Page:By order of the Czar.djvu/227



BY ORDER OF Til 'E CZAR. 215

geance a whisper from the red grave of the murdered rabbi. Then she remembered who and what she was ; the outrage of the governor Petronovitch ; and with that memory came grateful recollections of the devotion of Stra- vensky, who in his heart had loved the beautiful maid of the ghetto, and in his age, stricken with death, had endowed her with his name, and combined with hers his own passion of vengeance, and his aspirations for a free Russia. Anna's interview with Philip Forsyth had for the moment given a tone of sentiment to her otherwise rugged ambition when she found herself all suddenly in love with him, to discover as suddenly that it was love by proxy the revival of a passion that belonged to the dead. But the passing weakness over the retrospect that had come into her reflection now tended to strengthen the arm that was rather made for loving embraces than to wield the ven- geance of a conspiracy. Fate has its own inscrutable purposes that make havoc with every human intention, and provide perpetual surprises for those who come to the conclusion that they can no longer be astonished.

Lady Forsyth understood that the Countess Stravensky had gone to Paris en route for St. Petersburg, but this was not the fact. Ferrari had traveled to the gay city alone. It was seldom that he left the side of the countess, whom he served with the devotion of a slave, but with the au- thority also of a member of the same band of Russian regenerators. She had no wish to stray from the patriotic path upon which they traveled together ; and if she had, it would have been the duty of her secretary to hold her to her bonds. Immediately after Lady Forsyth's " At Home," Ferrari had sudden business in Paris and Venice ; and the countess withdrew to an almost equally foreign country in London, namely, to Soho, an English land of exiles, con- spirators, and Nihilistic wire-pullers, in the heart of a peaceful metropolis.