Lebedeff's Household and Hidden Motives — The Idiot

The Epanchins have already gone to Pavlofsk. Two days later the prince steps off the Moscow train, and two strangely glowing eyes fix on him from the crowd. He cannot find them again. It must have been a hallucination. The impression stays. He takes a bad hotel near the Litaynaya, changes into clothes that are perhaps too fashionable, and goes to a small wooden villa full of flowers. A voice is shouting inside, and then laughing.

Lebedeff is in his shirt-sleeves, beating his breast. He has been reciting, for the fifth time this morning, the speech he made for a usurer against a robbed old woman. A boy with a book. A girl in mourning with an infant. Another laughing in the doorway. A handsome nephew on the sofa. The cook announces a gentleman. Ex-ex-excellency. He runs at the children, then rushes for his coat. He has only had three or four small glasses. Their mother died five weeks ago. He reads Scripture in the evenings and weeps. Vera says if he has come on business, this is the hour. The nephew bets he is trying to cheat the prince. He lies about his own Christian name, to humble himself. The nephew wants fifteen roubles for boots and a railway post, after gambling twenty away to one of Rogozhin's discarded boxing teachers. The prince says he is quite wrong. The nephew will not leave until he gets it.

In the garden the prince has had enough of trickery. Give up serving two masters. Rogozhin has been here three weeks. Have you sold her to him again? He discovered everything himself. He set a dog on me in Moscow. She left him on the eve of the wedding, minutes. Save me, Lukian. Say nothing to the prince. She is more afraid of you than of him. She is living with the sister-in-law. I am free, she says, over and over. A bad sign. She is searching as if she had lost something. The marriage disgusts her. She cares for him as for orange-peel, and looks on him with fear. A few days ago she tried to pull Lebedeff's hair. He soothed her by reading the Apocalypse. The black horse, the measure. He once made a lordly personage tremble, and the man died eight days later. Colia spent the night here. The prince paid the father's debts. Colia may already be at Pavlofsk.

The prince's head aches. Everybody is going to Pavlofsk. Let the villa to me. This is precisely what Lebedeff decided in the last three minutes. There is already a chance tenant whose perhaps means certainly. Daria Alexeyevna has a villa there too. A certain person intends to visit. Aglaya Ivanovna. Oh stop. That has nothing to do with him. He walks off without goodbye. Lebedeff stands looking after him. He knows how courteous the prince usually is.