When she went back to Bagrovo, Praskovya Ivanovna, soothed by the sincere and tender love of her cousin and by the assiduous attentions of his womankind (whom she did not much like but who expected great favours and benefits from her) gradually got over the terrible blow she had suffered. Her good health came back, and her peace of mind; and at the end of a year she resolved to go back to Choorassovo. It was painful to Stepan Mihailovitch to part with his favourite: her whole nature appealed to him, and he had become thoroughly accustomed to her society. Not once in his whole life was he in a rage with Praskovya Ivanovna. But he did not try to keep her: on the contrary, he pressed her to go as soon as possible. "It's no sort of life for you here, my dear," he used to say; "it's a dull place, though we have got accustomed to it. You are young still"—she was thirty—"and rich and used to something different. You should go back to Choorassovo, and enjoy your fine house and splendid garden and the springs. You have plenty of kind neighbours there, rich people who live a gay life. It is possible that God will send you better fortune in a second venture; you won't want for offers." Praskovya Ivanovna put off her departure from day to day—so hard did she find it to part from the cousin who had saved her life and been her benefactor from her childhood. At last the day was fixed. Early on the previous morning, she came out to join Stepan Mihailovitch, who was sitting on his stoop and thinking sad thoughts. She kissed and embraced him; the tears came to her eyes as she said: "I feel all your love for me, and I love and respect you like a daughter. God sees my gratitude; but I wish that men should see it too. Will you let me bequeath to your family all my mother's property? What I have from my father will come to your son in any case. My relations on my mother's side are rich, and you know that they have given me no reason to reward them with my wealth. I shall never marry. I wish the Bagroff family to be rich. Say yes, my dear cousin, and you will comfort me and set my mind at rest." She threw herself at his feet and covered with kisses the hands with which he was trying to raise her up. "Listen, my dear," said Stepan Mihailovitch in a rather stern voice: "You don't know me aright. That I should covet what does not belong to me, and cut out the rightful heirs to your estates—no! that shall never be, and never shall any one be able to say that of Stepan Bagroff! Mind you don't ever mention it again. If you do, we shall quarrel; and it will be the first time in our lives."
Next day Praskovya Ivanovna left Bagrovo and began her own independent life at Choorassovo.
[FRAGMENT III: THE MARRIAGE OF THE YOUNG BAGROFF]
Many years passed by and much happened during that time—famine and plague, and the rebellion of Pugatchoff.[33] The landowners of the Orenburg district scattered before the bands of the usurper, and Stepan Mihailovitch also made off with his family, first to Samára, and then down the Volga to Saratoff and as far off as Astrakhan. But by degrees all disturbances passed over and calmed down and were forgotten. Children became boys, boys became men, and men came to grey hairs; and among these last was Stepan Mihailovitch. He saw this himself, but he hardly believed it. He would sometimes allude to the ravages of time, but he did so without uneasiness, as if there were no personal reference to himself. Yet my grandfather had ceased to be his old self: his herculean strength and tireless activity had gone for ever. This sometimes surprised him; but he went on living precisely in the old way—eating and drinking to his heart's content, and dressing with no regard to the weather, though he sometimes suffered for this neglect. Little by little, his keen clear eye became clouded and his great voice lost its power; his fits of anger were rarer, but so were his bright and happy moods. His elder daughters had all married, and the oldest had been dead some time, leaving a daughter of three years old. Aksinya,[34] the second, had lost one husband and married again; Elizabeth, a clever but arrogant woman, had somehow married a General Yerlykin, who was old and poor and given to drinking; and Alexandra had found herself a husband in Ivan Karatayeff, well-born, young, and rich, but a passionate lover of the Bashkirs and their wandering life—a true Bashkir himself in mind and body. The youngest daughter, Tanyusha, had not married. The only son[35] was now twenty-six, a handsome youth with a complexion of lilies and roses: his own father used to say of him, "Put a petticoat on him, and he'd be a prettier girl than any of his sisters!" Though his wife, Arina Vassilyevna, shed bitter tears and would not be comforted, Stepan Mihailovitch sent his son into the Army as soon as he was sixteen. He served for three years, and, owing to the influence of Mihail Kurolyessoff, acted as aide-de-camp for part of the time to Suvóroff. But Suvóroff left the district of Orenburg and was succeeded by a German general (I think his name was Treubluth); and he sentenced the young man to a severe flogging, from which his entire innocence, if not his noble birth, should have protected him. His mother nearly died of grief, when she heard it; and even my grandfather thought this was going too far. He withdrew his son from the Army and got him a place in the law court at Ufa, where he earned promotion by long and zealous service.
I cannot pass over in silence a strange fact that I have noticed: most of the Germans and foreigners in general who held posts in the Russian service in those days were notorious for their cruelty and love of inflicting corporal punishment. The German who punished young Bagroff so cruelly was a Lutheran himself, but at the same time a great stickler for all the rites and ceremonies of the Russian Church. This historic incident in the annals of the Bagroff family happened in the following way. The general ordered a service to be performed in the regimental chapel on the eve of some unimportant saint's-day; he was always present himself on these occasions, and all officers were expected to attend. It was summer, and the chapel windows were open. Suddenly, a voice in the street outside struck up a popular song. The general rushed to the window: three subalterns were walking along the street, and one of them was singing. He ordered them under arrest and sentenced each of them to 300 lashes. My unfortunate father, who was not singing but merely walking with his friends, pleaded his noble birth; but the general said with a sneer, "A noble is bound to show special respect to divine service"; and then the brute himself looked on till the last stripe was inflicted on the innocent youth. This took place in a room next the chapel, where the solemn singing of the choir could be distinctly heard; and the tyrant forbade his victim to cry out, "for fear of disturbing divine worship." After his punishment, he was carried off unconscious to hospital, where it was found necessary to cut off his uniform, owing to the swelling of his tender young body. It was two months before his back and shoulders healed up. What must it have cost his mother to hear such news of her only son whom she simply worshipped! My grandfather lodged a complaint in some quarter; and his son, who had sent in his papers at once, got his discharge from the Army before he left the hospital, and entered the Civil Service as an official of the fourteenth or lowest class. Eight years had now gone by, and the incident was by this time forgotten.
Alexyéi Stepanitch was now living peacefully at Ufa and performing his duties there. Twice a year he paid a visit to his parents at Bagrovo, 240 versts away. His life was quite uneventful. Quiet, bashful, and unassuming, this young heir to a landed estate lived on good terms with all the world, till suddenly the modest course of his existence became disturbed.
There was a permanent military administration in the town of Ufa, and next in authority the Lieutenant-Governor was Nikolai Zubin, who resided regularly in the town. M. Zubin was an honest and able man, but his character was weak. His wife had died, leaving three children—Sonitchka,[36] a girl of twelve, and two younger boys. He was devoted to his daughter; and it was no wonder he should love a child so beautiful and so clever, who, in spite of her tender years, soon became her father's companion and assisted him in the management of the household. Eighteen months after the death of his first wife, whom he had loved and sincerely mourned, M. Zubin found consolation by falling in love with the daughter of M. Rychkoff, a landowner in Orenburg, well-known for his descriptions of that country. The marriage soon took place; and the young wife, Alexandra, by her intelligence and beauty, soon gained entire control over her submissive husband. But she was hard and unfeeling, and conceived a hatred for her stepdaughter, her father's darling, who bade fair to grow up into a beautiful woman. The thing is common enough. The name of stepmother has long been proverbial for cruelty, and it fitted Mme. Zubin precisely. But it was by no means easy to tear Sonitchka from her place in her father's heart: she was not a girl who could be put down easily, and the contest which followed inflamed the stepmother's anger to an extraordinary pitch. She swore that this hussy of thirteen, who was the idol of her father and all the town, should some day live in the maids' room, wear the coarsest clothes, and carry the slops out of the children's nursery. She kept her oath to the letter: after two or three years, Sonitchka was living with the servants and clothed like a scullion, and she scrubbed and cleaned the nursery which was now inhabited by two half-sisters. But what was the father doing? He had once loved her dearly; but now for whole months he never saw her; and when he did meet her going about in rags, he turned away with a sigh, wiped away a furtive tear, and made off as soon as possible. It is the way of many elderly men who have married again and are dominated by young wives. As I do not know exactly the ways and methods by which Mme. Zubin attained her object, I shall not speak of them; nor shall I dwell upon the cruelties and sufferings inflicted upon the bereaved girl, with her sensitive temper and strong will; nothing was spared her, not even the most humiliating punishments and beatings for imaginary offences. I shall only say, that the stepdaughter was not far from suicide, and was only saved from it by a miracle. It happened thus. When she had decided to put an end to an intolerable existence, the poor child wished to say her last prayer before an image of Our Lady of Smolensk, the image with which her mother on her deathbed had blessed her. She fell on her knees in her garret before the ikon, and, with floods of bitter tears, pressed her face on the dirt-stained floor. Suffering deprived her of consciousness for some minutes; when she recovered and got up, she saw the candle, which she had put out the night before, still burning before the image. At first she cried out with surprise and involuntary fear; but soon she recognised that she had seen a miracle wrought by Divine Power. She took courage; she was conscious of a strength and composure she had never felt before; and she firmly resolved to suffer and endure and live. From that day the helpless child wore armour of proof against the increasing exasperation of her stepmother: whatever she was told to do, she did; whatever was inflicted upon her, she bore. Degrading punishment no longer forced the tears from her eyes, no longer made her turn sick and faint, as it used to do. "Mean slut" had long been her title, and "desperate wretch" was now added to it. But the measure of God's patience now brimmed over, and His thunder pealed: Mme. Zubin, in the prime of life and in the pride of her health and beauty, died ten days after giving birth to a son. Twenty-four hours before the end, knowing that she must die, she was eager to take the load off her conscience. Sonitchka was suddenly wakened in the night and summoned to her stepmother's bedside. The dying woman confessed in the presence of witnesses her guilty conduct towards her stepdaughter, begged her forgiveness, and conjured her in the name of God to be good to the children. The girl forgave her and promised to care for the orphans; and she kept that promise. Mme. Zubin confessed also to her husband that the accusations which had been brought against his daughter were all calumnies and falsehoods.
