The interest and the curiosity of the gaping peasants rose to an incredible degree. Every one of them was anxious to give an advice or a suggestion:
"You go, Andrushka, and lead that front horse a little about, the one that is standing on the right-hand side from us; and Uncle Mitja would do well to mount the tiger-spotted animal! Get on his back, Mitja!"
During the time that Selifan and the strange coachman were arranging the traces of their respective horses, Tchichikoff had continued to look very attentively at the young lady stranger. He made an attempt to address her several times, but, somehow or another, he thought there was no favourable opportunity. Meanwhile, the ladies drove off, the pretty head, and face with the fine outlines, the slender figure, all disappeared like an apparition; and there remained nothing but the high-road, the britchka, the three horses already familiar to our reader, Selifan, and the level and empty fields surrounding them.
"A charming little woman!" said he, whilst opening his snuff-box, and taking a pinch of snuff. "But what is the most handsome thing about her? It is pleasant to see, that she seems just to have left a boarding-school, or some such institution, and that there is yet nothing womanly, or rather matronly about her, and that is one of the most unpleasing features in the sex. She is still like a child, all in her is still natural, she will speak what she thinks, she will laugh at every thing that pleases her. She might yet be taught any thing and every thing, she might become an accomplished and virtuous woman, and she might also turn out the very contrary. If she now happens to come under the control and advice of her mother or aunts, then farewell natural innocence! In a year they will have changed her so completely by instilling into her, what they are pleased to term the dignities of a woman, that her own father will have every difficulty to recognise, in that young person, his own daughter.
"From the elder ladies, she will derive conceitedness and affected manners, move about according to the dictates of fashion, torment her brains to know, with whom, about what, and how much she might venture to speak, and especially how to look at them; every moment she will be alarmed least she should speak more than is strictly necessary. At last, she will become confused from so much unnatural exertion, and dissimulation will become natural to her, and then—heaven knows what she may come to next!"
Having spoken thus much to himself, Tchichikoff remained silent for some moments, and then he added:
"It would be rather satisfactory to know who she is? Yes, what her father might be? Is he perhaps a rich landed proprietor of high respectability, or simply a respectable man with a large fortune acquired in serving his country? Because, let me suppose, that this pretty little girl receives but five thousand roubles as a marriage gift, she would become a most acceptable, nay a very enticing little woman. And this would constitute, so to say, the happiness of a respectable man."
The sum of five thousand roubles represented itself so attractively to his mind, that he began to scold himself inwardly for not having obtained some information about who the ladies were from their coachman, during the time that the confusion among the horses lasted. Soon after, however, the appearance of Sobakevitch's village began to distract his attention from the ladies, and he returned to his friend and more serious purposes.
The village seemed to him tolerably large, and even of importance; there were two forests, the one of birch-trees, the other of pines, the one of a gay colour, the other dark, spread out like wings on the right and left of the village; in the centre of it stood a large wooden building with a balcony, a roof with red tiles, and dark grey painted walls, the style of architecture reminding one of a barrack, or the primitive buildings of German emigrants.
It was evident that the builder of this house must have been in continual opposition to the taste of the owner. The builder was a pedant, and adhered to symmetry, the owner preferred conformity to the purpose, and, thus it seemed that in consequence of the differences of taste, the lawful lord of the mansion had blocked up the windows of the whole of one of the fronts of the house, and left only a small aperture instead, no doubt to serve as a skylight to some lumber-room.