‘O Lord!’ some one was heard to utter mournfully. After the exclamation of surprise that broke from Vereshtchagin he uttered a piteous cry of pain, and that cry was his undoing. The barrier of human feeling that still held the mob back was strained to the utmost limit, and it snapped instantaneously. The crime had been begun, its completion was inevitable. The piteous moan of reproach was drowned in the angry and menacing roar of the mob. Like the great seventh wave that shatters a ship, that last, irresistible wave surged up at the back of the crowd, passed on to the foremost ranks, carried them off their feet and engulfed all together. The draeoon who had struck the victim would have repeated his blow.
Vereshtchagin, with a scream of terror, putting his hands up before him. dashed into the crowd. The tall young man, against whom he stumbled gripped Vereshtchagin’s slender neck in his hands, and with a savage shriek fell with him under the feet of the trampling, roaring mob. Some beat and tore at Vereshtchagin, others at the tall young man. And the screams of persons crushed in the crowd and of those who tried to rescue the tall young man only increased the frenzy of the mob. For a long while the dragoons were unable to get the bleeding, half-murdered factory workman away. And in spite of all the feverish haste with which the mob strove to make an end of what had once been begun, the men who beat and strangled Vereshtchagin and tore him to pieces could not kill him. The crowd pressed on them on all sides, heaved from side to side like one man with them in the middle, and would not let them kill him outright or let him go.
‘Hit him with an axe, eh? . . . they have crushed him . . . Traitor, he sold Christ! . . . living . . . alive . . . serve the thief right. With a bar! ... Is he alive? . . .’
Only when the victim ceased to struggle, and his shrieks had passed into a long-drawn, rhythmic death-rattle, the mob began hurriedly to change places about the bleeding corpse on the ground. Every one went up to it, gazed at what had been done, and pressed back horror-stricken, surprised, and reproachful.
‘O Lord, the people’s like a wild beast; how could he be alive!’ was heard in the crowd. ‘And a young fellow too . . . must have been a merchant’s son, to be sure, the people . . . they do say it’s not the right man . . . not the right man! . . . O Lord! . . . They have nearly murdered another man; they say he’s almost dead . . . Ah, the people . . . who wouldn’t be afraid of sin . . were saying now the same people, looking with rueful pity at the dead body, with the blue face fouled with dust and blood, and the long, slender, broken neck.
A punctilious police official, feeling the presence of the body unseemly in the courtyard of his excellency, bade the dragoons drag the body away into the street. Two dragoons took hold of the mutilated legs, and drew the body away. The dead, shaven head, stained with blood and grimed with dust, was trailed along the ground, rolling from side to side on the long neck. The crowd shrank away from the corpse.
When Vereshtchagin fell, and the crowd with a savage yell closed in and heaved about him, Rastoptchin suddenly turned white, and instead of going to the back entrance, where horses were waiting for him, he strode rapidly along the corridor leading to the rooms of the lower story, looking on the floor and not knowing where or why he was going. The count’s face was white, and he could not check the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.
‘Your excellency, this way . . . where are you going? . . . this way,’ said a trembling, frightened voice behind him. Count Rastoptchin was incapable of making any reply. Obediently turning, he went in the direction indicated. At the back entrance stood a carriage. The distant roar
