Daria shuddered, turning her face away. Sophia looked at her with glittering eyes.
“It will avail nothing to resist,” she went on, in a fierce, low tone, “you are in my power; your father cannot save you; you shall marry Kurakin, I swear it! And Galitsyn will never see your face again—never.”
Daria gave her a look of superb disdain and answered not a word, and the czarevna, maddened by her manner, caught her by the wrist and drew her to a window, and they looked through it as I looked through another. We could see nearly the whole of the Red Place, and it was filled with a living, surging mass of humanity that roared and wavered like the billows of the ocean. A mass of upturned savage faces, white with fury, red with blood, and, borne aloft—here and there—on the points of spears, the gory heads of their victims. They waded deep in blood and mire, for they had trampled the dead and dying under foot, the very air reeked as from a slaughter-house, and the voice of the mob! Deep and awesome as the voice of the tempest, rolling and growling in the distance, and then rising in a fearful, ear-splitting yell of frenzy—“Slay, slay, slay!”
I, a strong man, turned sick and dizzy; I looked back and saw the princess standing like a statue. Sophia had her left wrist, but Daria did not look at her: her eyes were riveted upon the sight below, her nostrils dilated, her breath came quickly; I saw her right hand clench. The voice of the mob echoed about us; a raven, frightened by the noise, burst into the window and flew over our heads, beating its wings against the roof in its efforts to escape. Looking at the princess, I felt that she too, was like a captive bird, but still she gazed below and I looked again also, and saw them kill a boyar and dash his brains out on the pavement. I cursed Sophia in my heart as a fiend. Then the howl came up—the wolf’s cry, after tasting blood.
“A Naryshkin! Give us a traitor—give us Prince Voronin!”
“Hearest thou, Daria Kirilovna?” said the czarevna; “he cannot save you—but I can save him!”
The Princess Daria leaned against the wall, her eyes closed.
“You are in my power!” said Sophia fiercely.
Again, the wolf’s howl: “Blood, blood!”
It rose and leaped against the turrets and rebounded with an echo that froze the heart. The raven beat its wings.