"Going to marry! your wife!" repeated my father, his eyes rolling. "Your wife! ho! ho! ho!" ("Ha! ha! ha!" echoed my aunt outside the door.) "How old are you? A year less one week has he been in this world--he's hardly weaned yet--and he wants to get married! I shall--"
"Let me go! let me go!" whispered Raissa, turning to the door.
"I shall not ask your permission," shouted David, supporting himself on his hands, "but my own father's, who will be back to-day or to-morrow. He can command me, not you; and as for my age, both Raissa and I can wait. You can say what you please: we shall wait."
"David, think a moment," interrupted my father: "take care what you say. You are beside yourself: you have forgotten all respect."
David grasped his shirt where it lay across his breast. "Whatever you may say," he repeated.
"Stop his mouth, Porphyr Petrovitch--silence him!" hissed my aunt from the door; "and as for this baggage, this--"
But something strange cut my aunt's eloquence short: her voice became suddenly silent, and in its place was heard another, weak and hoarse from age. "Brother!" exclaimed this weak voice--"Christian souls!"
We all turned round. Before us, in the same dress in which I had just seen him, stood Latkin, looking like a ghost, thin, haggard and sad. "God," he said in a somewhat childish way, raising his trembling, bent figure and gazing feebly at my father--"God has punished, and I have come for Wa--for Ra--yes, yes, for Raissa. What--choo--what ails me? Soon I shall be laid--what do you call that thing? a staff--straight--and that other thing?--a prop. That's all I need, and you, brother jeweler, see: I too am a man."
Raissa crossed the room without a word, and while she supported her father she buttoned his jacket.
"Let us go, Wassilievna," he said. "All here are saints: don't go near them; and he who lies there in a case," pointing to David, "is also a saint. But we, brother, you and I, are sinners. Choo, gentlemen: excuse an old, broken-down man. We have stolen together," he cried suddenly--"stolen together, stolen together," he repeated with evident joy: at last he had control of his tongue.
All of us in the room were silent. "But where is your picture of the saints?" he inquired, gazing about: "we must cleanse ourselves."