The unhappy blondine had to submit to a very unpleasant tête-à-tête, indeed such a one as perhaps a young girl of sixteen years of age, never underwent before. Streams of questions rapidly flowed from the lips of the angry mother, followed in succession by strict examination, reproaches, threats and exhortations, so that the poor young girl began to cry bitterly without being able to understand a word of the real causes of her mother's anger and indignation.
The porter at the lodge also received positive instructions never to admit for the future, under any circumstances or pretences, the gentleman calling himself Tchichikoff.
[CHAPTER XX.]
Having, as it were, finished their affair with her Excellency, the ladies felt inclined to join the party of the gentlemen, with the view of bringing them round to their own opinion, and they continued to affirm that the alleged purchase of dead serfs was nothing else but a scheme to divert attention from his real intentions, and thus more successfully to accomplish the projected elopement.
Many of the gentlemen were even gained over, and persuaded to join the female party, notwithstanding the bitter reproaches that were addressed to them by their own party and comrades, who called them old women and petticoat worshippers, which allegations, as is well known, are very offensive to any gentleman.
But, however strong and obstinate the remaining coalition of the men was, their party was far from being so well organised as that of the ladies. With them all was somehow irregular, rough, loose, not well at all; their heads were full of confusion, partiality, contradiction; their thoughts tormented by doubts and suspicions—in a word, the, in every respect, empty nature of the men appeared to be in the greatest disorder, a naturel, at the same time rough and heavy, unfit for household matters, nor for the more tender impressions of the heart, suspicious, indolent, full of continual doubts and eternal apprehensions.
They maintained most obstinately that all was stuff and nonsense, that the elopement with his Excellency's daughter was more likely to be undertaken by a dashing hussar, but not by a peaceable civilian; and that Tchichikoff was not the man to carry out such a plan, so full of madness; that the women were all silly, and had got up a false alarm; that the real object upon which they had to turn their exclusive attention were the dead serfs themselves, for it was with them that the secret lay buried; but what this secret was, the devil alone knew, at any rate in their opinion, it was something awful. Why it was so dreadful, so awful, in' the opinion of the gentlemen, we shall know at once.
By a decree of his Majesty the Emperor Nicholas I, another Lord-Lieutenant, or Governor had been appointed for the province of Smolensk, and the present one recalled to St. Petersburgh; such an ukase causes in Russia a thorough change of administration and appointments, and for this reason it had the most alarming effect upon the nervous and moral system of the Imperial employés; Courts of Inquiries would be held in all branches of administration, many of them had the prospect before them of being dismissed, whilst others ran the risk of seeing themselves utterly stripped of their little profits under the new head of administration.
And really, some of them thought, "if the new Governor was to know all our little trespasses, it would be quite sufficient to effect our complete disgrace, and perhaps even banishment would be the consequence." The Superintendent of the Imperial Hospitals grew suddenly pale; heaven knows what thoughts flashed across his mind; did these dead serfs mean, perhaps, that all those people who died lately in great numbers from cholera and various fevers in the Imperial Hospitals and other places, for want of proper and careful sanitary measures, and was Tchichikoff, by chance, an Imperial Attorney, or Commissioner sent by the Governor-General to hold a secret Court of Inquiry.