
the students and did not encourage the general in being as severe as was
necessary for the safety of the Empire. But Michael, he has a heart of
stone; he knows nothing but the countersign and massacres fathers and
mothers, crying, ‘Vive le Tsar!’ Truly, it seems his heart can only be
touched by the sight of Natacha. And that again has caused a good deal
of anxiety to Feodor and me. It has caught us in a useless complication
that we would have liked to end by the prompt marriage of Natacha and
Boris. But Natacha, to our great surprise, has not wished it to be so.
No, she has not wished it, saying that there is always time to think
of her wedding and that she is in no hurry to leave us. Meantime she
entertains herself with this Michael as if she did not fear his passion,
and neither has Michael the desperate air of a man who knows the
definite engagement of Natacha and Boris. And my step-daughter is not a
coquette. No, no. No one can say she is a coquette. At least, no one had
been able to say it up to the time that Michael arrived. Can it be
that she is a coquette? They are mysterious, these young girls, very
mysterious, above all when they have that calm and tranquil look that
Natacha always has; a face, monsieur, as you have noticed perhaps, whose
beauty is rather passive whatever one says and does, excepting when the
volleys in the streets kill her young comrades of the schools. Then I
have seen her almost faint, which proves she has a great heart under
her tranquil beauty. Poor Natacha! I have seen her excited as I over the
life of her father. My little friend, I have seen her searching in the
middle of the night, with me, for infernal machines under the furniture,
and then she has expressed the opinion that it is nervous, childish,
unworthy of us to act like that, like timid beasts under the sofas, and
she has left me to search by myself. True, she never quits the general.
She is more reassured, and is reassuring to him, at his side. It has
an excellent moral effect on him, while I walk about and search like a
beast. And she has become as fatalistic as he, and now she sings verses
to the guzla, like Boris, or talks in corners with Michael, which makes
the two enraged each with the other. They are curious, the young women
of St. Petersburg and Moscow, very curious. We were not like that in our
time, at Orel. We did not try to enrage people. We would have received a
box on the ears if we had.”
Natacha came in upon this conversation, happy, in white voile, fresh and
smiling like a girl who had passed an excellent night. She asked after
the health of the young man very prettily and embraced Matrena, in truth
as one embraces a much-beloved mother. She complained again of Matrena’s
night-watch.
“You have not stopped it, mamma; you have not stopped it, eh? You are
not going to be a little reasonable at last? I beg of you! What has
given me such a mother! Why don’t you sleep? Night is made for sleep.
Koupriane has upset you. All the terrible things are over in Moscow.
There is no occasion to think of them any more. That Koupriane makes
himself important with his police-agents and obsesses us all. I am
convinced that the affair of the bouquet was the work of his police.”
“Mademoiselle,” said Rouletabille, “I have just had them all sent away,
all of them--because I think very much the same as you do.”
“Well, then, you will be my friend, Monsieur Rouletabille I promise you,
since you have done that. Now that the police are gone we have nothing
more to fear. Nothing. I tell you, mamma; you can believe me and not
weep any more, mamma dear.”
“Yes, yes; kiss me. Kiss me again!” repeated Matrena, drying her eyes.
“When you kiss me I forget everything. You love me like your own mother,
don’t you?”
“Like my mother. Like my own mother.”
“You have nothing to hide from me?--tell me, Natacha.”
“Nothing to hide.”
“Then why do you make Boris suffer so? Why don’t you marry him?”
“Because I don’t wish to leave you, mamma dear.”
She escaped further parley by jumping up on the garden edge away from
Khor, who had just been set free for the day.
“The dear child,” said Matrena; “the dear little one, she little knows
how much pain she has caused us without being aware of it, by her ideas,
her extravagant ideas. Her father said to me one day at Moscow, ‘Matrena
Petrovna, I’ll tell you what I think--Natacha is the victim of the
wicked books that have turned the brains of all these poor rebellious
students. Yes, yes; it would be better for her and for us if she did not
know how to read, for there are moments--my word!--when she talks very
wildly, and I have said to myself more than once that with such ideas
her place is not in our salon hut behind a barricade. All the same,’ he
added after reflection, ‘I prefer to find her in the salon where I can
embrace her than behind a barricade where I would kill her like a mad
dog.’ But my husband, dear little monsieur, did not say what he really
thinks, for he loves his daughter more than all the rest of the world
put together, and there are things that even a general, yes, even a
governor-general, would not be able to do without violating both divine
and human laws. He suspects Boris also of setting Natacha’s wits awry.
We really have to consider that when they are married they will read
everything they have a mind to. My husband has much more real respect
for Michael Korsakoff because of his impregnable character and his
granite conscience. More than once he has said, ‘Here is the aide I
should have had in the worst days of Moscow. He would have spared me
much of the individual pain.’ I can understand how that would please
the general, but how such a tigerish nature succeeds in appealing to
Natacha, how it succeeds in not actually revolting her, these young
girls of the capital, one never can tell about them--they get away from
all your notions of them.”
Rouletabille inquired:
“Why did Boris say to Michael, ‘We will return together’? Do they live
together?”
“Yes, in the small villa on the Krestowsky Ostrov, the isle across from
ours, that you can see from the window of the sitting-room. Boris chose
it because of that. The orderlies wished to have camp-beds prepared for
them right here in the general’s house, by a natural devotion to him;
but I opposed it, in order to keep them both from Natacha, in whom,
of course, I have the most complete confidence, but one cannot be sure
about the extravagance of men nowadays.”
Ermolai came to announce the petit-dejeuner. They found Natacha already
at table and she poured them coffee and milk, eating away all the time
at a sandwich of anchovies and caviare.
“Tell me, mamma, do you know what gives me such an appetite? It is the
thought of the way poor Koupriane must have taken this dismissal of his
men. I should like to go to see him.”
“If you see him,” said Rouletabille, “it is unnecessary to tell him that
the general will go for a long promenade among the isles this afternoon,
because without fail he would send us an escort of gendarmes.”
“Papa! A promenade among the islands? Truly? Oh, that is going to be
lovely!”
Matrena Petrovna sprang to her feet.
“Are you mad, my dear little domovoi, actually mad?”
“Why? Why? It is fine. I must run and tell papa.”
“Your father’s room is locked,” said Matrena brusquely.
“Yes, yes; he is locked in. You have the key. Locked away until death!
You will kill him. It will be you who kills him.”
She left the table without waiting for a reply and went and shut herself
also in her chamber.
Matrena looked at Rouletabille, who continued his breakfast as though
nothing had happened.
“Is it possible that you speak seriously?” she demanded, coming over and
sitting down beside him. “A promenade! Without the police, when we have
received again this morning a letter saying now that before forty-eight
hours the general will be dead!”
“Forty-eight hours,” said Rouletabille, soaking his bread in his
chocolate, “forty-eight hours? It is possible. In any case, I know they
will try something very soon.”
“My God, how is it that you believe that? You speak with assurance.”
“Madame, it is necessary to do everything I tell you, to the letter.”
“But to have the general go out, unless he is guarded--how can you take
such a responsibility? When I think about it, when I really think about
it, I ask myself how you have dared send away the police. But here, at
least, I know what to do in order to feel a little safe, I know that
downstairs with Gniagnia and Ermolai we have nothing to fear. No
stranger can approach even the basement. The provisions are brought from
the lodge by our dvornicks whom we have had sent from my mother’s home
in the Orel country and who are as devoted to us as bull-dogs. Not
a bottle of preserves is taken into the kitchens without having been
previously opened outside. No package comes from any tradesman without
being opened in the lodge. Here, within, we are able to feel a little
safe, even without the police--but away from here--outside!”