All that night long Marfa Timofeevna sat watching by Liza’s bedside.

XXXIX.

Lavretsky spent a day and a half at Vasilievskoe, wandering about the neighborhood almost all the time.  He could not remain long in any one place.  His grief goaded him on.  He experienced all the pangs of a ceaseless, impetuous, and impotent longing.  He remembered the feeling which had come over him the day after his first arrival.  He remembered the resolution he had formed then, and he felt angrily indignant with himself.  What was it that had been able to wrest him aside from that which he had acknowledged as his duty, the single problem of his future life?  The thirst after happiness—­the old thirst after happiness.  “It seems that Mikhalevich was right after all,” he thought.  “You wanted to find happiness in life once more,” he said to himself.  “You forgot that for happiness to visit a man even once is an undeserved favor, a steeping in luxury.  Your happiness was incomplete—­was false, you may say.  Well, show what right you have to true and complete happiness!  Look around you and see who is happy, who enjoys his life!  There is a peasant going to the field to mow.  It may be that he is satisfied with his lot.  But what of that?  Would you be willing to exchange lots with him?  Remember your own mother.  How exceedingly modest were her wishes, and yet what sort of a lot fell to her share!  You seem to have only been boasting before Panshine, when you told him that you had come into Russia to till the soil.  It was to run after the girls in your old age that you came.  Tidings of freedom, reached you, and you flung aside every thing, forgot every thing, ran like a child after a butterfly.”

In the midst of his reflections the image of Liza constantly haunted him.  By a violent effort he tried to drive it away, and along with it another haunting face, other beautiful but ever malignant and hateful features.

Old Anton remarked that his master was not quite himself; and after sighing several times behind the door, and several times on the threshold, he ventured to go up to him, and advised him to drink something hot.  Lavretsky spoke to him harshly, and ordered him out of the room:  afterwards he told the old man he was sorry he had done so; but this only made Anton sadder than he had been before.

Lavretsky could not stop in the drawing-room.  He fancied that his great grandfather, Andrei, was looking out from his frame with contempt on his feeble descendant.  “So much for you!  You float in shallow water!"[A] the wry lips seemed to be saying to him.  “Is it possible,” he thought, “that I cannot gain mastery over myself; that I am going to yield to this—­this trifling affair!” (Men who are seriously wounded in a battle always think their wounds “a mere trifle;” when a man can deceive himself no longer, it is time to give up living).  “Am I really a child?