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It was still and warm, with a delicious smell of hay; stars were twinkling brightly between the clouds. Vlassitch's old garden, which had seen so many gloomy stories in its time, lay slumbering in the darkness, and for some reason it was mournful riding through it. "Zina and I to-day after dinner spent some really exalted moments," said Vlassitch.
Three-quarters of a mile to the right of the church there was a copse like a dark blur it was Count Koltonovitch's. And beyond the church Vlassitch's estate began. From behind the church and the count's copse a huge black storm-cloud was rising, and there were ashes of white lightning. "Here it is!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch. "Lord help us, Lord help us!"
And Vlassitch's fanatical belief in the extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness of his own way of thinking struck him as naïve and even morbid; and the fact that Vlassitch all his life had contrived to mix the trivial with the exalted, that he had made a stupid marriage and looked upon it as an act of heroism, and then had affairs with other women and regarded that as a triumph of some idea or other was simply incomprehensible.
And it seemed to him utterly absurd that his sister, so like his mother, pampered, elegant, should be living with Vlassitch and in Vlassitch's house, with the petrified servant, and the table with six legs in the house where a man had been flogged to death, and that she was not going home with him, but was staying here to sleep. "You know mother," he said, not answering her question.
If you went to fight for freedom, that would distress your mother, too. What's to be done! Any one who puts the peace of his family before everything has to renounce the life of ideas completely." There was a vivid flash of lightning at the window, and the lightning seemed to change the course of Vlassitch's thoughts.
It was only three-quarters of a mile through a meadow from the copse to Vlassitch's house. Here there were old birch-trees on each side of the road. They had the same melancholy and unhappy air as their owner Vlassitch, and looked as tall and lanky as he. Big drops of rain pattered on the birches and on the grass; the wind had suddenly dropped, and there was a smell of wet earth and poplars.
Before him he saw Vlassitch's fence with a row of yellow acacias, which were tall and lanky too; where the fence was broken he could see the neglected orchard. Pyotr Mihalitch was not thinking now of the horsewhip or of a slap in the face, and did not know what he would do at Vlassitch's. He felt nervous.
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