“I don’t remember his name,” mused Mourièff. “Something ending with a y, I think. (Diable! but that punch is hot! Pour a bottle of brandy in to cool it!) I saw him, though—the happy mortal, that is—several times. Pleasing chap with square shoulders and many inches, soft, lackadaisical brown eyes, a promising trifle of a mustache, and big, white teeth.”
“The better to eat you, my child!” cried Zàptine. “Military, did you say?”
“Of course—could see it at a glance; been drilled, you know. Came here as a private individual, but was recognized by— Let me see, who told me? Oh, I remember—our Colonel, our beloved jewel of a Colonel, that Cavalier of Cavaliers whom we glory in obeying, said the interesting youth was Military Attaché somewhere, somehow, but mum was the word—he was so visibly here for other purposes than to slyly inspect our frontier defenses. I met him—not the Colonel—the Don Juan—one afternoon leaving the upper galleries of the Gostinoï-Dvòr—there’s always plenty of solitude there, for that’s merely where the reserve merchandise from below is kept. He didn’t seem pleased to see me—pulled the collar of his coat up to his eyes, and slunk away with black guilt showing in every line of his back. Talk of petticoats! Lord, it wasn’t the Lesghise’s he—”
Basil, who had been listening at first only with one ear and then with absorbed attention, threw his cigar away with sudden violence.
“You’re becoming indecent!” he said, and managed to say it with deceiving indifference. “I think I will retire; really, your conversation is unfit for my chaste hearing!” And he rose.
“Hear! Hear! A just and righteous man in our midst! Sit down, Palitzin, and preach us a sermon. Let’s vote him a speaking-trumpet of honor. Go on, Basil, give it to us, old boy! We deserve it! We’re a bad lot, we are!”
But Basil was inexorable. He elaborately explained that he was forced to catch his train at an unearthly hour, and that trains carrying him always started on time; so nolens-volens, after giving him a regular ovation, they let him go, accompanying him to the very portals of the club and his waiting sleigh, around which they gathered, uttering loud cheers.
The night was exceedingly cold. A half-congealed vapor formed a little cloud around the nostrils of the three horses held in rein by his coachman; the sidewalks, quite recently swept and powdered with fine sand, as is done again and again each day in Petersburg’s luxurious quarters, showed two lines of pale gold on either side of the broad, brilliantly lighted streets, and rime lavishly broidered with innumerable paillettes every roof and projection sparkling beneath the frigid moon. It was a scene to hearten up any lover of the North; but Basil, intrenched behind his high sable collar, was not enjoying it as he should have done. For there was something he did not like slowly taking shape in his mind.
It was past eleven o’clock, but notwithstanding this fact he gave his yèmshik the order to drive him to the house of a friend who had been his father’s comrade-in-arms, and had until recently held the post of Chief of Police. “He has got into the habit, while manipulating the Third Section, of never going to bed. I’ll find him as wide awake as a barrelful of mice,” thought Basil, and his previsions were fulfilled. “I must clear up a point or two, otherwise I will never rest easy again,” the Prince was saying angrily to himself, as he ascended the stairs; but when he entered the library where the General sat wrapped in a cloud of smoke, like a Buddhist image, his face was impassive.
“So here you are, you rascal!” chuckled the gray-beard, getting up to shake Basil warmly by the hand. “We never quite lose our old habits, and I knew that you had arrived this morning, the moment you put your foot on the quay. But here, what do you want of me that you look me up in this way? It must be something important!”