第24章

The Cossacks rode away,passing through the yards of the home farm straight into the fields.The priest,still arguing with the peasants,moved gradually down the drive and his earnest eloquence was drawing the silent mob after him,away from the house.This justice must be rendered to the parish priests of the Greek Church that,strangers to the country as they were (being all drawn from the interior of Russia),the majority of them used such influence as they had over their flocks in the cause of peace and humanity.True to the spirit of their calling,they tried to soothe the passions of the excited peasantry,and opposed rapine and violence,whenever they could,with all their might.And this conduct they pursued against the express wishes of the authorities.Later on some of them were made to suffer for this disobedience by being removed abruptly to the far north or sent away to Siberian parishes.

The servant was anxious to get rid of the few peasants who had got into the house.What sort of conduct was that,he asked them,toward a man who was only a tenant,had been invariably good and considerate to the villagers for years,and only the other day had agreed to give up two meadows for the use of the village herd?He reminded them,too,of Mr.Nicholas B.'s devotion to the sick in time of cholera.Every word of this was true,and so far effective that the fellows began to scratch their heads and look irresolute.The speaker then pointed at the window,exclaiming:"Look!there's all your crowd going away quietly,and you silly chaps had better go after them and pray God to forgive you your evil thoughts."

This appeal was an unlucky inspiration.

In crowding clumsily to the window to see whether he was speaking the truth,the fellows overturned the little writing-table.As it fell over a chink of loose coin was heard."There's money in that thing,"cried the blacksmith.In a moment the top of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed and there lay exposed in a drawer eighty half imperials.Gold coin was a rare sight in Russia even at that time;it put the peasants beside themselves.

"There must be more of that in the house,and we shall have it,"

yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith."This is war-time."The others were already shouting out of the window,urging the crowd to come back and help.The priest,abandoned suddenly at the gate,flung his arms up and hurried away so as not to see what was going to happen.

In their search for money that bucolic mob smashed everything in the house,ripping with knives,splitting with hatchets,so that,as the servant said,there were no two pieces of wood holding together left in the whole house.They broke some very fine mirrors,all the windows,and every piece of glass and china.

They threw the books and papers out on the lawn and set fire to the heap for the mere fun of the thing,apparently.Absolutely the only one solitary thing which they left whole was a small ivory crucifix,which remained hanging on the wall in the wrecked bedroom above a wild heap of rags,broken mahogany,and splintered boards which had been Mr.Nicholas B.'s bedstead.

Detecting the servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned tin box,they tore it from him,and because he resisted they threw him out of the dining-room window.The house was on one floor,but raised well above the ground,and the fall was so serious that the man remained lying stunned till the cook and a stable-boy ventured forth at dusk from their hiding-places and picked him up.But by that time the mob had departed,carrying off the tin box,which they supposed to be full of paper money.

Some distance from the house,in the middle of a field,they broke it open.They found in side documents engrossed on parchment and the two crosses of the Legion of Honour and For Valour.At the sight of these objects,which,the blacksmith explained,were marks of honour given only by the Tsar,they became extremely frightened at what they had done.They threw the whole lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily.

On learning of this particular loss Mr.Nicholas B.broke down completely.The mere sacking of his house did not seem to affect him much.While he was still in bed from the shock,the two crosses were found and returned to him.It helped somewhat his slow convalescence,but the tin box and the parchments,though searched for in all the ditches around,never turned up again.

He could not get over the loss of his Legion of Honour Patent,whose preamble,setting forth his services,he knew by heart to the very letter,and after this blow volunteered sometimes to recite,tears standing in his eyes the while.Its terms haunted him apparently during the last two years of his life to such an extent that he used to repeat them to himself.This is confirmed by the remark made more than once by his old servant to the more intimate friends."What makes my heart heavy is to hear our master in his room at night walking up and down and praying aloud in the French language."

It must have been somewhat over a year afterward that I saw Mr.

Nicholas B.--or,more correctly,that he saw me--for the last time.It was,as I have already said,at the time when my mother had a three months'leave from exile,which she was spending in the house of her brother,and friends and relations were coming from far and near to do her honour.It is inconceivable that Mr.

Nicholas B.should not have been of the number.The little child a few months old he had taken up in his arms on the day of his home-coming,after years of war and exile,was confessing her faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn.I do not know whether he was present on the very day of our departure.