The count in these last years of peace had grown stouter, his neck was quite like a bull’s, his shoulders like Jupiter’s or Bacchus’s, his face quite striking, with its look of health and dauntlessness.
“Well! what are you staring at?” said he, standing and looking at me. “I was amusing myself with birds, while you were sitting with the Turks. Here they are all clay-coloured and black, but the tuberous ones, like ours, old fellow, are few, and not common. Yes, they can take letters for a longer distance than 100 versts. Marvellous! If we could but breed them in Russia! Well now, tell me everything about the prison and about the travels.”
I began my narration. The count listened to me at first very inattentively, all the while looking out of the window, but afterwards he grew more interested; and when I touched upon the subject of the person whom I had met at Ragusa, and handed him the letter, the count threw a handful of seed from a plate at the assembled doves, and when they all flew off in a crowd up on the roof, stood up.
“This news, my dear fellow, is such that we must talk seriously. Let’s get down from this mast into the company cabin.” We went downstairs and afterwards into the garden. The count on the way had dressed himself, and given orders that no one was to be received. We walked a long while backwards and forwards in the avenues. While I answered his questions I looked attentively into the expressive and often dreamy eyes of the count. He listened to me with very great attention.
“Ah! art scheming?” said he, all at once; “why, suppose she is a pretender, an adventuress. Now explain,” added he, sitting down on a bench. “Art repeating the words of others or thine own?”
I felt confused, and did not quite know what to answer.
“All the tales of her past life are so strange,” said I, “so much like a fairy-tale—Siberia, poison, escape from Persia, correspondence with all the crowned heads of Europe—that I have conscientiously acted as a faithful servant of the empress, looked well about me, as I cannot, I must say, hide my doubts.…”
“Agreed,” said the count, “Of course, you can look at it in two ways; but the most important fact is that she is known of at St. Petersburg. They have written to me about her, speaking of her as a ‘vagabond,’ who has taken to herself a name and genealogy to which she has no right.”
The count was silent for some time.
“H’m! nice vagabond!” added he, as if to himself. “Puzzling, of course. Let it be so; I do not dispute it.… But why have they decided on exacting her extradition? and, in case it should be refused, on taking her by force, even if it is necessary to bombard the citadel of Ragusa? No one acts like that with a common vagabond. Such a person you just catch—a stone on the neck and in the water.”