“On the contrary, I am very much interested,” said Nekhlúdoff, touched by this overflowing, happy mother-love. “Please let me see them.”
“She’s taking the Prince to see her babies,” the General shouted, laughing from the card-table, where he sat with his son-in-law, the mine owner and the aide-de-camp. “Go, go, pay your tribute.”
The young woman, visibly excited by the thought that judgment was about to be passed on her children, went quickly towards the inner apartments, followed by Nekhlúdoff. In the third, a lofty room, papered with white and lit up by a shaded lamp, stood two small cots, and a nurse with a white cape on her shoulders sat between the cots. She had a kindly, true Siberian face, with its high cheekbones.
The nurse rose and bowed. The mother stooped over the first cot, in which a two-year-old little girl lay peacefully sleeping with her little mouth open and her long, curly hair tumbled over the pillow.
“This is Katie,” said the mother, straightening the white and blue crochet coverlet, from under which a little white foot pushed itself languidly out.
“Is she not pretty? She’s only two years old, you know.”
“Lovely.”
“And this is Vasiúk, as ‘grandpapa’ calls him. Quite a different type. A Siberian, is he not?”
“A splendid boy,” said Nekhlúdoff, as he looked at the little fatty lying asleep on his stomach.
“Yes,” said the mother, with a smile full of meaning.
Nekhlúdoff recalled to his mind chains, shaved heads, fighting debauchery, the dying Kryltzóff, Katúsha and the whole of her past, and he began to feel envious and to wish for what he saw here, which now seemed to him pure and refined happiness.
After having repeatedly expressed his admiration of the children, thereby at least partially satisfying their mother, who eagerly drank in this praise, he followed her back to the drawing-room, where the Englishman was waiting for him to go and visit the prison, as they had arranged. Having taken leave of their hosts, the old and the young ones, the Englishman and Nekhlúdoff went out into the porch of the General’s house.
The weather had changed. It was snowing, and the snow fell densely in large flakes, and already covered the road, the roof and the trees in the garden, the steps of the porch, the roof of the trap and the back of the horse.
The Englishman had a trap of his own, and Nekhlúdoff, having told the coachman to drive to the prison, called his isvóstchik and got in with the heavy sense of having to fulfil an unpleasant duty, and followed the Englishman over the soft snow, through which the wheels turned with difficulty.
XXV
The dismal prison house, with its sentinel and lamp burning under the gateway, produced an even more dismal impression, with its long row of lighted windows, than it had done in the morning, in spite of the white covering that now lay over everything—the porch, the roof and the walls.
The imposing inspector came up to the gate and read the pass that had been given to Nekhlúdoff and the Englishman by the light of the lamp, shrugged his fine shoulders in surprise, but, in obedience to the order, asked the visitors to follow him in. He led them through the courtyard and then in at a door to the right and up a staircase into the office. He offered them a seat and asked what he could do for them, and when he heard that Nekhlúdoff would like to see Máslova at once, he sent a jailer to fetch her. Then he prepared himself to answer the questions which the Englishman began to put to him, Nekhlúdoff acting as interpreter.
“How many persons is the prison built to hold?” the Englishman asked. “How many are confined in it? How many men? How many women? Children? How many sentenced to the mines? How many exiles? How many sick persons?”
Nekhlúdoff translated the Englishman’s and the inspector’s words without paying any attention to their meaning, and felt an awkwardness he had not in the least expected at the thought of the impending interview. When, in the midst of a sentence he was translating for the Englishman, he heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and the office door opened, and, as had happened many times before, a jailer came in, followed by Katúsha, and he saw her with a kerchief tied round her head, and in a prison jacket a heavy sensation came over him. “I wish to live, I want a family, children, I want a human life.” These thoughts flashed through his mind as she entered the room with rapid steps and blinking her eyes.
He rose and made a few steps to meet her, and her face appeared hard and unpleasant to him. It was again as it had been at the time when she reproached him. She flushed and turned pale, her fingers nervously twisting a corner of her jacket. She looked up at him, then cast down her eyes.
“You know that a mitigation has come?”
“Yes, the jailer told me.”
“So that as soon as the original document arrives you may come away and settle where you like. We shall consider—”
She interrupted him hurriedly. “What have I to consider? Where Vóldemar Símonson goes, there I shall follow.” In spite of the excitement she was in she raised her eyes to Nekhlúdoff’s and pronounced these words quickly and distinctly, as if she had prepared what she had to say.
“Indeed!”
“Well, Dmítri Ivánovitch, you see he wishes me to live with him—” and she stopped, quite frightened, and corrected herself. “He wishes me to be near him. What more can I desire? I must look upon it as happiness. What else is there for me—”
“One of two things,” thought he. “Either she loves Símonson and does not in the least require the sacrifice I imagined I was bringing her, or she still loves me and refuses me for my own sake, and is burning her ships by uniting her fate with Símonson.” And Nekhlúdoff felt
