§4
For the rest, he had convinced himself that he was dangerously ill, and was constantly under treatment. He had a doctor resident in the house and was visited by two or three other physicians; and at least three consultations took place each year. His sour looks and constant complaints of his health (which was not really so bad) soon reduced the number of our visitors. He resented this; yet he never remonstrated or invited any friend to the house. An air of terrible boredom reigned in our house, especially in the endless winter evenings. The whole suite of drawing-rooms was lit up by a single pair of lamps; and there the old man walked up and down, a stooping figure with his hands behind his back; he wore cloth boots, a velvet skull-cap, and a warm jacket of white lamb-skin; he never spoke a word, and three or four brown dogs walked up and down with him.
As melancholy grew on him, so did his wish to save, but it was entirely misapplied. His management of his land was not beneficial either to himself or to his serfs. The head man and his underlings robbed both their master and the peasants. In certain matters there was strict economy: candle-ends were saved and light French wine was replaced by sour wine from the Crimea; on the other hand, a whole forest was felled without his knowledge on one estate, and he paid the market price for his own oats on another. There were men whom he permitted to steal; thus a peasant, whom he made collector of the obrók at Moscow, and who was sent every summer to the country, to report on the head man and the farm-work, the garden and the timber, grew rich enough to buy a house in Moscow after ten years’ service. From childhood I hated this factotum: I was present once when he thrashed an old peasant in our court-yard; in my fury I caught him by the beard and nearly fainted myself. From that time I could never bear the sight of him. He died in 1845. Several times I asked my father where this man got the money to buy a house.
“The result of sober habits,” he said; “that man never took a drop in his life.”