“Do you know,” she whispered to Varvara Pavlovna, “I want to endeavour to reconcile you and your husband; I won’t answer for my success, but I will make an effort. He has, you know, a great respect for me.” Varvara Pavlovna slowly raised her eyes to Marya Dmitrievna, and eloquently clasped her hands.
“You would be my saviour, ma tante,” she said in a mournful voice: “I don’t know how to thank you for all your kindness; but I have been too guilty towards Fedor Ivanitch; he can not forgive me.”
“But did you—in reality—” Marya Dmitrievna was beginning inquisitively.
“Don’t question me,” Varvara Pavlovna interrupted her, and she cast down her eyes. “I was young, frivolous. But I don’t want to justify myself.”
“Well, anyway, why not try? Don’t despair,” rejoined Marya Dmitrievna, and she was on the point of patting her on the cheek, but after a glance at her she had not the courage. “She is humble, very humble,” she thought, “but still she is a lioness.”
“Are you ill?” Panshin was saying to Lisa meanwhile.
“Yes, I am not well.”
“I understand you,” he brought out after a rather protracted silence. “Yes, I understand you.”
“What?”
“I understand you,” Panshin repeated significantly; he simply did not know what to say.
Lisa felt embarrassed, and then “so be it!” she thought. Panshin assumed a mysterious air and kept silent, looking severely away.
“I fancy though it’s struck eleven,” remarked Marya Dmitrievna.
Her guests took the hint and began to say goodbye. Varvara Pavlovna had to promise that she would come to dinner the following day and bring Ada. Gedeonovsky, who had all but fallen asleep sitting in his corner, offered to escort her home. Panshin took leave solemnly of all, but at the steps as he put Varvara Pavlovna into her carriage he pressed her hand, and cried after her, “au revoir!” Gedeonovsky sat beside her all the way home. She amused herself by pressing the tip of her little foot as though accidentally on his foot; he was thrown into confusion and began paying her compliments. She tittered and made eyes at him when the light of a street lamp fell into the carriage. The waltz she had played was ringing in her head, and exciting her; whatever position she might find herself in, she had only to imagine lights, a ballroom, rapid whirling to the strains of music—and her blood was on fire, her eyes glittered strangely, a smile strayed about her lips, and something of bacchanalian grace was visible over her whole frame. When she reached home Varvara Pavlovna bounded lightly out of the carriage—only real lionesses know how to bound like that—and turning round to Gedeonovsky she burst suddenly into a ringing laugh right in his face.
“An attractive person,” thought the counsellor of state as he made his way to his lodgings, where his servant was awaiting him with a glass of opodeldoc: “It’s well I’m a steady fellow—only, what was she laughing at?”
Marfa Timofyevna spent the whole night sitting beside Lisa’s bed.
XLI
Lavretsky spent a day and a half at Vassilyevskoe, and employed almost all the time in wandering about the neighbourhood. He could not stop long in one place: he was devoured by anguish; he was torn unceasingly by impotent violent impulses. He remembered the feeling which had taken possession of him the day after his arrival in the country; he remembered his plans then and was intensely exasperated with himself. What had been able to tear him away from what he recognised as his duty—as the one task set before him in the future? The thirst for happiness—again the same thirst for happiness.
“It seems Mihalevitch was right,” he thought; “you wanted a second time to taste happiness in life,” he said to himself, “you forgot that it is a luxury, an undeserved bliss, if it even comes once to a man. It was not complete, it was not genuine, you say; but prove your right to full, genuine happiness. Look round and see who is happy, who enjoys life about you? Look at that peasant going to the mowing; is he contented with his fate? … What! would you care to change places with him? Remember your mother; how infinitely little she asked of life, and what a life fell to her lot. You were only bragging it seems when you said to Panshin that you had come back to Russia to cultivate the soil; you have come back to dangle after young girls in your old age. Directly the news of your freedom came, you threw up everything, forgot everything; you ran like a boy after a butterfly.” …
The image of Lisa continually presented itself in the midst of his broodings. He drove it away with an effort together with another importunate figure, other serenely wily, beautiful, hated features. Old Anton noticed that the master was not himself: after sighing several times outside the door and several times in the doorway, he made up his mind to go up to him, and advised him to take a hot drink of something. Lavretsky swore at him; ordered him out; afterwards he begged his pardon, but that only made Anton still more sorrowful. Lavretsky could not stay in the drawing-room; it seemed to him that his great-grandfather Andrey, was looking contemptuously from the canvas at his feeble descendant. “Bah: you swim in shallow water,” the distorted lips seemed to be saying. “Is it possible,” he thought, “that I cannot master myself, that I am going to give in to this … nonsense?” (Those who are badly wounded in war always call their wounds “nonsense.” If man did not deceive himself, he could not live
