The sound of her voice seemed to strike him; for some moments he looked at her intently, as though trying to penetrate to her very soul.
“No matter,” he muttered, softly, “I don’t want to.…”
And he went away altogether.
Liza was completely overwhelmed, quite disproportionately in fact, so it seemed to me.
“Wonderfully queer man,” Mavriky Nikolaevitch observed aloud.
III
He certainly was queer, but in all this there was a very great deal not clear to me. There was something underlying it all. I simply did not believe in this publication; then that stupid letter, in which there was an offer, only too barefaced, to give information and produce “documents,” though they were all silent about that, and talked of something quite different; finally that printing-press and Shatov’s sudden exit, just because they spoke of a printing-press. All this led me to imagine that something had happened before I came in of which I knew nothing; and, consequently, that it was no business of mine and that I was in the way. And, indeed, it was time to take leave, I had stayed long enough for the first call. I went up to say good-bye to Lizaveta Nikolaevna.
She seemed to have forgotten that I was in the room, and was still standing in the same place by the table with her head bowed, plunged in thought, gazing fixedly at one spot on the carpet.
“Ah, you, too, are going, good-bye,” she murmured in an ordinary friendly tone. “Give my greetings to Stepan Trofimovitch, and persuade him to come and see me as soon as he can. Mavriky Nikolaevitch, Anton Lavrentyevitch is going. Excuse maman’s not being able to come out and say good-bye to you.…”
I went out and had reached the bottom of the stairs when a footman suddenly overtook me at the street door.