At this point I lost patience, and cried furiously to Pyotr Stepanovitch:
"It's all your doing, you rascal!
This was what you were doing this morning.
You helped Stavrogin, you came in the carriage, you helped her into it... it was you, you, you!
Yulia Mihailovna, he is your enemy; he will be your ruin too!
Beware of him!"
And I ran headlong out of the house.
I wonder myself and cannot make out to this day how I came to say that to him.
But I guessed quite right: it had all happened almost exactly as I said, as appeared later.
What struck me most was the obviously artificial way in which he broke the news.
He had not told it at once on entering the house as an extraordinary piece of news, but pretended that we knew without his telling us which was impossible in so short a time.
And if we had known it, we could not possibly have refrained from mentioning it till he introduced the subject.
Besides, he could not have heard yet that the town was "ringing with gossip" about the marshal's wife in so short a time.
Besides, he had once or twice given a vulgar, frivolous smile as he told the story, probably considering that we were fools and completely taken in.
But I had no thought to spare for him; the central fact I believed, and ran from Yulia Mihailovna's, beside myself.
The catastrophe cut me to the heart.
I was wounded almost to tears; perhaps I did shed some indeed.
I was at a complete loss what to do.
I rushed to Stepan Trofimovitch's, but the vexatious man still refused to open the door.
Nastasya informed me, in a reverent whisper, that he had gone to bed, but I did not believe it.
At Liza's house I succeeded in questioning the servants. They confirmed the story of the elopement, but knew nothing themselves.
There was great commotion in the house; their mistress had been attacked by fainting fits, and Mavriky Nikolaevitch was with her.
I did not feel it possible to ask for Mavriky Nikolaevitch.
To my inquiries about Pyotr Stepanovitch they told me that he had been in and out continually of late, sometimes twice in the day.
The servants were sad, and showed particular respectfulness in speaking of Liza; they were fond of her.
That she was ruined, utterly ruined, I did not doubt; but the psychological aspect of the matter I was utterly unable to understand, especially after her scene with Stavrogin the previous day.
To run about the town and inquire at the houses of acquaintances, who would, of course, by now have heard the news and be rejoicing at it, seemed to me revolting, besides being humiliating for Liza.
But, strange to say, I ran to see Darya Pavlovna, though I was not admitted (no one had been admitted into the house since the previous morning). I don't know what I could have said to her and what made me run to her.
From her I went to her brother's.
Shatov listened sullenly and in silence.
I may observe that I found him more gloomy than I had ever seen him before; he was awfully preoccupied and seemed only to listen to me with an effort.
He said scarcely anything and began walking up and down his cell from corner to corner, treading more noisily than usual.
As I was going down the stairs he shouted after me to go to Liputin's:
"There you'll hear everything."
Yet I did not go to Liputin's, but after I'd gone a good way towards home I turned back to Shatov's again, and, half opening the door without going in, suggested to him laconically and with no kind of explanation, "Won't you go to Marya Timofyevna to-day?"
At this Shatov swore at me, and I went away.
I note here that I may not forget it that he did purposely go that evening to the other end of the town to see Marya Timofyevna, whom he had not seen for some time.
He found her in excellent health and spirits and Lebyadkin dead drunk, asleep on the sofa in the first room.
This was at nine o'clock.
He told me so himself next day when we met for a moment in the street.
Before ten o'clock I made up my mind to go to the ball, but not in the capacity of a steward (besides my rosette had been left at Yulia Mihailovna's). I was tempted by irresistible curiosity to listen, without asking any questions, to what people were saying in the town about all that had happened.
I wanted, too, to have a look at Yulia Mihailovna, if only at a distance.
I reproached myself greatly that I had left her so abruptly that afternoon.
III
All that night, with its almost grotesque incidents, and the terrible denouement that followed in the early morning, still seems to me like a hideous nightmare, and is, for me at least, the most painful chapter in my chronicle.
I was late for the ball, and it was destined to end so quickly that I arrived not long before it was over.
It was eleven o'clock when I reached the entrance of the marshal's house, where the same White Hall in which the matinee had taken place had, in spite of the short interval between, been cleared and made ready to serve as the chief ballroom for the whole town, as we expected, to dance in.
But far as I had been that morning from expecting the ball to be a success, I had had no presentiment of the full truth. Not one family of the higher circles appeared; even the subordinate officials of rather more consequence were absent—and this was a very striking fact.
As for ladies and girls, Pyotr Stepanovitch's arguments (the duplicity of which was obvious now) turned out to be utterly incorrect: exceedingly few had come; to four men there was scarcely one lady—and what ladies they were!
Regimental ladies of a sort, three doctors' wives with their daughters, two or three poor ladies from the country, the seven daughters and the niece of the secretary whom I have mentioned already, some wives of tradesmen, of post-office clerks and other small fry—was this what Yulia Mihailovna expected?