Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/285

Rh besides. He was like a whole regiment in himself. Tchitchikov was beginning to protest. The monster said roughly: 'You are commanded to come at once!' Through the door in the hall he caught a glimpse of another monster; he looked out of window, there was a carriage. What could he do? Just as he was, in his coat of the 'smoke and flame of Navarino' he had to get into it, and trembling all over he drove off with the gendarmes beside him.

They did not even let him get his breath in the hall. 'Go in! the prince is expecting you,' said the clerk on duty. He caught glimpses, as through a mist, of the hall with the couriers receiving envelopes, then of a big room which he crossed, thinking: 'This is how men are seized and without trial, without anything, sent straight to Siberia.' His heart beat more violently than the most passionate lover's. At last a door was thrown open before him: and he was confronted with a study, with portfolios, shelves and books, and the prince, the embodiment of anger.

'The author of my ruin!' thought Tchitchikov, 'he'll be the ruin of my life,' and he almost fell fainting: 'he will slay me as a wolf slays a lamb!'

'I spared you, I allowed you to stay in the town when you ought to have been in prison, and you have disgraced yourself again with the foulest dishonesty with which a man has ever disgraced himself.' The prince's lips trembled with anger.