‘Evlampia? She’s worse than Anna! She’s altogether given herself up into Volodka’s hands. That’s the reason she refused your soldier, too. At his, at Volodka’s bidding. Anna, to be sure, ought to resent it, and she can’t bear her sister, but she submits! He’s bewitched them, the cursed scoundrel! Though she, Anna, I daresay, is pleased to think that Evlampia, who was always so proud,—and now see what she’s come to!… O … alas … alas! God, my God!’
My mother looked uneasily towards me. I moved a little away as a precautionary measure, for fear I should be sent away altogether.…
‘I am very sorry indeed, Martin Petrovitch,’ she began, ‘that my former protégé has caused you so much sorrow, and has turned out so badly. But I, too, was mistaken in him.… Who could have expected this of him?’
‘Madam,’ Harlov moaned out, and he struck himself a blow on the chest, ‘I cannot bear the ingratitude of my daughters! I cannot, madam! You know I gave them everything, everything! And besides, my conscience has been tormenting me. Many things … alas! many things I have thought over, sitting by the pond, fishing. “If you’d only done good to any one in your life!” was what I pondered upon, “succoured the poor, set the peasants free, or something, to atone for having wrung their lives out of them. You must answer for them before God! Now their tears are revenged.” And what sort of life have they now? It was a deep pit even in my time—why disguise my sins?—but now there’s no seeing the bottom! All these sins I have taken upon my soul; I have sacrificed my conscience for my children, and for this I’m laughed to scorn! Kicked out of the house, like a cur!’
‘Don’t think about that, Martin Petrovitch,’ observed my mother.
‘And when he told me, your Volodka,’ Harlov went on with fresh force, ‘when he told me I was not to live in my room any more,—I laid every plank in that room with my own hands,—when he said that to me,—God only knows what passed within me! It was all confusion in my head, and like a knife in my heart.… Either to cut his throat or get away out of the house!… So, I have run to you, my benefactress, Natalia Nikolaevna … where had I to lay my head? And then the rain, the filth … I fell down twenty times, maybe! And now … in such unseemly.…’
Harlov scanned himself and moved restlessly in his chair, as though intending to get up.
‘Say no more, Martin Petrovitch,’ my mother interposed hurriedly; ‘what does that signify? That you’ve made the floor dirty? That’s no great matter! Come, I want to make you a proposition. Listen! They shall take you now to a special room, and make you up a clean bed,—you undress, wash, and lie down and sleep a little.…’
‘Natalia Nikolaevna! There’s no sleeping for me!’ Harlov responded drearily. ‘It’s as though there were hammers beating in my brain! Me! like some good-for-nothing beast!…’