Lavretsky came to himself at last; he moved away from the wall and turned towards the door.
“You are going?” cried his wife in a voice of despair. “Oh, this is cruel! Without uttering one word to me, not even a reproach. This contempt will kill me, it is terrible!”
Lavretsky stood still.
“What do you want to hear from me?” he articulated in an expressionless voice.
“Nothing, nothing,” she rejoined quickly, “I know I have no right to expect anything; I am not mad, believe me; I do not hope, I do not dare to hope for your forgiveness; I only venture to entreat you to command me what I am to do, where I am to live. Like a slave I will fulfil your commands whatever they may be.”
“I have no commands to give you,” replied Lavretsky in the same colourless voice; “you know, all is over between us … and now more than ever; you can live where you like; and if your allowance is too little—”
“Ah, don’t say such dreadful things,” Varvara Pavlovna interrupted him, “spare me, if only … if only for the sake of this angel.” And as she uttered these words, Varvara Pavlovna ran impulsively into the next room, and returned at once with a small and very elegantly dressed little girl in her arms.
Thick flaxen curls fell over her pretty rosy little face, and on to her large sleepy black eyes; she smiled and blinked her eyes at the light and laid a chubby little hand on her mother’s neck.
“Ada, vois, c’est ton père,” said Varvara Pavlovna, pushing the curls back from her eyes and kissing her vigorously, “prie le avec moi.”
“C’est ça, papa?” stammered the little girl lisping.
“Oui, mon enfant, n’est-ce pas que tu l’aimes?”
But this was more than Lavretsky could stand.
“In such a melodrama must there really be a scene like this?” he muttered, and went out of the room.
Varvara Pavlovna stood still for some time in the same place, slightly shrugged her shoulders, carried the little girl off into the next room, undressed her and put her to bed. Then she took up a book and sat down near the lamp, and after staying up for an hour she went to bed herself.
“Eh bien, madame?” queried her maid, a Frenchwoman whom she had brought from Paris, as she unlaced her corset.
“Eh bien, Justine,” she replied, “he is a good deal older, but I fancy he is just the same good-natured fellow. Give me my gloves for the night, and get out my grey high-necked dress for tomorrow, and don’t forget the mutton cutlets for Ada. … I daresay it will be difficult to get them here; but we must try.”
“A la guerre comme à la guerre,” replied Justine as she put out the candle.
XXXVII
For more than two hours Lavretsky wandered about the streets of town. The night he had spent in the outskirts of Paris returned to his mind. His heart was bursting and his head, dull and stunned, was filled again with the same dark senseless angry thoughts, constantly recurring. “She is alive, she is here,” he muttered with ever fresh amazement. He felt that he had lost Lisa. His wrath choked him; this blow had fallen too suddenly upon him. How could he so readily have believed in the nonsensical gossip of a journal, a wretched scrap of paper? “Well, if I had not believed it,” he thought, “what difference would it have made? I should not have known that Lisa loved me; she would not have known it herself.” He could not rid himself of the image, the voice, the eyes of his wife … and he cursed himself, he cursed everything in the world.
Wearied out he went towards morning to Lemm’s. For a long while he could make no one hear; at last at a window the old man’s head appeared in a nightcap, sour, wrinkled, and utterly unlike the inspired austere visage which twenty-four hours ago had looked down imperiously upon Lavretsky in all the dignity of artistic grandeur.
“What do you want?” queried Lemm. “I can’t play to you every night, I have taken a decoction for a cold.” But Lavretsky’s face, apparently, struck him as strange; the old man made a shade for his eyes with his hand, took a look at his belated visitor, and let him in.
Lavretsky went into the room and sank into a chair. The old man stood still before him, wrapping the skirts of his shabby striped dressing-gown around him, shrinking together and gnawing his lips.
“My wife is here,” Lavretsky brought out. He raised his head and suddenly broke into involuntary laughter.
Lemm’s face expressed bewilderment, but he did not even smile, only wrapped himself closer in his dressing-gown.
“Of course, you don’t know,” Lavretsky went on, “I had imagined … I read in a paper that she was dead.”
“O—oh, did you read that lately?” asked Lemm.
“Yes, lately.”
“O—oh,” repeated the old man, raising his eyebrows. “And she is here?”
“Yes. She is at my house now; and I … I am an unlucky fellow.”
And he laughed again.
“You are an unlucky fellow,” Lemm repeated slowly.
“Christopher Fedoritch,” began Lavretsky, “would you undertake to carry a note for me?”
“H’m. May I know to whom?”
“Lisavet—”
“Ah … yes, yes, I understand. Very good. And when must the letter be received?”
“Tomorrow, as early as possible.”
“H’m. I can send Katrine, my cook. No, I will go myself.”
“And you will
