Her timid attempt was silenced however, by indignant voices crying:—
“He is no Tsar! only a mock-Tsar; he has squandered himself, goes about as if beside himself.”
“He has become quite a Jew, he can no longer live without a sip of blood from time to time. The day he drinks blood, that day he is content and merry, but the day he gets none he can neither eat nor drink.”
“Glutton! he will have eaten everybody soon, for himself there is no extermination.”
“May the earth engulph him!”
“Fools! Curs!” interposed with fury the gunner Alexis Furlong, a red-haired man of huge height, with a face now suggesting a beast, now a child, “fools, for not knowing how to defend yourselves! All of you are doomed soul and body; you will be mashed up like worms in a cabbage. As for me nothing would please me better than to cut him up into little bits.”
Elena weakly sighed and made the sign of the cross; these words, she confessed afterwards, made her feel hot all over. The others looked with terror at Alexis, while he, fixing his bloodshot eyes on one spot, and clenching his fist, added slowly as if lost in thought,—and there was something yet more terrible in this measured tone than in his fury:—
“I am surprised that no one has finished him off before now. He is always about alone. There are plenty of chances to cut him up half a dozen times over.”
Elena grew pale, she wanted to say something, but her moving lips could not articulate a sound.