“You’ve got it!” she cried. “You’ve got it! You dear, clever, dazzling old boy!” And, throwing her arms about his neck, she gave him a resounding kiss.
“Delicious!” he exclaimed, smacking his lips. “Your kisses, Tatiana, are like yourself—quite out of the common nice.”
“Not so loud!” she admonished. “Think of it, there’s frost on both our heads, and we’ve been lovers for nearly—”
“’Ssh, ’ssh!” he laughed. “Never mention figures except when they are slender ones.”
She was about to riposte, but Piotr at this juncture bounded in from the veranda, waving his Kossàk cap in his chubby gloved hand, with a “But aren’t you ready, Aunt Tatiana?” that sent her flying to her dressing-room.
In the park it was delightful. The trees were covered with a delicate veil of tender green, while flowers newly bedded and glistening with drops from the gardeners’ “lances” breathed the very breath of spring, and the ruffled surface of the lakes gleamed and glinted like pailleted satin, showing soft azure lights through their dancing transparencies.
Salvières and his Tatiana had determined to go together to Krasnöe-Sèloe in order to cheer up their little nephew, and in a short while they reached the camp.
The dust raised in the early morning by cavalry hoofs and the marching feet of infantry had settled down after a fashion, but there still remained a sort of golden haze about the whole place which gave it a mysterious charm. The great mess-tent, its front flaps symmetrically looped back, stood in the midst of the officers’ toy isbas like a snowy mother-hen tending her brood; while in the middle distance the gay little summer theater, where youth and middle-age and valor congregate in the evening, to while away the boredom engendered by banishment all of a few versts from Petersburg, displayed its gay façade. Here and there a general or a colonel, already a trifle heavy on the wing, passed at a canter saluting right and left, and many a “selfish” dròchki rattled by—narrow as a dagger-blade, with some young subaltern holding the reins, and often with one of his comrades perched on the very edge of his knees—so to speak—for lack of space to sit beside him.
And here, there, and everywhere—like pastilles of peppermint and cherry, as Piotr sapiently remarked—the flat, white caps liséréd with red of Messieurs les Gardes-à-Cheval dotted the fresh verdure, for that distinguished corps had just arrived to take up its manœuvering quarters.
“Pavlo,” or, rather, Paul, Prince de Salvières, oldest son and heir of the charming couple of that ilk, had out of adoration for his mother elected to enter the Russian army, and more particularly the Gardes-à-Cheval—a crack corps—nor had his father objected to this. “You are not needed in France, my boy,” he had said to the lad, “at least not as long as what one of the Republic’s amiable ministers called ‘draughty names’ (des noms à courants d’air) are systematically discouraged in both the army and navy. Should the day of the Revanche ever dawn, it will be another affair, but for us, unfortunately, there is nothing to do now in our own beloved land. It is,” he had added, although little given to sentiment, especially when expressed aloud, “the only real sorrow of my life to see that from day to day our rôle, political, diplomatic, or military, is rendered more and more impossible. However, our hour may come sooner than we expect. Let us, at any rate, pray that it may be so.”