Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/89

Rh arms against us, God in his inscrutable providence has seen fit to send us Alexander Paulovitch."

"But, dädushka, the people love him."

"Love him?—with all their hearts. The men of Russia are not wood or stone. They love him well enough to be true to him to the death, if only he dares to be true to himself and to them. But that is too much to hope. All things must do after their kind. Does the antelope of the desert confront the tiger in his den, and tear from him his blood-stained spoil? Do men take the fine gold out of the furnace to forge it into their weapons of war? or the silk of China to spin into the cable that holds the ship of war to her moorings? But, Prince Ivan, I am talking wildly, perhaps idly and sinfully. Forget what I have said. After all, Alexander Paulovitch is the Lord's anointed."

"And you know that, since last April, he has been in the field with his army—where he ought to be."

"Where he ought not to be!" thundered Petrovitch angrily. "What we ask from our Czar is not the cheap courage of the recruit, whose one virtue is to stand and be shot at, but the far higher courage to think, to decide, to act for fifty millions of men. 'Thou shalt not go forth with us to battle,' said the men of old to their king, 'that thou quench not the light of Israel.' God put the heart of man in the very midst of his body, to send the life-giving blood to the strong hands, which in their turn are meant to defend it from scath and harm."

"True;—and it occurs to me," said Ivan quietly, "that my place is with the hands."

The face of Petrovitch actually lighted up. "Thank God for that word!" he said. "But I expected no less from Prince Ivan Ivanovitch Pojarsky."

Ivan had entered the house of Petrovitch that day a reckless, frivolous youth, capable indeed of nobler things, but absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure and in the petty, selfish troubles