“How are you, Kaetan Kazimirovich?” I answered, pretending not to notice his outstretched hand. “How's the Count?”
“Thank God, he's quite well.… He's only a little dull.… He's expecting you to come every minute.”
I read on Pshekhotsky's face the desire to converse with me. How could that desire have arisen after the “swine” with which I had treated him on that evening, and what caused this change of tone?
“What a lot of money you have!” I said, gazing at the packet of hundred-rouble notes he was sending away.
It seemed as if somebody had given a fillip to my brain! I noticed that one of the hundred-rouble notes had charred edges, and one corner had been quite burnt off.… It was the hundred-rouble note which I had wanted to burn in the flame of a Chandor candle, when the Count refused to accept it from me as my share of the payment for the gipsies, and which Pshekhotsky had picked up when I flung it on the ground.
“It's better that I should give it to the poor, than let it be consumed by the flames,” he had said then.
To what “poor” was he sending it now?
“Seven thousand five hundred roubles,” Maxim Fedorovich counted in a drawling voice. “Quite right!”
It is ill to pry into the secrets of other people, but I wanted terribly to find out whose this money was and to whom this black-browed Pole was sending it to Petersburg, This money was certainly not his, and the Count had nobody to whom he would send it.
“He has plundered the drunken Count,” I thought. “If deaf and silly Scops-Owl knows how to plunder the Count, what difficulty will this goose have in thrusting his paw into his pockets?”