Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/102

92 loyal and patriotic enthusiasm? Napoleon expected that these "oppressed and degraded slaves" would hail him as a deliverer—would rise everywhere in revolt, and massacre their tyrants. Very different was the fact. When the time came for the serfs voted by the nobles to be levied from their estates, and when the vast crown lands had also to contribute their proportion of recruits, there was weeping and wailing in the izbas of every village from the Neva to the steppes of Tartary. But it was not, as in other days, the conscript who mourned his hard lot, and his mother, his sister, his betrothed who made sore lamentation over a separation probably life-long. It was the one not chosen who mingled his tears with those of his friends and parents, because he might not go and shed his blood for the Czar and holy Russia. Glad was the young recruit as he donned his simple uniform—a gray caftan, with loose trousers and a crimson sash; and proudly did he wear on the front of his gray cap the imperial badge, "a brazen cross surmounting a crown over the letter A." First and highest the cross, symbol of the Christian faith; beneath that, the imperial crown of Russia; again beneath that—Alexander.

But although putting himself, as he was wont to do, in the lowest place, and when possible out of sight altogether, the strong personal love with which Alexander had inspired his subjects counted for more, in that hour of a nation's conflict and agony, than the traditional religious veneration of the Russian for his country and his Czar. Well was it for Russia, and for Europe also, that the Czar God had given her was Alexander Paulovitch. It was not only that he had been, since the beginning of his reign, "perfectly just as emperor, singularly generous as man;" not only that he was richly endowed with all those brilliant and fascinating qualities which take the eye and win the suffrage of the multitude. The secret of his influence lay deeper. God had given him a gift more