“What is the matter with you, knave?” I asked, half angry, half amused, for there was something in the frightened look on his usually stolid face which was absurd. “Have you attended to the wretch in here, or have you forgotten, and don’t want me to know it?” He still held my sleeve, staring at the door as if he expected Satan to appear. “It doesn’t matter, my lord,” he replied, in a low voice, “whether he is forgotten or not. He will never need any attention, except from the grave-digger.” I made an attempt to open the door, but he still held me back. “How did it happen?” I asked sharply. “Did he kill himself, or did--” I stopped; I divined the truth,--Michael had wreaked his revenge, I saw it in my man’s face. “You rogue, you!” I exclaimed. “I ordered you to keep the fellow safe.” “M. le Vicomte,” Pierrot replied, “you remember that I went to find you, believing your life to be in peril; when you sent me back I was too late. That Russian devil had accomplished his revenge and gone. I have not seen him since. The man was quite dead when I returned. It is not worth while to look at him. It makes me sick.” And the poor fellow turned away shuddering as I opened the door. The sight within turned my stomach. There was a beam across the room, a little below the ceiling; and from this hung the corpse of Polotsky, suspended by a rope about his neck. A glance sufficed to tell me what had happened. The fire had evidently been raked down to a bed of coals, and the poker lay near at hand. The feet of the corpse were blackened, and both eyes had been put out. He had been tortured into eternity. I went out and shut the door, as sickened as Pierrot. This was a Russian vengeance. How bitter must have been the wrongs that had roused such hatred as this! I walked up and down the hall for a while, blaming myself for having left the wretch bound and helpless in my house. I did not regret his death nor pity him, but I revolted at the barbaric brutality visited upon a human being, and under my roof. I thought of the boyar in the upper room, and wondered how he would regard it, reflecting, however, that he was a hard man and had tasted the bitter suffering of exile and imprisonment, meted out by his own brother and this dead man. It was not likely that he would feel either pity or remorse. I knew that the Tartar was close under the skin of that stern-faced man, and it seemed to me almost impossible that he could be Zénaïde’s father. Her uncle, with all his fierce and evil traits, had possessed a grace of manner entirely foreign to Feodor.