“Come and eat and sleep, my friend; we have done well so far. Mishka will take charge here.”
He looked almost as fresh and alert after that tremendous night we’d had, as if he’d just come out of his bedroom at Zostrov, when we joined him in a big dilapidated dining-room, where he’d planked some food and a couple of bottles of wine on the great oaken table, though I was as big a scarecrow as Vassilitzi, who was as used up as if he hadn’t been to bed for a week.
He had dropped his flippant manner, and was as cross and irritable as an over-tired woman.
“Think of these canaille that we feed and clothe, and risk our lives for!” he exclaimed half hysterically. “We left twenty of them here, when Anna and I started for Zizscky yesterday,—twenty armed men. And yet at the first rumor of danger they sneak away to the woods, and leave their charge, that they had sworn to defend, so that we trusted them. And it is these swine, and others like them,—dastards all!—who clamor for what they call freedom, and think if they get their vote and their Duma, all will go well. Why should we throw our lives away for such as these? We are all fools together, you and I and Anna. And you,” he turned towards me, “you are the biggest fool of us all, for you have not even the excuse that is ours! You have no stake in this accursed country and its people. Nom du diable, why do you act as if you had? You are—”
“Calm yourself, Stepán,” Loris interposed. “Go and sleep; we all need that. And as for your cowardly servants, forget all about them. They are worth no more. Go, as I bid you!”
His level voice, his authoritative manner, had their affect, and Vassilitzi lurched away. He wasn’t really drunk; but when a man is famished and dead-tired, two or three glasses of wine will have an immense effect on him; though one glass will serve to pull him together, as it did me, to a certain extent anyhow. I was able to ask Loris about that horrible apparition I had seen.
“Yes, she is the Countess Anna Pendennis, or all that remains of her,” he answered sternly and sadly. “You have only seen her at a distance, but that was sufficient to show you what Siberia may mean to a delicately nurtured woman. If she had only died—as was given out! But she did not die. She worked as a slave,—in the prison in winter, in the fields in summer. She had frost-bite; it destroyed her sight, her face; it made her a horror to look upon. Yet still she did not die, perhaps because her mind was gone, and strength lingers in mad creatures!
“Yossof told all this. He was her fellow prisoner, and he made his escape two—no, three years or more, since. He made his way here, and Anna was good to him; as she is good to every creature in adversity. Until then she had always believed that her mother died at her birth; but when she learned the truth, she would have moved Heaven and earth to deliver her. It was accomplished at last; the Tzar was induced to sign an order for the release of this mad and maimed woman. Just when all hope seemed lost the deliverance came; and the wreck that remains of the Countess Anna Pendennis was brought here,—less than three months ago; and—”
He broke off as the woman servant Yossof had spoken of as Natalya hurried into the room and unceremoniously beckoned him out. He rose at once and followed her, but turned at the door.
“Get some sleep while you can,” he said, nodding towards a great couch covered with a bear-skin rug. “None will disturb you here for a few hours; and we shall have either to fight or to travel again ere long.”