“I have already said that I cannot do it without witnesses, and so I shall say to the Court.”

“Dear me, what does it matter?”

“I cannot do it,” said Breve; and, waving his arm, he ran into his private room.

He was putting off the case of the Skoptzy on account of the absence of a very unimportant witness, his real reason being that if they were tried by an educated jury they might possibly be acquitted.

By an agreement with the president this case was to be tried in the coming session at a provincial town, where there would be more peasants, and, therefore, more chances of conviction.

The movement in the corridor increased.  The people crowded most at the doors of the Civil Court, in which the case that the dignified man talked about was being heard.

An interval in the proceeding occurred, and the old woman came out of the court, whose property that genius of an advocate had found means of getting for his client, a person versed in law who had no right to it whatever.  The judges knew all about the case, and the advocate and his client knew it better still, but the move they had invented was such that it was impossible not to take the old woman’s property and not to hand it over to the person versed in law.

The old woman was stout, well dressed, and had enormous flowers on her bonnet; she stopped as she came out of the door, and spreading out her short fat arms and turning to her advocate, she kept repeating.  “What does it all mean? just fancy!”

The advocate was looking at the flowers in her bonnet, and evidently not listening to her, but considering some question or other.

Next to the old woman, out of the door of the Civil Court, his broad, starched shirt front glistening from under his low-cut waistcoat, with a self-satisfied look on his face, came the celebrated advocate who had managed to arrange matters so that the old woman lost all she had, and the person versed in the law received more than 100,000 roubles.  The advocate passed close to the old woman, and, feeling all eyes directed towards him, his whole bearing seemed to say:  “No expressions of deference are required.”

CHAPTER VII.

The officials of the court.

At last Matthew Nikitich also arrived, and the usher, a thin man, with a long neck and a kind of sideways walk, his nether lip protruding to one side, which made him resemble a turkey, came into the jurymen’s room.

This usher was an honest man, and had a university education, but could not keep a place for any length of time, as he was subject to fits of drunkenness.  Three months before a certain countess, who patronised his wife, had found him this place, and he was very pleased to have kept it so long.

“Well, sirs, is everybody here?” he asked, putting his pince-nez on his nose, and looking round.