“What do they say about Grandmother?” he asked in a low, intimate voice. “Ah, c’est degôutant. No one believes it, and everybody is jeering at Tychkov for having debased himself to interrogate a drink-maddened old beggar-woman. I will not repeat it.”
“If you please,” he whispered tenderly.
“You wish to know?” she whispered, bending towards him. “Then you shall hear everything. This woman, who stands regularly in the porch of the Church of the Ascension, has been saying that Tiet Nikonich loved Tatiana Markovna, and she him.”
“I know that,” he interrupted impatiently. “That is no crime.”
“And she was sought in marriage by the late Count Sergei Ivanovich—”
“I have heard that, too. She did not agree, and the Count married somebody else, but she was forbidden to marry Tiet Nikonich. I have been told all that by Vassilissa. What did the drunken woman say?”
“The Count is said to have surprised a rendezvous between Tatiana Markovna and Tiet Nikonich, and such a rendezvous.
“No, no!” she cried, shaking with laughter. “Tatiana Markovna! Who would believe such a thing?”
Raisky listened seriously, and surmises flitted across his mind.
“The Count gave Tiet Nikonich a box on the ears.”