On the evening of that day, Yúditch was sitting on the porch of the house-serfs' cottage. The servants swarmed around him, pitied him, and bitterly blamed the master.
"Stop, my lads," he said to them at last;—"enough of that .... why do you abuse him? I don't believe that he, our dear little father, is pleased himself with his desperate deed...."
As a result of this affair, Vasíly never saw his parents again. Iván Andréevitch died without him, probably with such grief at his heart as may God spare any of us from experiencing. In the meantime, Vasíly Ivánovitch went out in society, made merry after his own fashion, and squandered money. How he obtained the money, I cannot say with certainty. He procured for himself a French servant, a clever and intelligent young fellow, a certain Boursier. This man became passionately attached to him, and aided him in all his numerous performances. I have no intention of narrating to you in detail all the pranks of my great-uncle; he distinguished himself by such unbounded audacity, such snaky tact, such incredible cold-bloodedness, such adroit and subtle wit, that, I must confess, I can understand the limitless power of that unprincipled man over the most noble souls....
Soon after his father's death, Vasíly Ivánovitch, notwithstanding all his tact, was challenged to a duel by an outraged husband. He fought, severely wounded his antagonist, and was forced to quit the capital: he was ordered to reside permanently on his hereditary estate. Vasíly Ivánovitch was thirty years of age. You can easily imagine, gentlemen, with what feelings this man, who had become accustomed to the brilliant life of the capital, journeyed to his native place. They say that, on the road, he frequently got out of his kibítka, flung himself face down on the snow, and wept. No one in Lutchínovko recognised the former jolly, amiable Vasíly Ivánovitch. He spoke to no one, he went off hunting from morning until night, with visible impatience endured the timid caresses of his mother, and jeered pitilessly at his brothers, and at their wives (both of them were already married)....
So far I have said nothing to you, I believe, about Olga Ivánovna. She had been brought to Lutchínovko as an infant at the breast; she had almost died on the way. Olga Ivánovna had been reared, as the saying is, in the fear of God and of her parents.... It must be confessed that Iván Andréevitch and Anna Pávlovna both treated her like a daughter. But there was concealed in her a feeble spark of that fire which blazed so brightly in the soul of Vasíly Ivánovitch. In the meantime, while Iván Andréevitch's own children did not dare to indulge in conjectures concerning the strange, speechless quarrel between their parents, Olga, from her earliest years had been disturbed and pained by the position of Anna Pávlovna. Like Vasíly, she loved independence; all oppression revolted her. She had attached herself to her benefactress with all the powers of her soul; she hated old Lutchínoff, and more than once, as she sat at table, she had fixed upon him such sombre glances, that even the man who was serving the viands felt frightened. Iván Andréevitch did not notice all those glances, because, in general, he paid no attention whatever to his family.
At first, Anna Pávlovna endeavoured to exterminate this hatred in her—but several bold questions on Olga's part forced her to complete silence. Iván Andréevitch's children adored Olga, and the old woman loved her also, although with rather a cold affection.
Prolonged sorrow had crushed all cheerfulness, all strong feeling, in this poor woman; nothing so clearly proves Vasíly's bewitching amiability as the fact that he made even his mother love him ardently. Effusions of tenderness on the part of children was not in the spirit of that age, and therefore it is not surprising that Olga did not venture to display her devotion, although she always kissed Anna Pávlovna's hand with particular respect in the evening, when she bade her good-night. She was barely able to read and write. Twenty years later, Russian girls began to read novels in the style of the "Adventures of Marquis G***,"—"Fanfan and Lolotte,"—of "Alexyéi; or, The Cot in the Forest";—they began to learn to play on the clavichord and to sing romances in the style of the following, once very familiar song:
"Men in the light
Cling to us like flies"—and so forth.
But in the '70s (Olga Ivánovna was born in the year 1757), our rustic beauties had no conception of all these accomplishments. It would be difficult for us now to picture to ourselves a young Russian girl of good birth of that epoch. We can, it is true, judge from our grandmothers as to the degree of education of noble gentlewomen in the times of Katherine II; but how is one to distinguish that which was inculcated in them in the course of their long life, from that which they were in the days of their youth?
Olga Ivánovna spoke a little French, but with a strong Russian accent; in her day, there was no thought of such a thing as the emigrés.[19] In a word, with all her good qualities, she was, nevertheless, a decided savage, and, probably, in the simplicity of her heart, she more than once administered chastisement with her own hands to some unlucky maid....