rather timidly.
“Yes, I meant to marry her, she died of consumption, HER step-daughter. I knew that you knew . . . all that gossip. Though you could have known nothing about it but the gossip. Put the portrait down, my boy, that was a poor, mad girl and nothing more.”
“Really mad?”
“Or imbecile; I think she was mad though. She had a child by Prince Sergay. It came about through madness not through love; it was one of Prince Sergay’s most scoundrelly actions. The child is here now in the next room, and I’ve long wanted to show it to you. Prince Sergay has never dared come here to look at the child; that was the compact I made with him abroad. I took the child to bring up with your mother’s permission. With your mother’s permission I meant at the time to marry that unhappy creature . . .”
“Could such permission have been possible?” I protested warmly.
“Oh yes, she allowed it: jealousy could only have been felt of a woman, and that was not a woman.”
“Not a woman to anyone but mother! I shall never in my life believe that mother was not jealous!” I cried.
“And you’re right. I guessed it was so when everything was over, that is when she had given her permission. But enough of that. It all came to nothing through Lidya’s death, and perhaps it wouldn’t have come off if she had lived, and even now I don’t let mother come to see the child. It was only an episode. My dear boy, I’ve been looking forward to having you here for ever so long. I’ve been dreaming of how we should get to know each other here. Do you know how long?— for the last two years.”
He looked at me sincerely and truthfully, and with a warmth of heart in which there was no reserve. I gripped his hand:
“Why have you put it off, why did you not invite me long ago? If only you knew all that has been . . . which would not have been if only you had sent for me earlier! . . .”
At that instant the samovar was brought in, and Darya Onisimovna suddenly brought in the baby asleep.
“Look at it,” said Versilov; “I am fond of it, and I told them to bring it in now that you might look at it. Well, take it away again, Darya Onisimovna. Sit down to the samovar. I shall imagine that we have always lived together like this, and that we’ve been meeting every evening with no parting before us. Let me look at you: there, sit like this, that I can see your face. How I love your face. How I used to imagine your face when I was expecting you from Moscow. You ask why I did not send for you long ago? Wait a little, perhaps you will understand that now.”
“Can it be that it’s only that old man’s death that has set your tongue free? That’s strange . . .”
But though I said that, I looked at him with love. We talked like two friends in the highest and fullest sense of the word. He had asked me to come here to make something clear to me, to tell me something, to justify himself; and yet everything was explained and justified before a word was said. Whatever I might hear from him now, the result was already attained, and we both knew that and were happy, and looked at each other knowing it.
“It’s not the death of that old man,” he answered: “it’s not his death alone, there is something else too, which has happened at the same time. . . . God bless this moment and our future for a long time to come! Let us talk, my dear boy. I keep wandering from the point and letting myself be drawn off. I want to speak about one thing, but I launch into a thousand side issues. It’s always like that when the heart is full. . . . But let us talk; the time has come and I’ve been in love with you, boy, for ever so long . . .”
He sank back in the armchair and looked at me once more.
“How strange it is to hear that, how strange it is,” I repeated in an ecstasy of delight. And then I remember there suddenly came into his face that habitual line, as it were, of sadness and mockery together, which I knew so well. He controlled himself and with a certain stiffness began.
2
“You see, Arkady, if I had asked you to come earlier what should I have said to you? That question is my whole answer.”
“You mean that now you are mother’s husband, and my father, while then. . . . You did not know what to say to me before about the social position? Is that it?”
“Not only about that, dear boy. I should not have known what to say to you: there was so much I should have had to be silent about. Much that was absurd, indeed, and humiliating, because it was like a mountebank performance — yes, a regular show at a fair. Come, how could we have understood each other before, when I’ve only understood myself to-day at five o’clock this afternoon, just two hours before Makar Ivanovitch’s death? You look at me with unpleasant perplexity. Don’t be uneasy: I will explain the facts, but what I have just said is absolutely true; my whole life has been lost in mazes and perplexity, and suddenly they are all solved on such a day, at five o’clock this afternoon! It’s quite mortifying, isn’t it? A little while ago I should really have felt mortified.”
I was listening indeed with painful wonder; that old expression of Versilov’s, which I should have liked not to meet that evening after what had been said, was strongly marked. Suddenly I exclaimed:
“My God! You’ve received something from her . . . at five o’clock this afternoon?”
He looked at me intently, and was evidently struck at my exclamation: and, perhaps, at my expression: “from her.”
“You shall know all about it,” he said, with a dreamy smile, “and, of course, I shall not conceal from you anything you ought to know; for that’s what I brought you here for; but let us put that off for a time. You see, my dear boy, I knew long ago that there are children who brood from their earliest years over their family through being humiliated by the unseemliness of their surroundings and of their parents’ lives. I noticed these brooding natures while I was still at school, and I concluded then that it all came from their being prematurely envious. Though I was myself a brooding child, yet . . . excuse me, my dear, I’m wonderfully absent-minded. I only meant to say that almost all this time I have been continually uneasy about you. I always imagined you one of those little creatures doomed to solitude, though conscious of being gifted. Like you, I was never fond of my schoolfellows. It is sad for those natures who are flung back on their own resources and dreams, especially when they have a passionate, premature and almost vindictive longing for ‘seemliness’— yes, ‘vindictive.’ But enough, dear boy, I’m wandering from the point. Before I had begun to love you, I was picturing you and your solitary wild dreams. . . . But enough; I’ve actually forgotten what I had begun to speak about. But all this had to be said, however. But what could I have said to you before? Now I see your eyes looking at me, and I feel it’s my SON looking at me. Why, even yesterday I could not have believed that I should ever be sitting and talking to my boy as I am to-day.”
He certainly did seem unable to concentrate his mind, and at the same time he seemed, as it were, softened.
“I have no need to dream and brood now; it’s enough for me, now, that I have you! I will follow you!” I said, dedicating myself to him with my whole heart.
“Follow me? But my wanderings are just over, they have ended to-day: you are too late, my dear boy. To-day is the end of the last act, and the curtain has gone down. This last act has dragged on long. It began very long ago — the last time I rushed off abroad. I threw up everything then, and you must know, my dear, I broke off all relations for good with your mother, and told her I was doing so myself. That you ought to know. I told her then I was going away for ever; that she would never see me again. What was worst of all, I even forgot to leave her any money. I did not think of you either, not for one minute. I went away meaning to remain in Europe and never to return home, my dear. I emigrated.”
“To Herzen? To take part in the revolutionary propaganda abroad? Probably all your life you have been taking part in political conspiracies?” I cried, unable to restrain myself.
“No, my dear, I’ve never taken part in any conspiracy. But how your eyes sparkle; I like your exclamations, my dear. No, I simply went away then from a sudden attack of melancholy. It was the typical melancholy of the Russian nobleman, I really don’t know how to describe it better. The melancholy of our upper class, and nothing else.”
“Of the serf-owner . . . the emancipation of the serfs,” I was beginning to mutter, breathless.
“Serf-owner? You think I was grieving for the loss of it? That I could not endure the emancipation of the serfs. Oh no, my boy; why, we were all for the emancipation. I emigrated with no resentful feeling. I had only just been a mediator, and exerted myself to the utmost, I exerted myself disinterestedly, and I did not even go away because I got very little for my liberalism. We none of us got anything in those days, that is to say again, not those that were like me. I went away more in pride than in penitence, and, believe me, I was far from imagining that the time had come for me to end my life as a modest shoemaker. Je suis gentilhomme avant tout et je mourrai gentilhomme! Yet all the same I was sad. There are, perhaps, a thousand of my sort in Russia, no more perhaps
