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"One has seduced and abducted my sister," he thought, "another will come and murder my mother, a third will set fire to the house and sack the place. . . . And all this under the mask of friendship, lofty ideas, unhappiness!" "No, it shall not be!" Pyotr Mihalitch cried suddenly, and he brought his fist down on the table. He jumped up and ran out of the dining-room.
"And your master carried her off from you?" "No, not at all. It was this gentleman here, Mr. Psyekov, Ivan Mihalitch, who enticed her from me, and the master took her from Ivan Mihalitch. That's how it was." Psyekov looked confused and began rubbing his left eye. Dyukovsky fastened his eyes upon him, detected his confusion, and started.
As he rode into the darkness, he looked round and saw Vlassitch and Zina walking home along the road he taking long strides, while she walked with a hurried, jerky step beside him talking eagerly about something. "I am an old woman!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch. "I went to solve the question and I have only made it more complicated there it is!" He was heavy at heart.
Pyotr Mihalitch walked home, and thought with horror what the police captain's feelings would be when he learned the truth. And Pyotr Mihalitch imagined his feelings, and actually experiencing them himself, went into the house. "Lord help us," he thought, "Lord help us!" At evening tea the only one at the table was his aunt.
Before him he saw Vlassitch's fence with a row of yellow acacias, which were tall and lanky too; where the fence was broken he could see the neglected orchard. Pyotr Mihalitch was not thinking now of the horsewhip or of a slap in the face, and did not know what he would do at Vlassitch's. He felt nervous.
There were three people at the samovar: maman; an old lady with tortoiseshell pince-nez, who gave music lessons; and Avgustin Mihalitch, an elderly and very stout Frenchman, who was employed at a perfumery factory. "I have had no dinner to-day," said maman. "I ought to send the maid to buy some bread." "Dunyasha!" shouted the Frenchman.
'A wise man cast me off, she says, 'and a fool picked me up. To her thinking no one but a pitiful idiot could have behaved as I did. And that is insufferably bitter to me, brother. Altogether, I may say in parenthesis, fate has been hard upon me, very hard." Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and wondered in perplexity what it was in this man that had so charmed his sister.
Pyotr Mihalitch and Vlassitch had been walking near this very spot only a fortnight before, humming a students' song: "'Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and loveless." A wretched song! It was thundering as Pyotr Mihalitch rode through the copse, and the trees were bending and rustling in the wind. He had to make haste.
Pyotr Mihalitch crossed the boundary of his estate and galloped over a smooth, level field. He often went along this road and knew every bush, every hollow in it. What now in the far distance looked in the dusk like a dark cliff was a red church; he could picture it all down to the smallest detail, even the plaster on the gate and the calves that were always grazing in the church enclosure.
We were getting near the place where they were cutting down the trees, when suddenly a shout and hurried talk was heard, following on the crash of a falling tree, and a few instants after a young peasant, pale and dishevelled, dashed out of the thicket towards us. 'What is it? where are you running? Ardalion Mihalitch asked him. He stopped at once. 'Ah, Ardalion Mihalitch, sir, an accident!
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