Shame on you, you old dog, that, despite my strict orders, you did not inform me about my son Pyotr Andrevich and that strangers have had to tell me about his mischief. Is this how you fulfill your duties and your master’s will? I’ll send you to herd swine, you old dog, for concealing the truth and covering up for the young man. With the receipt of this, I order you to write back to me immediately about the state of his health now, of which they write to me that it has improved, as well as the exact place of the wound and whether he has been properly treated.
It was obvious that Savelyich was in the right before me and that I had wrongfully offended him with my reproaches and suspicions. I asked his forgiveness, but the old man was inconsolable.
“So I’ve lived to see this,” he repeated. “So this is how the masters reward me for my services! I’m an old dog and a swineherd, and I’m also the cause of your wound? No, my dear Pyotr Andreich! It’s not me, it’s that cursed moosieu who’s to blame for it all: he taught you to go poking with iron skewers and stamping your feet, as if by poking and stamping you could protect yourself from a wicked man. What need was there to hire a moosieu and throw good money away?”
But who, then, had taken the trouble to inform my father of my behavior? The general? But he did not seem overly concerned with me; and Ivan Kuzmich had not considered it necessary to report my duel. I was torn by conjectures. My suspicions rested on Shvabrin. He alone would profit by the denunciation, the consequence of which could be my removal from the fortress and my break with the commandant’s family. I went to tell all this to Marya Ivanovna. She met me on the porch.
“What’s happened to you?” she said on seeing me. “You’re so pale!”
“It’s all over!” I replied and handed her my father’s letter.
She went pale in her turn. Having read it, she gave me back the letter with a trembling hand and said in a trembling voice:
“Clearly, it’s not my fate…Your parents don’t want me in their family. The Lord’s will be done in everything! God knows what we need better than we do. There’s nothing to be done, Pyotr Andreich. May you at least be happy…”
“This will not be!” I cried, seizing her by the hand. “You love me; I’m ready for anything. Let’s go and throw ourselves at your parents’ feet. They’re simple people, not hard-hearted and proud…They’ll give us their blessing; we’ll get married…and then, in time, I’m sure we’ll win my father over; mother will be for us; he’ll forgive me…”
“No, Pyotr Andreich,” Masha replied, “I won’t marry you without your parents’ blessing. Without their blessing there will be no happiness for you. Let us submit to God’s will. If you find the one who is meant for you, if you come to love another—God be with you, Pyotr Andreich; and you will both be in my…”
Here she began to weep and left me. I wanted to follow her inside, but felt that I was in no condition to control myself and went home.
I was sitting plunged in deep thought when Savelyich suddenly interrupted my reflections.
“Here, sir,” he said, handing me a sheet of paper covered with writing. “See whether I’m an informer on my master and am trying to make trouble between father and son.”
I took the paper from him: it was Savelyich’s reply to the letter he had received. Here it is word for word:
Gracious master and father, Andrei Petrovich!
I have received your gracious letter, in which you are pleased to be angry with me, your bondsman, for the shame of my not fulfilling my master’s orders; but I, not an old dog, but your faithful servant, do obey my master’s orders and have always served you zealously and have lived to be gray-haired. I did not write you anything about Pyotr Andreich’s wound, so as not to frighten you needlessly, and I hear that the mistress, our mother, Avdotya Vasilievna, has taken to her bed from fright even so, and I will pray to God for her health. And Pyotr Andreich was wounded under the right shoulder, in the chest just under the bone, two inches deep, and he lay in the commandant’s bed, where we brought him from the riverbank, and he was treated by the local barber, Stepan Paramonov; and now, thank God, Pyotr Andreich is well, and there is nothing to write about him except good things. The superiors, I hear, are pleased with him, and Vasilisa Egorovna treats him like her own son. And the boy should not be reproached for such a mishap: a horse has four legs, and still he stumbles. And you were pleased to write that you would send me to herd swine, and so be it by your lordly will. With my servile respects,
Your faithful serf,
Arkhip Savelyevich
I could not help smiling several times, reading the good old man’s letter. I was in no condition to write a reply to my father; and Savelyich’s letter seemed enough to reassure my mother.
