"The old woman is doing poorly, my, how poorly! At times she even raves," he consoled himself. "The darling sits down to play fool and before you know it, she dozes off."
In justice to Yudushka it must be admitted that his mother's decrepitude gave him some alarm. Even he was not quite ready for her death, had not made any plans, had had no time to make estimates--how much capital mother had when she left Dubrovino, what that capital might bring in annually, how much of the interest she had spent, and how much she had added to the principal. In a word, he had not gone through an infinity of useless trifles, without which he always felt as if he were caught unawares.
"The old woman is hale and hearty," he would muse at times. "Still she won't spend it all--impossible. When she shared us out, she had a neat sum. Maybe she transferred some to the orphans. Oh, the old woman is rich. Yes, she is."
But these musings were not so very serious, and vanished without leaving an impress on his mind. The mass of daily trivialities was already great, and there was as yet no urgent need to augment them by the addition of new trivialities. Porfiry Vladimirych kept putting the matter off, and did not realize it was time to begin until after the damnation scene.
The catastrophe came sooner than he expected. On the second day after Petenka's departure Arina Petrovna left for Pogorelka, and never again visited Golovliovo. She spent a month in total solitude, keeping to her room and scarcely exchanging a word with her servants. From force of habit she rose early in the morning, sat down at her desk, and began to play patience, but hardly ever brought the game to an end, and sat in frozen rigidity--with her glazed eyes fixed on the window. What she thought about or whether she thought at all, even the keenest judge of the deep-lying mysteries of the human soul could not have divined. She seemed to be trying to recollect something, perhaps how she came to be within those walls, and could not. Alarmed by her mistress's silence, Afimyushka would appear in the room, arrange the pillows lining her easy-chair, and try to open a conversation on this or that, but received only impatient monosyllabic replies.
