“Here I am at home, actually returned!”
thought Lavretsky, as he entered the little vestibule,
while the shutters opened, one after another, with
creak and rattle, and the light of day penetrated into
the long-deserted rooms.
XIX.
The little house at which Lavretsky had arrived, and
in which Glafira Petrovna had died two years before,
had been built of solid pine timber in the preceding
century. It looked very old, but it was good
for another fifty years or more. Lavretsky walked
through all the rooms, and, to the great disquiet
of the faded old flies which clung to the cornices
without moving, their backs covered with white dust,
he had the windows thrown open everywhere. Since
the death of Glafira Petrovna, no one had opened them.
Every thing had remained precisely as it used to be
in the house. In the drawing-room the little white
sofas, with their thin legs, and their shining grey
coverings, all worn and rumpled, vividly recalled
to mind the times of Catharine. In that room
also stood the famous arm-chair of the late proprietress,
a chair with a high, straight back, in which, even
in her old age, she used always to sit bolt upright.
On the wall hung an old portrait of Fedor’s
great-grandfather, Andrei Lavretsky. His dark,
sallow countenance could scarcely be distinguished
against the cracked and darkened background.
His small, malicious eyes looked out morosely from
beneath the heavy, apparently swollen eyelids.
His black hair, worn without powder, rose up stiff
as a brush above his heavy, wrinkled forehead.
From the corner of the portrait hung a dusky wreath
of immortelles. “Glafira Petrovna
deigned to weave it herself,” observed Anthony.
In the bed-room stood a narrow bedstead, with curtains
of some striped material, extremely old, but of very
good quality. On the bed lay a heap of faded
cushions and a thin, quilted counterpane; and above
the bolster hung a picture of the Presentation of
the Blessed Virgin in the Temple, the very picture
which the old lady, when she lay dying, alone and
forgotten, pressed for the last time with lips which
were already beginning to grow cold. Near the
window stood a toilet table, inlaid with different
kinds of wood and ornamented with plates of copper,
supporting a crooked mirror in a frame of which the
gilding had turned black. In a line with the
bed-room was the oratory, a little room with bare walls;
in the corner stood a heavy case for holding sacred
pictures, and on the floor lay the scrap of carpet,
worn threadbare, and covered with droppings from wax
candles, on which Glafira Petrovna used to prostrate
herself when she prayed.
