“Not in the least; be patient, and hear me to the end. The position is this: If my marriage is stopped, or even put off, a few months, the devils will take me, with my position, my credit, my Kremen, and all that I have. I tell thee that I am travelling with the last of my steam, and I must stop. Panna Kraslavski does not marry me for love, but because she is twenty-nine years of age, and I seem to her, if not the match she dreamed of, at least a satisfactory one. If it shall seem that I am not what she thinks, she will break with me. If those ladies should discover to-day that I sold the oak in Kremen from necessity, I should receive a refusal to-morrow. Now think: the scandal was public, for it was in presence of my subordinates. The matter will not be kept secret. I might explain to those ladies the sale of the oak, but yet I shall be an insulted man. If I do not challenge Gantovski, they may break with me, as a fellow without honor; if I challenge him,—remember that they are devotees, and, besides, women who keep up appearances as no others that I know,—they will break with me then as a man of adventures. If I shoot Gantovski, they will break with me as a murderer; if he hits me, they will break with me as an imbecile, who lets himself be insulted and beaten. In a hundred chances there are ninety that they will act in this way. Is it clear to thee now why I said that the devils will take me, my credit, my position, and Kremen in addition?”
Pan Stanislav waved his hand with all the easy egotism to which a man can bring himself in reference to another, who, at the bottom of things, is of little account to him.
“Bah!” said he; “maybe I will buy Kremen of thee. But the position is difficult. What dost thou think, then, of doing with Gantovski?”
To this Mashko answered: “So far I pay my debts. Thou dost not wish to be my groomsman; wilt thou be my second?”
“That is not refused,” answered Pan Stanislav.
“I thank thee. Gantovksi lives in the Hotel Saxe.”
“I will be with him to-morrow.”
Immediately after Mashko’s departure, Pan Stanislav went to spend the evening at Plavitski’s; on the road he thought,—
“There are no jokes with Mashko, and the affair will not finish in common fashion; but what is that to me? What are they all to me, or I to them? Still, how devilishly alone a man is in the world!”
And all at once he felt that the only person on earth who cared for him, and who thought of him, not as a thing, was Marynia.