"Wait a minute," she said, "don't shake your head. Listen first.
Think of my feelings when I learned that he had thrown away his parental blessing like a gnawed bone into a cesspool.
Think how he outraged me, me, who for years refused myself sleep and food. He has done to his patrimony what one would do to a bauble bought at a fair."
"Oh, mother dear, what a shame, what a shame!" began Porfiry Vladimirych, but Arina Petrovna stopped him again.
"Wait a minute. Let me have your opinion when I order you to.
If at least the scoundrel had come to me in time and said:
'I am guilty, dear mamma, I couldn't restrain myself,' I might have bought the house back for a song.
The unworthy son did not know how to make use of the property.
Perhaps the worthier children would.
The house easily brought in fifteen per cent. income yearly.
Maybe I would have thrown him out another thousand rubles in his distress.
But instead, he disposed of the property without so much as saying a word to me.
With my own hands, I paid out twelve thousand rubles for the house, and it was sold at auction for eight thousand rubles!"
"The main thing, dear mamma, is that he has dealt so basely with the parental blessing," Porfiry interjected hastily, as if afraid of being stopped again.
"Yes, that's so, too.
My money does not come lightly. I have earned it with the sweat of my brow.
When I married your father, all he owned was the estate of Golovliovo with one hundred and one souls, and a few more souls scattered in distant estates, a hundred and fifty in all.
As for me, I had nothing at all.
Now look what an estate I have built up on that foundation.
There are four thousand souls, not a single one less.
I can't take them into the grave with me.
Do you think it was an easy task to scrape four thousand souls together?
No, dear child, not easy, far from easy. I spent many a sleepless night trying to work out a good business scheme, so that no one should smell it out and stand in my way.
And what have I not endured in my business travels?
I have had plenty of hard road and bad weather and slippery ice.
It is only lately that I allow myself the luxury of a coach. In former times I rode in a plain two-horse peasant's cart with a cover put on extra for me. It was in nothing but a cart that I used to go to Moscow.
And the filth and stench I had to put up with in the Moscow inns!
I begrudged myself the dime for the cabby, and I walked all the way from Rogozhskaya Street to Solyanka.
The house-porter would say to me wonderingly: "Mistress, they say you are young and well-to-do, why do you work so hard?"
But I was silent and patient.
At first all I had at my disposal were thirty thousand rubles in bank notes. I sold your father's remote estates with their one hundred souls, and with what I realized from the sale I set out to buy a property with a thousand souls.
I had a mass said at the Iverska Church and went to Solyanka to try my luck.
What do you think happened?
The Holy Virgin must have seen my bitter tears. She helped me buy the estate.
It was like a miracle. The instant I bid thirty thousand rubles the auction came to an end.
There had been a lot of noise and excitement, but then the people stopped bidding, and it was as quiet as could be.
The auctioneer got up and congratulated me. I was dumfounded.
Ivan Nikolaich, the lawyer, came over to me and said: 'Let me congratulate you, madam, on your purchase.' But I stood there stiff as a post.
How great is God's mercy!
Think of it, if in my confusion someone had called out just for spite, 'I bid thirty-five thousand,' I should certainly have offered every bit of forty thousand.
And where would I have gotten the money from?"
Many a time before had Arina Petrovna regaled her children with the epical beginnings of her career of acquisition. It had never lost the charm of novelty for them.
Porfiry Vladimirych listened smiling, sighing, turning up his eye-balls, lowering them, to the tune of the rapid changes through which the tale passed.
As for Pavel Vladimirych, he sat with wide-open eyes, like a child, listening to a familiar, yet ever-fascinating fairy tale.
"Do you think your mother built up her fortune without trouble?" went on Arina Petrovna. "It takes trouble even to make a pimple on your nose. After the first purchase I was laid up with fever for six weeks.
So judge for yourselves how it must make my heart ache to see my hard-earned money, money I went through torments to get, you may say, thrown out into the gutter for no earthly reason."
There was a minute's pause.
Porfiry Vladimirych was ready to rend his garments, but refrained, fearing there would be no one in the village to mend them. Pavel Vladimirych, as soon as the fairy tale was over, fell back into his wonted apathy, and his face resumed its customary dull expression.
"That is why I asked you to come here," began Arina Petrovna anew. "Now judge us, me and the villain.
Whatever you decide will be done.