it into the stewpan. When at last it was ready,
Anton laid the table, placing beside the dish a three-footed
plated salt-cellar, blackened with age, and a cut glass
decanter, with a round glass stopper in its narrow
neck. Then, in a kind of chant, he announced
to Lavretsky that dinner was ready, and took his place
behind his master’s chair, a napkin wound around
his right hand, and a kind of air of the past, like
the odor of cypress-wood hanging about him. Lavretsky
tasted the broth, and took the fowl out of it.
The bird’s skin was covered all over with round
blisters, a thick tendon ran up each leg, and the flesh
was as tough as wood, and had a flavor like that which
pervades a laundry. After dinner Lavretsky said
that he would take tea if—
“I will bring it in a moment,” broke in
the old man, and he kept his promise. A few pinches
of tea were found rolled up in a scrap of red paper.
Also a small, but very zealous and noisy little samovar[A]
was discovered, and some sugar in minute pieces, which
looked as if they had been all but melted away.
Lavretsky drank his tea out of a large cup. From
his earliest childhood he remembered this cup, on
which playing cards were painted, and from which only
visitors were allowed to drink; and now he drank from
it, like a visitor.
[Footnote A: Urn.]
Towards the evening came the servants. Lavretsky
did not like to sleep in his aunt’s bed, so
he had one made up for him in the dining-room.
After putting out the candle, he lay for a long time
looking around him, and thinking what were not joyous
thoughts. He experienced the sensations which
every one knows who has had to spend the night for
the first time in a long uninhabited room. He
fancied that the darkness which pressed in upon him
from all sides could not accustom itself to the new
tenant—that the very walls of the house
were astonished at him. At last he sighed, pulled
the counterpane well over him, and went to sleep.
Anton remained on his legs long after every one else
had gone to bed. For some time he spoke in a whisper
to Apraxia, sighing low at intervals, and three times
he crossed himself. The old servants had never
expected that their master would settle down among
them at Vasilievskoe, when he had such a fine estate,
with a well-appointed manor-house close by. They
did not suspect what was really the truth, that Lavriki
was repugnant to its owner, that it aroused in his
mind too painful recollections. After they had
whispered to each other enough, Anton took a stick,
and struck the watchman’s board, which had long
hung silently by the barn. Then he lay down in
the open yard, without troubling himself about any
covering for his white head. The May night was
calm and soothing, and the old man slept soundly.
