ved evident traces of the touch of a great artist.
The picture seemed to have been scarcely finished, but the force of
treatment was immense. Its most extraordinary part was the eyes; in them
the artist had concentrated all the power of his pencil. There was
vitality in those dark and lustrous orbs, they looked out of the
portrait, and in some measure destroyed its harmony by their strange and
life-like expression. When Tchartkoff took the picture to the door, he
fancied the pupils dilated. The peculiarity of the painting at once
attracted the attention of the idlers without. Some uttered exclamations
of surprise, others fell back a pace as if in terror. A pale,
sickly-looking woman of the lower classes, who suddenly found herself
face to face with this singular portrait, screamed with alarm. "It's
looking at me!" she cried, and hurried away, casting nervous glances
over her shoulder. Tchartkoff himself experienced--he could not tell
why--a sort of disagreeable sensation, and he put the portrait on the
ground.

"D'ye buy?" said the picture-dealer.

"How much?" replied the artist.

"At a word--three _tchetvertaks_."[27]

Tchartkoff shook his head. "Too much. I will give you a dougrivennoi,"
he added, moving towards the door.

"A dougrivennoi for that picture! You are pleased to joke, sir. The
frame is worth twice the money. Bid me something more, if it be only
another grivennik. Come back, sir," he shouted, running after the
painter, and detaining him by his cloak-skirt; "come back, sir. You are
my first customer to-day, and I will take your offer, for luck's sake.
But the picture is given away."

On finding his offer thus unexpectedly accepted, Tchartkoff heartily
repented his temerity in making it. The dougrivennoi he paid the dealer
was his last in the world, and he was encumbered with a lumbering old
portrait for which he had no earthly use. Cursing his own imprudence, he
took up his purchase, and trudged away with it. Its weight and size
caused it to slip perpetually from under his arm, and rendered it a most
troublesome burthen. At last, tired to death and bathed in perspiration,
he reached the house, in the fifteenth line of the Vasilievskue Ostrow,
in which he occupied a modest lodging, ascended the uncleanly staircase,
and knocked impatiently at the door of his apartment. It was opened by a
slatternly lad in a blue shirt--his cook, model, colour-grinder and
floor-sweeper, who had to thank his godfathers f