War and Peace Leo Tolstoy (best e books to read .TXT) 📖

“The Elder? What do you want with him?⁠ ⁠…” asked Karp.

But before the words were well out of his mouth, his cap flew off and a fierce blow jerked his head to one side.

“Caps off, traitors!” shouted Rostóv in a wrathful voice. “Where’s the Elder?” he cried furiously.

“The Elder.⁠ ⁠… He wants the Elder!⁠ ⁠… Dron Zakhárych, you!” meek and flustered voices here and there were heard calling and caps began to come off their heads.

“We don’t riot, we’re following the orders,” declared Karp, and at that moment several voices began speaking together.

“It’s as the old men have decided⁠—there’s too many of you giving orders.”

“Arguing? Mutiny!⁠ ⁠… Brigands! Traitors!” cried Rostóv unmeaningly in a voice not his own, gripping Karp by the collar. “Bind him, bind him!” he shouted, though there was no one to bind him but Lavrúshka and Alpátych.

Lavrúshka, however, ran up to Karp and seized him by the arms from behind.

“Shall I call up our men from beyond the hill?” he called out.

Alpátych turned to the peasants and ordered two of them by name to come and bind Karp. The men obediently came out of the crowd and began taking off their belts.

“Where’s the Elder?” demanded Rostóv in a loud voice.

With a pale and frowning face Dron stepped out of the crowd.

“Are you the Elder? Bind him, Lavrúshka!” shouted Rostóv, as if that order, too, could not possibly meet with any opposition.

And in fact two more peasants began binding Dron, who took off his own belt and handed it to them, as if to aid them.

“And you all listen to me!” said Rostóv to the peasants. “Be off to your houses at once, and don’t let one of your voices be heard!”

“Why, we’ve not done any harm! We did it just out of foolishness. It’s all nonsense.⁠ ⁠… I said then that it was not in order,” voices were heard bickering with one another.

“There! What did I say?” said Alpátych, coming into his own again. “It’s wrong, lads!”

“All our stupidity, Yákov Alpátych,” came the answers, and the crowd began at once to disperse through the village.

The two bound men were led off to the master’s house. The two drunken peasants followed them.

“Aye, when I look at you!⁠ ⁠…” said one of them to Karp.

“How can one talk to the masters like that? What were you thinking of, you fool?” added the other⁠—“A real fool!”

Two hours later the carts were standing in the courtyard of the Boguchárovo house. The peasants were briskly carrying out the proprietor’s goods and packing them on the carts, and Dron, liberated at Princess Márya’s wish from the cupboard where he had been confined, was standing in the yard directing the men.

“Don’t put it in so carelessly,” said one of the peasants, a man with a round smiling face, taking a casket from a housemaid. “You know it has cost money! How can you chuck it in like that or shove it under the cord where it’ll get rubbed? I don’t like that way of doing things. Let it all be done properly, according to rule. Look here, put it under the bast matting and cover it with hay⁠—that’s the way!”

“Eh, books, books!” said another peasant, bringing out Prince Andréy’s library cupboards. “Don’t catch up against it! It’s heavy, lads⁠—solid books.”

“Yes, they worked all day and didn’t play!” remarked the tall, round-faced peasant gravely, pointing with a significant wink at the dictionaries that were on the top.

Unwilling to obtrude himself on the princess, Rostóv did not go back to the house but remained in the village awaiting her departure. When her carriage drove out of the house, he mounted and accompanied her eight miles from Boguchárovo to where the road was occupied by our troops. At the inn at Yankóvo he respectfully took leave of her, for the first time permitting himself to kiss her hand.

“How can you speak so!” he blushingly replied to Princess Márya’s expressions of gratitude for her deliverance, as she termed what had occurred. “Any police officer would have done as much! If we had had only peasants to fight, we should not have let the enemy come so far,” said he with a sense of shame and wishing to change the subject. “I am only happy to have had the opportunity of making your acquaintance. Goodbye, Princess. I wish you happiness and consolation and hope to meet you again in happier circumstances. If you don’t want to make me blush, please don’t thank me!”

But the princess, if she did not again thank him in words, thanked him with the whole expression of her face, radiant with gratitude and tenderness. She could not believe that there was nothing to thank him for. On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he not been there she would have perished at the hands of the mutineers and of the French, and that he had exposed himself to terrible and obvious danger to save her, and even more certain was it that he was a man of lofty and noble soul, able to understand her position and her sorrow. His kind, honest eyes, with the tears rising in them when she herself had begun to cry as she spoke of her loss, did not leave her memory.

When she had taken leave of him and remained alone she suddenly felt her eyes filling with tears, and then not for the first time the strange question presented itself to her: did she love him?

On the rest of the way to Moscow, though the princess’ position was not a cheerful one, Dunyásha, who went with her in the carriage, more than once noticed that her mistress leaned out of the window and smiled at something with an expression of mingled joy and sorrow.

“Well, supposing I do love him?” thought Princess Márya.

Ashamed as she was of acknowledging to herself that she had fallen in love with a man who would perhaps never love her, she comforted herself with the thought that no one