Rescuing the Czar | Page 3

their happiness over the
cheerful events that heralded the approach of Victory. The evening star
that poured down its steel-blue rays upon the crosses of St. Isaac's
presaged to their encouraged fancies the early dawn of peace. Yet the
chilly wind that whistled round their dull-red household was laden with
a frosty air that blew from official regions and "froze the genial current
of their souls." The icy glances of ambitious princelings, reflecting

back the sinister sullenness of designing ministers, fell like a spectral
gloom upon their happy hearts. A hollow roar rolled down the Nevskii
Prospekt--a guard burst into the palace and put the women under arrest.
The pent-up Revolution at last had burst--anarchy howled around the
capital--the isolated Czar was captive, and plotting princelings joined
hands with puny lawyers to browbeat courageous women and drive the
chariot of State!
The miserable fiasco of a delirious Revolution went careering through
the giddy maze of treachery and madness until a frenzied wave of
rapine and disorder swept all the noblewomen of the Imperial
household into a barricaded fortress around which lust and inebriety
held unsated and remorseless vigil for the prize. (See
Part II: Tumen.)
Among these prisoners of State were five women who realized that the
Power which had organized disorder as a feature of its military strategy
had also honeycombed the Army, the Navy and the State with its
agencies of pillage and so undermined the public conscience that their
purity and virtue, more than their jewels and fortune, became an open
challenge to the vanity of mob lust.
The younger of these women in their unsullied maidenhood looked
longingly and unsuspectingly in the direction of Siberia. They were
learning by degrees that the semblance of freedom which offered a
pathway to escape was nothing but a strategem employed by pretended
friends to entrap them into more cruel and ruthless hands. On every
side loomed the evidence of their danger. The villainous stares of
foreign interlopers, the ribald jests of guards, the furtive glances of the
envious, the scowls of the emancipated underling, the profanity of the
domineering agitator who denounced respectability and clamored for
possession of the girls,--no moment of their lives was free from ugly
threats; no retreat, save the wild jungle or the mountains, offered any
liberation from the immodest glare of cruel, licentious eyes. (See
Part II: Tobolsk.)

The eldest of the girls was scarcely twenty-two. Like her mother, she
was erect and stately and somewhat saddened by the hostile
experiences through which the family had just passed. The youngest
was a chummy little creature of sixteen years who did not conceal her
admiration for her next elder sister, whose courage seemed unfailing
through all the trying hours. The next eldest sister, with her little
younger brother, was openly planning to outwit the guard and escape to
the Siberian wilds. It was doubtless her undisguised activity that
ultimately betrayed the Royal prisoners into the unhappy tangle that
beset their future lives.
From one camp to another they were carted off like cattle and never for
a moment permitted to forget that, if they ever reached a place of safety,
they would have to pay the price. Along the frozen pathway of their
weary eastern journey there did come, here and there, some slender
little byways that offered an escape. Whenever they approached these
places and estimated the perils, they found no one to confide in--there
were none that they could trust. Treason, like a contagion, lurked in
smiles as well as scowls about them, and even their steadfast trust in
the Invisible Diplomacy of European Royalty was gradually yielding in
their hearts to the dissolving acid of despair. (See
Part II: Tobolsk.)
From the conflicting rumors that reached them they fully realized that it
was the politician in all countries who ignorantly obstructed their relief.
The ferocious and misleading propaganda employed to fanaticize the
populace as an element of military strategy seemed to sweep its own
authors from their feet and drag the prisoners through many months of
torture toward a time and place set for their execution by other
politicians in the drunken stupor of their power. (See
Part II:
Tobolsk.)
Under the agitated surface of this tidal wave of fanaticism that

threatened to engulf the Royal prisoners there were a few men in
Europe and America, as well as in India and Thibet, who were slowly
converging in the direction of the victims with a phrase upon their lips
that none but Royalty and themselves were privileged to use. It was
that ancient secret code transmitted by tradition to the followers of a
sturdy Tyrian king. It was made use of by Lycurgus, as well as by
Solomon and Justinian; and it was again employed by the partisans of
Louis XVIII to save the House