Ivan's first impression was of a dead, heavy chill which the fire burning in the great fireplace at the other end of the vast room was powerless to lighten. The place was half underground, and what light entered was filtered through dusty and cobwebbed panes of leaded glass set high under the vaulted roof. The windows partially lighted the heavy oak beams which supported the ceiling, but the lower parts of the room lay in deep shadow. Emblems and rude pictures were scratched and chalked on the walls, but Ivan could not make them out in the dim light.
Running the width of the room before the fireplace was a massive table, and on either side of it were benches built where they stood. From the size and strength of them, they might have been intended for the use of a race of giants or exceedingly fat men! Their carved bases spread heavily apart, and huge dragon claw feet braced them on the floor which, beneath and around the table, was carefully paved with stone.
At one side of the fireplace a great pile of wood was placed, broken and splintered pieces picked up from the buildings which had been shelled by the great guns of the enemy. Bits of oaken beams, pieces of rare, highly polished furniture, and scraps of priceless carvings made the pile which soon would go in flames to cook the wretched supper even then in course of preparation.
A woman stood by the table, scraping scales from a fish. A heavy knife was in her hand, and as she raised her dark and scowling face Ivan recognized her and shuddered.
As she stood watching the entrance of the group at the door, scowling and peering through the gloom, she looked to Ivan's eyes like one of the furies of the French Revolution. All the history he had read of that dreadful period was made clear and real to him. Ivan, closely watched, and closely guarded from harm, had up to the time of the bombardment of Warsaw, never come in contact with anyone out of his own noble class with the exception of the Morris family. His father, knowing the educational standing of Professor Morris in America, and judging the whole family by his mild, inoffensive manner, had decided to allow Ivan, his son, to learn English from the Professor. It had not occurred to him, a man of many affairs, to suspect the presence of an ingenious lively, mischievous whirlwind in the person of the Professor's elder son.
When Ivan told his father with enthusiasm of the Professor's family, the Prince imagined them of course to be exactly like the Professor, and rejoiced that Ivan could be among such studious and book loving, quiet people. So he told Ivan that he might spend what time he liked with the Morris family, and then forgot the whole thing in the fearful question of War which soon arose. When he left for the Russian front he left orders that in case of any peril or disaster Ivan was to go to the Morris house and there remain for greater safety.
Before the happenings of the last chapter, however, Ivan had been almost constantly with Warren for a year, and had so imbibed his democratic ideas and had studied so hard to make good as a Scout that Prince Ivan the Magnificent, had he returned, would have had difficulty in recognizing his only and dearly loved son.
But as a matter of fact, Ivan the Magnificent did not return. Instead, blood stained, mud stained and distorted, he slept in a far away trench past which had swept the invaders' line, grim and terrible.
He had fought well and desperately for the honor of Poland until at last, under a leaden rain, Ivan the Prince had gone to meet the fate of Ivan the Man. And not one word of this did Ivan the boy suspect.
It had never seemed that harm could touch his wonderful father. He must be safe; and Ivan moved through his many adventurous days with only the thought that he would have so much more to tell his father on one of the rare and precious evenings when Prince Ivan's duties at court and with his regiment would allow him to spend a few happy hours with his son.
So it was with a keen and appraising eye that Ivan viewed that dark and dungeon-like interior, thinking to tell his father all about it.
The woman beside the table scowled darkly as she saw the group.
"What now?" she demanded. "Are those the spies? They are nothing but boys! Why do you bother with them, Michael Paovla, why did you bring them here? Crack them on the head! The river runs swift enough down the street there."
She brandished her knife as she spoke.
"I will not give them one single meal, do, you hear that?"
"Peace, Martha! Do not jest," said the large man with a wry smile.
He looked at Ivan as he spoke.
"Who are you?" he asked. Clothed as the boy was in mean and soiled garments, there was still something distinguished about him.
He stood proudly erect. Perhaps his name would help out.
"Ivan Ivanovich, of the House of Sabriski," he said, looking the man in the face.
