Having, as it were, finished their affair with her Excellency, the ladies felt inclined to join the party of the gentlemen, with the view of bringing them round to their own opinion, and they continued to affirm that the alleged purchase of dead serfs was nothing else but a scheme to divert attention from his real intentions, and thus more successfully to accomplish the projected elopement.
Many of the gentlemen were even gained over, and persuaded to join the female party, notwithstanding the bitter reproaches that were addressed to them by their own party and comrades, who called them old women and petticoat worshippers, which allegations, as is well known, are very offensive to any gentleman.
But, however strong and obstinate the remaining coalition of the men was, their party was far from being so well organised as that of the ladies. With them all was somehow irregular, rough, loose, not well at all; their heads were full of confusion, partiality, contradiction; their thoughts tormented by doubts and suspicions—in a word, the, in every respect, empty nature of the men appeared to be in the greatest disorder, a naturel, at the same time rough and heavy, unfit for household matters, nor for the more tender impressions of the heart, suspicious, indolent, full of continual doubts and eternal apprehensions.
They maintained most obstinately that all was stuff and nonsense, that the elopement with his Excellency\'s daughter was more likely to be undertaken by a dashing hussar, but not by a peaceable civilian; and that Tchichikoff was not the man to carry out such a plan, so full of madness; that the women were all silly, and had got up a false alarm; that the real object upon which they had to turn their exclusive attention were the dead serfs themselves, for it was with them that the secret lay buried; but what this secret was, the devil alone knew, at any rate in their opinion, it was something awful. Why it was so dreadful, so awful, in\' the opinion of the gentlemen, we shall know at once.
By a decree of his Majesty the Emperor Nicholas I, another Lord-Lieutenant, or Governor had been appointed for the province of Smolensk, and the present one recalled to St. Petersburgh; such an ukase causes in Russia a thorough change of administration and appointments, and for this reason it had the most alarming effect upon the nervous and moral system of the Imperial employés; Courts of Inquiries would be held in all branches of administration, many of them had the prospect before them of being dismissed, whilst others ran the risk of seeing themselves utterly stripped of their little profits under the new head of administration.
And really, some of them thought, "if the new Governor was to know all our little trespasses, it would be quite sufficient to effect our complete disgrace, and perhaps even banishment would be the consequence." The Superintendent of the Imperial Hospitals grew suddenly pale; heaven knows what thoughts flashed across his mind; did these dead serfs mean, perhaps, that all those people who died lately in great numbers from cholera and various fevers in the Imperial Hospitals and other places, for want of proper and careful sanitary measures, and was Tchichikoff, by chance, an Imperial Attorney, or Commissioner sent by the Governor-General to hold a secret Court of Inquiry.
He communicated this opinion to the President of the Council. The President answered that this supposition was absurd, and then immediately grew pale himself as he put to himself the following question:
"But if these serfs whom Tchichikoff has been purchasing were really dead, he has caused us all to legalise the transaction, and has obliged me to sign the contract of sale as Pluschkin\'s agent, and if the whole transaction is reported with all its particulars to the Governor-General, how then? And if the Governor-General lays all the particulars of this transaction before His Majesty the Emperor? I shudder at the thought."
He communicated these apprehensions to the one and to the other, and immediately after, the one and the other grew pale as death. Fear is like a contagious disorder; it communicates itself in an instant. All the Imperial employés suddenly discovered in themselves such transgressions as did not even exist in reality. The words "dead serfs" spread fear and terror all around, which were instantaneously communicated to all who were even in the slightest degree compromised in the transaction; they began also to suspect that it might be an allusion to some recent occurrences in which a few peasants died suddenly, and were buried hurriedly without an inquest being held on their bodies.
The first occurrence was an encounter between some tradesmen from Great Novgorod and some men of the same calling from Little or Nishni-Novogorod, who had come to visit the fair held at that time in Smolensk. After having done a good business in town, the Great Novogorodians gave a regular Russian feast to their friends the little Novogorodians, seasoned with all the foreign improvements of kitchen and cellar. The feast, however, ended in a regular fight The petty jealousies existing between these two very important towns determined the Little Novogorodians to resent an old quarrel which had been brought again on the tapis as regarded the pre-eminence of the two towns, in a commercial sense. They rushed upon the Great Novogorodians, determined to have their lives; but the result was, that they got fearfully ill-used by the Great Novogorodians, who disfigured their heads, faces and sides in a most merciless manner, and proved that the fists of some of the defunct Great Novogorodians were of an extraordinary size and hardness.
One of the defeated combatants had fared very badly indeed, and narrowly escaped losing his life; however, he had got off only after having had his nose flattened like a crumpet, so much so indeed that there remained but a vestige of a nose on his face. The merchants confessed to the authorities that they had been only jesting; but it was rumoured about that in this serious conflict, four of the Imperial peacemongers had lost their lives. However, the real loss of life was kept in the dark, and the inquiries that were held by the proper authorities went to show that the deceased Novogorodians had died from the effects of suffocation and they were at once buried as suffocated people.
The other occurrence, which happened nearly at the same time, was the following: Some crown serfs (property of the Emperor) of the not unimportant village of Vladomirsk, had joined their brethren and neighbours in the adjoining village of Volkonsk, for the purpose of taking revenge upon an imperial steward, who resided between the two villages, and who not only ill-treated them in the most barbarous manner, but even seduced by threats and intimidation, their wives and daughters. This same imperial steward, Drobriaschkin by name, had been observed to pay too frequent visits in both villages, and at unusual hours, which was thought highly improper by the peasants for an imperial manager, and head of the country police. It, therefore, seemed to them that their magistrate had too many weaknesses for their wives and daughters.
However, nothing positive could be proved against him, although the imperial serfs had stated in their depositions, that they had seen their magistrate roaming about in the neighbourhood like a cat, and that they had more than once given him fair warning, and that on one occasion they had even beaten and driven him out of the hut of one of their worthiest elders, where he had stealthily entered, Heaven knows for what purpose. The magistrate merited, of course, chastisement for the weaknesses of his heart, and ought not to have imagined, that because he was an imperial manager, he could presume to trample upon the affections of imperial serfs; on the other hand again, the peasants of the imperial villages of Vladomirsk and Volkonsk, could also not have been justified in murdering their magistrate for his weaknesses of the heart, provided the charge could have been proved against one or all of them.
However, this occurrence also remained in the dark, because all matters in which the police and people of high rank are interested, remain in Russia usually enveloped in darkness; nevertheless, the country magistrate, the imperial manager, was found murdered on the high road, his official coat was torn into rags, and as for his face and body, it was perfectly impossible to identify them as having once harboured the haughty and tyrannical soul of a Dobriaschkin.
The whole occurrence, with al............