When I mentioned the ruined house and his apparent desire to get away from it, Vassilii drew a long breath, passed his hand across his eyes, and gazed up to the ikon hanging opposite. His papiroska trembled a little in his lean brown hand, and he began in a voice that had a strange quiver in it.
“You noticed that woman—the one with fair hair and pale complexion—who came in for a letter just now? I spoke to her. There was such a remarkable resemblance that I could not refrain from asking her a question—and yet how foolish!
“I am not an old man, scarcely sixty, nevertheless I might have seen a century of things in the years that have passed since I last sat in this post-station. I feel as though I have utterly wasted my life; still I do not know that I regret that the sweets came first, all at once, and the dregs afterwards. Why not? One may at least sit and rail at the present, though he envy his neighbours.
“You know nothing of the tragedy that has overshadowed my life? No. Then I will tell you. See! I wear the ribbon of St. Andrew in my buttonhole. It is worn, and the colours have faded. The Tzar bestowed it upon me for bravery in the Crimea. Bravery! Bah! it was not valour but sheer recklessness, because I had no desire to live longer.
“The story is a queer one, and still more queer perhaps that it should be I who tell it.
“In that house the ruins of which we passed this afternoon I once lived with my father, Count Alexander Nechaieff. My mother died soon after my birth, and all my earlier days were passed in that great gloomy old place without any companions of my own age. My father, the barin of that wretched little village of Nagorskoie, owned many serfs. He was cruel, harsh, unjust, and hard-hearted, and the peasants regarded him with terror. This part of Vologda is, you see, flat and exposed; the soil is poor, the population sparse, and the long winter is always more severe than away in Petersburg. The consequence of this was that the inhabitants of Nagorskoie had become wild and embittered, for my father’s exactions had reduced his serfs to the direst poverty; the isbas were devoid of all but absolute necessities, the fields neglected, and the wretched moujiks starving. In the majority of the cottages the stove had gone out owing to lack of fuel, and the samovar disused because there was no tea. The poverty was worse than in previous years, and the peasantry were driven to despair.
“One day, in the bitterest season of that merciless winter, my father and I were sitting before the stove in the dining-room, smoking our papiroski after our mid-day meal. I was then only twenty, having just returned from my studies at Moscow. The room in which we sat was cosy and well furnished, for my father, arrogant and selfish, denied himself no luxury, and led a life of idleness and ease, spending half his time at Petersburg, and the remainder at Nagorskoie.
“Suddenly Artem Makaroff, my father’s secretary, entered. I had always disliked him, for he was an oleaginous, soft-spoken man whose ugly face always wore a sinister expression. Addressing my father, he said—