The three shouted with laughter. "Isn't he clever?" cried the woman.
"Ask him something else!"
"No," said the man. "I want to think that over. Come, it is cold here!"
He picked Warren up from the floor where he had thrown him, and, carrying him down the long room, made his way around the great table and dropped him roughly on the pile of rags where, Elinor and Rika were crouched.
Poor little Elinor, huddled on her pile of rags, did not recognize the limp burden carried in by the larger of the two men, whom she had learned to dread with unspeakable terror. When he threw it down in the middle of the room, the pale face was turned toward the child, and she recognized, Warren. She commenced to scream. Shriek after shriek left her pale lips, and the man started over to her side, when a short, sharp word silenced her. She looked to see who had spoken, calling her so familiarly by name.
"Stop, Elly, stop," said the voice in English, and her cries were stilled as by magic, although she still gazed with longing and terror at the pale face down which a tiny line of blood trickled.
The second man clasped a second boy, dirty and torn, and meanly dressed in a workman's blouse. She stared at him, never recognizing Ivan, whom she had always seen so gorgeously clothed in furs and fine broadcloth and exquisite linen. It was not until he spoke again that she recognized him.
"Be quiet, Elinor," he said. "We will save you. Warren is not hurt, he is just dizzy. He will be all right soon."
Ivan spoke hopefully, but as he looked down at the boy lying before him, he wondered in his heart if there was really a spark of life left in that still, pale, bleeding body. As for Elinor, after the first outburst, she sat dumbly trembling.
The past day and night had been so crowded with horrors that the tender children were fast passing into a state where they neither realized nor felt the hardships and abuse they were subjected to.
The time when they sat playing in Professor Morris's quiet house seemed too far away to remember.
They had been playing happily, the two children, when the family decided to go away for a few hours, but so happily were they with their dolls and each other, that they paid no attention to the stir and unrest about them. Even Elinor, who was almost six years old, had not concerned herself with the sound of the big guns.
She did not notice when her father left the room. If he told her, as he thought he had, to "sit quietly" and await his return, she failed to hear him. So she took Rika by the hand and "went, visiting." They sat down on the top step, and looked into the empty street, and watched occasional groups of fleeing Poles hurry past to the safety of the plains. A rough looking woman came past, noticed them, and returned, looking as she did so at the house, and peering into the hall through the open door.
Then she approached the children and in a voice she tried in vain to make soft, she asked what they were doing, and who they were.
Little Rika, who could say but few words, sat and stared at her with a frown.
Elinor answered politely. The woman studied them carefully. Elinor was a child whose beauty was always remarked wherever she went, and the little Rika was equally lovely. They had been used to kindness and attention from everyone, so when the woman took out a queer little box, and offered them each a funny little black candy, they accepted them quite as a matter of course. Then she drew back, and the children turned to their dolls again. But only for a moment. Then the head of golden curls and the long, black ringlets drooped and the drugged children were asleep. The woman shook two big sacks out from beneath her dress, and as coolly and as cruelly as though she was filling them with straw, she shoved a child in either bag, crossed to the curb with her heavy burden, and sat down to wait.
When her two accomplices joined her, they went rapidly to the hovel where Warren had tracked them later, and releasing the half smothered and unconscious children, they laid them down on a pile of rags, and sat looking at them, while they ate their evening portion of black bread and cold fish.
There was a great discussion. The larger man, Michael, was in favor of offering the children for a ransom. The others would not consider it at all.
"Remember," said Martha, the woman, "there is much danger in collecting such fees. Rather will I prepare these little ladies for the trade of beggars. So beautiful are they that I can go through every capital in Europe, if so Europe still stands."
"Have it your own way," said the smaller man, Patro by name.
"I always do," she said simply. Then she studied the sleeping forms again.
"I think it will be well, some time soon, to twist the legs of the small one," she said. "She would make a sweet cripple."
"No!" said Michael. "You may not do so. I will not have it."
The woman laughed. "Said I not that I have my own way?" she asked.
