“My dear,42 I have not been thinking about it at all. It is so painful for me to think about it.”
“But, Viérotchka, maybe it would be well for me to know about it.”
“Very well, my dearest! I dreamed that I was bored because I had not gone to the opera, and I was thinking about Bosio; some woman seemed to call on me, and at first I thought it was Bosio, but she kept hiding from me; she compelled me to read my diary; and there was nothing in it except how we loved each other; but when she touched her hand to the pages, new words seemed to be which said that I did not love you.”
“Forgive me, dearie,43 for asking one thing more. Was that all that you saw in your dream?”
“My dearest, if that had not been all, wouldn’t I have told thee so? And I have already told thee all.”
This was said so tenderly, so sincerely, so simply, that Lopukhóf felt in his heart a wave of warmth and sweetness, such as one who has once experienced this joy will never forget till his dying day. Oh, how pitiful that only a few, a very few, husbands can have this feeling! All the pleasures of happy love are nothing in comparison with it; it fills the human heart with the purest content, the holiest pride. In Viéra Pavlovna’s words, which were spoken with a shade of melancholy, rang a reproach, but the significance of the reproach was this: “My dear, don’t you know that I have perfect confidence in you? A wife may hide from her husband the mysterious motions of her soul; such are those very relations in which they stand to each other. But you, my dear, have so behaved that there has never been any need of hiding things from you, that my heart is open before you as before my own eyes.”
This is a great merit in a husband; this great reward is purchased only by a high moral worth, and whoever has deserved it has a right to look upon himself as a man of unquestionable nobility; he may boldly hope that his conscience is pure and will always remain pure, that his manhood will never play him false, that in all trials of every sort he will remain calm and firm, that fate is not reigning over the peace of his soul, that from the time that he has deserved this great honor, to the very last moment of his life, disregarding whatever shocks to which he may be subjected; he will be happy in the consciousness of his worthy manhood. Now we know enough of Lopukhóf to see that he was not a sentimental man, but he was so touched by these words of his wife that his face burned:—
“Viérotchka, my dearest, you have reproached me.” His voice for the second and last time in his life trembled. The first time that his voice trembled it was from doubt arising from conjecturing his position; now it trembled from pleasure. “You have reproached me, but this reproach is dearer to me than all the words of love. I offended you with my question, but how happy I am that my bad question gave me, brought me, such a reproach. Look, there are tears in my eyes, the first tears that I have shed since I was a boy!”
The whole evening long he scarcely took his eyes from her, and she never once thought that he was making an effort to appear tender to her; and this evening was one of the happiest of her life, at least, up to the present time. Several years after the time of which I am now telling you about her, she will have a good many such days, months, years; this will be when her children shall have grown up, and she will find in them people worthy of happiness and sure of it. This pleasure is higher than all other individual pleasures; whatever may appear in any other personal pleasure is a rare and transitory loftiness; with her it is an ordinary, everyday level of happiness. But this is in the future which will come to her.
XXI
But after his wife had gone to sleep sitting on his knees, after he laid her down on her little sofa, Lopukhóf began to think seriously about her dream. It was not his affair whether she loved him or not; that was her concern, over which he had no control, and over which as he himself plainly saw, he had no control. This will settle itself; there is no need of thinking about it today; let time tell; but now there is no time for it; it is now his business to find out what is the cause of her foreboding that she does not love him.
For the first time he sat a long while in these thoughts; already for the last few days he has seen that he is not retaining her love for him. A great loss; but what could be done about it? If he could exchange his nature, acquire a tendency towards that gentle fondness which her nature demanded, then of course it would be a different thing. But he saw that such an attempt would be in vain. If the inclination is not given by nature, and if it is not developed by life independently of the man himself, this man cannot create it in himself by force of will, and without this tendency nothing can be done as it ought to be done. Consequently the question about him was already decided. His former thoughts had been spent in this very direction. But now that he had finished his own side of the
