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“Betrothed!” repeated my father, with round eyes. “Betrothed! Wife! Ho, ho, ho! …” (“Ha, ha, ha,” my aunt echoed behind the door.) “Why, how old are you? He’s been no time in the world, the milk is hardly dry on his lips, he is a mere babe and he is going to be married! But I … but you …”

“Let me go, let me go,” whispered Raissa, and she made for the door. She looked more dead than alive.

“I am not going to ask permission of you,” David went on shouting, propping himself up with his fists on the edge of the bed, “but of my own father who is bound to be here one day soon; he is a law to me, but you are not; but as for my age, if Raissa and I are not old enough … we will bide our time whatever you may say….”

“Aie, aie, Davidka, don’t forget yourself,” my father interrupted. “Just look at yourself. You are not fit to be seen. You have lost all sense of decency.”

David put his hand to the front of his shirt.

“Whatever you may say …” he repeated. “Oh, shut his mouth, Porfiry Petrovitch,” piped my aunt from behind the door, “shut his mouth, and as for this hussy, this baggage … this …”

But something extraordinary must have cut short my aunt’s eloquence at that moment: her voice suddenly broke off and in its place we heard another, feeble and husky with old age….

“Brother,” this weak voice articulated, “Christian soul.”

XXIII

We all turned round…. In the same costume
in which I had just seen him, thin, pitiful
and wild looking, Latkin stood before us like an
apparition.

“God!” he pronounced in a sort of childish way, pointing upwards with a bent and trembling finger and gazing impotently at my father, “God has chastised me, but I have come for Va … for Ra … yes, yes, for Raissotchka…. What … tchoo! what is there for me? Soon underground–and what do you call it? One little stick, another … cross-beam–that’s what I … want, but you, brother, diamond-merchant … mind … I’m a man, too!”

Raissa crossed the room without a word and taking his arm buttoned his vest.

“Let us go, Vassilyevna,” he said; “they are all saints here, don’t come to them and he lying there in his case”–he pointed to David–“is a saint, too, but you and I are sinners, brother. Come. Tchoo…. Forgive an old man with a pepper pot, gentleman! We have stolen together!” he shouted suddenly; “stolen together, stolen together!” he repeated, with evident satisfaction that his tongue had obeyed him at last.

Everyone in the room was silent. “And where is … the ikon here,” he asked, throwing back his head and turning up his eyes; “we must cleanse ourselves a bit.”

He fell to praying to one of the corners, crossing himself fervently several times in succession, tapping first one shoulder and then the other with his fingers and hurriedly repeating:

“Have mercy me, oh, Lor … me, oh, Lor … me, oh, Lor …” My father, who had not taken his eyes off Latkin, and had not uttered a word, suddenly started, stood beside him and began crossing himself, too. Then he turned to him, bowed very low so that he touched the floor with one hand, saying, “You forgive me, too, Martinyan Gavrilitch,” kissed him on the shoulder. Latkin in response smacked his lips in the air and blinked: I doubt whether he quite knew what he was doing. Then my father turned to everyone in the room, to David, to Raissa and to me:

“Do as you like, act as you think best,” he brought out in a soft and mournful voice, and he withdrew.

My aunt was running up to him, but he cried out sharply and gruffly to her. He was overwhelmed.

“Me, oh, Lor … me, oh, Lor … mercy!” Latkin repeated. “I am a man.”