"All right, Martha, you do," said Patro, "but believe me, it is better to take the greatest care of those little ones. Think what dancers they may make some day. There is a fortune in those little feet, I'll be bound. Be careful of them, watch them, and perhaps some day they may be prancing on the opera stage at St. Petersburg, or even here in Warsaw."
The woman sat thinking for a little. "Perhaps you are right," she said. "People are dance-mad these times. They are pretty enough to climb to any heights."
"Why laugh?" said Martha angrily.
"Nothing, nothing, dear Martha, only that it is funny to think you are taking these children down from the heights where they belong so that they may climb back for your pleasure."
The woman's brow grew black. She reached out a heavy foot, and pushed Elinor away from her.
"Not for thy pleasure," she said sneeringly.
"No, Patro, no! They are to pay me over and over for my life. Drop for drop, pain for pain, I will take from them all I have myself suffered. They shall sleep cold, because so I slept all my childhood. They shall hunger because I did so. They shall beg in the streets while I listen. Ah!" she shook her fists above her head, "I have hated all the world, and now these shall pay me!"
Patro shrugged his shoulders. "As you will," he said. "They are coming to life again, however. I would advise you to feed them enough to keep beauty in their faces and grace in their limbs, if you indeed wish to use them for food and light and fire."
"That is sound sense, Patro," she answered, and when the children came dizzily to consciousness again, she treated them with almost a rough kindness. But when they cried, she beat them, taking pains to let the blows fall where they would not leave visible scars or bruises.
So passed the dragging hours, until Warren, unconscious and bleeding, was flung down at Elinor's side.
"There!" said Michael. "You will spy, will you? Well, we have you now. And when next you walk the streets, if so you do, you will have cause to remember Michael Paovla and his friends."
Patro frowned. "You are too handy with names," he said. "Trust only a dead dog."
"Leave that to me," said Michael with a dark frown. "You," he said to Ivan, "you see this gun? We'll not bind you, but if you stir toward the door, or make a move to free yourself, you are lost. I will shoot you down."
"We only want the children," said Ivan boldly. "Give them to us, and we will go away, and you will not be harmed."
The three set up a shout of laughter. "Thanks, thanks!" said Michael when he could speak, but Martha said angrily, "What! Give up my fire and light and food? Not much!"
"Suppose I pay you," said Ivan, "I will reward you well."
"A million thanks," said the woman. "What will you give—a dozen dried fishes?"
"You don't know me," scowled Ivan proudly. "I am the son of your Prince, Ivan the Brilliant. Beware how you treat me and these friends of mine."
"The boy will kill me!" cried the woman, leaning back and wiping the tears of mirth from her leathery cheeks. "Go on, go on, my prince. And will you not ask us to the palace some day soon? We would like to see you at your own home."
"Give us the children and set us free, and you may come," said Ivan after a pause.
"No; you are too amusing," said the woman. "Rather we will take you with us, or else leave you safely locked here where no one shall disturb you."
Ivan looked at the worn and haggard children and the form of Warren now stirring slightly, then he handed the great ruby to Michael.
"Take, this and let us go," he pleaded.
The man looked wonderingly at the flashing stone. "So you too help yourself in these war times?" he said sneeringly. "What else do you carry, little rat?"
He ran a practiced, light fingered hand over Ivan, searching for more jewels, but of course found none.
Night seemed to come all at once in the dark and partly underground room. Warren, untended, came slowly back to consciousness, and lay where he had fallen in a sort of doze. Little Elinor crept to him and, laying her head on his shoulder, went to sleep. Presently Martha began to yawn, and the men nodded where they sprawled on the benches. The woman drew out an armful of rags, and prepared for the night by wrapping another shawl around her shoulders.
The men rose after a whispered consultation, and taking Ivan to the furthest and darkest corner, tied him securely to a ring in the wall. His bonds were loose enough to permit him to lie down on the hard earth and stone floor, but he sat with his back against the wall, wide awake, every nerve tense and quivering.
