“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.