Rabbi and Priest. Milton Goldsmith
comprising confiscated lands, formerly the property of less fortunate nobles, who, deprived of their rank, were now atoning for their sins in the frozen North. His possessions included about twenty thousand male serfs; consequently, more than forty thousand souls.
Dimitri, upon his father's elevation, was sent to the army, where he distinguished himself in nocturnal debauches and adventures such as we have related, and where, thanks to his father's influence, he shortly rose to the rank of lieutenant.
About five years before the beginning of this story, Paul Drentell died and his vast estates, as well as his title of Count, descended to Dimitri, who now found himself one of the richest men in the Empire. He was, moreover, a personal friend of the young Czarewitch, Alexander, in whose regiment he served. To such a man, a notable future was open: great honors as Governor of a province or exile to Siberia as a dangerous power. One of the features of public life in Russia is the comparative ease with which either of these distinctions may be obtained.
Count Drentell was haughty and arrogant, caring for naught but his own personal advantage, consulting only his own tastes and pleasures. He was a stern officer to his soldiers, a cruel taskmaster to the serfs he had inherited, and a bitter foe of the Jews whom he had offended.
Very different was his wife, Louise. A Georgian by birth, her beauty and ingenuousness had won her great popularity at the court of St. Petersburg, to which she had been introduced by the Governor of Tiflis. She was neither tall nor short, possessed a wealth of raven black hair, perfect teeth, lustrous black eyes, a smile that would inspire poets and a voice that was all music and melody. When Count Drentell carried her off in the face of a hundred admirers, he was considered lucky indeed. Dimitri never confessed, even to himself, that he regretted his hasty choice. Louise was as capricious as she was beautiful, as unlettered as she was charming, as superstitious as she was fascinating. All that she did was done on impulse. She loved her husband on impulse, she deserted her child for weeks at a time on impulse, she succored the poor or neglected them on impulse. Her army of servants set her commands at defiance, for they knew them to be the outgrowth of momentary caprice.
Fortunately for the domestic happiness of the couple, the Count was with his command at St. Petersburg during two-thirds of the year, while his wife enjoyed herself as best she might on his magnificent estate at Lubny.
Brought up among the highlands of Tiflis, Louise possessed all of the unreasoning bigotry characteristic of the people inhabiting that region. She was religious to the very depths of superstition, and she chose Lubny for a dwelling-place, less for its resemblance to the sunny hills of her native province than for its proximity to several large Catholic cloisters for both monks and nuns, whence she hoped to receive that religious nourishment which her southern and impetuous nature craved. It was while returning from an expedition to the furthest of these nunneries, in which she frequently immured herself for weeks at a time, that she found Jacob upon the road.
The Count, who, with the companions of his youth, had lost what little religious sentiment he may have once possessed, regarded this trait in his wife with great disfavor; but neither threats nor prayers effected a change, and he finally allowed her to follow her own inclinations.
While the union was not one of the happiest, there were fewer altercations than might have been reasonably expected from the thoroughly opposite natures of man and wife. Louise, with all her faults, was a loving wife, and when her husband's temper was ruffled, her smiles and caresses, her appealing looks and tender glances, won him back to serenity.
The supper, therefore, was not as gloomy as the stormy introduction indicated. Both had much to tell each other, for a great deal had occurred during their eight months' separation, and it was late when they left the table.
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