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The first hut of the village sprang out of the fog before us like some dark monster ... then the second, our hut, emerged and my setter dog began barking, probably scenting me. I knocked at the window. "Semyon!" I shouted to Tyeglev's servant, "hey, Semyon! Make haste and open the gate for us." The gate creaked and opened; Semyon crossed the threshold.
Was it for the same reason, then? "Why don't you marry her, then?" I asked again. Tyeglev's strange, drowsy eyes strayed over the table. "There is ... no answering that ... in a few words," he began, hesitating. "There were reasons.... And besides, she was ... a working-class girl. And then there is my uncle.... I was obliged to consider him, too." "Your uncle?" I cried.
He had the habit of shrugging his shoulders and turning his head from side to side, putting his right hand to his throat as he did so, as though his cravat were constricting it. Tyeglev's character was expressed, so at least it seemed to me, in this uneasy and nervous movement. He, too, felt constricted in the world.
I must add, however, that of late I had begun noticing an unusual expression of anxiety and uneasiness on Tyeglev's face, and it was not a "fatal" melancholy: something really was fretting and worrying him. On this occasion, too, I was struck by the dejected expression of his face. Were not those very doubts of which he had spoken to me beginning to assail him?
To tell the truth, this last letter of poor Tyeglev was somewhat vulgar; and I can fancy the contemptuous surprise of the great personage to whom it was addressed I can imagine the tone in which he would pronounce "a worthless officer! ill weeds are cleared out of the field!" Only at the very end of the letter there was a sincere note from Tyeglev's heart.
Tyeglev's countenance, which was not, however, without a certain attractiveness, almost always wore an expression of discontent mingled with perplexity, as though he were chasing within himself a gloomy thought which he was never able to catch. At the same time he did not give one the impression of being stuck up: he might rather have been taken for an aggrieved than a haughty man.
Semyon said suddenly and showed me his hand stained crimson with blood.... The blood was coming from under Tyeglev's great-coat, from the left side of his chest. He had shot himself from a small, single-barreled pistol which was lying beside him. The faint pop I had heard was the sound made by the fatal shot. Tyeglev's suicide did not surprise his comrades very much.
"Ah, Your Excellency," he concluded his epistle, "I am an orphan, I had no one to love me as a child and all held aloof from me ... and I myself destroyed the only heart that gave itself to me!" Semyon found in the pocket of Tyeglev's great-coat a little album from which his master was never separated.
Tyeglev's aunt was fearfully incensed, she turned the luckless girl out of her house in disgrace, and moved to Moscow where she adopted a young lady of noble birth and made her her heiress. On her return to her own relations, poor and drunken people, Masha's lot was a bitter one. Tyeglev had promised to marry her and did not keep his promise.
A man really was sitting with his back towards us, awkwardly huddled up under the birch-tree. I hurriedly approached and recognised Tyeglev's great-coat, recognised his figure, his head bowed on his breast. "Tyeglev!" I cried ... but he did not answer. "Tyeglev!" I repeated, and laid my hand on his shoulder.
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