Saying these words, Tchertop-hanov jumped off the
sofa and majestically withdrew.
But the cavalry captain Yaff did not demand satisfaction
from him—indeed, he never met him anywhere—and
Tchertop-hanov did not think of seeking his enemy
out, and no scandal followed. Masha herself soon
after this disappeared beyond all trace. Tchertop-hanov
took to drink; however, he ‘reformed’
later. But then a second blow fell upon him.
This was the death of his bosom friend Tihon Ivanovitch
Nedopyuskin. His health had begun to fail two
years before his death: he began to suffer from
asthma, and was constantly dropping asleep, and on
waking up could not at once come to himself; the district
doctor maintained that this was the result of ‘something
rather like fits.’ During the three days
which preceded Masha’s departure, those three
days when ’her heart was heavy,’ Nedopyuskin
had been away at his own place at Bezselendyevka:
he had been laid up with a severe cold. Masha’s
conduct was consequently even more unexpected for
him; it made almost a deeper impression on him than
on Tchertop-hanov himself. With his natural sweetness
and diffidence, he gave utterance to nothing but the
tenderest sympathy with his friend, and the most painful
perplexity... but it crushed and made havoc of everything
in him. ‘She has torn the heart out of me,’
he would murmur to himself, as he sat on his favourite
checked sofa and twisted his fingers. Even when
Tchertop-hanov had got over it, he, Nedopyuskin, did
not recover, and still felt that ‘there was a
void within him.’ ‘Here,’ he
would say, pointing to the middle of his breast above
his stomach. In that way he lingered on till
the winter. When the frosts came, his asthma
got better, but he was visited by, not ’something
rather like a fit’ this time, but a real unmistakable
fit. He did not lose his memory at once; he still
knew Tchertop-hanov and his friend’s cry of
despair, ’How can you desert me, Tisha, without
my consent, just as Masha did?’ He even responded
with faltering, uncertain tongue, ‘O—P—a—ey—E—e—yitch,
I will o—bey you.’
This did not, however, prevent him from dying the
same day, without waiting for the district doctor,
who (on seeing the hardly cold body) found nothing
left for him to do, but with a melancholy recognition
of the instability of all things mortal, to ask for
’a drop of vodka and a snack of fish.’
As might have been anticipated, Tihon Ivanitch had
bequeathed his property to his revered patron and generous
protector, Panteley Eremyitch Tchertop-hanov; but
it was of no great benefit to the revered patron,
as it was shortly after sold by public auction, partly
in order to cover the expense of a sepulchral monument,
a statue, which Tchertop-hanov (and one can see his
father’s craze coming out in him here) had thought
fit to put up over the ashes of his friend. This
statue, which was to have represented an angel praying,
