Lavretsky came up to him and embraced him. At first Lemm did not respond to his embrace—even put him aside with his elbow. Then he remained rigid for some time, without moving any of his limbs, wearing the same severe, almost repellent, look as before, and only growling out twice, "Aha!" But at last a change came over him, his face grew calm, and his head was no longer thrown back. Then, in reply to Lavretsky's warm congratulations, he first smiled a little, and afterwards began to cry, sobbing faintly, like a child.
"It is wonderful," he said, "your coming just at this very moment. But
I know every thing—I know all about it."
"You know every thing?" exclaimed Lavretsky in astonishment.
"You have heard what I said," replied Lemm. "Didn't you understand that I knew every thing?"
* * * * *
Lavretsky did not get to sleep till the morning. All night long he remained sitting on the bed. Neither did Liza sleep. She was praying.
XXXIII.
The reader knows how Lavretsky had been brought up and educated. We will now say a few words about Liza's education. She was ten years old when her father died, who had troubled himself but little about her. Overwhelmed with business, constantly absorbed in the pursuit of adding to his income, a man of bilious temperament and a sour and impatient nature, he never grudged paying for the teachers and tutors, or for the dress and the other necessaries required by his children, but he could not bear "to nurse his squallers," according to his own expression—and, indeed, he never had any time for nursing them. He used to work, become absorbed in business, sleep a little, play cards on rare occasions, then work again. He often compared himself to a horse yoked to a threshing machine. "My life has soon been spent," he said on his death-bed, a bitter smile contracting his lips.
As to Maria Dmitrievna, she really troubled herself about Liza very little more than her husband did, for all that she had taken credit to herself, when speaking to Lavretsky, for having educated her children herself. She used to dress her like a doll, and when visitors were present, she would caress her and call her a good child and her darling, and that was all. Every continuous care troubled that indolent lady.
During her father's lifetime, Liza was left in the hands of a governess, a Mademoiselle Moreau, from Paris; but after his death she passed under the care of Marfa Timofeevna. That lady is already known to the reader. As for Mademoiselle Moreau, she was a very small woman, much wrinkled, and having the manners of a bird, and the character of a bird also. In her youth she had led a very dissipated life; in her old age she retained only two passions—the love of dainties and the love of cards. When her appetite was satiated, and when she was not playing cards or talking nonsense, her countenance rapidly assumed an almost death-like expression. She would sit and gaze and breathe, but it was plain that there was not a single idea stirring in her mind. She could not even be called good; goodness is not an attribute of birds. In consequence either of her frivolous youth or of the air of Paris, which she had breathed from her childhood's days, there was rooted in her a kind of universal scepticism, which usually found expression in the words, "Tout ça c'est des bêtises." She spoke an incorrect, but purely Parisian jargon, did not talk scandal, and had no caprices—what more could one expect from a governess? Over Liza she had but little influence. All the more powerful, then, was the influence exercised over the child by her nurse, Agafia Vlasievna.