"Wait for the owners," he told the people gathered in the hallway to see him off. "If they come, they'll be welcome; if they don't--just as they please. For my part, I did all I could. I straightened out the guardianship accounts and hid nothing. Everything was done in plain view, in front of everybody. The money that mother left belongs to me legally. The coach and the two cows that I sent to Golovliovo are mine _by law._ Maybe some of my property is left _here._ However, I won't insist on it. God Himself commands us to give to orphans. I am sorry to have lost mother, she was a good old woman, a kindly soul. Oh, mother dear, it was not right of you, darling, to have left us poor orphans. But if it had pleased God to take you, it befits us to submit to His holy will. May, at least, your soul rejoice in heaven, and as for us--well, we are not to be considered."
The first death was soon followed by another.
Yudushka's attitude toward his son's fate was quite puzzling. Since he did not receive newspapers and was not in correspondence with anybody, he could not learn anything of the trial in which Petenka figured. And he hardly wished to. Above all things, he shunned disturbance of every kind. He was buried up to his ears in a swamp of petty details, all centering around the welfare and preservation of his precious self. There are many such people in this world. They live apart from the rest of humanity, having neither the desire nor the knowledge to identify themselves with a "cause," and bursting in the end like so many soap bubbles. They have no ties of friendship, for friendship presupposes the existence of common interests; nor do they have any business connections. For thirty years at a stretch Porfiry Vladimirych had marked time in a government office. Then, one fine day he disappeared, and no one noticed the fact.
He learned of his son's fate after his domestics had. But even then he feigned ignorance, so that when Yevpraksia once tried to mention Petenka, he waved her off and said:
"No, no, no! I don't know, I did not hear anything, and I don't want to hear anything. I don't want to know a thing about his dirty affairs."
But finally he did learn about Petenka. He received a letter from him saying he was about to leave for one of the remote provinces and asking his father to continue to send him an allowance in his new position. The whole of the next day Porfiry Vladimirych was in a state of visible perplexity. He darted from room to room, peeped into the oratory, crossed himself, and sighed. But toward evening he plucked up courage and wrote the following letter: