"I wish," said I, "that it were in my power to give you any consolation."
"I expect no consolation," she replied; "it is out of your power to give me any."
"But why are you crying?"
She was silent, and her sobs alone intimated that she was deeply afflicted.
"Can you have committed any fault," said I, "that has roused your father's anger against you?"
"He is angry with me, it is true; but is it my fault if I cannot love his Aphanassi?"
The subject now began to be interesting; for as Chateaubriand says, there were love and tears at the bottom of this story. I felt peculiarly interested in the narrative.
I asked the young Siberian girl who this Aphanassi was whom she could not love. She became more composed, and with enchanting grace, and almost French volubility, she informed me that the summer before a Baskir family had travelled further to the north than these tribes are accustomed to do, and had brought their flocks into the neighbourhood of the zavode of Tchornaïa; they came from time to time to the village to buy things, and to sell the gowns called doubas, which their wives dye of a yellow colour with the bark of the birch tree. Now her father, the respectable Michael, was a shopkeeper, and constant communications began to be established between the Baskir and the Russian family. This connection became more close, when it was discovered that both families were of that sect which pretends to have preserved its religion free from all pollution or mixture, and gives its members the name of Stareobratzi. The head of the Baskir family, Aphanassi, soon fell in love with young Daria, and asked her in marriage from her father; but though wealthy, Aphanassi had a rough and repulsive look, and Daria could not bear him; she had, therefore, given him an absolute refusal. Her father doated on her, and had not pressed the matter farther, though he was desirous of forming an alliance so advantageous to his trade; and the Baskir had returned to his own country in the month of August to gather the crops of hemp and rye. But winter passed away, and the heats of June had scarcely been felt before Aphanassi had again appeared, with an immense quantity of bales of rich doubas, Chinese belts, and kaftans, and a herd of more than five hundred horses; he came, in fact, surrounded with all his splendour, and renewed again his offers and his entreaties. Old Michael was nearly gained by his offers, and Daria was in despair, for she was about to be sacrificed to gain, and she detested Aphanassi more than she had done the year before.
I listened to her with strong emotion, pitied her sorrows, which had so easily procured me her confidence, and when she left me, she was less afflicted than before.
The next day I returned to the spot where I had seen her, and found her again; she received me with a smile. Aphanassi had not come that morning, and Daria, probably thinking that I would come back to the spot, had come to ask me what she ought to reply to him, as well as to her father. I gave her my advice with a strong feeling of interest, and convinced that pity would henceforward open to me the road to her heart, I tried to become acquainted with her family. The same evening I bought some things from old Michael, and flattering him on his judgment and experience, endeavoured to lay the foundation of intimacy.