“Well, you are recovering?” he asked curtly.
I moved my lips, but no sound would come, so I just looked up at him.
He saw how it was with me, and ordered the soldier to fetch water. He was a decent youngster, that Mirakoff, too good for a Russian; he must have had some foreign blood in him.
“This is a serious matter,” he said, while the man was gone. “Lucky I chanced on you, or you’d have been finished off at once, and shoved in there with the rest”—he jerked his head towards the new-made grave. “I’ve done the best I could for you. You’ll be carried through the wood, and sent in a cart to Petersburg, instead of having to run by the stirrup, as the others who can stand must do. But you’d have to go to prison. What on earth induced you to come here?”
The man came back with the water, and I drank greedily, and found my voice, though the words came slowly and clumsily.
“Curiosity, as I told you.”
“Curiosity to see ‘La Mort,’ you mean?”
“No; though I’ve got pretty close to death,” I said, making a feeble pun. (We were, of course, speaking in French.)
“I don’t mean death; I mean a woman who is called ‘La Mort.’ Her name’s Anna Petrovna. She was to have been there. Did you see her? Was she there?”