I knew that before many days had passed, and wondered then how much he could have told me if he had been minded.
"If we meet again!" I echoed sadly. "Is that likely, friend Mishka?"
"God knows! Stranger things have happened. If I die with, or before my master,--well, I die. If I do not, I, too, shall make for the frontier when he no longer has need of me. Where is the good of staying? What should I do here? I would like to see peace--yes, but there will be no peace within this generation--"
"But your father?" I asked, thinking of the stanch old man, who had gone back to his duty at Zostrov.
"Dead!" I exclaimed, startled for the moment out of the inertness that paralyzed my brain.
"He was murdered a week after he returned to Zostrov. There was trouble with the _moujiks_,--as I knew there would be. The garrison at the castle was helpless, and there was trouble there also, first about my little bomb that covered our retreat. You knew I planned that,--_hein_?"
"And you said nothing; you are discreet enough in your way. _He_ never suspected,--does not even now; he thinks it was a plot hatched by his enemies--perhaps by Stravensky himself, the old fox! But we should never have got through to Warsaw, if, for a time, at least, all had not believed that he and I and you were finished off in that affair. Better for him perhaps, if it had been so!"
He fell silent, and I know he was thinking of the last tragedy, as I was. The memory of it was hard enough for me to bear; what must it not be for Loris?
"Yes, there was much trouble," Mishka resumed. "Old Stravensky was summoned to Petersburg, and he had scarcely set out before the revolution began, and the troops were recalled. There was but a small garrison left; I doubt if they would have moved a finger in any case; and so the _moujiks_ took their own way, and my father--went to his reward. He was a good man, and their best friend for many a year, but that they did not understand, since the Almighty has made them beasts without understanding!"
The darkness had fallen, but I guessed he shrugged his shoulders in the way I knew so well. A fatalist to the finger-tips was Mishka.
"The news came three days since," he continued. "And such news will come, in time, from every country district. I tell you all you have seen and known is but the beginning, and God knows what the end will be! Therefore, as I have said, this is no country for honest peaceable folk. My mother died long since, God be thanked; and now but one tie holds me here."