A House of Gentlefolk eBook

Having no confidence in the skill of Russian doctors, he began to make efforts to obtain permission to go abroad.  It was refused.  Then he took his son with him and for three whole years was wandering about Russia, from one doctor to another, incessantly moving from one town to another, and driving his physicians, his son, and his servants to despair by his cowardice and impatience.  He returned to Lavriky a perfect wreck, a tearful and capricious child.  Bitter days followed, every one had much to put up with from him.  Ivan Petrovitch was only quiet when he was dining; he had never been so greedy and eaten so much; all the rest of the time he gave himself and others no peace.  He prayed, cursed his fate, abused himself, abused politics, his system, abused everything he had boasted of and prided himself upon, everything he had held up to his son as a model; he declared that he believed in nothing and then began to pray again; he could not put up with one instant of solitude, and expected his household to sit by his chair continually day and night, and entertain him with stories, which he constantly interrupted with exclamations, “You are for ever lying, . . . a pack of nonsense!”

Glafira Petrovna was specially necessary to him; he absolutely could not get on without her—­and to the end she always carried out every whim of the sick man, though sometimes she could not bring herself to answer at once for fear the sound of her voice should betray her inward anger.  Thus he lingered on for two years and died on the first day of May, when he had been brought out on to the balcony into the sun.  “Glasha, Glashka! soup, soup, old foo—–­his halting tongue muttered and before he had articulated the last word, it was silent for ever.  Glafira Petrovna, who had only just taken the cup of soup from the hands of the steward, stopped, looked at her brother’s face, slowly made a large sign of the cross and turned away in silence; and his son, who happened to be there, also said nothing; he leaned on the railing of the balcony and gazed a long while into the garden, all fragrant and green, and shining in the rays of the golden sunshine of spring.  He was twenty-three years old; how terribly, how imperceptibly quickly those twenty-three years had passed by! . . .  Life was opening before him.

Chapter XII

After burying his father and intrusting to the unchanged Glafira Petrovna the management of his estate and superintendence of his bailiffs, young Lavretsky went to Moscow, whither he felt drawn by a vague but strong attraction.  He recognised the defects of his education, and formed the resolution, as far as possible, to regain lost ground.  In the last five years he had read much and seen something; he had many stray ideas in his head; any professor might have envied some of his acquirements, but at the same time he did not know much that every schoolboy would have learnt long ago.