“And that is all? People have been spreading God knows what tales about your cousin--and you. They have not even spared that saint Tatiana Markovna with their poisonous tongues. That unendurable Tychkov!”
Raisky pricked up his ears. “They talk about Grandmother?” he asked waveringly.
He remembered the hint Vera had given him of Tatiana Markovna’s love story, and he had heard something from Vassilissa, but what woman has not her romance? They must have dug up some lie or some gossip out of the dust of forty years. He must know what it was in order to stop Tychkov’s mouth.
“What do they say about Grandmother?” he asked in a low, intimate voice. “_Ah, c’est degôutant_. No one believes it, and everybody is jeering at Tychkov for having debased himself to interrogate a drink-maddened old beggar-woman. I will not repeat it.”
“You wish to know?” she whispered, bending towards him. “Then you shall hear everything. This woman, who stands regularly in the porch of the Church of the Ascension, has been saying that Tiet Nikonich loved Tatiana Markovna, and she him.”
“I know that,” he interrupted impatiently. “That is no crime.”
“And she was sought in marriage by the late Count Sergei Ivanovich--”
“I have heard that, too. She did not agree, and the Count married somebody else, but she was forbidden to marry Tiet Nikonich. I have been told all that by Vassilissa. What did the drunken woman say?”
“The Count is said to have surprised a rendezvous between Tatiana Markovna and Tiet Nikonich, and such a rendezvous.
“No, no!” she cried, shaking with laughter. “Tatiana Markovna! Who would believe such a thing?”
Raisky listened seriously, and surmises flitted across his mind.
“The Count gave Tiet Nikonich a box on the ears.”
“That is a lie,” cried Raisky, jumping up. “Tiet Nikonich would not have endured it.”
“A lie naturally--he did not endure it. He seized a garden knife that he found among the flowers, struck the Count to the ground, seized him by the throat, and would have killed him.”
“Tatiana Markovna restrained his hand. ‘You are’ she said, ‘a nobleman, not a bandit, your weapon is a sword.’ She succeeded in separating them, and a duel was not possible, for it would have compromised her. The opponents gave their word; the Count to keep silence over what had happened, and Tiet Nikonich not to marry Tatiana Markovna. That is why she remains unmarried. Is it not a shame to spread such calumnies?”