“They’ll soothe the child finely, he won’t make a sound; they’ll see to that!”
“And we, too, shall in all probability have a hot time.”
“A great calamity, brothers; even two minds are not enough to get one out of this scrape.”
Among the nobles, as among the people, all repeated.
“Evil will befall us! Evil will befall us!”
Meanwhile on tramped the Tsar, tramping, marching through the mud, beating the drum, drowning the melancholy funeral chants. The mist thickened, the fog grew denser. Everything seemed to lose its precision, dissolve, grow phantom-like, and the whole town, together with its people, houses and streets, as if it would lift in another instant, together with the fog, and vanish into thin air.
CHAPTER VIII
On his return from the funeral to the Summer Palace, Peter took a light wherry and rowed himself across the Neva to a small wooden landing stage on the opposite shore.