swelled, his eyes were swimming with tears.
'Dolly!' he said, sobbing now; 'for mercy's sake, think of the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!'
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak, but could not. He waited.
'You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember them, and know that this means their ruin,' she said--obviously one of the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of the last few days.
She had called him 'Stiva,' and he glanced at her with gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.
'I think of the children, and for that reason I would do anything in the world to save them, but I don't myself know how to save them. by taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious father--yes, a vicious father.... Tell me, after what...has happened, can we live together? Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?' she repeated, raising her voice, 'after my husband, the father of my children, enters into a love affair with his own children's governess?'
'But what could I do? what could I do?' he kept saying in a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and lower.
'You are loathsome to me, repulsive!' she shrieked, getting more and more heated. 'Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honorable feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger--yes, a complete stranger!' With pain and wrath she uttered the word so terrible to herself--stranger.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She saw in him sympathy for her, but not love. 'No, she hates me. She will not forgive me,' he thought.
'It is awful! awful!' he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it had fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she did not know where she was, and what she was doing, and getting up rapidly, she moved towards the door.
'Well, she loves my child,' he thought, noticing the change of her face at the child's cry, 'my child: how can she hate me?'
'Dolly, one word more,' he said, following her.
'If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the children! They may all know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may live here with your mistress!'
And she went out, slamming the door.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a subdued tread walked out of the room. 'Matvey says she will come round; but how? I don't see the least chance of it. Ah, oh, how horrible it is! And how vulgarly she shouted,' he said to himself, remembering her shriek and the words--'scoundrel' and 'mistress.' 'And very likely the maids were listening! Horribly vulgar! horrible!' Stepan Arkadyevitch stood a few seconds alone, wiped his face, squared his chest, and walked out of the room.
It was Friday, and in the dining room the German watchmaker was winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this punctual, bald watchmaker, 'that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches,' and he smiled. Stepan Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke: 'And maybe she will come round! That's a good expression, 'come round,'' he thought. 'I must repeat that.'
'Matvey!' he shouted. 'Arrange everything with Darya in the sitting room for Anna Arkadyevna,' he said to Matvey when he came in.
'Yes, sir.'
Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.
'You won't dine at home?' said Matvey, seeing him off.
'That's as it happens. But here's for the housekeeping,' he said, taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. 'That'll be enough.'
'Enough or not enough, we must make it do,' said Matvey, slamming the carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.
Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back again to her bedroom. It was her solitary refuge from the household cares which crowded upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the short time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matrona Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer: 'What were the children to put on for their walk? Should they have any milk? Should not a new cook be sent for?'
'Ah, let me alone, let me alone!' she said, and going back to her bedroom she sat down in the same place as she had sat when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands with the rings that slipped down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over in her memory all the conversation. 'He has gone! But has he broken it off with her?' she thought. 'Can it be he sees her? Why didn't I ask him! No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers--strangers forever! She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her. 'And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!.... How I loved him! And now don't I love him? Don't I love him more than before? The most horrible thing is,' she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.
'Let us send for my brother,' she said; 'he can get a dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like yesterday.'
'Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you send for some new milk?'
And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.
