MY FRIEND’S WEDDING DAY.
The droshky took me safe enough to my old quarters at Grignard’s snug hotel, not a dozen yards from the Nevskoi itself. I always put up at Grignard’s, in preference to the much more pretentious and palatial edifices of which St. Petersburg has no lack. It was small, to be sure, but it was quiet, comfortable, and—cheap.
As I passed the wire cage which is common in the halls of foreign hotels, and through the slim bars of which the letters of expected guests peeped forth, as from a prison grating, I cast a cursory glance on the contents, and saw my own name, which I had not thought to find on the back of a letter there just yet. The eyes of Jules followed mine.
“Ah, pardon, M. Pearson,” said he, “pardon, one thousand times. I neglected to remember that a note came for Monsieur two days ago.”
And, whipping out his key, he opened the tiny safe, and handed the letter, with a deprecatory shrug and a bow, to its rightful owner. I broke it open at once, but as it was too long to be perused at a glance, in the quick way in which we extract the purport of most masculine epistles, I set it by to read after dinner. After dinner, then, as I sipped my Beaune in the trim salle of the hotel, I waded conscientiously through the letter. It was from a dear old friend, long settled in Russia, Ned Vaughan by name. The writer was a member of my own profession, and we had been educated together at the same Institute (they called it an Institute, but it was a school, though only for big boys who studied technical matters), and had been fast friends ever since. And now Vaughan, who had a leaning towards experimental agriculture, was right-hand man to a great Russian noble, deep in the interior, and was engaged to be married to the daughter of the Scotch superintendent of the prince’s cotton factory. Indeed the wedding-day had been fixed, and it was to invite me to be present at the ceremony that Vaughan had written. A long letter, such a one as no man would be justified in inflicting upon a friend, except at a time like that, when a new life, with all its novel cares, hopes, and joys, was about to begin. My friend was not to remain at his present station. He and his young wife were to remove to one of Prince Emindoff’s Asiatic estates, far more extensive than the European property on which Ned had been long employed, and there he was to have a liberal salary and full authority to change everything that impeded his plans, from the caftans of the peasantry to the shape of the ploughshares. He was full of buoyant hope, of praises of his Emma—that was her name, derived from her English mother, who had been dead some years—and of fair dreams of the future. But he vowed