Page 949 - the-brothers-karamazov

nightcap, and was evidently ill and weak, though he was
smiling blissfully. When the homeless old man returned
with Grushenka from Mokroe two months before, he had
simply stayed on and was still staying with her. He arrived
with her in rain and sleet, sat down on the sofa, drenched
and scared, and gazed mutely at her with a timid, appealing
smile. Grushenka, who was in terrible grief and in the first
stage of fever, almost forgot his existence in all she had to do
the first half hour after her arrival. Suddenly she chanced
to look at him intently: he laughed a pitiful, helpless little
laugh. She called Fenya and told her to give him something
to eat. All that day he sat in the same place, almost without
stirring. When it got dark and the shutters were closed, Fe-
nya asked her mistress:
‘Is the gentleman going to stay the night, mistress?’
‘Yes; make him a bed on the sofa,’ answered Grushenka.
Questioning him more in detail, Grushenka learned
from him that he had literally nowhere to go, and that ‘Mr.
Kalganov, my benefactor, told me straight that he wouldn’t
receive me again and gave me five roubles.’
‘Well, God bless you, you’d better stay, then,’ Grushenka
decided in her grief, smiling compassionately at him. Her
smile wrung the old man’s heart and his lips twitched with
grateful tears. And so the destitute wanderer had stayed
with her ever since. He did not leave the house even when
she was ill. Fenya and her grandmother, the cook, did not
turn him out, but went on serving him meals and making
up his bed on the sofa. Grushenka had grown used to him,
and coming back from seeing Mitya (whom she had begun

The Brothers Karamazov