Olenka blushed scarlet and looked askance at the smiling ladies. The poor little thing was consumed by shame.
“Mit'ka did not lock the door!” the forester continued, turning to us. “It would not be difficult for robbers to get in!… The samovar was stolen out of the kitchen last summer, and now she wants us to be robbed again.”
“I don't know who can have let him out!” Urbenin whispered to me. “I ordered him to be locked up.… Golubchik, Sergei Petrovich, have pity on us; get us out of this awkward position somehow! Anyhow!”
“I know who stole your samovar,” I said to the forester. “Come along, I'll show you where it is.”
Taking Skvortsov round the waist, I led him towards the church. I took him into the churchyard and talked to him until, by my calculation, I thought the wedding procession ought to be in the house, then I left him without having told him where his stolen samovar was to be found.
Although this meeting with the madman was quite unexpected and extraordinary, it was soon forgotten.… A new surprise that Fate had prepared for the young couple was still more unusual.
XIV
An hour later we were all seated at long tables, dining.
To anybody who was accustomed to cobwebs, mildew and wild gipsy whoops in the Count's apartments it must have seemed strange to look on the workaday, prosaical crowd that now, by their habitual chatter, broke the usual silence of the ancient and deserted halls. This many coloured noisy throng looked like a flight of starlings which in flying past had alighted to rest in a neglected churchyard or—may the noble bird forgive me such a comparison!—a flight of storks that in the twilight of one of their migratory days had settled down on the ruins of a deserted castle.
I sat there hating that crowd which frivolously examined the decaying wealth of the Counts Karnéev. The mosaic walls, the carved ceilings, the rich Persian carpets and the rococo furniture excited enthusiasm and astonishment. A self-satisfied smile never left the Count's moustachioed face. He received the enthusiastic flattery of his guests as something that he deserved, though in reality all the riches and luxuries of his deserted mansion were not acquired in any way thanks to him, but on the contrary, he merited the bitterest reproaches and contempt for the barbarously dull indifference with which he treated all the wealth, that had been collected by his fathers and grandfathers, collected not in days, but in scores of years! It was only the mentally blind or the poor of spirit who could not see in every slab of damp marble, in every picture, in each dark corner of the Count's garden, the sweat, the tears and the callosities on the hands of the people whose children now swarmed in the little log huts of the Count's miserable villages.… Among all those people seated at the wedding feast, rich, independent people, people who might easily have told him the plainest truths, there was not one who would have told the Count that his self-satisfied grin was stupid and out of place.… Everybody found it necessary to smile flatteringly and to burn paltry incense before him. If this was ordinary politeness (with us, many love to throw everything on politeness and propriety), I would prefer the churl who eats with his hands, who takes the bread from his neighbour's plate, and blows his nose between two fingers, to these dandies.