"The result is that I can thank God I do not love a Frenchman, one of Russia's enemies."
"Then I thank God also humbly and sincerely. You know well what I would have of you, if I could. You treat me now as a brother, you are kindness itself, but I hunger for more; I will wait more patiently now that I am assured that at any rate your heart is free."
"When I love I promise that I will love a Russian," Vera smiled. "Promise me in return that you will not run foolish risks in order to prove to me how cleverly your hand and eye work together in sword play. There are greater issues at stake for us Russians than the nursing of private petty vanities. The noblest of men may yet be the clumsiest. Russia requires all the manhood of all her sons, my friend. Come, promise me!"
"Well, I promise then," muttered Sasha, "though your words are not flattering to my vanity. I wish you could have added," he sighed, "that you wanted me alive for your own sake, as well as for Russia's."
"Oh, I will say that," she laughed. "I certainly want you alive. Sasha," she added suddenly, her eyes softening wonderfully, though her voice was full of laughter, "I see that you are still far from having eschewed the follies of cadetdom; you are as vain as ever, mon ami, and as blind to—to the true proportion of things."
Sasha Maximof looked puzzled and shook his head, failing to understand the meaning of Vera's last utterance.
CHAPTER XX.
During these first few days of the French occupation Moscow became a very pandemonium of pillage and violence, of smoke and fire, of orgies and of cruelties too horrible to relate. The churches and cathedrals were robbed and desecrated without distinction. Marshal Davoust could find no more appropriate place for his bedroom than the sanctuary, the very "Holy of Holies" of a cathedral, wherein he slept, guarded by a sentinel at each of the two royal doors which gave entrance to this hallowed spot. Horses were stabled in the churches. Furnaces and melting-pots were to be seen outside each of Moscow's most venerable cathedrals, where gold and silver vessels, the frames of costly ikons, ornaments, even the golden decorations of the vestments of the priests were melted down and fought over.
Soldiers on "leave of absence," which meant that they had received, each in turn, licence for a season of plundering, spent every hour of their leisure in pillage and violence, declaring—if interfered with—that the Emperor had promised them the treasures of Moscow.