found himself after springing clown to the
ground, one of his arms resting on the box seat. The old man brought
the keys and opened the door, lifting his elbows high the while, and
needlessly wriggling his body--then he stood on one side, and again
bowed down to his girdle.

"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 dif