There are fifty thousand head of cattle in the Royal pastures, and five thousand horses in the Royal stables. Over all these the Tsaritsa is supreme--as the wife and consort of the Tsar,--and one hundred and forty million subjects besides!
The point of her whole life as Empress is that when Princess Alix married Nicholas she gave herself and all of her activity to Nicholas--not to the Russian nation.
Every act of hers has been one of personal devotion. If Princess Alix had been ambitious as many women in court circles are, or if she had never loved so intensely and so blindly, the world looking back upon her career as it does to-day, might have deemed her a better Empress. As it happened, circumstances throughout her life have all driven her back from the public role and more into the circle of the family. Thus it comes about that the chronicler of her life must pass lightly over her life as Empress and dwell at length upon those sides of her character which the words wife and mother indicate. In other words, her entire life has been one long romance. A life of devotion to her husband and to her children, and this at the expense of her duties as Empress.
As the years have passed the disposition of the child once called “Sunny” has altered and changed, and the lines of wistful pathos which have settled round her still lovely face are doubtless indications of the drops of gall that have tainted her cup of life’s happiness. For all these mellowing lines the Tsaritsa wears an expression that in many lights is of that unusual other-worldly beauty, so seldom seen in the great world of to-day, but common to so many of the women whose portraits have been left us by the world artists of the Middle Ages. It is an expression that appears and ripens only under soul development, and as we see it in the Tsaritsa we do not find it difficult to understand and trace, for a considerable part of her life has been given over to religious thought and contemplation, and not to the study of theological doctrines and controversies only, but to the deeper truths of spiritualism and mysticism, truths whose elusiveness holds them for ever remote to all save the few, and whose realities are measured only by the standards of the eternal verities. This brings us to one of the most extraordinary, and at the same time one of the fascinating sides of the life of the Tsaritsa.