War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [580]
An approving murmur of satisfaction ran through the crowd. “It means he’ll deal with all the villains! And you say Frenchmen…he’ll undo the whole distance for you!” people said, as if reproaching each other for lack of faith.
A few minutes later an officer came hastily out of the front door, gave some order, and the dragoons stood to attention. The crowd eagerly moved from the balcony towards the porch. Coming out to the porch with wrathfully quick steps, Rastopchin hastily looked around, as if seeking someone.
“Where is he?” said the count, and the moment he said it, he saw coming around the corner of the house, between two dragoons, a young man with a long, thin neck, half of his head shaved and covered with new stubble. This young man was dressed in a once-foppish but now shabby coat of dark blue broadcloth lined with fox fur and dirty canvas convict’s trousers tucked into unpolished, thin, down-at-heel boots. Irons hung heavily on his thin, weak legs, hampering the young man’s irresolute steps.
“Ah!” said Rastopchin, hastily turning his gaze from the young man in the fox fur coat and pointing to the lowest step of the porch. “Put him there!” The young man, clanking his irons, climbed heavily onto the step indicated, pulled with his finger at the chafing collar of his coat, turned his long neck twice, and, with a sigh, folded his slender, nonworking hands over his stomach in a submissive gesture.
For a few seconds, while the young man was settling himself on the step, the silence continued. Only in the back rows, from among the people pressing towards that one point, came grunts, groans, the sounds of shoving and the stamping of shifting feet.
Rastopchin, waiting for the man to stand still on the appointed place, frowningly rubbed his face with his hand.
“Lads!” Rastopchin said in a ringing, metallic voice, “this man, Vereshchagin—is the very scoundrel who has brought ruin to Moscow.”
The young man in the fox fur coat stood in a submissive pose, stooping slightly, his hands clasped together over his stomach. His emaciated young face, with a hopeless expression, disfigured by the shaven head, was lowered. At the count’s first words, he slowly raised his head and looked at him from below as if wishing to say something to him or at least to meet his eyes. But Rastopchin was not looking at him. On the young man’s long, thin neck, behind his ear, a vein swelled like a cord and turned blue, and his face suddenly reddened.
All eyes were directed at him. He looked at the crowd, and, as if encouraged by the expression he read on people’s faces, smiled sadly and timidly, and, lowering his head again, shifted his feet on the step.
“He has betrayed his tsar and his fatherland, he has gone over to Bonaparte, he alone of all Russians has disgraced the Russian name, and he has brought ruin on Moscow,” Rastopchin was saying in a flat, shrill voice; but suddenly he gave a quick glance down at Vereshchagin, who went on standing in the same submissive pose. It was as if this glance blew him up. Raising his arm, he almost shouted, turning to the people: “Deal summarily with him! I hand him over to you!”
The people were silent and only pressed closer and closer from behind. To hold on to each other, to breathe in that infected atmosphere, having no strength to stir, and to wait for something unknown, incomprehensible, and dreadful, was becoming unbearable. The people standing in the front rows, seeing and hearing all that was going on before them, with frightened, wide-open eyes and gaping mouths, strained all their forces to hold back the pressure of those behind them.
“Beat him!…Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!” Rastopchin began shouting. “Cut him down! I order it!”
Hearing not the words but the wrathful sound of Rastopchin’s voice, the crowd groaned and moved closer, but stopped again.
“Count!…” Vereshchagin’s voice, timid and at