Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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Suddenly one of the audience who had remained silent all this while, a woman named Elena with a simple, kind face, started defending the Tsar. “We don’t know how to express it,” she said, in a low voice, as if to herself, “but we continually pray—O Lord, bring the Tsar back to our Christian faith!”

Her timid attempt was silenced however, by indignant voices crying:—

“He is no Tsar! only a mock-Tsar; he has squandered himself, goes about as if beside himself.”

“He has become quite a Jew, he can no longer live without a sip of blood from time to time. The day he drinks blood, that day he is content and merry, but the day he gets none he can neither eat nor drink.”

“Glutton! he will have eaten everybody soon, for himself there is no extermination.”

“May the earth engulph him!”

“Fools! Curs!” interposed with fury the gunner Alexis Furlong, a red-haired man of huge height, with a face now suggesting a beast, now a child, “fools, for not knowing how to defend yourselves! All of you are doomed soul and body; you will be mashed up like worms in a cabbage. As for me nothing would please me better than to cut him up into little bits.”