“This is the ikon with which our father blessed me on his deathbed, and he then charged me and my late brother, Peter, to take his place and care for you two. If our father could know how you have behaved to your elder brother....”
“Come, mon cher frère,” said my father, in his voice of studied indifference, “you have little to boast about on that score yourself. These references to the past are painful for you and for us, and we had better drop them.”
“What do you mean? Did you invite me here for this?” shouted the pious brother, and he dashed the ikon down with such violence that the silver frame rang loudly on the floor. Now the Senator began, and he shouted still louder; but at this point I rushed upstairs, just waiting long enough to see the nephew and the lawyer, as much alarmed as I was, beating a retreat to the balcony.
What then took place, I cannot tell. The servants had all hid for safety and could give no information; and neither my father nor the Senator ever alluded to the scene in my presence. The noise grew less by degrees, and the division of the land was carried out, but whether then or later, I do not know.
What fell to my father was Vasílevskoë, a large estate near Moscow. We spent all the following summer there; and during that time the Senator bought a house for himself in the Arbat quarter of Moscow, so that, when we returned alone to our big house, we found it empty and dead. Soon after, my father also bought a new house in Moscow.
When the Senator left us, he took with him, in the first place, my friend Calot, and, in the second place, all that gave life in our establishment. He alone could check my father’s tendency to morbid depression, which now had room to develop and assert itself fully. Our new house was not cheerful: it reminded one of a prison or hospital. The ground-floor rooms were vaulted; the thick walls made the windows look like the embrasures of a fortress; and the house was surrounded on all sides by a uselessly large court-yard.
The real wonder was, not that the Senator left us, but that he was able to stay so long under one roof with my father. I have seldom seen two men more unlike in character.
§9
My uncle was a kind-hearted man, who loved movement and excitement. His whole life was spent in an artificial world, a world of diplomats and lords-in-waiting, and he never guessed that there is a different world which comes nearer to the reality of things. And yet he was not merely a spectator of all that happened between 1789 and 1815, but was personally involved in that mighty drama. Count Vorontsov sent him to England, to learn from Lord Grenville what “General Buonaparte” was up to, after he left the army of Egypt. He was in Paris at the time of Napoleon’s coronation. In 1811 Napoleon ordered him to be detained and arrested at Cassel, where he was minister at the court of King Jérôme[[14]]—“Emperor Jérôme,” as my father used to say when he was annoyed. In fact, he witnessed each scene of that tremendous spectacle; but, somehow, it seemed not to impress him in the right way.
[14]. Jérôme Bonaparte (1784-1860) was King of Westphalia from 1807 to 1813.