Heaven give you peace and rest!"
He rose to his feet, debating what he should do.
"Poor Vjera!" he sighed. "Poor Vjera--she will go next!"
Once more, he looked down, and his eye caught sight of the papers
projecting from the inner pocket of the coat, which was still open and
thrown back upon the floor. It has been noticed more than once that Johann
Schmidt was a man subject to attacks of quite irresistible curiosity. He
hesitated a moment, and then came to the conclusion that he was as much
entitled as any one else to be the Count's executor.
"It cannot harm him now," he said, as he extracted the bundle from its
place.
One of the letters was quite fresh. The rest were evidently very old,
being yellow with age and ragged at the edges. He turned over the former.
It was addressed to Count Skariatine, at his lodging, and it bore the
postmark of a town in Great-Russia, between Petersburg and Moscow. Schmidt
took out the sheet, and his face suddenly grew very dark and angry. The
handwriting was either in reality Akulina's, or it resembled it so closely
as to have deceived a better expert than the Cossack.
The missive purported to be written by the wife of Count Skariatine's
steward, and it set forth in rather servile and illiterate language that
the said Count Skariatine and his eldest son were both dead, having been
seized on the same day with the smallpox, of which there had been an
epidemic in the neighbourhood, but which was supposed to have quite
disappeared when they fell ill.
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