“H’m. That’s very possible,” he muttered in a peculiar tone, as if giving his opinion on a matter of fact. “I wonder what. …” He checked himself.
“That would be the end. Her mind shall be gone then, and her spirit will follow.”
Miss Haldin unclasped her hands and let them fall by her side.
“You think so?” he queried profoundly. Miss Haldin’s lips were slightly parted. Something unexpected and unfathomable in that young man’s character had fascinated her from the first. “No! There’s neither truth nor consolation to be got from the phantoms of the dead,” he added after a weighty pause. “I might have told her something true; for instance, that your brother meant to save his life—to escape. There can be no doubt of that. But I did not.”
“You did not! But why?”
“I don’t know. Other thoughts came into my head,” he answered. He seemed to me to be watching himself inwardly, as though he were trying to count his own heartbeats, while his eyes never for a moment left the face of the girl. “You were not there,” he continued. “I had made up my mind never to see you again.”
This seemed to take her breath away for a moment.
“You. … How is it possible?”
“You may well ask. … However, I think that I refrained from telling your mother from prudence. I might have assured her that in the last conversation he held as a free man he mentioned you both. …”
“That last conversation was with you,” she struck in her deep, moving voice. “Some day you must. …”
“It was with me. Of you he said that you had trustful eyes. And why I have not been able to forget that phrase I don’t know. It meant that there is in you no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no suspicion—nothing in your heart that could give you a conception of a living, acting, speaking lie, if ever it came in your way. That you are a predestined victim. … Ha! what a devilish suggestion!”
The convulsive, uncontrolled tone of the last words disclosed the precarious hold he had over himself. He was like a man defying his own dizziness in high places and tottering suddenly on the very edge of the precipice. Miss Haldin pressed her hand to her breast. The dropped black veil lay on the floor between them. Her movement steadied him. He looked intently on that hand till it descended slowly, and then raised again his eyes to her face. But he did not give her time to speak.
“No? You don’t understand? Very well.” He had recovered his calm by a miracle of will. “So you talked with Sophia Antonovna?”
“Yes. Sophia Antonovna told me. …” Miss Haldin stopped, wonder growing in her wide eyes.
“H’m. That’s the respectable enemy,” he muttered, as though he were alone.
“The tone of her references to you was extremely friendly,” remarked Miss Haldin, after waiting for a while.
“Is that your impression? And she the most intelligent of the lot, too. Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires to … Ah! these conspirators,” he said slowly, with an accent of scorn; “they would get hold of you in no time! You know, Natalia Victorovna, I have the greatest difficulty in saving myself from the superstition of an active Providence. It’s irresistible. … The alternative, of course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if so, he has overdone it altogether—the old Father of Lies—our national patron—our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has overdone it. It seems that I am not simple enough. … That’s it! I ought to have known. … And I did know it,” he added in a tone of poignant distress which overcame my astonishment.
“This man is deranged,” I said to myself, very much frightened.
The next moment he gave me a very special impression beyond the range of commonplace definitions. It was as though he had stabbed himself outside and had come in there to show it; and more than that—as though he were turning the knife in the wound and watching the effect. That was the impression, rendered in physical terms. One could not defend oneself from a certain amount of pity. But it was for Miss Haldin, already so tried in her deepest affections, that I felt a serious concern. Her attitude, her face, expressed compassion struggling with doubt on the verge of terror.
“What is it, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” There was a hint of tenderness in that cry. He only stared at her in that complete surrender of all his faculties which in a happy lover would have had the name of ecstasy.
“Why are you looking at me like this, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I have approached you frankly. I need at this time to see clearly in myself. …” She ceased for a moment as if to give him an opportunity to utter at last some word worthy of her exalted trust in her brother’s friend. His silence became impressive, like a sign of a momentous resolution.
In the end Miss Haldin went on, appealingly—
“I have waited for you anxiously. But now that you have been moved to come to us in your kindness, you alarm me. You speak obscurely. It seems as if you were keeping back something from me.”
“Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,” he was heard at last in a strange unringing voice, “whom did you see in that place?”
She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
“Where? In Peter Ivanovitch’s rooms? There was Mr. Laspara and three other people.”
“Ha! The vanguard—the forlorn hope of the great plot,” he commented to himself. “Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to change fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter Ivanovitch should be the head of a State.”
“You are teasing me,” she said. “Our dear one told me once to remember that men serve always something greater than themselves—the idea.”
“Our dear one,” he repeated slowly. The effort he made to appear unmoved