Twice Michael came and looked at him in the light of a torch from the fire, and retreated muttering. Ivan decided to pretend sleep. The third time Michael gave a grunt of satisfaction.
He went back to the fire and beckoned the others from their pallets.
"He is dead asleep," he said in a low whisper. "We must make our plans."
"Good!" said the woman. "What do you want to do about it?"
She too whispered in a low tone and it struck Ivan that for some strange reason he was listening to a conversation spoken in tones that ordinarily could not be heard three feet away from the speakers. He listened intently. Every syllable was clear and distinct. Owing to some peculiar formation of the vaulted ceiling, the sounds were brought to him, forty feet from the speakers, as accurately as though spoken into a telephone. Ivan's courage rose once more.
He heard the man Michael light his pipe.
"Of course not!" sneered the woman. "You never do! I suppose you don't want to kill them?"
"What's the use?" asked the man. "Why blacken our souls further than we must?"
"I'll tell you why," said Martha suddenly. Her whisper cut like a knife. "I'll tell you. Because I fear them. Boys as they are, I fear them! There is a spirit in the eyes of the one who calls himself Ivan that will never die until death blinds them. The little rat! The smart little rat! Calling himself a prince! My, I wish I had had the training of him. Well, whoever he is, he is a Pole, and he will hurt us yet. I feel it. I can feel it, anyway, that harm will come to us through those boys. I warn you, Michael. Patro, I warn you. Once, twice, thrice! You know I never fail."
There was a silence, and Ivan heard Patro catch his breath sharply.
"Well, what would you?" he said finally.
There was a note of triumph in the woman's voice when she spoke.
"Tomorrow night," she said, "we will leave them here, tied to the table. I will leave food on the table for them, just enough for one meal. I have still my little friends in the pill box on the chimney ledge. They are as strong as ever. We will not stay to see whether they eat or not. But I think they will, because I will see to it that they do not taste much food tomorrow. We will lock the door. I will go down to Prague. They say it is but little harmed, and I have a sister there. I will give the smaller child to her. I have a fancy for the light one myself, and they are too unlike to pass off for sisters."
There was a long pause. Then, "Have it as you like," said Michael. "Of course, the boys will bother a good deal, if they go free."
"Certainly they would," said Martha. "We would never know where they would crop up, especially that Ivan one."
"Suppose they do not eat?" asked Patro.
"Eat, eat!" cried Martha. "Well, know you nothing of boys! And they will suspect nothing. You are brutes, brutes, remember, and I so kind and so sorry," she laughed. "They will believe all I say," she added.
Michael nodded. "Then it is settled," he said.
In the United States, every possible precaution is taken to protect children from harm. Laws are made especially for their safety; societies exist in every town and city to look after them. They go unharmed through the streets. Noble men and women give their lives to visiting the poorest districts and making easier the lot of the unfortunate ones they find there. Special cases are frequently written up in the papers, and help found for them in that way. In factories, shops, stores, asylums, in the streets, in the slums, every possible, effort is made to make the lot of children an easier and happier one.
In a great number of the European countries, the case is different. There are no laws, for instance, governing the age at which a child shall be put to work. In fact, in order to keep body and soul together, children labor from the time they are babies. They do the work of farm animals when their little hands can scarcely grasp the implements of toil. There are many, oh, so many of them; and they are held cheaply. Poorly clothed, poorly fed, they take kindly to theft, as a means of getting the necessities of their bare, miserable little lives.
Once upon a time, there was a dark and dreadful age when making cripples and dwarfs was a regular trade. Children were taken (nearly always stolen ones) and their limbs twisted, or their faces distorted, in order to gain sympathy from the passersby, of whom they were taught to beg. That frightful time is long past; but the trades of begging and thieving are still taught.
And to criminals like those in whose hands the children had fallen, life, and child life especially, was too cheap and of too little account to matter much. They did not in the least mind the contemplation of a crime as horrible as the one they had just decided on. They were afraid of the bright, alert Scouts who had fallen into their clutches, and to them there was but one way to treat the matter—the shackles and the poisoned food.