"Shall I then be shot down in cold blood as your Majesty has just slaughtered a body of my poor countrymen?" she said suddenly.
"Morbleu!" exclaimed Napoleon, glancing angrily at the girl. He paused a moment, then laughed, shrugged his shoulders and rode on.
"She is mad, Sire, patriot-mad!" Vera heard some one say, and the Emperor's reply reached her ears: "She has nevertheless a fine spirit".
Vera hastened homewards. She forgot the incident of her encounter with Napoleon; she took no notice of the hundreds of compliments, impudent observations and rude jests thrown at her by scores of French soldiers as she passed; Sasha Maximof was dead: this was her only thought; it absorbed her entire being; was it—she asked herself—really so all-important to her that this man was dead? She had not yet learned to love him; it must surely be a mere sentimental regret, this black heavy weight upon her heart; a sentimental regret that one who had once been nominally her fiancé had suddenly met his death; her heart had not received its death-wound—oh no! this was but a passing feeling of sympathy and sorrow; it would disappear; the shock of the sudden catastrophe had unnerved her.
Nevertheless when Vera had lain for an hour upon her bed, assuring herself that after all this calamity was not really a disaster, for her, of the first magnitude, she suddenly realised that nothing in the world could have mattered more to her than the death of this man; and turning her face to the wall she wept as though her heart were indeed broken.
CHAPTER XIX.
Vera heard a banging at the front door—a sound which might have startled and even frightened her at another moment, but she was so full of her new grief that she scarcely noticed it; she felt as though nothing mattered; that she did not care what happened.
Then old Michael, one of the two servants who had remained in the house when the rest left Moscow, knocked at her door and put his head into the room.
"Golôobushka moyá," he said, "do not be frightened, a disaster has happened; the young Graf Maximof——" he paused; Vera laughed hysterically.