Read Ebook: The Samovar Girl by Moore Frederick Ferdinand

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Ebook has 2067 lines and 95679 words, and 42 pages

But Peter could not move quickly for his arms and legs seemed strangely stiff and numb and helpless. His father ran out into the open space just as Governor Kirsakoff got out of his carriage to hasten to his little daughter in the sledge. He was a tall man, ruddy of face, with white teeth showing in a smile under black mustaches. He wore a high cap of sable with a badge of the Czar upon it. His longskirted coat of black was lined with fur which stuck out in fringes at the edges, and he wore a belt with silver doubleheaded eagles at the buckle. A scarlet strap depended from one shoulder and crossed his breast, and he wore a saber at his side--a saber with a gold hilt, bearing upon it the initials of his Emperor.

Governor Kirsakoff held out his arms toward his daughter as he approached the sledge. The officer who struck Peter was beside the Governor, with watchful eyes for the safety of his chief and the little girl.

Peter's father lifted him to his feet, and Peter brushed the icy film from his eyes.

"Get away, you and that boy!" the officer growled as the Governor strode swiftly to the sledge.

"The boy meant no harm, Excellence," said Peter's father, pulling off his cap and making a deep bow, as he tried to push Peter on before him.

"Who is this here?" demanded the Governor, catching sight of Peter and his father, and seeing that the boy's face was bleeding. Governor Kirsakoff's smile vanished, and he scowled angrily, sensing something in the nature of a calamity in the presence of his daughter.

"Excellence, this boy yelled at Katerin Stephanovna," explained the officer. "And he tripped my feet when I came down from the sledge."

Peter's father swept his cap to the ground in an abject bow.

"Pardon, Excellence--I will take the boy away."

"What now!" exclaimed Kirsakoff, with a close look at the bootmaker. "Is this Gorekin? Is this what I put you into the free gang for? to be under the feet of your Governor?"

Peter's father bowed once more.

"True, Excellence, I am Peter Pavlovitch Gorekin, the bootmaker."

"Then you should be at your boots and not under my feet!" raged Kirsakoff. "Do I give you the liberty of the settlement to have you in the way with a bloody-nosed youngster when my little daughter comes home?" The Governor turned wrathfully to the commander of the Cossack guard about the sledges. "Take this Gorekin away to the prison!" he commanded.

"Excellence, my son!" cried Peter's father, stricken to his soul by the disaster in the Governor's order. "Oh, Excellence, I beg--if I go to the prison, what is to become of my son?"

And Kirsakoff turned away and hurried to the sledge.

"What has happened to the poor people?" asked Katerin, her face troubled as she watched Peter and his father. She saw that the boy had been hurt and was crying, and that the soldiers now menaced them.

"Do not look at them, little daughter," said Kirsakoff. "They have disobeyed the rules. Was it cold coming from Irkutsk? And did you bring me many kisses?"

The Governor lifted her out of the sledge and smothered her in his arms. At this moment a Cossack interposed himself between the bootmaker and the Governor, and two soldiers closed in on Peter and his father, their bayonets fixed upon their rifles.

Gorekin held up his hand in a plea to speak once more to the Governor. The bootmaker had dropped his cap, his face showed the agony of his despair, and the tears streamed down his face. His mouth was open and his lips trembled with the chagrin and horror of what had befallen him.

"Excellence! I submit!" he pleaded. "But by the mercy of God, condemn not my son to the prison too!"

One of the Cossacks pushed him back violently so that he spun round and staggered blindly in an effort to keep his footing on the slippery snow. Then he turned with a cry and thrust the Cossack aside, to run after the Governor, hands stretched out in supplication.

"Mercy for my son!" he called after Kirsakoff.

A Cossack's saber flashed, and Gorekin received its point in the back--once, twice--and with a scream, fell writhing on the snow-packed street before the post-house.

Kirsakoff ran with little Katerin in his arms toward the near-by droshky which was awaiting them. The crowd closed in at once about the stricken bootmaker and his son.

Little Peter fell to his knees beside his father, who had been rudely rolled upon his back by the Cossack with the saber. This Cossack searched hastily through the pockets of the greatcoat of Gorekin. Peter, screaming in terror, supposed that all this was being done to help his father.

The Cossack found the curved leather-knife of Gorekin in a pocket of the dying man's coat, and flung the knife upon the ground. "He held this knife in his hand!" cried the Cossack. "It is the knife with which he would have killed the Governor!"

Peter could not realize yet the disaster which had come to him and his father. He knew only that the one human being who loved him, and whom he loved above everything in the world, was hurt and bleeding. The slowly reddening snow beside his father gave the boy a vague idea of a wound which might in time be cured.

