“The cholera has come, Excellency.”

“Many deaths?”

“To-day—­eleven.”

Paul looked up sharply.

“And the doctor?”

“He has not come yet, Excellency.  I sent for him—­a fortnight ago.  The cholera is at Oseff, at Dolja, at Kalisheffa.  It is everywhere.  He has forty thousand souls under his care.  He has to obey the Zemstvo, to go where they tell him.  He takes no notice of me.”

“Yes,” interrupted Paul, “I know.  And the people themselves, do they attempt to understand it—­to follow out my instructions?”

The starosta spread out his thin hands in deprecation.  He cringed a little as he stood.  He had Jewish blood in his veins, which, while it raised him above his fellows in Osterno, carried with it the usual tendency to cringe.  It is in the blood; it is part of what the people who stood without Pilate’s palace took upon themselves and upon their children.

“Your Excellency,” he said, “knows what they are.  It is slow.  They make no progress.  For them one disease is as another.  ‘Bog dal e Bog vzial,’ they say.  ‘God gave and God took!’”

He paused, his black eyes flashing from one face to the other.

“Only the Moscow doctor, Excellency,” he said significantly, “can manage them.”

Paul shrugged his shoulders.  He rose from his seat, glancing at Steinmetz, who was looking on in silence, with his queer, mocking smile.

“I will go with you now,” he said.  “It is late enough already.”

The starosta bowed very low, but he said nothing.

Paul went to a cupboard and took from it an old fur coat, dragged at the seams, stained about the cuffs a dull brown—­doctors know the color.  Such stains have hanged a man before now, for they are the marks of blood.  Paul put on this coat.  He took a long, soft silken scarf such as Russians wear in winter, and wrapped it round his throat, quite concealing the lower part of his face.  He crammed a fur cap down over his ears.

“Come,” he said.

Karl Steinmetz accompanied them down stairs, carrying a lamp in one hand.  He closed the door behind them, but did not lock it.  Then he went upstairs again to the quiet little room, where he sat down in a deep chair.  He looked at the open door of the cupboard from which Paul Alexis had taken his simple disguise, with a large, tolerant humor.

“El Senor Don Quixote de la Mancha,” he said sleepily.

It is said that to a doctor nothing is shocking and nothing is disgusting.  But doctors are, after all, only men of stomach like the rest of us, and it is to be presumed that what nauseates one will nauseate the other.  When the starosta unceremoniously threw open the door of the miserable cabin belonging to Vasilli Tula, Paul gave a little gasp.  The foul air pouring out of the noisome den was such that it seemed impossible that human lungs could assimilate it.  This Vasilli Tula was a notorious drunkard, a discontent, a braggart.  The Nihilist propaganda had in the early days of that mistaken mission reached him and unsettled his discontented mind.  Misfortune seemed to pursue him.  In higher grades of life than his there are men who, like Tula, make a profession of misfortune.