“We in England are limited to one. Is it different in Russia?”
“One!” echoed Nadia. “Some of our great boyars have ten thousand souls.”
“They must take an unconscionable time in dying! And how many has Nadia?”
“None,” replied the girl with a flash of her eyes as if detecting some hidden insult in the question. “We are souls ourselves, my father and I.”
“It is the fashion of our boyars,” explained Boris, “to call their serfs ‘souls.’”
“A good name,” added Nadia in a bitter tone, “for they have us, body as well as soul.”
“And there are twenty million like us,” said Boris.
It came upon Wilfrid as a painful shock to learn that this dignified innkeeper and his pretty daughter were serfs. That serfage existed in Russia was, of course, no news to him, but it had existed as something remote, and therefore as shadowy as the helotry of ancient Sparta. It was a very different thing to be brought vividly face to face with the system, to know that Boris, head man of the village, the lessee of a government post-house, and therefore himself a master of servants and the owner of many roubles, was of no account in the eye of the law. He and Nadia could be summoned back at any time to their lord’s estate, clothed in peasant attire, put to degrading tasks, and, like domestic animals, could be whipped or sold at the pleasure of their owner.
No wonder, with such fears as these always present to their mind, that Boris should wear an habitual look of melancholy, and that Nadia’s flashes of liveliness should alternate with moods of gloom!