And it might not be real at all, this tragic morning, but a dream. Peter saw about him the black circle of boots like the trees of a forest; he saw the print of nails in the hard snow; he noted a small round stone close by his father's head--the world appeared to be full of trifling things, yet suddenly all trifles were invested with terror. He prayed even as he screamed, that he might wake to find his father reading from the new almanac beside the fire in their little hut.

"Little father! Little father!" he cried in his agony.

The bootmaker coughed harshly.

"He tried to kill the Governor," said a voice. "There lies the knife--and I ran him through with my saber."

Peter recognized the voice as that of the Cossack who had struck down his father.

"Little son--" gasped Gorekin, his dimming eyes on Peter, and his hand moving slowly toward the boy.

"Thou whom I love!" cried Peter, "come quickly for the man who has medicine and can cure you! Come to the watch-fixer who has the charms and the herbs!"

"God's blessing on you--I go--to meet--the--dead!" whispered Gorekin.

"You are not to die!" cried Peter, and flung himself down upon his father and kissed him. Then he sat back on his heels, moaning wildly as he saw his father's face graying to the color of the trampled snow.

"Pray!" said his father weakly. "Pray to God for--power and--" but he could say no more, and making an effort to cross himself with both hands he died, staring up into the leaden sky.

"He is dead," said a voice. "Take the boy to the prison. It is the order of the Governor."

And Peter, sobbing and kicking out against the soldiers who grasped him and dragged him away, left his father lying in the snow before the post-house.

The soldiers dragged Peter up the Sofistkaya. His eyes clung to the mail bags being carried into the post-house, and though he was crying bitterly, he wondered if the almanacs had come from Moscow after all.

Next he knew he found himself in the sandy snow of the Sofistkaya, passing his own little hut, and saw the white smoke rising from the crude stone chimney. He thought of the samovar inside singing on a shelf, of the warmth and comfort that he would never know again, of his beloved father who somehow, by some terrible fate which had descended upon him out of the skies, was gone forever from the bench and the stitching-frame.

The two soldiers drove Peter on and in time they went over the wooden bridge across the frozen Ingoda, and up a hill. The tears on his face and frozen in his lids gave him great pain from cold. But he brushed his eyes clear of the ice particles and looked ahead. Before him were the yellow upright logs of the great prison stockade--and the great gate waiting to receive him into the Gethsemane of the Valley of Despair.

TWENTY YEARS AFTER

KATERIN was awake before dawn. She lay still, listening in the dark for sounds of conflict in the city. For months she had been accustomed to the rattle of rifle-fire through day and night, and now she found it hard to realize that the looting and burning had ceased.

The windows of Katerin's room were hung with heavy blankets to conceal the candlelight by night, even though in the winter the glass of the panes was always nearly covered with heavy frost. She had no way of knowing how near it was to dawn, or if the day had come.

Katerin Stephanovna Kirsakoff--that was her full name. And she was hiding in an old log house with her father, who had been retired from the army of the Czar with the rank of general. And her father was Michael Alexandrovitch Kirsakoff, once Governor in the Valley of Despair, as it was known in the exile days before the revolution. And the log house was in Chita, where Kirsakoff had ruled his Cossacks, but Kirsakoff and his daughter were now hiding from the Cossacks.

Katerin rose from her bed, and guided by the dim, shaded flame burning before the icon in the corner of the room, she held out her arms to the image of the Virgin Mother, and whispered, "Save us, Mother of God, again this day, from those who beset us, and bring to us help from our enemies in our time of danger!"

She continued to whisper her prayers while she dressed in the dark. Then she went to one of the windows and pulled aside the blanket. She scraped a tiny hole in the frost so that she might look down into the courtyard, to the end of the street and out over the plains which stretched away from the city toward the border of Manchuria, many versts away. In that direction lay safety, but Katerin knew that she could not get out of the city, much less cross those frozen plains.

The subdued light of morning coming in through the white frost on the panes revealed her as a woman of medium height, of figure slender and supple, and clad in a trailing velvet house-dress of wine-red. Thrown over her shoulders, and partly covering the faded velvet of the dress, was a sleeveless coat of sable. She had the oval, high-bred face of the untitled nobility of Russia. The Kirsakoffs were one of the old boyar families who had always served their emperors as officers and administrators in the empire which spanned half the world.

Katerin had inherited all the best qualities of her race and her class. As the daughter of General Kirsakoff she had grown up like an Imperial princess. Educated by tutors from Paris and Petersburg, she had also learned to ride like a Cossack. And as her mother had died when Katerin was a small girl, she had the poise of a woman, who, though still young, had presided over her father's table in the Governor's palace--the Government house. So all her life she had been accustomed to a deference which was akin to that granted to royalty.

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