Hadji Murád, Leo Tolstoy [romantic books to read txt] 📗

a requiem chanted, and Peter’s name entered among those for whose souls prayers were to be said; and she distributed bits of holy bread to all the good people, in memory of Peter, the servant of God.

Aksínya, his widow, also lamented loudly when she heard of the death of her beloved husband, with whom she had lived but one short year. She regretted her husband, and her own ruined life; and in her lamentations mentioned Peter’s brown locks and his love, and the sadness of her life with her little orphaned Vánka; and bitterly reproached Peter for having had pity on his brother, but none on her⁠—obliged to wander among strangers!

But in the depth of her soul Aksínya was glad of her husband’s death. She was pregnant by the shopman with whom she was living; and no one would now have a right to scold her, and the shopman could marry her as, when he was persuading her to yield, he had said he would.

IX

Michael Seménovich Vorontsóv, being the son of the Russian Ambassador, had been educated in England, and possessed a European education quite exceptional among the higher Russian officials of his day. He was ambitious, gentle, and kind in his manner with inferiors, and a finished courtier with superiors. He did not understand life without power and submission. He had obtained all the highest ranks and decorations, and was looked upon as a clever commander, and even as the conqueror of Napoleon at Krásnoye.21

In 1852 he was over seventy, but was still quite fresh, moved briskly, and above all was in full possession of a facile, refined, and agreeable intellect which he used to maintain his power and strengthen and increase his popularity. He possessed large means⁠—his own and his wife’s (née countess Branítski)⁠—and received an enormous salary as Viceroy; and he spent a great part of his means on building a palace and laying out a garden on the south coast of the Crimea.

On the evening of December the 4th, 1852, a courier’s troika drew up before his palace in Tiflis. A tired officer, black with dust, whom General Kozlovski had sent with the news of Hadji Murád’s surrender to the Russians, went stretching the stiffened muscles of his legs past the sentinel, and entered the wide porch. It was six o’clock, and Vorontsóv was just going in to dinner, when he was informed of the courier’s arrival. Vorontsóv received him at once, and was therefore a few minutes late for dinner.

When he entered the drawing room, the thirty persons invited to dine, sitting beside Princess Elizabeth Ksavérevna Vorontsóva, or standing in groups by the windows, turned their faces towards him. Vorontsóv was dressed in his usual black military coat, with shoulder-straps but no epaulets, and wore the White Cross of the Order of St. George at his neck.

His clean-shaven, foxlike face wore a pleasant smile as, screwing up his eyes, he surveyed the assembly. Entering with quick, soft steps he apologized to the ladies for being late, greeted the men, and approaching Princess Manana Orbelyáni⁠—a tall, fine, handsome woman of Oriental type about forty-five years of age⁠—he offered her his arm to take her in to dinner. The Princess Elizabeth Ksavérevna Vorontsóva herself gave her arm to a red-haired general with bristly mustaches who was visiting Tiflis. A Georgian prince offered his arm to Princess Vorontsóva’s friend, the Countess Choiseuil; Doctor Andréevsky, the aide-de-camp, and others, with ladies or without, followed these first couples. Footmen in livery and knee-breeches drew back and replaced the guests’ chairs when they sat down, while the majordomo ceremoniously ladled out steaming soup from a silver tureen.

Vorontsóv took his place in the center of one side of the long table, and wife sat opposite, with the General on her right. On the Prince’s right sat his lady, the beautiful Orbelyáni; and on his left was a graceful, dark, red-cheeked Georgian woman, glittering with jewels and incessantly smiling.

“Excellentes, chère amie!”22 replied Vorontsóv to his wife’s inquiry about what news the courier had brought him. “Simon a eu de la chance!”23 And he began to tell aloud, so that everyone could hear, the striking news (for him alone not quite unexpected, because negotiations had long been going on) that the bravest and most famous of Shamil’s officers, Hadji Murád, had come over to the Russians and would in a day or two be brought to Tiflis.

Everybody⁠—even the young aides-de-camp and officials who sat at the far ends of the table, and who had been quietly laughing at something among themselves⁠—became silent and listened.

“And you, General, have you ever met this Hadji Murád?” asked the Princess of her neighbor, the carroty General with the bristly mustaches, when the Prince had finished speaking.

“More than once, Princess.”

And the General went on to tell how Hadji Murád, after the mountaineers had captured Gergebel in 1843, had fallen upon General Pahlen’s detachment and killed Colonel Zolotúkhin almost before their very eyes.

Vorontsóv listened to the General and smiled amiably, evidently pleased that the latter had joined in the conversation. But suddenly his face assumed an absentminded and depressed expression.

The General, having started talking, had begun to tell of his second encounter with Hadji Murád.

“Why, it was he, if your Excellency will please remember,” said the General, “who arranged the ambush that attacked the rescue party in the ‘Biscuit’ expedition.”

“Where?” asked Vorontsóv, screwing up his eyes.

What the brave General spoke of as the “rescue,” was the affair in the unfortunate Dargo campaign in which a whole detachment, including Prince Vorontsóv who commanded it, would certainly have perished had it not been rescued by the arrival of fresh troops. Everyone knew that the whole Dargo campaign under Vorontsóv’s command⁠—in which the Russians lost many killed and wounded and several cannons⁠—had been a shameful affair; and therefore if anyone mentioned it in Vorontsóv’s presence, they did so only in the aspect in which Vorontsóv