“Your—who?”
“Our Maria Ivanovka, who was with us from the day we left St. Petersburg until we entered this same city of Paris—which is no great things of a city, as I shall always say. Poor dear Maria Ivanovka! She may have been rather old,—I don’t deny it,—and she had a droop in her upper lip, which they say is a bad sign, besides being frayed about the mouth in a sort of general way. But the Invalids will never love her and take care of her as we used to do.”
A momentary stupefaction had fallen upon Ivan; he wondered hazily whether Michael was speaking of a hospital nurse or of a favourite sutler. But he prudently held his peace, and Michael went on: “Before the war she used to take care of the Winter Palace,—there are some that say she stood in front of it for fifty years, but that I can’t believe. However, not a fight have we had since we left St. Petersburg that she has not borne a part in and done her business well, though it is I who say it. At Leipzig her carriage was broken; but we mended it with a cart wheel, which answered famously.”
Ivan understood now. “You don’t mean to say,” he exclaimed, laughing heartily, “that the Invalids have got your gun! How came that about?”
“It is no laughing matter, Barrinka. They have got her; and it was the Czar’s own doing. He went to see the poor old Frenchmen, and found them sorely cast down and sorrowful, breaking their hearts over their country’s disgrace and their Emperor’s defeat.”
“That was natural,” Ivan interrupted. “Think what you and I would have felt, Michael, had this war gone against us. And if we were old and worn out, unable to strike a blow for our country and our Czar, we would have felt it all the more.”
“The Czar seems to have thought like you, Barrinka; for he spoke kindly to the poor old fellows, and tried to cheer them. And when he found they were grieving over the loss of their guns, the trophies of their old victories that they used to be so proud of, he told them to be comforted; they should have their trophies back again. The Allies had carried off those guns of theirs when they came into the city, so what must he do but send them twelve of ours, Maria Ivanovka being one of them—to my sorrow.”
For a moment Ivan wondered silently, “Was there ever such a knight in friendship or in war” as his Czar, Alexander Paulovitch? Then he said: “I think you need not grudge your gun to the poor old Frenchmen. Do you know how many of their cannon they left behind in our country, for us to show as trophies of what our arms—no, rather of what our God has done?”
“No, Barrinka, I have never heard exactly; but I am sure they must be many.”
“Not counting those they contrived to bury, or lost in the rivers they passed over, we have captured of their cannon—nine hundred and twenty and nine!”