THE tocsin in the church tower at Narva had ceased. In a breach of the battered rampart lay the fallen Swedish heroes, over whose despoiled and naked bodies the Russians stormed into the city with wild cries. Some Cossacks, who had sewed a live cat into the belly of an inn-keeper, were still laughing in a circle around their victim, but the gigantic Peter Alexievitch, the czar, soon burst his way through the midst of the throng on street and courtyard and cut down his own men to check their misdeeds. His right arm up to the shoulder was drenched with the blood of his own subjects. Weary of murder, troop after troop finally assembled in the square and the churchyard. Under the pretext that the churches had been desecrated by the misbelievers who lay buried there, bands of soldiers began to violate and plunder the graves. Stones were pried up from the floor of the church with crowbars, and outside, the graves were opened with shovels. Pillagers broke the copper and tin caskets into pieces and threw dice for the silver handles and plates. The streets, where at the first mêlée the inhabitants had thrown down fire-brands and tiles, and where the blood of the slain was still swimming in the gutters, were for many days piled up with rusty or half-blackened coffins. The hair on some of the bodies had grown so that it hung out between the boards. Some of the dead lay embalmed and well preserved, though brown and withered, but from most of the coffins yellow skeletons grinned forth from collapsed and mouldered shrouds. People who stole anxiously among them read the coffin-plates in the twilight and now and then recognized the name of a near relative, a mother or a sister. Sometimes they saw the ravagers pull out the decayed remains and throw them into the river. Sometimes, again, protected by night, they themselves succeeded in carrying them off and burying them outside the city. So in the dusk one might encounter an old man or woman who came stealing along toilsomely with children or serving-maids, carrying a coffin.
One night a swarm of pillagers bivouacked in a corner of the churchyard. Hi! what fun it was to pile up a bonfire of bed-slats and bolsters and chairs and coffin-ends and what the devil else could be dragged forth. Flames and sparks blazed up as high as the attic window of the parsonage. Round about stood coffins propped one against another. The bottom of one of the uppermost had been broken, so that the treasurer, of blessed memory, who was inside it, stood there upright with his spliced wig on his head and looked as if he thought: “I pray you, into what company have I been conducted?”
“Haha! little father,” the robbers called to him, as they roasted August apples and onions at the flames; “you always wanted something to wet your whistle, you there!”
The glow of the fire lighted up the living-room of the parsonage and the sparks flew in through the broken panes. In the rooms stood only a broken table and a chair, upon which sat the parson with his head propped on his hands.
“Who knows? Perhaps it might succeed,” he mumbled and raised himself as if he had found the key to a long-considered problem.
His silver-white beard spread itself over all his breast, and his hair hung down to his shoulders. In his youth as chaplain he had gone in for a little of everything and he had never pushed back a cup that was offered him. Afterwards as a widower in the parsonage he had worshipped God with joy and mirth and a brimming bowl, and it was bruited about that he did not reach first for his Bible if a well-formed wench happened to be in his company. He therefore even now took misfortune more bravely and resignedly than others, and his heart was as undaunted as his soldierly body was unbowed by years.
He went out into the entry and cautiously pulled out the five or six rusty nails that held down a couple of boards above a little narrow recess under the stairs. Then he lifted the boards aside.
“Come out, my child!” he said.
When no one obeyed him, his voice grew somewhat more severe and he repeated his words: “Come out, Lina! Both the other maids have been bound and carried away. It was verily at the last minute that I got you in here. But it is almost a day since then, and you cannot live without meat and drink. Eh?”
When he was not obeyed, he threw back his head in annoyance, and he now spoke in accents of harsh command: “Why don’t you obey? Do you think there is food here? There’s not so much as a pinch of salt left in the house. You must be got away, you understand. If it goes ill with you, if a plunderer gets you on the way, I can only say this: clasp your arms about his neck and follow with him on his horse’s back wherever it carries you. Many a time in the rough-and-tumble of war have I seen such a love, and then I have slung the soldier’s cloak over my priest’s frock and waved my hat for a lucky end to the song. Don’t you hear, lass? When your late father, who was a drinker—if I must tell the truth—was my stableboy and pulled me out of a hole in the ice once, I promised for the future to provide for him and his child. Besides, he was Swedish born as I was. Well, haven’t I always been a fatherly master to you, or what has Her Grace to object? Have her wits deserted her, eh?”