Part 39 (1/2)

”There they are. There is the forest, and there is the cloud, so be pleased to look between the two.”

Ivan Petrovich could not see anything.

”It is time for them. Why, it is less than a week to Annunciation.”

”That's so.”

”Well, go on!”

Near a puddle, Mishka jumped down from the footboard and tested the road, again climbed up, and the carriage safely drove on the pond dam in the garden, ascended the avenue, drove past the cellar and the laundry, from which water was falling, and nimbly rolled up and stopped at the porch. The Chernshev calash had just left the yard. From the house at once ran the servants: gloomy old Danilych with the side whiskers, Nikolay, Mishka's brother, and the boy Pavlushka; and after them came a girl with large black eyes and red arms, which were bared above the elbow, and with just such a bared neck.

”Marya Ivanovna, Marya Ivanovna! Where are you going? Your mother will be worried. You will have time,” was heard the voice of fat Katerina behind her.

But the girl paid no attention to her; just as her father had expected her to do, she took hold of his arm and looked at him with a strange glance.

”Well, papa, have you been to communion?” she asked, as though in dread.

”Yes. You look as though you were afraid that I am such a sinner that I could not receive the communion.”

The girl was apparently offended by her father's jest at such a solemn moment. She heaved a sigh and, following him, held his hand, which she kissed.

”Who is here?”

”Young Chernshev. He is in the drawing-room.”

”Is mamma up? How is she?”

”Mamma feels better to-day. She is sitting down-stairs.”

In the pa.s.sage room Ivan Petrovich was met by nurse Evprakseya, clerk Andrey Ivanovich, and a surveyor, who was living at the house, in order to lay out some land. All of them congratulated Ivan Petrovich. In the drawing-room sat Luiza Karlovna Trugoni, for ten years a friend of the house, an emigrant governess, and a young man of sixteen years, Chernshev, with his French tutor.

THE DECEMBRISTS

THIRD FRAGMENT

(Variant of the First Chapter)

On the 2d of August, 1817, the sixth department of the Directing Senate handed down a decision in the debatable land case between the economic peasants of the village of Izlegoshcha and Chernshev, which was in favour of the peasants and against Chernshev. This decision was an unexpected and important calamitous event for Chernshev. The case had lasted five years. It had been begun by the attorney of the rich village of Izlegoshcha with its three thousand inhabitants, and was won by the peasants in the County Court; but when, with the advice of lawyer Ilya Mitrofanov, a manorial servant bought of Prince Saltykov, Prince Chernshev carried the case to the Government, he won it and besides, the Izlegoshcha peasants were punished by having six of them, who had insulted the surveyor, put in jail.

After that, Prince Chernshev, with his good-natured and merry carelessness, entirely acquiesced, the more so since he knew full well that he had not ”appropriated” any land of the peasants, as was said in the pet.i.tion of the peasants. If the land was ”appropriated,” his father had done it, and since then more than forty years had pa.s.sed. He knew that the peasants of the village of Izlegoshcha were getting along well without that land, had no need of it, and lived on terms of friends.h.i.+p with him, and was unable to understand why they had become so infuriated against him. He knew that he never offended and never wished to offend any one, that he lived in peace with everybody, and that he never wished to do otherwise, and so could not believe that any one should think of offending him. He hated litigations, and so did not defend his case in the Senate, in spite of the advice and earnest solicitations of his lawyer, Ilya Mitrofanov; by allowing the time for the appeal to lapse, he lost the case in the Senate, and lost it in such a way that he was confronted with complete ruin. By the decree of the Senate he not only was to be deprived of five thousand desyatinas of land, but also, for the illegal tenure of that land, was to be mulcted to the amount of 107,000 roubles in favour of the peasants.

Prince Chernshev had eight thousand souls, but all the estates were mortgaged and he had large debts, so that this decree of the Senate ruined him with his whole large family. He had a son and five daughters.

He thought of his case when it was too late to attend to it in the Senate. According to Ilya Mitrofanov's words there was but one salvation, and that was, to pet.i.tion the sovereign and to transfer the case to the Imperial Council. To obtain this it was necessary in person to approach one of the ministers or a member of the Council, or, better still, the emperor himself. Taking all that into consideration, Prince Grigori Ivanovich in the fall of the year 1817 with his whole family left his beloved estate of Studenets, where he had lived so long without leaving it, and went to Moscow. He started for Moscow, and not for St.

Petersburg, because in the fall of that year the emperor with his whole court, with all the highest dignitaries, and with part of the Guards, in which the son of Grigori Ivanovich was serving, was to arrive in Moscow to lay the corner-stone of the Church of the Saviour in commemoration of the liberation of Russia from the French invasion.

In August, immediately after receiving the terrible news of the decree of the Senate, Prince Grigori Ivanovich got ready to go to Moscow. At first the majordomo was sent away to fix the prince's own house on the Arbat; then was sent out a caravan with furniture, servants, horses, carriages, and provisions. In September the prince with his whole family travelled in seven carriages, drawn by his own horses, and, after arriving in Moscow, settled in his house. Relatives, friends, visitors from the province and from St. Petersburg began to a.s.semble in Moscow in the month of September. The Moscow life, with its entertainments, the arrival of his son, the debuts of his daughters, and the success of his eldest daughter, Aleksandra, the only blonde among all the brunettes of the Chernshevs, so much occupied and diverted the prince's attention that, in spite of the fact that here in Moscow he was spending everything which would be left to him after paying all he owed, he forgot his affair and was annoyed and tired whenever Ilya Mitrofanov talked of it, and undertook nothing for the success of his case.

Ivan Mironovich Baushkin, the chief attorney of the peasants, who had conducted the case against the prince with so much zeal in the Senate, who knew all the approaches to the secretaries and departmental chiefs, and who had so skilfully distributed the ten thousand roubles, collected from the peasants, in the shape of presents, now himself brought his activity to an end and returned to the village, where, with the money collected for him as a reward and with what was left of the presents, he bought himself a grove from a neighbouring proprietor and built there a hut and an office. The case was finished in the court of the highest instance, and everything would now proceed of its own accord.