Half an hour later, Lavretzky was standing before the wicket. He found
it locked, and was obliged to leap across the fence. He returned to the
town, and walked through the sleeping streets. A sensation of great, of
unexpected happiness filled his soul; all doubts had died within him.
"Vanish, past, dark spectre," he thought: "she loves me, she will be
mine." All at once, it seemed to him that in the air, over his head,
wondrous, triumphant sounds rang out; the sounds rolled on still more
magnificently; in a chanting, mighty flood they streamed on,--and in
them, so it seemed, all his happiness was speaking and singing. He
glanced around him: the sounds were floating from two upper windows of a
tiny house.

"Lemm!"--cried Lavretzky, and ran to the house.--"Lemm! Lemm!"--he
repeated loudly.

The sounds died away, and the figure of the old man in his dressing-gown,
with breast bare, and hair dishevelled, made its appearance at the
window.

"Aha!"--he said, with dignity:--"is that you?"

"Christofor Feodoritch! what splendid music! For God's sake, let me
in."

The old man, without uttering a word, with a majestic movement of the arm
flung the door-key out of the window into the street. Lavretzky briskly
ran up-stairs, entered the room, and was on the point of rushing at Lemm,
but the latter imperiously motioned him to a chair; he said, abruptly, in
Russian: "Sit down and listen!" seated himself at the piano, gazed
proudly and sternly about him, and began to play. It was long since
Lavretzky had heard anything of the sort: a sweet, passionate melody,
which gripped the heart from its very first notes; it was all beaming and
languishing with inspiration, with happiness, with beauty; it swelled and
melted away; it touched everything which exists on earth of precious,
mysterious, holy; it breathed forth deathless sadness, and floated away
to die in heaven. Lavretzky straightened himself up and stood there,
cold and pale with rapture. Those sounds fairly sank into his soul, which
had only just been shaken with the bliss of love; they themselves were
flaming with love. "Repeat it,"--he whispered, as soon as the last chord
resounded. The old man cast upon him an eagle glance, struck his breast
with his hand, and saying deliberately, in his native language:--"I made
that, for I am a great musician,"--he again played his wonderful
composition. There was no candle in the room; the light of the rising
moon fell aslant through the