Her death caused a complete reversal of affairs. M. Zubin also had a paralytic stroke, and, though he survived for some years, never left his bed again. The oppressed and ragged Cinderella, whom the servants—and especially those belonging to Mme. Zubin—had been mean enough to humiliate and insult to their heart's content, suddenly became the absolute mistress of the household, her sick father having put everything under her control. The reconciliation between the guilty father and the injured daughter was touching and even distressing to the daughter and all who saw it. For long, M. Zubin was wrung by remorse: his tears flowed day and night, and he repeated the same words over and over, "No, Sonitchka, it is impossible you should forgive me!" To each one of his acquaintance in the town he formally confessed his misconduct towards his daughter; and "Sofya Nikolayevna," as she was now called, became the object of general respect and admiration. Made wise by years of suffering, this girl of seventeen developed into a grown woman, a mother to the children, and the manager of the household. She even discharged public duties; for, owing to her father's illness, she received all heads of departments, officials, and private citizens; she discussed matters with them, wrote letters and official documents, and at last became the real manager of the business in her father's office. Sofya Nikolayevna nursed her father with anxious care and tenderness; she looked after her three brothers and two sisters, and even took trouble about the education of the elder children. Her own brothers, Serghéi and Alexander, were now boys of twelve and ten; and she contrived to find teachers for them—a kind old Frenchman called Villemer, whom fortune had somehow stranded at Ufa, and a half-educated Little Russian who had been exiled to the town for an attempted fraud. She availed herself of the opportunity to study with her brothers, and worked so hard that she could soon understand a French book or conversation and even talk French a little herself. Eighteen months later she sent her brothers to Moscow for their education. Through a certain M. Anitchkoff who lived at Ufa, she had become acquainted with his cousin who lived at Moscow, and they often corresponded. The well-known writer, Novikoff, shared a house at Moscow with this M. Anitchkoff; and both friends were so struck by the letters from this young lady on the banks of the river Byélaya, that they sent her regularly all new and important books in the way of Russian literature; and this did much for her mental development. This M. Anitchkoff had a special respect for her, and considered it an honour to carry out her request. He undertook to receive both her brothers and place them at a boarding-school connected with Moscow University, and performed his undertaking punctiliously. The boys got on well at school, but their studies were broken off when the summons came for them to enter the Guards, in which they had been enrolled while still in the cradle.
All clever and educated people who came to Ufa hastened to make the acquaintance of Sofya Nikolayevna, were attracted by her, and never forgot her. Many of these acquaintances became in course of time the intimate friends of her children, and the relation was severed only by death. I shall name only those of them whom I knew myself—V. Romanovsky, A. Avenarius, Peter Chichagoff, Dmitri Myortvavo, and V. Itchansky. Scholars also and travellers, attracted by the novelty and beauty of the district, invariably made the young lady's acquaintance and left written testimony of their admiration for her beauty and wit. It is true that her position in society and her home helped her, and served, one might say, as a pedestal for the statue; but the statue itself was a noble figure. I remember especially the verses of Count Manteuffel, a traveller; he sent them to Sofya Nikolayevna with a most respectful letter in French; and he also sent a copy of an immense work in five quarto volumes, by a Dr. Buchan,[37] which had just been translated from English into Russian and made a great sensation in the medical world of that day. Buchan's Domestic Medicine was a real treasure to Sofya Nikolayevna: she was able to make use of its directions to make up medicines for her father's benefit. In his verses Count Manteuffel compared the fair lady of Ufa to both Venus and Minerva.
In spite of his enfeebled state, M. Zubin did not resign his office for several years. Twice a year he gave a ball; he did not appear himself, in order to welcome the ladies, but the men went to see him where he lay in his study; and the young hostess had to receive the whole town. Several times a year, her father insisted on her going out to balls in the houses of the leading people, and she yielded to his earnest entreaties and put in a short appearance at the ball. She wore fine dresses and was an excellent dancer in the fashion of the time. When she had gone through a Polish minuet and a single country-dance or schottische, she went away at once, after flashing through the room like a meteor. All who had the right to be so, were in love with Sofya Nikolayevna, but they sighed at a respectful distance; for this young lady gave none of them any encouragement whatever.