alked to me the whole day. He has told me grave
secrets. Not even to you would I reveal them. So many have loved
me--why should not he? I shall live in St. Petersburg, and see all
Europe!--thousands of people--Dios mio! Dios mio!"

"Indeed!" Santiago, still unamiable, responded to this confidence with
a sneer. "You aspire very high for a little girl of the wilderness,
without fortune, and only half a coat-of-arms, so to speak. Do you
know that this Rezanov--Dr. Langsdorff has told us all about him--is a
great noble, one of the ten barons of Russia, and a Chamberlain in
accordance with a decree of Peter the Great that court titles should be
bestowed as a reward for distinguished services alone? He got a
fortune in his youth by marriage with a daughter of Shelikov--that
Siberian who founded the Russian colonies in America. The wife died
almost immediately, but the Baron's influence remained with
Shelikov--for his influence at court was even greater--and after the
older man's death, with his mother-in-law, who is uncommonly clever.
Shelikov's schemes were but little sketches beside Rezanov's, who from
merely a courtier and a gay blood about town developed into a great man
of business, with an ambition to correspond. It was he who got the
Imperial ukase that gave the Russian-American Company its power to
squeeze all the other fur hunters and traders out of the northeast, and
made Rezanov and everybody belonging to it so rich your head would swim
if I told you the number of doubloons they spend in a year. Nobody has
ever been so clever at managing those old beasts of autocrats as he.
They think him merely the accomplished courtier, a brilliant
dilettante, a condescending patron of art and letters, a devotee of
pleasure, and all the time he is pulling their befuddled old brains
about to suit himself. The Tsar Paul was a lunatic and they murdered
him, but meanwhile he signed the ukase. The Tsar Alexander, who is not
so bad nor so silly as the others, thinks there is no man so clever as
Rezanov, who addresses him personally when sending home his reports.
Do you know what all that means? Your plenipotentiary is not only a
Chamberlain at court, a Privy Councillor, and the Tsar himself on this
side of the world, but when his inspections and reforms are concluded,
and he is one of the wealthiest men in Russia, he will return to St.
Petersburg and become so high and mighty that a princess would snap at
him. And you asp