She drew his attention to the supper-table, which she had laden with good things, or what she thought were good. But he had no appetite. He drank a cup of coffee, and told her to go to bed. He said he felt no desire to sleep. His heart was heavy with its own sorrows, and his mind was oppressed by a fear that he had undertaken a task which was beyond his strength. “You cannot wash a blackamoor white,” says a homely proverb; and he began to perceive that those whom he desired to cleanse were very black indeed. He knew that all the acts which in moral codes are called thefts, arson, contraband, fraud, were merely sport in their eyes, and that even murder appeared to almost all of them a wholly natural and legitimate way of settling old scores and redressing uneven balances, whilst to cheat the revenue, to defraud the landlord, to weave a dramatic coil of lies, and to poach, purloin, and plunder as occasion served, seemed to them all the mere playful pastime of summer eve and winter dawn, simple as the frisking of young leverets on a sward. He was a Russian of Esthonia, a noble, and an officer of the Imperial Guard; he had been merely a man of pleasure, until he had been impressed and converted by Tolstoi and other humanitarians. Then the zeal of his reformation as shown in his acts and his words had led to condemnation by his military superiors; he had been cashiered, arrested, and accused of Nihilism; he had been found guilty of subversive doctrines and collectivist opinions; the influence of his own powerful family, and others with which he was connected had been of no avail to save him; he had been condemned to the mines of Siberia for life, and his estates confiscated by the court-martial before which he had been brought up for judgment; he had escaped from the fortress in which he was confined before he was taken to the mines, and in disguise, and by the help of some of his late comrades, had got across the frontier and across Germany. When, penniless and famished, he had chanced to meet in Brussels a friend of earlier years, Alfonso Gandolfo, that gay and generous prince could induce him to accept nothing, not even a dinner or a cigar, but at length offered him the stewardship of the estates of Le Selve, and succeeded with difficulty in persuading him that in this homely and obscure post he could do good, and more than earn his maintenance. “We have been ill served,” said the Roman gentleman; “we have been the prey of a series of scoundrels; if you can put down the perpetual thefts, and protect the timber in some degree, my father and I shall be infinitely grateful.”