And yet the matter still went ahead gropingly. It was mutually and amicably agreed between Totsky and the general that for the time being they would avoid any formal and irrevocable steps. The parents had still not even begun to speak quite openly with their daughters; some dissonance seemed to set in: Mrs. Epanchin, the mother of the family, was becoming displeased for some reason, and that was very grave. There was one circumstance here that hindered everything, one complex and troublesome occurrence, owing to which the whole matter might fall apart irrevocably.
This complex and troublesome "occurrence" (as Totsky himself put it) had begun very far back, about eighteen years ago. Next to one of Afanasy Ivanovich's rich estates, in one of the central provinces, an impoverished petty landowner was living an impoverished life. This was a man remarkable for his ceaseless and anecdotal misfortunes—a retired officer, from a good noble family, and in that respect even better than Totsky, a certain Filipp Alexandrovich Barashkov. Buried in debts and mortgages, he succeeded at last, after hard, almost peasant-like labors, in setting up his small estate more or less satisfactorily. The smallest success encouraged him extraordinarily. Encouraged and radiant with hopes, he went for a few days to his district town, to meet and, if possible, come to a final agreement with one of his chief creditors. On the third day after his arrival in town, his warden came from the village, on horseback, his cheek burned and his beard singed, and informed him that the "family estate burned down" the day before, at noon, and that "his wife burned with it, but the little children were left unharmed." This surprise even Barashkov, accustomed as he was to the "bruises of fortune," could not bear; he went mad and a
month later died in delirium. The burned-down estate, with its peasants gone off begging, was sold for debts; and Barashkov's children, two little girls aged six and seven, were taken out of magnanimity to be kept and brought up by Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky. They were brought up together with the children of Afanasy Ivanovich's steward, a retired official with a large family and a German besides. Soon only one girl, Nastya, was left, the younger one having died of whooping cough. Totsky, who was living abroad, soon forgot all about them. One day, some five years later, Afanasy Ivanovich, passing by, decided to have a look at his estate and suddenly noticed in his country house, in the family of his German, a lovely child, a girl of about twelve, lively, sweet, clever, and promising to become a great beauty—in that regard Afanasy Ivanovich was an unerring connoisseur. That time he spent only a few days on his estate, but he had time to arrange things; a considerable change took place in the girl's education: a respectable, elderly governess was called in, experienced in the higher upbringing of girls, an educated Swiss woman, who, along with French, taught various other subjects. She settled into the country house, and little Nastya's upbringing acquired exceptional scope. Exactly four years later, this upbringing came to an end; the governess left, and a certain lady came to fetch Nastya, also a landowner of some sort, and also Mr. Totsky's neighbor, but in another, distant province, and on the instructions and by the authority of Afanasy Ivanovich, took Nastya away with her. On this small estate there also turned out to be a small but newly constructed wooden house; it was decorated with particular elegance, and the little village, as if on purpose, was called "Delight." The lady landowner brought Nastya straight to this quiet little house, and as she herself, a childless widow, lived less than a mile away, she settled in with Nastya. Around Nastya an old housekeeper and a young, experienced maid appeared. There were musical instruments in the house, an elegant library for girls, paintings, prints, pencils, brushes, paints, an astonishing greyhound, and two weeks later Afanasy Ivanovich himself arrived . . . After that he somehow became especially fond of this little village lost in the steppes, came every summer, stayed for two, even three months, and thus a rather long time, some four years, passed peacefully and happily, with taste and elegance.
Once it happened, at the beginning of winter, about four months after one of Afanasy Ivanovich's summer visits to Delight, which this time had lasted only two weeks, that a rumor spread, or,
rather, the rumor somehow reached Nastasya Filippovna, that in Petersburg, Afanasy Ivanovich was about to marry a beauty, a rich girl, from the nobility—in short, to make a respectable and brilliant match. Later it turned out that the rumor was not accurate in all details: the wedding was then only a project, and everything was still very uncertain, but all the same an extraordinary upheaval took place in Nastasya Filippovna's life after that. She suddenly showed an extraordinary resolve and revealed a most unexpected character. Without further thought, she left her little country house and suddenly went to Petersburg, straight to Totsky, all on her own. He was amazed, tried to begin speaking; but it suddenly turned out, almost from the first phrase, that he had to change completely the style, the vocal range, the former topics of pleasant and elegant conversation, which till then had been used so successfully, the logic—everything, everything! Before him sat a totally different woman, not at all like the one he had known till then and had left only that July in the village of Delight.
This new woman, it turned out, first of all knew and understood an extraordinary amount—so much that it was a cause of profound wonder where she could have acquired such information, could have developed such precise notions in herself. (Could it have been from her girls' library?) What's more, she even understood an exceeding amount about legal matters and had a positive knowledge, if not of the world, then at least of how certain things went in the world; second of all, this was a completely different character from before, that is, not something timid, uncertain in a boarding-school way, sometimes charming in its original liveliness and naivety, sometimes melancholy and pensive, astonished, mistrustful, weepy, and restless.
No: here before him an extraordinary and unexpected being laughed and stung him with a most poisonous sarcasm, telling him outright that she had never felt anything in her heart for him except the deepest contempt, contempt to the point of nausea, which had followed directly upon her initial astonishment. This new woman announced to him that in the fullest sense it would make no difference to her if he married any woman he liked right then and there, but that she had come to prevent this marriage of his, and to prevent it out of spite, solely because she wanted it that way, and consequently it must be that way—"well, so that now I can simply laugh at you to my heart's content, because now I, too, finally feel like laughing."
At least that was how she put it, though she may not have said everything she had in mind. But while the new Nastasya Filippovna was laughing and explaining all this, Afanasy Ivanovich was thinking the matter over to himself and, as far as possible, putting his somewhat shattered thoughts in order. This thinking went on for some time; for almost two weeks he grappled with it and tried to reach a final decision; but after two weeks his decision was taken. The thing was that Afanasy Ivanovich was about fifty at that time, and he was in the highest degree a respectable and settled man. His position in the world and in society had long been established on a most solid foundation. He loved and valued himself, his peace, and his comfort more than anything in the world, as befitted a man decent in the highest degree. Not the slightest disturbance, not the slightest wavering, could be tolerated in what had been established by his entire life and had acquired such a beautiful form. On the other hand, his experience and profound insight into things told Totsky very quickly and with extraordinary sureness that he now had to do with a being who was completely out of the ordinary, that this was precisely the sort of being who would not merely threaten, but would certainly act, and above all would decidedly stop at nothing, the more so as she valued decidedly nothing in the world, so that it was even impossible to tempt her. Here, obviously, was something else, implying some heartful and soulful swill—like some sort of romantic indignation, God knows against whom or why, some insatiable feeling of contempt that leaps completely beyond measure—in short, something highly ridiculous and inadmissible in decent society, something that was a sheer punishment from God for any decent man to encounter. To be sure, with Totsky's wealth and connections, it was possible to produce some small and totally innocent villainy at once, so as to be rid of this trouble. On the other hand, it was obvious that Nastasya Filippovna herself was scarcely capable of doing any harm, for instance, in the legal sense; she could not even cause a significant scandal, because it would always be too easy to limit her. But all that was so only in case Nastasya Filippovna decided to act as everyone generally acts in such cases, without leaping too eccentrically beyond measure. But it was here that Totsky's keen eye also proved usefuclass="underline" he was able to perceive that Nastasya Filippovna herself understood perfectly well how harmless she was in the legal sense, but that she had something quite different in mind and ... in her flashing eyes. Valuing nothing, and least of all herself (it took great intelligence