Peter, though affecting the most utter simplicity himself, liked to see those about him richly clad, and his favorites vied with each other in the splendor of their appointments; nothing pleased him more than to see the man who had worked beside him at the carpenter bench at Wapping and Zaandam, clad in workman’s overall, appear in all the trappings of a French or English courtier. To-day he was in a good humor; the boyars had been compliant before his every command; his blood-thirsty vengeance on the reactionary party who had dared to raise a rebellion during his absence abroad was indeed too fresh in the minds of all for anyone to risk angering the terrible Czar.
“I will teach Russia the arts of war as I am teaching her the arts of peace,” he remarked, looking at the Duke of Croy whom he admired as a tried soldier.
The German made a suitably loyal reply, but Mentchikoff broke in with a sharp remark.
“How many years do you think it will take you, Peter Alexievitch?”
“All your life,” smiled Croy, “and not the meanest serf in All the Russias will thank you for your labors.”
“Oh, go on with your wars and your politics and your reforms,” he said cynically. “You are a strong man--but stronger is Holy Russia!”
Peter looked at him with a certain eagerness entirely devoid of anger; though he was so haughtily autocratic with his boyars he would take even insolence from these men whom he had put in the position of his masters; for a long while Croy and his like had represented European civilization to Peter.
But Mentchikoff resented on his master’s behalf this speech made so sharply by the German.
“The Czar holds the Russias in the palm of his hand,” he said haughtily.
Peter smiled grimly; he was thinking of the little chapel a few yards away, from the window of which his uncle had been hurled out on to the pikes of the soldiery below, and of his own boyhood of flight, and peril, and hiding; not far away in this same fierce fortress was the Red Staircase where Ivan the Terrible had stood to watch the cross-formed comet that had predicted his own ghastly end, that staircase where, one blood-stained June, Feodor Borisvitch, strangled by the sheltsi, had been flung down, this but in revenge for another murdered Czar; the history of his predecessors might indeed teach Peter that Holy Russia was not so easily governed or so rapidly subdued.