‘Up there’, that is, in the mistress’s house, reigned the same horror as in the serfs’ quarters. Her bedroom smelt of eau-de-cologne and medicine. Dunyásha was melting yellow wax and making a plaster. What the plaster was for I don’t know, but it was always made when the lady was unwell. And now she was so upset that she was quite ill. To keep Dunyásha’s courage up her aunt had come to stay the night, so there were four of them, including the girl, sitting in the maid’s room, and talking in low voices.
‘Who will go to get some oil?’ asked Dunyásha.
‘Nothing will induce me to go, Avdótya Pávlovna!’ the second maid said decidedly.
‘Nonsense! You and Aksyútka go together.’
‘I’ll run across alone. I’m not afraid of anything!’ said Aksyútka, and at once became frightened.
‘Well then, go, dear; ask Granny Anna to give you some in a tumbler and bring it here; don’t spill any,’ said Dunyásha.
Aksyútka lifted her skirt with one hand, and being thereby prevented from swinging both arms, swung one of them twice as violently across the line of her progression, and darted away. She was afraid, and felt that if she should see or hear anything, even her own living mother, she would perish with fright. She flew, with her eyes shut, along the familiar pathway.
XIII
‘IS the mistress asleep or not?’ suddenly asked a deep peasant-voice close to Aksyútka. She opened her eyes, which she had kept shut, and saw a figure that seemed to her taller than the house. She screeched, and flew back so fast that her skirts floated behind her. With one bound she was on the porch and with another in the maid’s room, where she threw herself on her bed with a wild yell. Dunyásha, her aunt, and the second maid almost died of terror, and before they had time to recover they heard heavy, slow, hesitating steps in the passage and at their door. Dunyásha rushed to her mistress, spilling the melted wax. The second maid hid herself behind the skirts that hung on the wall; the aunt, a more determined character, was about to hold the door to the passage closed, but it opened and a peasant entered the room. It was Dútlov, with his boat-like shoes. Paying no heed to the maids’ fears, he looked round for an icon, and not seeing the tiny one in the left-hand corner of the room, he crossed himself in front of a cupboard in which teacups were kept, laid his cap on the window-sill, and thrusting his arm deep into the bosom of his coat as if he were going to scratch himself under his other arm, he pulled out the letter with the five brown seals stamped with an anchor. Dunyásha’s aunt held her hands to her heart and with difficulty brought out the words:
‘Well, you did give me a fright, Naúmych! I can’t utter a wo … ord! I thought my last moment had come!’
‘Is that the way to behave?’ said the second maid, appearing from under the skirts.
‘The mistress herself is upset,’ said Dunyásha, coming out of her mistress’s door. ‘What do you mean, shoving yourself in through the maids’ entrance without leave?… Just like a peasant lout!’
Dútlov, without excusing himself, explained that he wanted to see the lady.
‘She is not well,’ said Dunyásha.
At this moment Aksyútka burst into such loud and unseemly laughter that she was obliged to hide her face in the pillow on the bed, from which for a whole hour, in spite of Dunyásha’s and the aunt’s threats, she could not for long lift it without going off again as if something were bursting in her pink print bosom and rosy cheeks. It seemed to her so funny that everybody should have been so scared, that she again hid her head in the pillows and scraped the floor with her shoe and jerked her whole body as if in convulsions.
Dútlov stopped and looked at her attentively, as if to ascertain what was happening to her, but turned away again without having discovered what it was all about, and continued:
‘You see, it’s just this – it’s a very important matter,’ he said. ‘You just go and say that a peasant has found the letter with the money.’
‘What money?’
Dunyásha, before going to report, read the address and questioned Dútlov as to when and how he had found this money which Polikéy was to have brought back from town. Having heard all the details and pushed the little errand-girl, who was still convulsed with laughter, out into the vestibule, Dunyásha went to her mistress; but to Dútlov’s surprise the mistress would not see him and did not say anything intelligible to Dunyásha.
‘I know nothing about it and don’t want to know anything!’ the lady said. ‘What peasant? What money?… I can’t and won’t see anyone! He must leave me in peace.’
‘What am I to do?’ said Dútlov, turning the envelope over; ‘it’s not a small sum. What is written on it?’ he asked Dunyásha, who again read the address to him.
Dútlov seemed in doubt. He was still hoping that perhaps the money was not the mistress’s and that the address had not been read to him right, but Dunyásha confirmed it, and he put the envelope back into his bosom with a sigh, and was about to go.
‘I suppose I shall have to hand it over to the police-constable,’ he said.
‘Wait a bit! I’ll try again,’ said Dunyásha, stopping him, after attentively following the disappearance of the envelope into the bosom of the peasant’s coat. ‘Let me have the letter.’
Dútlov took it out again, but did not at once put it into Dunyásha’s outstretched hand.
‘Say that Semën Dútlov found it on the road.…’
‘Well, let me have it!’
‘I did think it was just nothing – only a letter; but a soldier read out to me that there was money inside.…’