Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [386]
And Misha stared at this happy pair and wondered what to say.
‘We shall go to Moscow tomorrow,’ Sergei gaily announced. ‘Then to St Petersburg. Karpenko and I are full of ideas. We shall take the capital by storm!’ He looked about him. ‘Where the devil’s Ilya? We’re both longing to see him.’ And servants were sent to look for him.
It was only after running upstairs to see his wife that Sergei returned looking puzzled. ‘That’s the strangest thing,’ he remarked to Misha. ‘I thought she hated the country. Now she says she wants to stay down here another week or two while we go on to Moscow. What do you make of that?’ And then, staring in perplexity at his nephew’s troubled face: ‘Now what’s the matter with you, my Misha?’
And now, it seemed to Misha, he had to tell him.
The arrangements were discreetly made that afternoon.
The place chosen was the little clearing by the burial mounds off the lane that led to the monastery. No one was likely to come by there at dawn. Pinegin having no person to be his second, Karpenko had unwillingly done as Sergei asked, and assumed that responsibility.
Dinner that afternoon passed quietly. Sergei, Pinegin and Karpenko made polite conversation, in which Misha attempted to follow them. By agreement, neither Tatiana nor Nadia was given any inkling of what was passing.
Indeed, the only mystery that day lay in the whereabouts of Ilya who still, by afternoon, had not returned. Since he had been seen going along the lane towards Russka, however, it was hard to believe that much harm could have come to him. After dinner, Karpenko undertook to amuse the ladies while Sergei retired to his room to make his preparations.
There were a number of letters to write. One was to Olga; another to his mother; another to his wife. He wrote them very calmly and carefully. The one to his wife contained no reproaches. The letter on which he spent the most trouble, strangely, was the one to Alexis.
It was in the late afternoon, as the sun was starting to sink towards the tall watchtower at Russka, that another, even more curious sight was seen by the villagers at Bobrovo.
It was the return of Ilya.
He came, as before, on foot. He was very tired now and his feet were dragging, but he did not seem to mind. And upon his face was a look which, insofar as was possible in a man so overweight, could only be described as religious ecstasy.
For Ilya had found that which he sought.
And it was this wonderful discovery that he shared with Sergei, in the latter’s room that night, long after the sun had gone down.
It was a strange little scene: the one brother tired, shaken, longing only to be left alone with his thoughts until the dawn; the other, entirely unaware of what was going on, his face flushed with excitement, intent upon telling his companion the things that were passing through his mind and which seemed to him so important. ‘Indeed, Seriozha,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t have come at a better time.’
The great crisis Ilya had suffered was easy enough to understand. All summer he had laboured at the plan of his great book. Every waking moment, all his mind, had gone into it. And by August he had produced a blue-print for a new Russia, a modern Russia, with western laws and institutions, and a vigorous economy – ‘maybe like that of the merchants and free farmers of America,’ There was really nothing wrong with Ilya’s plan. It was intelligent, practical, logical: