“You seem to be very much offended with them, Marya Timofyevna?”
“I? Oh, no,” she smiled with simplehearted mirth. “Not at all. I looked at you all, then. You were all angry, you were all quarrelling. They meet together, and they don’t know how to laugh from their hearts. So much wealth and so little gaiety. It all disgusts me. Though I feel for no one now except myself.”
“I’ve heard that you’ve had a hard life with your brother without me?”
“Who told you that? It’s nonsense. It’s much worse now. Now my dreams are not good, and my dreams are bad, because you’ve come. What have you come for, I’d like to know. Tell me please?”
“Wouldn’t you like to go back into the nunnery?”
“I knew they’d suggest the nunnery again. Your nunnery is a fine marvel for me! And why should I go to it? What should I go for now? I’m all alone in the world now. It’s too late for me to begin a third life.”
“You seem very angry about something. Surely you’re not afraid that I’ve left off loving you?”
“I’m not troubling about you at all. I’m afraid that I may leave off loving somebody.”
She laughed contemptuously.
“I must have done him some great wrong,” she added suddenly, as it were to herself, “only I don’t know what I’ve done wrong; that’s always what troubles me. Always, always, for the last five years. I’ve been afraid day and night that I’ve done him some wrong. I’ve prayed and prayed and always thought of the great wrong I’d done him. And now it turns out it was true.”
“What’s turned out?”
“I’m only afraid whether there’s something on his side,” she went on, not answering his question, not hearing it in fact. “And then, again, he couldn’t get on with such horrid people. The countess would have liked to eat me, though she did make me sit in the carriage beside her. They’re all in the plot. Surely he’s not betrayed me?” (Her chin and lips were twitching.) “Tell me, have you read about Grishka Otrepyev, how he was cursed in seven cathedrals?”
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch did not speak.
“But I’ll turn round now and look at you.” She seemed to decide suddenly. “You turn to me, too, and look at me, but more attentively. I want to make sure for the last time.”
“I’ve been looking at you for a long time.”
“H’m!” said Marya Timofyevna, looking at him intently. “You’ve grown much fatter.”
She wanted to say something more, but suddenly, for the third time, the same terror instantly distorted her face, and again she drew back, putting her hand up before her.
“What’s the matter with you?” cried Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, almost enraged.
But her panic lasted only one instant, her face worked with a sort of strange smile, suspicious and unpleasant.
“I beg you, prince, get up and come in,” she brought out suddenly, in a firm, emphatic voice.
“Come in? Where am I to come in?”
“I’ve been fancying for five years how he would come in. Get up and go out of the door into the other room. I’ll sit as though I weren’t expecting anything, and I’ll take up a book, and suddenly you’ll come in after five years’ travelling. I want to see what it will be like.”
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch ground his teeth, and muttered something to himself.
“Enough,” he said, striking the table with his open hand. “I beg you to listen to me, Marya Timofyevna. Do me the favour to concentrate all your attention if you can. You’re not altogether mad, you know!” he broke out impatiently. “Tomorrow I shall make our marriage public. You never will live in a palace, get that out of your head. Do you want to live with me for the rest of your life, only very far away from here? In the mountains in Switzerland, there’s a place there. … Don’t be afraid. I’ll never abandon you or put you in a madhouse. I shall have money enough to live without asking anyone’s help. You shall have a servant, you shall do no work at all. Everything you want that’s possible shall be got for you. You shall pray, go where you like, and do what you like. I won’t touch you. I won’t go away from the place myself at all. If you like, I won’t speak to you all my life, or if you like, you can tell me your stories every evening as you used to do in Petersburg in the corners. I’ll read aloud to you if you like. But it must be all your life in the same place, and that place is a gloomy one. Will you? Are you ready? You won’t regret it, torment me with tears and curses, will you?”
She listened with extreme curiosity, and for a long time she was silent, thinking.
“It all seems incredible to me,” she said at last, ironically and disdainfully. “I might live for forty years in those mountains,” she laughed.
“What of it? Let’s live forty years then …” said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, scowling.
“H’m! I won’t come for anything.”
“Not even with me?”
“And what are you that I should go with you? I’m to sit on a mountain beside him for forty years on end—a pretty story! And upon my word, how long-suffering people have become nowadays! No, it cannot be that a falcon has become an owl. My prince is not like that!” she said, raising her head proudly and triumphantly.
Light seemed to dawn upon him.
“What makes you call me a prince, and … for whom do you take me?” he asked quickly.
“Why, aren’t you the prince?”
“I never have been one.”
“So yourself, yourself, you tell me straight to my face that you’re not the prince?”
“I tell you I never have been.”
“Good Lord!” she cried, clasping her hands. “I was ready to expect anything from his enemies, but such insolence, never! Is he alive?” she shrieked in a frenzy, turning upon Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch. “Have you killed him? Confess!”
“Whom do you take me for?” he cried, jumping
