Mrs. Epanchin was just wondering whether she would not forbid the performance after all, when, at the very moment that Aglaya commenced her declamation, two new guests, both talking loudly, entered from the street. The new arrivals were General Epanchin and a young man.
“Just so, prince, just so. How well you bring out that fact! Because your own heart is good!” cried the ecstatic old gentleman, and, strangely enough, real tears glistened in his eyes. “Yes, prince, it was a wonderful spectacle. And, do you know, I all but went off to Paris, and should assuredly have shared his solitary exile with him; but, alas, our destinies were otherwise ordered! We parted, he to his island, where I am sure he thought of the weeping child who had embraced him so affectionately at parting in Moscow; and I was sent off to the cadet corps, where I found nothing but roughness and harsh discipline. Alas, my happy days were done!”
“It was you,” he murmured, almost in a whisper, but with absolute conviction. “Yes, it was you who came to my room and sat silently on a chair at my window for a whole hour--more! It was between one and two at night; you rose and went out at about three. It was you, you! Why you should have frightened me so, why you should have wished to torment me like that, I cannot tell--but you it was.”
“You have made a mistake, general,” said he. “The name on the door is Koulakoff, and you were going to see General Sokolovitch.”
“I believe I have just written dreadful nonsense; but there’s no time for correcting, as I said before. Besides that, I have made myself a promise not to alter a single word of what I write in this paper, even though I find that I am contradicting myself every five lines. I wish to verify the working of the natural logic of my ideas tomorrow during the reading--whether I am capable of detecting logical errors, and whether all that I have meditated over during the last six months be true, or nothing but delirium.
Nastasia Philipovna was waiting for them in the first room they went into. She was dressed very simply, in black.
The note was written and folded anyhow, evidently in a great hurry, and probably just before Aglaya had come down to the verandah.
These were the tears of joy and peace and reconciliation. Aglaya was kissing her mother’s lips and cheeks and hands; they were hugging each other in the most ardent way.
In response to this challenge all the others chimed in and re-echoed mamma’s sentiments.
“A little while ago a very amusing idea struck me. What if I were now to commit some terrible crime--murder ten fellow-creatures, for instance, or anything else that is thought most shocking and dreadful in this world--what a dilemma my judges would be in, with a criminal who only has a fortnight to live in any case, now that the rack and other forms of torture are abolished! Why, I should die comfortably in their own hospital--in a warm, clean room, with an attentive doctor--probably much more comfortably than I should at home.
| “We are not afraid of your friends, prince,” remarked Lebedeff’s nephew, “for we are within our rights.” |
The prince began to be a little incredulous.
“‘Nurse, where is your tomb?’
“Well, I don’t mind telling you the truth--you only! Because you see through a man somehow. Words and actions, truth and falsehood, are all jumbled up together in me, and yet I am perfectly sincere. I feel the deepest repentance, believe it or not, as you choose; but words and lies come out in the infernal craving to get the better of other people. It is always there--the notion of cheating people, and of using my repentant tears to my own advantage! I assure you this is the truth, prince! I would not tell any other man for the world! He would laugh and jeer at me--but you, you judge a man humanely.”
| “He turns people out of a house that isn’t his own,” muttered Rogojin. |
“In the morning we had parted not the best of friends; I remember he looked at me with disagreeable sarcasm once or twice; and this same look I observed in his eyes now--which was the cause of the annoyance I felt.
“I was glad for the poor fellow, and went home. But an idea got hold of me somehow. I don’t know how. It was nearly two in the morning. I rang the bell and ordered the coachman to be waked up and sent to me. He came. I gave him a tip of fifteen roubles, and told him to get the carriage ready at once. In half an hour it was at the door. I got in and off we went.
“What--you’re a relation then, are you?” asked the servant, so bewildered that he began to feel quite alarmed.
| “Tell us about the execution,” put in Adelaida. |
“Your love is mingled with hatred, and therefore, when your love passes, there will be the greater misery,” said the prince. “I tell you this, Parfen--”
Hippolyte, too, was a source of some distraction to the prince at this time; he would send for him at any and every hour of the day. They lived,--Hippolyte and his mother and the children,--in a small house not far off, and the little ones were happy, if only because they were able to escape from the invalid into the garden. The prince had enough to do in keeping the peace between the irritable Hippolyte and his mother, and eventually the former became so malicious and sarcastic on the subject of the approaching wedding, that Muishkin took offence at last, and refused to continue his visits.
This was odd of Lizabetha Prokofievna and her daughters. They had themselves decided that it would be better if the prince did not talk all the evening. Yet seeing him sitting silent and alone, but perfectly happy, they had been on the point of exerting themselves to draw him into one of the groups of talkers around the room. Now that he was in the midst of a talk they became more than ever anxious and perturbed.
| “Reject her! I should think not!” said the general with annoyance, and apparently not in the least anxious to conceal it. “Why, my dear fellow, it’s not a question of your rejecting her, it is whether you are prepared to receive her consent joyfully, and with proper satisfaction. How are things going on at home?” |
“It was Gogol, in Dead Souls, father,” cried Colia, glancing at him in some alarm.
Lebedeff made an impatient movement.
“Listen, prince,” said Gania, as though an idea had just struck him, “I wish to ask you a great favour, and yet I really don’t know--”
“Yes, of course,” said Ferdishenko. “C’est du nouveau.”
“I never thought of such a thing for a moment,” said the prince, with disgust.
“I daren’t say, one way or the other; all this is very strange--but--”
| “Nastasia Philipovna?” said the clerk, as though trying to think out something. |
| “I did not come to marry at all,” replied the prince. |
Oh, he could not then speak these words, or express all he felt! He had been tormented dumbly; but now it appeared to him that he must have said these very words--even then--and that Hippolyte must have taken his picture of the little fly from his tears and words of that time.
IV.
With a few exceptions, the worthy couple had lived through their long union very happily. While still young the wife had been able to make important friends among the aristocracy, partly by virtue of her family descent, and partly by her own exertions; while, in after life, thanks to their wealth and to the position of her husband in the service, she took her place among the higher circles as by right.
“Yes, that same one.”
“Oh yes, and in three days you’ll come and invite me yourself. Aren’t you ashamed now? These are your best feelings; you are only tormenting yourself.”
Some of her guests suspected that she must be ill; but concluded at last that she was expecting something, for she continued to look at her watch impatiently and unceasingly; she was most absent and strange.
| “I am going away tomorrow, as you bade me--I won’t write--so that this is the last time I shall see you, the last time! This is really the _last time!_” |
“Of course, of course! And about your fits?”
“That is _not_ true,” said the prince, in an equally low voice.
“Why, he must pay toll for his entrance,” explained the latter.
“I will not deceive you. ‘Reality’ got me so entrapped in its meshes now and again during the past six months, that I forgot my ‘sentence’ (or perhaps I did not wish to think of it), and actually busied myself with affairs.
“Ah! I thought perhaps Ferdishenko had taken it.”
“Oh, you shall tell us about the Basle picture another time; now we must have all about the execution,” said Adelaida. “Tell us about that face as it appeared to your imagination--how should it be drawn?--just the face alone, do you mean?”
“Yes, by-the-by,” whispered the prince, hurriedly and excitedly as before, as though he had just seized hold of an idea and was afraid of losing it again. “I--I wanted those cards! They say you played cards with her?”