ng his
spiritual power with the servants) all that was going on in the house,
and especially in respect of the visitors these ladies received, who
they were, the length of their stay, whether any of them were strangers
to that part of the country, and so on. The poor, simple old man was in
an agony of humiliation and terror. "I came to warn you. Be cautious in
your conduct, for the love of God. I am burning with shame, but there is
no getting out from under the net. I shall have to tell them what I
see, because if I did not there is my deacon. He would make the worst
of things to curry favour. And then my son-in-law, the husband of my
Parasha, who is a writer in the Government Domain office; they would
soon kick him out--and maybe send him away somewhere." The old man
lamented the necessities of the times--"when people do not agree
somehow" and wiped his eyes. He did not wish to spend the evening of his
days with a shaven head in the penitent's cell of some monastery--"and
subjected to all the severities of ecclesiastical discipline; for
they would show no mercy to an old man," he groaned. He became almost
hysterical, and the two ladies, full of commiseration, soothed him the
best they could before they let him go back to his cottage. But, as a
matter of fact, they had very few visitors. The neighbours--some of them
old friends--began to keep away; a few from timidity, others with marked
disdain, being grand people that came only for the summer--Miss Haldin
explained to me--aristocrats, reactionaries. It was a solitary existence
for a young girl. Her relations with her mother were of the tenderest
and most open kind; but Mrs. Haldin had seen the experiences of her
own generation, its sufferings, its deceptions, its apostasies too. Her
affection for her children was expressed by the suppression of all signs
of anxiety. She maintained a heroic reserve. To Nathalie Haldin, her
brother with his Petersburg existence, not enigmatical in the least
(there could be no doubt of what he felt or thought) but conducted a
little mysteriously, was the only visible representative of a proscribed
liberty. All the significance of freedom, its indefinite promises, lived
in their long discussions, which breathed the loftiest hope of action
and faith in success. Then, suddenly, the action, the hopes, came to
an end with the details ferreted out by the English journalist. The
concrete fact, the fact of his death remained! but it remained obscu