Asbein Part 16

Why does the little brook sob so loudly? Can it not be silent a moment?

Natalie's whole being is now only a strained, longing listening. Why does her heart beat so loudly? Why does her strong imagination charm up things in the stillness which do not exist? Or--no--no; she hears a sigh, a step, slow, slow! Who can that be? No man walks so slowly who after long, oh, how long absence, returns to wife and child! It is a messenger of misfortune, who delays to announce some ill news to her.

Then, from out the shadow, in the foggy moonlight, comes a broad-shouldered form.

"Boris!" calls Natalie, half to herself. She cannot go to meet him--she cannot. Trembling in her whole body, she stands there, in the carved Gothic portal, against the bright golden background of the lighted hall; stands there in her white dress, between the tall, pale lilies, like an angel before the door of a church, into which a wicked sinner would like to slip.

"Is it you, at last?" she breathes out.

"Yes; I am somewhat late. You know, with one's colleagues, one must offend no one; it is always so."

How rough his voice sounds! How fleetingly, how hastily he kisses her.

Is she dreaming?

"How are you; how are the children?" He steps in the hall, blinking uneasily in the light.

Is this really the man to whose coming she has so foolishly, so breathlessly looked forward? This irritable, heavy man with the tumbled clothes, the badly arranged hair, the fearfully altered face, with a new expression of G.o.d knows what! Her feet refuse her their service; she catches hold of a support, and sinks down in a chair.

"How pale you are, Natalie!" says he. "Are you ill?"

"No--no--only--I have waited for you since five o'clock. I--I thought you would never find the way back to us."

For an instant he hesitates; then he sinks at her feet, embraces her knees with both arms. He, who at parting had not shed a tear, now, at their meeting, sobs like a desperate one. What pretext, what falsehood can he utter? As if his colleagues could have withheld him if he had only really wished to come home!

"O Natalie! Natalie! Pardon me. We all fear to return to Heaven when we have accustomed ourselves to Earth. Natalie! be good to me; never let me leave you again."

He had plunged a dagger in her heart, but her whole tenderness is awakened.

She bends over him, strokes his rough hair with her tender, white hand.

"My poor genius!" she whispers gently. "My poor, dear genius!"

"Papa!" calls a silvery voice, joyfully. "Pa--pa!" he repeats, hesitatingly, frightened. Kolia has run up.

If he lives to be a hundred years old he will never forget how he saw his father sobbing at his mother's feet after the first long separation.

Then he did not understand, but later he understood--understood only too well.

How sad life is: how sad!

It was the morning after his arrival. Lensky stood at the window of his room, and looked down in the quiet garden. The little brook which tumbled down the hill at the side of the Hermitage with exaggerated violence, quite like a little waterfall, in front of the house from whence Lensky looked down on it, plashed quite calmly, earnestly, and dreamily along its here scarcely susceptibly descending bed, and bore away on its dark waves only as much of the sunshine as could reach it between the lindens. A cool breeze rose from the water, all around was dark green, dewy and luxuriant--luxuriant without the slightest indication of decay, without the least trace of approaching withering.

And what an abundance of roses stood out in gay, blooming colors against the sober, dark-green background! Great Marchal Niel roses, with heavy, earthward-bent heads, dark-red Jacqueminot, fiery Baroness Rothschild, delicate pink, capriciously crumpled La France. The Gloire de Dijon roses climbed quite in the window of his room in their race with the quite small, pert little running roses.

Light steps crunched the gravel, large and small steps. Natalie stepped out from the shady lindens in front of the house. She held her little daughter in her arms. Kolia walked near her, and with the important earnestness of six years carried a basketful of strawberries, which he had evidently just helped his mother pick. One could think of nothing more charming than the young woman in her white morning-dress, with its lilac ribbons, and the tiny, rosy being in her arms. The little thing was bareheaded, and her little arms and feet were also bare. She quivered and danced with animation. There she discovered a b.u.t.terfly, cried out gayly, and clapped her little hands.

"Oh, are you ready so soon?" called Natalie, when she saw her husband at the window. "Come to breakfast; I have had the table laid in the garden."

He hurried down. The breakfast-table stood in a shady spot, over which the blooming lindens reached their branches.

Oh, what a table! How very pretty the Rouen service made it! a service whose old-fashioned gayness combined harmoniously the most incongruous colors, set out on the dazzling white damask table-cloth. How inviting and appetizing everything was! These curiously shaped dishes, with their fragrant burden of still warm golden cakes and rolls of pale yellow b.u.t.ter between glittering pieces of ice, and ham covered with transparent aspic! Around the greenish twilight, fragrant, cool, only here and there the reddish glimmer of a sunbeam curiously wandered into the shadow, and now held captive by the lindens.

When she saw her father coming, little Mascha became quite unruly, almost danced out of her mother's arms, and, without resisting, let herself be taken, hugged, and kissed by him. While he held her in his arms, Kolia seized her little bare legs, and pressed his mouth to her tiny pink feet.

