CHAPTER XLVII
THE TRAGEDY IN THE SQUARE
It was the flat of the sabre that had got me on the forehead, otherwise there’d have been an end of me at once. I was not unconscious for very long, for when I sat up, wiped the blood out of my eyes, and stared about me, sick and dazed, unable for the moment to recollect what had happened, I could still hear a tumult raging in the distance.
The street itself was quiet; the soldiers, the mob were gone; all the houses were shut and silent, though scared faces were peeping from some of the upper windows. Here and there a wounded man or woman was staggering or crawling away; and close beside me a woman was sitting, like a statue of despair, with her back against the wall, and something lying prone across her knees—the little mangled body of the boy who had been killed in the first scuffle, that Marie Levinska had provoked.
I remembered all then, and looked round wildly for Anne. There was no sign either of her or of Natalya.
I scrambled up, impatiently binding my handkerchief tight round my wounded head, which was bleeding profusely now, and stood over the silent woman.
“Where are they? Where is the lady who was with you?” I demanded hoarsely. “Answer me, for God’s sake!”
“They took her away—those devils incarnate—and the other woman got up and ran after,” she answered dully. “There was an officer with them; he cried out that they would teach her not to insult the army.”
I felt my blood run cold. Since I returned to this accursed country I had seen many—and heard of more—deeds of such fiendish cruelty perpetrated on weak women, on innocent little children, that I knew what the Cossacks were capable of when their blood was up. They were, as the women said, devils incarnate at such times.