"Oui, oui, je suis incapable."
"But by to-morrow you'll have rested and thought it over.
Stay at home. If anything happens let me know, even if it's at night.
Don't write letters, I shan't read them.
To-morrow I'll come again at this time alone, for a final answer, and I trust it will be satisfactory.
Try to have nobody here and no untidiness, for the place isn't fit to be seen.
Nastasya, Nastasya!"
The next day, of course, he consented, and, indeed, he could do nothing else.
There was one circumstance...
VIII
Stepan Trofimovitch's estate, as we used to call it (which consisted of fifty souls, reckoning in the old fashion, and bordered on Skvoreshniki), was not really his at all, but his first wife's, and so belonged now to his son Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky.
Stepan Trofimovitch was simply his trustee, and so, when the nestling was full-fledged, he had given his father a formal authorisation to manage the estate.
This transaction was a profitable one for the young man. He received as much as a thousand roubles a year by way of revenue from the estate, though under the new regime it could not have yielded more than five hundred, and possibly not that.
God knows how such an arrangement had arisen.
The whole sum, however, was sent the young man by Varvara Petrovna, and Stepan Trofimovitch had nothing to do with a single rouble of it.
On the other hand, the whole revenue from the land remained in his pocket, and he had, besides, completely ruined the estate, letting it to a mercenary rogue, and without the knowledge of Varvara Petrovna selling the timber which gave the estate its chief value.
He had some time before sold the woods bit by bit.
It was worth at least eight thousand, yet he had only received five thousand for it.
But he sometimes lost too much at the club, and was afraid to ask Varvara Petrovna for the money.
She clenched her teeth when she heard at last of everything.
And now, all at once, his son announced that he was coming himself to sell his property for what he could get for it, and commissioned his father to take steps promptly to arrange the sale.
It was clear that Stepan Trofimovitch, being a generous and disinterested man, felt ashamed of his treatment of ce cher enfant (whom he had seen for the last time nine years before as a student in Petersburg).
The estate might originally have been worth thirteen or fourteen thousand. Now it was doubtful whether anyone would give five for it.
No doubt Stepan Trofimovitch was fully entitled by the terms of the trust to sell the wood, and taking into account the incredibly large yearly revenue of a thousand roubles which had been sent punctually for so many years, he could have put up a good defence of his management.
But Stepan Trofimovitch was a generous man of exalted impulses.
A wonderfully fine inspiration occurred to his mind: when Petrusha returned, to lay on the table before him the maximum price of fifteen thousand roubles without a hint at the sums that had been sent him hitherto, and warmly and with tears to press ce cher fils to his heart, and so to make an end of all accounts between them.
He began cautiously and indirectly unfolding this picture before Varvara Petrovna.
He hinted that this would add a peculiarly noble note to their friendship... to their "idea."
This would set the parents of the last generation—and people of the last generation generally—in such a disinterested and magnanimous light in comparison with the new frivolous and socialistic younger generation.
He said a great deal more, but Varvara Petrovna was obstinately silent.
At last she informed him airily that she was prepared to buy their estate, and to pay for it the maximum price, that is, six or seven thousand (though four would have been a fair price for it).
Of the remaining eight thousand which had vanished with the woods she said not a word.
This conversation took place a month before the match was proposed to him.
Stepan Trofimovitch was overwhelmed, and began to ponder.
There might in the past have been a hope that his son would not come, after all—an outsider, that is to say, might have hoped so.
Stepan Trofimovitch as a father would have indignantly rejected the insinuation that he could entertain such a hope.
Anyway queer rumours had hitherto been reaching us about Petrusha.
To begin with, on completing his studies at the university six years before, he had hung about in Petersburg without getting work.
Suddenly we got the news that he had taken part in issuing some anonymous manifesto and that he was implicated in the affair.
Then he suddenly turned up abroad in Switzerland at Geneva—he had escaped, very likely.
"It's surprising to me," Stepan Trofimovitch commented, greatly disconcerted. "Petrusha, c'est une si pauvre tete!
He's good, noble-hearted, very sensitive, and I was so delighted with him in Petersburg, comparing him with the young people of to-day. But c'est un pauvre sire, tout de meme.... And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality.
They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it... second-hand, of course.
And for me, for me, think what it means!
I have so many enemies here and more still there, they'll put it down to the father's influence. Good God!
Petrusha a revolutionist!
What times we live in!"
Very soon, however, Petrusha sent his exact address from Switzerland for money to be sent him as usual; so he could not be exactly an exile.
And now, after four years abroad, he was suddenly making his appearance again in his own country, and announced that he would arrive shortly, so there could be no charge against him.
What was more, someone seemed to be interested in him and protecting him.