A few minutes later, while Pavel was destroying some papers in his room, the door swung open and in came Onufri. The old man burst into tears and dropped to his knees.
“Take pity, sir,” he wailed, kissing Pavel’s fingers. “You’ve played with fire long enough, sir. If they put you in prison, the murderers, and sent you away it would kill her Highness, your mother.”
“Get up, Onufri. I have no patience with you just now, really I haven’t.”
“It’s bad enough when your Highness takes chances in another town, but if you’re mixed up in this here thing, sir——”
“I’m not mixed up ‘in this here thing.’ Don’t bother me. Come, get up. Up with you, now. There is a good fellow!”
The old hussar obeyed distressedly.
Instead of going to the place where he expected to see Makar, Pavel went to the house of Major Safonoff, the gendarme officer, an uncomfortable-looking frame building across the river. As he approached it, Masha, the major’s sister, who stood at a second story window at that moment, apparently waiting for somebody, burst out beckoning to him and stamping her feet. Her excited gesticulations drew the attention of a knife-grinder and two little girls. Pavel dropped his eyes. “She is a perfect idiot,” he said to himself in a rage, “and I am another one. The idea of taking up with such a creature!”
“Didn’t you torture me!” she greeted him on the staircase. “I thought my heart was going to snap. Don’t be uneasy. I have dismissed our servant. There is nobody around.” When they reached the low-ceiled parlor, she sank her voice and said solemnly, yet with a certain note of triumph: “He was arrested at four o’clock yesterday on the railway tracks. The gendarme office had information that he was in the habit of taking walks there. I happened to be away—think of it! At a time like that I was away. Else I should have let you know at once, of course. Anyhow, he’s there.”
“You say it as if it was something to rejoice in,” Pavel remarked, disguising his rage. “It’s quite a serious matter, Maria Gavrilovna.”
Mlle. Safonoff stared. “But we’ll get him out. Why, are you afraid we mayn’t? I see you’re depressed and that makes me miserable, too. Really it does.”