Then she opened the door, and he found himself in a dark passage. The cottage had only two rooms. The one on the left of the front-door had been the gardener's dwelling-room, the other his workshop.
From the former, the door of which stood ajar, issued a powerful death odour.
He went in. A body veiled in white lay on a low bier in the middle of the close, gloomy little room.
"Leave me," he said, without looking round, and he threw back the cloth.
His father's rigid features, covered with bristles, stared up at him. The eyes had sunk far back in his head; the brows were contracted. In the hollows of his cheeks bushy black hair had sprouted, while the beard had turned partially grey. The short, thick nose had shrunk, and close to the firmly-shut lips that had not parted in death lay a deep line, denoting intense suffering, and, at the same time, defiant scorn; as Boleslav looked down on it, the line seemed to deepen still more, and at last to quiver and play round the mouth that was still for ever.
He dropped on his knees, and, with folded hands, prayed a paternoster. His tears fell fast, and rained heavily on the waxen face of the dead man.
"Your guilt is my guilt," he whispered hoarsely. "If I don't defend your memory, who else will? No one in all the world."
Then he covered up the body again with the white cloth, for flies were swarming round it. As he turned away, he observed the girl's dark head pressed against the foot of the bier. Her symmetrical neck and shoulders shone out in relief from the shadowy background.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded roughly. She crouched down, shivering, and raised her left shoulder, as if to ward off a threatened blow. Her eyes flashed a warm ray through the masses of her curly hair.
"No one has ever driven me away from him before," she murmured.
"But _I_ drive you away," he answered with decision.
She rose and quietly vanished. He tore open a window, for he felt half suffocated, and then took a survey of the apartment. It was small and wretched enough, and was filled up without any attempt at arrangement with the most inappropriate and heterogeneous assortment of furniture, most of it evidently rescued in haste from the fire; a gold-legged table harmonised ill with rickety kitchen chairs; a peasant's canopied bed stood near gorgeous consoles of inlaid marble, and a cracked Venetian mirror hung beside a bullfinch's simple wicker cage. But nothing looked more out of its element than the life-size portrait of the beautiful Pole, his grandmother, and the original cause of all the evil that had befallen him. Her haughty, arrogant eye still pierced the distance triumphantly; the small gloved hand still grasped the flexible riding-whip. "Kneel, slave," the full proud lips seemed to say. Only the diamond pin which used to glitter in her bosom like a star was gone, for just there the colour had warped, and the grey canvas beneath was exposed to view. The once elegant and artistically carved frame representing a garland of gilded roses and cupids had suffered too, being chipped and cracked in various places, where patches of coarse orange paint had been daubed on to repair the damage.