A House of Gentlefolk eBook

upon it, only visitors used to drink out of it—­and here was he drinking out if like a visitor.  In the evening his servants came; Lavretsky did not care to sleep in his aunt’s bed; he directed them put him up a bed in the dining-room.  After extinguishing his candle he stared for a long time about him and feel into cheerless reflection; he experienced that feeling which every man knows whose lot it is to pass the night in a place long uninhabited; it seemed to him that the darkness surrounding him on all sides could not be accustomed to the new inhabitant, the very walls of the house seemed amazed.  At last he sighed, drew up the counterpane round him and fell asleep.  Anton remained up after all the rest of the household; he was whispering a long while with Apraxya, he sighed in an undertone, and twice he crossed himself; they had neither of them expected that their master would settle among them at Vassilyevskoe when he had not far off such a splendid estate with such a capitally built house; they did not suspect that the very house was hateful to Lavretsky; it stirred painful memories within him.  Having gossiped to his heart’s content, Anton took a stick and struck the night watchman’s board, which had hung silent for so many years, and laid down to sleep in the courtyard with no covering on his white head.  The May night was mild and soft, and the old man slept sweetly.

Chapter XX

The next day Lavretsky got up rather early, had a talk with the village bailiff, visited the threshing-floor, ordered the chain to be taken off the yard dog, who only barked a little but did not even come out of his kennel, and returning home, sank into a kind of peaceful torpor, which he did not shake off the whole day.

“Here I am at the very bottom of the river,” he said to himself more than once.  He sat at the window without stirring, and, as it were, listened to the current of the quiet life surrounding him, to the few sounds of the country solitude.  Something from behind the nettles chirps with a shrill, shrill little note; a gnat seems to answer it.  Now it has ceased, but still the gnat keeps up its sharp whirr; across the pleasant, persistent, fretful buzz of the flies sounds the hum of a big bee, constantly knocking its head against the ceiling; a cock crows in the street, hoarsely prolonging the last note; there is the rattle of a cart; in the village a gate is creaking.  Then the jarring voice of a peasant woman, “What?” “Hey, you are my little sweetheart,” cries Anton to the little two-year-old girl he is dandling in his arms.  “Fetch the kvas,” repeats the same woman’s voice, and all at once there follows a deathly silence; nothing rattles, nothing is moving; the wind is not stirring a leaf; without a sound the swallows fly one after another over the earth, and sadness weights on the heart from their noiseless flight.  “Here I am at the very bottom of the river,” thought