"I, dearest mother——"
"What am I in this?" said Pavel Vladimirych. "I don't care. Have him torn to pieces."
"Hold your tongue, for Christ's sake, you wicked man!" Arina Petrovna felt she was fully entitled to call her son "scoundrel," but refrained in deference to the joyous meeting. "Well, if you refuse to judge him I shall. Here is my verdict. I shall try to treat him kindly once more. I shall hand over to him the little Vologda village, have a cottage built there, and let him live there and be fed by the peasants."
Although Porfiry Vladimirych had refused to sit in judgment on his brother, his mother's generosity was so amazing that he felt he simply had to point out the dangerous consequences of her project.
"Dearest mamma," he exclaimed, "you are more than magnanimous. You are confronted by a deed—well, the vilest, meanest deed—and then you forget and pardon. Magnificent! But forgive me, I am afraid for you, dearest. Think what you will of me, but if I were you, I wouldn't do it."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. Perhaps I lack your magnanimity, that motherly feeling of yours. But one thought comes back to me all the while—what if brother Stepan does the same with his second legacy as he did with his first?"
Arina Petrovna had already thought of that, yet in the back of her mind was another consideration.
"The Vologda estate is father's property, it belongs to the patrimony," she said through her teeth. "Sooner or later a portion of the patrimony will have to be doled out to him."
"I understand that very well, mother dear."