A House of Gentlefolk Part 3

"Ah!" he exclaimed: "I see that you have begun to copy my landscape--and capitally too. Excellent! only just here--give me a pencil--the shadows are not put in strongly enough. Look."

And Panshin with a flourish added a few long strokes. He was for ever drawing the same landscape: in the foreground large disheveled trees, a stretch of meadow in the background, and jagged mountains on the horizon. Lisa looked over his shoulders at his work.

"In drawing, just as in life generally," observed Panshin, holding his head to right and to left, "lightness and boldness--are the great things."

At that instant Lemm came into the room, and with a stiff bow was about to leave it; but Panshin, throwing aside alb.u.m and pencils, placed himself in his way.

"Where are you doing, dear Christopher Fedoritch? Aren't you going to stay and have tea with us?"

"I go home," answered Lemm in a surly voice; "my head aches."

"Oh, what nonsense!--do stop. We'll have an argument about Shakespeare."

"My head aches," repeated the old man.

"We set to work on the sonata of Beethoven without you," continued Panshin, taking hold of him affectionately and smiling brightly, "but we couldn't get on at all. Fancy, I couldn't play two notes together correctly."

"You'd better have sung your song again," replied Lemm, removing Panshin's hands, and he walked away.

Lisa ran after him. She overtook him on the stairs.

"Christopher Fedoritch, I want to tell you," she said to him in German, accompanying him over the short green gra.s.s of the yard to the gate, "I did wrong--forgive me."

Lemm made no answer.

"I showed Vladimir Nikolaitch your cantata; I felt sure he would appreciate it,--and he did like it very much really."

Lemm stopped.

"It's no matter," he said in Russian, and then added in his own language, "but he cannot understand anything; how is it you don't see that? He's a dilettante--and that's all!"

"You are unjust to him," replied Lisa, "he understands everything, and he can do almost everything himself."

"Yes, everything second-rate, cheap, scamped work. That pleases, and he pleases, and he is glad it is so--and so much the better. I'm not angry; the cantata and I--we are a pair of old fools; I'm a little ashamed, but it's no matter."

"Forgive me, Christopher Fedoritch," Lisa said again.

"It's no matter," he repeated in Russian, "you're a good girl... but here is some one coming to see you. Goodbye. You are a very good girl."

And Lemm moved with hastened steps towards the gate, through which had entered some gentleman unknown to him in a grey coat and a wide straw hat. Bowing politely to him (he always saluted all new faces in the town of O-----; from acquaintances he always turned aside in the street--that was the rule he had laid down for himself), Lemm pa.s.sed by and disappeared behind the fence. The stranger looked after him in amazement, and after gazing attentively at Lisa, went straight up to her.

Chapter VII

"You don't recognise me," he said, taking off his hat, "but I recognise you in spite of its being seven years since I saw you last. You were a child then. I am Lavretsky. Is your mother at home? Can I see her?"

"Mamma will be glad to see you," replied Lisa; "she had heard of your arrival."

"Let me see, I think your name is Elisaveta?" said Lavretsky, as he went up the stairs.

"Yes."

"I remember you very well; you had even then a face one doesn't forget.

I used to bring you sweets in those days."

Lisa blushed and thought what a queer man. Lavretsky stopped for an instant in the hall. Lisa went into the drawing-room, where Panshin's voice and laugh could be heard; he had been communicating some gossip of the town to Marya Dmitrievna, and Gedeonovksy, who by this time had come in from the garden, and he was himself laughing aloud at the story he was telling. At the name of Lavretsky, Marya Dmitrievna was all in a flutter. She turned pale and went up to meet him.

"How do you do, how do you do, my dear cousin?" she cried in a plaintive and almost tearful voice, "how glad I am to see you!"

"How are you, cousin?" replied Lavretsky, with a friendly pressure of her out-stretched hand; "how has Providence been treating you?"

"Sit down, sit down, my dear Fedor Ivanitch. Ah, how glad I am! But let me present my daughter Lisa to you."

"I have already introduced myself to Lisaveta Mihalovna," interposed Lavretsky.

"Monsier Panshin... Sergei Petrovitch Gedeonovsky... Please sit down.

When I look at you, I can hardly believe my eyes. How are you?"

"As you see, I'm flourishing. And you, too, cousin--no ill-luck to you!--have grown no thinner in eight years."

"To think how long it is since we met!" observed Marya Dmitrievna dreamily. "Where have you come from now? Where did you leave... that is, I meant to say," she put in hastily, "I meant to say, are you going to be with us for long?"

"I have come now from Berlin," replied Lavretsky, "and to-morrow I shall go into the country--probably for a long time."

"You will live at Lavriky, I suppose?"

"No, not at Lavriky; I have a little place twenty miles from here: I am going there."

"Is that the little estate that came to you from Glafira Petrovna?"

"Yes."

"Really, Fedor Ivanitch! You have such a magnificent house at Lavriky."

Lavretsky knitted his brows a little.

"Yes... but there's a small lodge in this little property, and I need nothing more for a time. That place is the most convenient for me now."

Marya Dmitrievna was again thrown into such a state of agitation that she became quite stiff, and her hands hung lifeless by her sides.

Panshin came to her support by entering into conversation with Lavretsky. Marya Dmitrievna regained her composure, she leaned back in her arm-chair and now and then put in a word. But she looked all the while with such sympathy at her guest, sighed so significantly, and shook her head so dejectedly, that the latter at last lost patience and asked her rather sharply if she was unwell.

"Thank G.o.d, no," replied Marya Dmitrievna; "why do you ask?"

"Oh, I fancied you didn't seem to be quite yourself."

Marya Dmitrievna a.s.sumed a dignified and somewhat offended air. "If that's how the land lies," she thought, "it's absolutely no matter to me; I see, my good fellow, it's all like water on a duck's back for you; any other man would have wasted away with grief, but you've grown fat on it." Marya Dmitrievna did not mince matters in her own mind; she expressed herself with more elegance aloud.