"And without fighting? Ivan Barrinka, it is too bad! So those accursed Nyemtzi will have it all—the glorious, beautiful city of the Czar; the tombs, the treasures of his fathers; the forty times forty churches, the holy pictures of the saints! Woe, woe! Why have we lived to see such days?"
"Listen, Michael," said Ivan, arresting the hand with which he was tearing his beard. "Listen to me. The Nyemtzi shall not have it."
"What do you mean, Barrinka?"
"This. We will do for holy Moscow—our beautiful, our beloved—what a father would do for an only daughter, a husband for a wife, a brother for a sister, if there were no other way to save them from those accursed Nyemtzi—our own hands will deal the death-blow."
"How?"
"What should you have done with Nicolofsky while the French were in it?"
"Holy saints! Then you mean to burn the city?"
"These hands of mine will fling the brand into this house, which has been my home ever since I left your village. Nay, more, I am one of the directors of the secret band commissioned to spread the conflagration."
Michael stared at him in amazement, but did not speak.
Ivan resumed: "Perhaps you will think me dreaming—at least you will wonder by what authority I tell you these strange and awful things. I was a boy when last we met, Michael; indeed, until six weeks ago I was little more. Then the war broke out, and the Czar came here. I saw him; not for the first time, Michael Ivanovitch, for it was he—he and no other—whom I saw in my childhood's days ministering to poor unconscious Stefen on the bank of the Oka. My heart went forth to him at once, laid itself at his feet, vowed to serve him until death."
"So? Then you fight for love, Ivan Barrinka. I fight for hate."
