“Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?” Sophia Antonovna was anxious to know.
“Yes.” Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling into a trap. It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he probably could not have said no. “He mentioned to me once,” he added, as if making an effort of memory, “a house of that sort. He used to visit some workmen there.”
“Exactly.”
Sophia Antonovna triumphed. Her correspondent had discovered that fact quite accidentally from the talk of the people of the house, having made friends with a workman who occupied a room there. They described Haldin’s appearance perfectly. He brought comforting words of hope into their misery. He came irregularly, but he came very often, and—her correspondent wrote—sometimes he spent a night in the house, sleeping, they thought, in a stable which opened upon the inner yard.
“Note that, Razumov! In a stable.”
Razumov had listened with a sort of ferocious but amused acquiescence.
“Yes. In the straw. It was probably the cleanest spot in the whole house.”
“No doubt,” assented the woman with that deep frown which seemed to draw closer together her black eyes in a sinister fashion. No four-footed beast could stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were condemned to suffer from in Russia. The point of this discovery was that it proved Haldin to have been familiar with that horse-owning peasant—a reckless, independent, free-living fellow not much liked by the other inhabitants of the house. He was believed to have been the associate of a band of housebreakers. Some of these got captured. Not while he was driving them, however; but still there was a suspicion against the fellow of having given a hint to the police and...
The woman revolutionist checked herself suddenly.
“And you? Have you ever heard your friend refer to a certain Ziemianitch?”