protocol in the fullest detail. Then they let the Poles go. The incident of the cheating at cards was hardly touched upon. Nikolay Parfenovitch was too well pleased with them, as it was, and did not want to worry them with trifles, moreover, it was nothing but a foolish, drunken quarrel over cards. There had been drinking and disorder enough, that night. … So the two hundred roubles remained in the pockets of the Poles.
Then old Maximov was summoned. He came in timidly, approached with little steps, looking very disheveled and depressed.
He had, all this time, taken refuge below with Grushenka, sitting dumbly beside her, and “now and then he’d begin blubbering over her and wiping his eyes with a blue check handkerchief,” as Mihail Makarovitch described afterwards. So that she herself began trying to pacify and comfort him.
The old man at once confessed that he had done wrong, that he had borrowed “ten roubles in my poverty,” from Dmitri Fyodorovitch, and that he was ready to pay it back.
To Nikolay Parfenovitch’s direct question, had he noticed how much money Dmitri Fyodorovitch held in his hand, as he must have been able to see the sum better than anyone when he took the note from him, Maximov, in the most positive manner, declared that there was twenty thousand.
“Have you ever seen so much as twenty thousand before, then?” inquired Nikolay Parfenovitch, with a smile.
“To be sure I have, not twenty, but seven, when my wife mortgaged my little property. She’d only let me look at it from a distance, boasting of it to me. It was a very thick bundle, all rainbow-colored notes. And Dmitri Fyodorovitch’s were all rainbow-colored. …”
He was not kept long.