Page:Chernyshevsky - What's to be done? A romance.djvu/49

Rh room. Pavel Konstantinytch lay down, according to his habit, to sleep a little; but he did not succeed, for hardly had he begun to doze when Matroena informed him that the servant of the mistress of the house had come to ask him to call upon her instantly.

Matroena trembled like a leaf.

Why?

And why should she not tremble? Had she not, without loss of time, told the wife of the mistress's cook of the suit of Mikhaïl Ivanytch? The latter had complained to the second waiting-maid of the secrets that were kept from her. The second servant had protested her innocence: if she had known anything, she would have said so; she had no secrets, she told everything. The cook's wife then made apologies; but the second servant ran straight to the first servant and told her the great news.

"Is it possible?" cried the latter. "As I did not know it, then Madame does not; he has concealed his course from his mother." And she ran to warn Anna Petrovna.

See what a fuss Matroena had caused.

"O my wicked tongue!" said she, angrily. "Fine things are going to happen to me now! Maria Alexevna will make inquiries."

But the affair took such a turn that Maria Alexevna forgot to look for the origin of the indiscretion.

Anna, Petrovna sighed and groaned; twice she fainted before her first waiting-maid. That showed that she was deeply afflicted. She sent in search of her son.

He came.

"Can what I have heard, Michel, be true?" she said to him in French in a voice at once broken and furious.

"What have you heard, Mamma?"

"That you have made a proposition of marriage to that to that  to that  to the daughter of our steward."

"It is true, Mamma."

"Without asking your mother's advice?"

"I intended to wait, before asking your consent, until I had received hers."

"You ought to know, it seems to me, that it is easier to obtain her consent than mine."

"Mamma, it is now allowable to first ask the consent of the young girl and then speak to the parents."

"That is allowable, for you? Perhaps for you it is also allowable that sons of