“Viéra,”—Pavel Konstantinuitch began—“Mikhaïl Ivanuitch has done us the honor of asking your hand. We answered like loving parents that we would not compel you, but we said that on our side we were glad. You, as a good and dutiful daughter, such as you have always appeared to be, will depend on our experience, that we have not dared to ask God for such a husband for you. Do you agree, Viéra?”
“No,” said Viérotchka.
“What is that you say, Viéra?” cried Pavel Konstantinuitch. The thing was so plain that even he could cry out, not asking his wife how to act.
“Have you lost your senses, you fool? Repeat that if you dare, you disobedient thing!” cried Marya Alekséyevna, doubling her fists against her daughter.
“Forgive me, mámenka,” said Viéra, rising; “if you touch me, I will leave the house; if you lock me up, I will jump out of the window. I knew how you would take my refusal, and I have resolved how to act. Take a seat, and sit down, or I shall go.”
Marya Alekséyevna sat down again. “What a piece of stupidity! that front door is not under lock and key; she would push away the bolt in a second; we could not ketch her. She would run away! she is crazy!”
“I shall not marry him! Without my consent, they can’t marry me!”
“Viéra, you are losing your senses,” said Marya Alekséyevna in a choking voice.
“How can that be? What answer can we give him tomorrow?” exclaimed her father.
“You are not to blame towards him, but I will not consent.”
This scene lasted about two hours. Marya Alekséyevna was in a stew; twenty times she began to cry out, and clench her fists, but Viérotchka said: “Don’t get up, or I shall leave!” They kept beating about the bush, but they could not do anything. It ended when Matrióna came in to ask whether she would put on the dinner. “The pirog [pie] was overdone.”
“Think till evening, Viéra. Come to your senses, you fool!” said Marya Alekséyevna, and whispered something to Matrióna.
“Mámenka, you are going to do something to me! to take out the key from my bedroom, or something else. Don’t you do it, or it will be worse!”
Marya Alekséyevna said to the cook, “No matter. What a beast she is! this Viérka! If it were not that he wanted her on account of her face, I would beat her till she bled! But now how can I touch her? She will disfigure herself, the confounded fool!”
They went in to dinner. They dined quietly. After dinner Viérotchka went to her room. Pavel Konstantinuitch lay down, as he usually did, to take a nap, but this time the nap was a failure. As soon as he closed his eyes, Matrióna came in and said that the khozyáïka’s manservant was there; that the landlady asks Pavel Konstantinuitch to call upon her immediately. Matrióna was trembling like an aspen leaf. Why should she tremble?
VIII
How could Matrióna help trembling when the whole trouble arose through her? As soon as she called Viérotchka to her pápenka and mámenka, she immediately ran off to tell the wife of the khozyáïka’s cook how “your barin is courting our baruishna”; they called the youngest of the khozyáïka’s chambermaids, and began to blame her for her unfriendliness in not having told them anything about it before. The youngest chambermaid could not understand what the secret was that they blamed her for not telling: she had never concealed anything. They told her when she said, “I have not concealed anything,” that they were sorry for reproaching her for concealing anything. She ran off to tell the news to the oldest of the chambermaids; the oldest of the chambermaids said, “Of course, he has done this without his mother’s knowledge, because I have not heard anything, and I must know everything that Anna Petrovna knows,” and she went off to tell the whole story to the baruina; such was the mischief caused by Matrióna! “My confounded little tongue has made me a great deal of bother,” she thought. “Marya Alekséyevna will find out who let the cat out of the bag.” But it happened that Marya Alekséyevna forgot to ask who told of it.
Anna Petrovna could not say anything else but akh and okh: twice she fell in a swoon, even while she was alone with the senior chambermaid. Of course, she was greatly shocked, and she summoned her son. The son appeared.
“Michel, is it true what I have heard?” in a tone of indignant suffering.
“What have you heard, maman?”
“That you have offered yourself to this—to this—to this—to the daughter of our manager!”
“I have, maman.”
“Without asking your mother’s consent?”
“I intended to ask your consent after I had obtained hers.”
“I presume that you were surer of her consent than of mine!”
“Maman, it is the fashion nowadays to get the girl’s consent first, and to speak to relations afterwards.”
“Is that your fashion? Maybe it is also your fashion for the sons of good families to marry God knows whom, and for the mothers to consent to it?”
“But, maman, she is not ‘a God-knows-whom’; when you come to know her you will approve of my choice.”
“ ‘When I know her!’ I shall never know her! ‘I approve of your choice’! I forbid any thought of this choice! Do you hear? I forbid it!”
“Maman, this is not the fashion nowadays; I am not a little boy to