"She is charming, a beauty! Is that really my daughter, can something so wonderfully pretty have such an ugly man for father?" he said from time to time, laughingly, tenderly, while he kissed her bare shoulders, and especially the dimple in her neck, again and again.

"She looks very like you, your pretty daughter," jested Natalie. "More than the boy! It vexes him if I say that, and I also would prefer it to be the other way."

Lensky laughed somewhat constrainedly. The nurse came up to get baby.

"Just a moment," said Lensky, swinging the little thing high in the air, to its great delight, "so--and one more kiss on the eyes, the neck, on these dear, sweet little hands, so----"

The nurse already had the little thing in her arms, when the sweet little rogue looked round at her father.

Meanwhile, Natalie busied herself with the samovar, which stood on a small stand near the breakfast table. No servant was near, Kolia helped mamma serve tea, and waited with a sober expression until his mother had confided the cup for his father to him. Carefully, as if he held the Holy Grail in his hands, he carried it over to Lensky. Natalie sat down opposite her husband, and b.u.t.tered him a piece of bread.

He looked at her with a peculiarly sad, touched look. "You are all much too good to me," he murmured; then he added, tenderly: "Either I had really forgotten during my absence how beautiful you are, or you have really gained in charm."

How awkwardly that came out! how stumblingly! He had wished to say something loving to her, but he had not succeeded well. He felt it himself. A petulant smile shone in her sad eyes at his well, or much rather, badly put little speech. Some reply trembled on her lips, then she suddenly closed her lovely mouth, as if she feared her husband would take what she wished to say somewhat ill, and busied herself in fastening a napkin round Kolia's neck.

After a while Lensky began anew: "How charming my home is. Ah, Natalie, how have I renounced it all for so long! How could I exist so long without you!"

"If you only are really pleased over your return we will make no further remarks about your absence," said Natalie very lovingly, and then hesitated with embarra.s.sment and blushed to the roots of her hair.

Breakfast took its course. Here and there, by turns, Natalie and Lensky made a remark, but the conversation did not become fluent. A strange irritation vibrated in every nerve of the virtuoso. Formerly there had been no end of talking between them, and now-- What was she thinking of, to speak about the weather as if he were any guest to whom one feels obliged to be polite, and to whom one does not know what to say, because no common interest unites him with us?

He remembered the words which she had spoken in the Hotel Windsor at that time before the conclusion of his contract with Morinsky: "As a stranger you will return to us, and a stranger you will remain among us from that time."

Was she right? Foolishness! She had only become a little too distinguished among the wearisome crowd with whom she had pa.s.sed the winter. The forced mood which reigned between them was her fault, not his.

"You are so stiff and formal, Natalie," he remarked at last, vexedly, quite irrelevantly. "You have again accustomed yourself to such fearfully aristocratic manners."

"How can you say anything so foolish?" she answered him, laughing constrainedly.

"Oh, it is not laughable to me," he growled, and suddenly, without any reason, only to air his inward uneasiness, he burst out: "It is painful to me, I cannot endure it--cannot bear it." He pushed his cup away with an involuntary motion.

"But, Boris!" Natalie admonished him. "My poor, unaccountable, dear genius!" She looked at him so roguishly therewith that his anger was scattered to the four winds.

He stretched out both his hands to her across the table; she took them.

He bent somewhat forward, wished to draw her hands to his lips, when a light step was heard on the gravel. Natalie blushed, and with a quick, almost frightened movement, drew them away from him. He scowled angrily. Before whom was she embarra.s.sed then?

A young woman in a very elegant _neglig_ costume, profusely trimmed with Valenciennes lace, without hat, and a yellow parasol in her hand, stepped up to the breakfast table. She resembled Natalie, although she was smaller, stouter, and the features of her pretty face were coa.r.s.er.

Lensky recognized in her his wife's sister, Princess Jeliagin, a person whom he detested from the bottom of his heart, even if he had until now only known her slightly, before his marriage with Natalie. Kind friends had told him that she had described his alliance with her sister as _une chose absurde_. Wife of a rich, quite incompetent diplomat, she had during her ten years' life in foreign countries made all the most absurd aristocratic prejudices her own, and was always addressed as "Princess," although her husband had no t.i.tle. With all these Western-Europe grimaces she combined something of her Russian, half Asiatic exaggeration, by which she became still more grotesque and tactless. In spite of her boasted exclusiveness she had never quite learned to understand the shades of foreign society, and made frequent mistakes in her choice of acquaintances.

Besides this, with all her weaknesses and affectations, she was good natured to silliness, and hospitable to prodigality.

"So early in the morning, Barbe what a surprise!" Natalie called to her, while she tried not to let it be perceived how inopportune her sister's visit was to her just at that moment. "That is charming, I must introduce my husband to you."

"We know each other already, at least I hope that Boris Nikolaivitch remembers me--once in St. Petersburg, at the Olins. In any case, I am very happy to renew the acquaintance," remarked the Jeliagin, and at once reached him her fat little hand, in a buckskin garden glove. Her voice was guttural and rough, her whole face, as Lensky could now see plainly, was painted.