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Updated: May 29, 2025
"Enough for the first time," said the lady. "A little more," said the artist, forgetting himself. "No, it is time to stop. Lise, three o'clock!" said the lady, taking out a tiny watch which hung by a gold chain from her girdle. "How late it is!" "Only a minute," said Tchartkoff innocently, with the pleading voice of a child.
Its most extraordinary part was the eyes; in them the artist had concentrated all the power of his pencil. There was vitality in those dark and lustrous orbs, they looked out of the portrait, and in some measure destroyed its harmony by their strange and life-like expression. When Tchartkóff took the picture to the door, he fancied the pupils dilated.
Tchartkóff remembered that, in a certain sense, this hideous portrait had been the origin of the useless life he had so long led and now so deeply deplored; that the hoard of gold discovered in its frame had developed and fostered in him those worldly passions, that sensuality and love of luxury, which had been the bane of his genius.
This boy was called Nikita, and spent all his time in the streets when his master was not at home. Nikita tried for a long time to get the key into the lock, which was quite invisible, by reason of the darkness. Finally the door was opened. Tchartkoff entered his ante-room, which was intolerably cold, as painters' rooms always are, which fact, however, they do not notice.
In defiance of reason, he imagined something peculiarly significant in the expression of the old man's face; a something of the cautious stealthy look it had worn when he crept round the screen, and counted his gold under the very nose of the needy painter. And Tchartkóff still felt the print of the rouleau upon his palm, as though it had but that instant left his grasp.
Thus he got through the day. The next morning, soon after breakfast, his bell rang. He hurried to the door; a lady entered, preceded by a footman in a furred livery cloak, and accompanied by a young girl of eighteen, her daughter. "Monsieur Tchartkóff, I believe?" said the lady. The painter bowed. "I have seen your name in the papers; your portraits, they say, are incomparable."
He expected every moment, his breath failing for fear, that the old man would look round the screen at him. And lo! he did look from behind the screen, with the very same bronzed face, and with his big eyes roving about. Tchartkoff tried to scream, and felt that his voice was gone; he tried to move; his limbs refused their office.
Returning home one day, Tchartkóff found lying on his table a letter, in which the Academy of Arts invited him, as one of its most distinguished members, to give his opinion of a new picture just arrived from Italy, the work of a Russian artist who had long studied there.
Why, you couldn't buy the frame for that! Perhaps you will decide to purchase to-morrow. Sir, sir, turn back! Add ten kopeks. Take it, take it! give me twenty kopeks. To tell the truth, you are my only customer to-day, and that's the only reason." Thus Tchartkoff quite unexpectedly became the purchaser of the old portrait, and at the same time reflected, "Why have I bought it? What is it to me?"
Completely knocked up, Tchartkóff let his cloak fall, placed his new purchase against the wall, and threw himself on a narrow meagre little sofa, whose leathern cover, torn upon one side from the row of brass nails that had formerly confined it, afforded Nikíta a convenient receptacle for dish-cloths, old clothes, dirty linen, and any other miscellaneous matters he thought fit to cram under.
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