"But did you try to drive the matter home to him, doctor?"
"Well, I said to him: 'You'll be a scoundrel if you don't make a definite provision for the orphans.' Could I make it clearer? Yes, mother, you certainly slipped up. If you had called me in a month ago, I would have given him a good bleeding and I would have seen to it that he made his will. But now everything will go to Yudushka, the lawful heir. It certainly will."
"Oh, grandmother, what will become of us?" said the older of the two girls, plaintively and almost in tears. "What is uncle doing to us?"
The girls were Anninka and Lubinka, the daughters of Anna Vladimirovna Ulanova, to whom Arina Petrovna had once "thrown a bone."
"I don't know, dear, I don't know. I don't even know what will become of me. Today I am here, and tomorrow God knows where I'll be. Maybe I'll have to sleep in a shed or at a peasant's."
"Goodness, isn't uncle silly!" exclaimed the younger girl.
"I wish, young lady, you would keep your mouth shut," remarked the doctor. Turning to Arina Petrovna, he suggested, "Why not try to talk to him yourself, mother?"
"No, no. There's no use my talking to him. He doesn't even want to see me. The other day I stuck my nose into his room, and he snarled, 'Have you come to see me off to the other world?'"
"I think Ulita is back of it all. She incites him against you."
"She surely does, nobody but she. And then she reports everything to Porfiry the Bloodsucker. People say he keeps a pair of horses harnessed all day waiting for the beginning of the agony. And just imagine, the other day Ulita went so far as to take an inventory of the furniture, wardrobe, and dishes, so that nothing should be lost, as she said. We are the thieves, just imagine it."
"Why don't you treat her more severely? Head over heels, you know, head over heels."
But fate decreed that the doctor should not develop his thought. A girl, all out of breath, dashed into the room and exclaimed in a fright:
"The master! The master wants the doctor."
Not more than ten years had passed since the death of Simple Simon, but the condition of the various members of the Golovliov family had so completely changed that not a trace remained of those artificial ties which had given the family the air of an impregnable stronghold. This stronghold, erected by the tireless hands of Arina Petrovna, had crumbled away, but so imperceptibly that she herself was ignorant of how it had happened, was even involved in the destruction, the leading spirit in which, of course, had been Porfiry the Bloodsucker.