Petrovna's chamber. Everybody was there. It was a gathering of
ghosts.

Here was what had happened above. That the "doctors" still remained
below, that they had not been received instantly, in brief, that the
catastrophe had been delayed up to now was due to Matrena Petrovna,
whose watchful love, like a watch-dog, was always ready to scent danger.
These two "doctors" whose names she did not know, who arrived so late,
and the precipitate departure of the little doctor of Vassili-Ostrow
aroused her watchfulness. Before allowing them to come upstairs to the
general she resolved to have a look at them herself downstairs. She
arose from her bed for that; and now her presentiment was justified.
When she saw Ermolai, sober and mysterious, enter with Koupriane's
message, she knew instinctively, before he spoke, that there were bombs
in the house. When Ermolai did speak it was a blow for everybody. At
first she, Matrena Perovna, had been a frightened, foolish figure in
the big flowered dressing-gown belonging to Feodor that she had wrapped
about her in her haste. When Ermolai left, the general, who knew she
only trembled for him, tried to reassure her, and, in the midst of
the frightened silence of all of them, said a few words recalling
the failure of all the previous attempts. But she shook her head and
trembled, shaking with fear for him, in agony at the thought that she
could do nothing there above those living bombs but wait for them to
burst. As to the friends, already their limbs were ruined, absolutely
ruined, in very truth. For a moment they were quite incapable of moving.
The jolly Councilor of Empire, Ivan Petrovitch, had no longer a lively
tale to tell, and the abominable prospect of "this horrible mix-up"
right at hand rendered him much less gay than in his best hours at
Cubat's place. And poor Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff was whiter than the
snow that covers old Lithuania's fields when the winter's chase is on.
Athanase Georgevitch himself was not brilliant, and his sanguine face
had quite changed, as though he had difficulty in digesting his last
masterpiece with knife and fork. But, in justice to them, that was
the first instantaneous effect. No one could learn like that, all of
a sudden, that they were about to die in an indiscriminate slaughter
without the heart being stopped for a little. Ermolai's words had turned
these amiable loafers into waxen statues, but, little by little, their
hearts commenced to beat again