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Ivan Matveitch was perceptibly failing, but he still put a good face on it. One day, three weeks before his death, he had a violent attack of giddiness just after dinner. He sank into thought, said, ‘C’est la fin,’ and pulling himself together with a sigh, he wrote a letter to Petersburg to his sole heir, a brother with whom he had had no intercourse for twenty years. Hearing that Ivan Matveitch was unwell, a neighbour paid him a visit–a German, a Catholic–once a distinguished physician, who was living in retirement in his little place in the country. He was very rarely at Ivan Matveitch’s, but the latter always received him with special deference, and in fact had a great respect for him. He was almost the only person in the world he did respect. The old man advised Ivan Matveitch to send for a priest, but Ivan Matveitch responded that ‘ces messieurs et moi, nous n’avons rien a nous dire,’ and begged him to change the subject. On the neighbour’s departure, he gave his valet orders to admit no one in future.

Then he sent for me. I was frightened when I saw him; there were blue patches under his eyes, his face looked drawn and stiff, his jaw hung down. ‘Vous voila grande, Suzon,’ he said, with difficulty articulating the consonants, but still trying to smile (I was then nineteen), ‘vous allez peut-etre bientot rester seule. Soyez toujours sage et vertueuse. C’est la derniere recommandation d’un’–he coughed–‘d’un vieillard qui vous veut du bien. Je vous ai recommande a mon frere et je ne doute pas qu’il ne respecte mes volontes….’ He coughed again, and anxiously felt his chest. ‘Du reste, j’esepre encore pouvoir faire quelque chose pour vous… dans mon testament.’ This last phrase cut me to the heart, like a knife. Ah, it was really too… too contemptuous and insulting! Ivan Matveitch probably ascribed to some other feeling–to a feeling of grief or gratitude–what was expressed in my face, and as though wishing to comfort me, he patted me on the shoulder, at the same time, as usual, gently repelling me, and observed: ‘Voyons, mon enfant, du courage! Nous sommes tous mortels! Et puis il n’y a pas encore de danger. Ce n’est qu’une precaution que j’ai cru devoir prendre…. Allez!’

Again, just as when he had summoned me after my mother’s death, I longed to shriek at him, ‘But I’m your daughter! your daughter!’ But I thought in those words, in that cry of the heart, he would doubtless hear nothing but a desire to assert my rights, my claims on his property, on his money…. Oh, no, for nothing in the world would I say a word to this man, who had not once mentioned my mother’s name to me, in whose eyes I was of so little account that he did not even trouble himself to ascertain whether I was aware of my parentage! Or, perhaps, he suspected, even knew it, and did not wish ‘to raise a dust’ (a favourite saying of his, almost the only Russian expression he ever used), did not care to deprive himself of a good reader with a young voice! No! no! Let him go on wronging his daughter, as he had wronged her mother! Let him carry both sins to the grave! I swore it, I swore he should not hear from my lips the word which must have something of a sweet and holy sound in every ear! I would not say to him father! I would not forgive him for my mother and myself! He felt no need of that forgiveness, of that name…. It could not be, it could not be that he felt no need of it! But he should not have forgiveness, he should not, he should not!

God knows whether I should have kept my vow, and whether my heart would not have softened, whether I should not have overcome my shyness, my shame, and my pride… but it happened with Ivan Matveitch just as with my mother. Death carried him off suddenly, and also in the night. It was again Mr. Ratsch who waked me, and ran with me to the big house, to Ivan Matveitch’s bedroom…. But I found not even the last dying gestures, which had left such a vivid impression on my memory at my mother’s bedside. On the embroidered, lace-edged pillows lay a sort of withered, dark-coloured doll, with sharp nose and ruffled grey eyebrows…. I shrieked with horror, with loathing, rushed away, stumbled in doorways against bearded peasants in smocks with holiday red sashes, and found myself, I don’t remember how, in the fresh air….