It was therefore natural that the Count should feel disturbed at what he had done, in spite of his sincere and honourable wish to abide by his proposal and to make Vjera his wife. He felt that in returning to his own position in the world he owed it in a measure to himself to wed with a maiden of whom he could at least say that she came of honest people.

Always centred in his own alternating hopes and fears, and conscious of little in the lives of others, it seemed to him that a great difficulty had suddenly revealed itself to his apprehensions. At the same time, by a self-contradiction familiar to such natures as his, he felt himself more and more strongly drawn to the girl, and more and more strictly bound in honour to marry her. As he thought of this, his habitual contempt of the world and its opinion returned. What had the world done for him? And if he had felt no obligation to consult it in his poverty, why need he bend to any such slavery in the coming days of his splendour? He stopped suddenly at the corner of the street in which the Polish girl lived. She lodged, with a little sister who was still too young to work, in a room she hired of a respectable Bohemian shoemaker. The latter's wife was of the sour-good kind, whose chief talent lies in giving their kind actions a hard-hearted appearance.

"Vjera," said the Count, earnestly, "I have been talking a great deal about myself. You must forgive me, for the news I have received is so very important and makes such a sudden difference in my prospects. But you have not given me the answer I want to my question. Will you be my wife, Vjera, and come with me out of this wretched existence to share my happy life and to make it happier? Will you?"

His tone was so sincere and loving that it produced a little storm of evanescent happiness in the girl's heart, and the tears started to her eyes and stained her sallow, waxen cheeks.

"Ah, if it could only be true!" she exclaimed in a voice more than half full of hope, as she quickly brushed away the drops.

"But it is true, indeed it is," answered the Count. "Oh, Vjera, do you think I would deceive you? Do you think I could tell you a story in which there is no truth whatever? Do not think that of me, Vjera."

The tears broke out afresh, but from a different source. For some seconds she could not speak.

"Why do you cry so bitterly?" he asked, not understanding at all what was pa.s.sing. "I swear to you it is all true--"

"It is not that--it is not that," cried Vjera. "I know--I know that you believe it--and I love you so very much--"

"But then, I do not understand," said the Count in a low voice that expressed his pitiful perplexity. "How can I not believe it, when it is all in the letters? And why should you not believe it, too? Besides, Vjera dear, it will all be quite clear to-morrow. Of course--well, I can understand that having known me poor so long, it must seem strange to you to think of me as very rich. But I shall not be another man, for that. I shall always be the same for you, Vjera, always the same."

"Yes, always the same," sighed the girl under her breath.

"Yes, and so, if you love me to-day, you will love me just as well to-morrow--to-morrow, the great day for me. What day will it be? Let me see--to-morrow is Wednesday."

"Wednesday, yes," repeated Vjera. "If only there were no to-morrow--" She checked herself. "I mean," she added, quickly, "if only it could be Thursday, without any day between."

"You are a strange girl, Vjera. I do not know what you are thinking of to-day. But to-morrow you will see. I think they will come for me in the morning. You shall see, you shall see."

Vjera began to move onward and the Count walked by her side, wondering at her manner and tormenting his brain in the vain effort to understand it.

In front of her door he held out his hand.

"Promise me one thing," he said, as she laid her fingers in his and looked up at him. Her eyes were still full of tears.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Promise that you will be my wife, when you are convinced that all this good fortune is real. You do not believe in it, though I cannot tell why.

I only ask that when you are obliged to believe in it, you will do as I ask."

Vjera hesitated, and as she stood still the hand he held trembled nervously.

"I promise," she said, at last, as though with a great effort. Then, all at once, she covered her eyes and leaned against the door-post. He laid his hand caressingly upon her shoulder.

"Is it so hard to say?" he asked, tenderly.

"Oh, but if it should ever be indeed true!" she moaned. "If it should--if it should!"

"What then? Shall we not be happy together? Will it not be even pleasant to remember these wretched years?"

"But if it should turn out so--oh, how can I ever be a fitting wife for you, how can I learn all that a great lady must think, and do, and say? I shall be unworthy of you--of your new friends, of your new world--but then, it cannot really happen. No--do not speak of it any more, it hurts me too much--good-night, good-night! Let us sleep and forget, and go back to our work in the morning, as though nothing had happened--in the morning, to-morrow. Will you? Then good-night."

"There will be no work to-morrow," he said, returning to his argument. But she broke away and fled from him and disappeared in the dark and narrow staircase. As he stood, he could hear her light tread on the creaking wood of the steps, fainter and fainter in the distance. Then he caught the feeble tinkle of a little bell, the opening and shutting of a door, and he was alone in the gloom of the evening.

For some minutes he stood still, as though listening for some faint echo from the direction in which Vjera had disappeared, then he slowly and thoughtfully walked away. He had forgotten to eat at dinner-time, and now he forgot that the hour of the second meal had come round. He walked on, not knowing and not caring whither he went, absorbed in the contemplation of the bright pictures which framed themselves in his brain, troubled only by his ever-recurring wonder at Vjera's behaviour.

Unconsciously, and from sheer force of habit, he threaded the streets in the direction of the tobacconist's shop where so much of his time was spent. If it be not true that the ghosts of the dead haunt places familiar to them in life, yet the superst.i.tion is founded upon the instincts of human nature. Men begin to haunt certain spots unconsciously while they are alive, especially those which they are obliged to visit every day and in which they are accustomed to sit, idle or at work, during the greater part of the week. The artist, when he wishes to be completely at rest, re-enters the studio he left but an hour earlier; the sailor hangs about the port when he is ash.o.r.e, the shopman cannot resist the temptation to spend an hour among his wares on Sunday, the farmer is irresistibly drawn to the field to while away the time on holidays between dinner and supper.

We all of us see more and understand better what we see, in those surroundings most familiar to us, and it is a general law that the average intelligence likes the best that which it understands with the least effort. The mechanical part of us, too, when free from any direct and especial impulse of the mind, does unknowingly what it has been in the habit of doing. Two-thirds of all the physical diseases in the world are caused by the disturbance of the mental habits and are vastly aggravated by the direction of the thoughts to the part afflicted. Idiots and madmen are often phenomenally healthy people, because there is in their case no unnatural effort of the mind to control and manage the body. The Count having bestowed no thought upon the direction of his walk, mechanically turned towards the scene of his daily labour.

Considering that he believed himself to have abandoned for ever the irksome employment of rolling tobacco in a piece of parchment in order to slip it into a piece of paper, it might have been supposed that he would be glad to look at anything rather than the gla.s.s door of the shop in which he had repeated that operation so many hundreds of thousands of times; or, at least, it might have been expected that on realising where he was he would be satisfied with a glance of recognition and would turn away.

But the Count's fate had ordained otherwise. When he reached the shop the lights were burning brightly in the show window and within. Through the gla.s.s door he could see that Fischelowitz was comfortably installed in a chair behind the counter, contentedly smoking one of his own best cigarettes, and smiling happily to himself through the fragrant cloud. If the tobacconist's wife had been present, the Count would have gone away without entering, for he did not like her, and had reason to suspect that she hated him, which was indeed the case. But Akulina was nowhere to be seen, the shop looked bright and cheerful, the Count was tired, he pushed the door and entered. Fischelowitz turned his head without modifying his smile, and seeing who his visitor was nodded familiarly. The Count raised his hat a little from his head and immediately replaced it.

"Good-evening, Herr Fischelowitz," he said, speaking, as usual, in German.

"Good-evening, Count," answered the tobacconist, cheerfully. "Sit down, and light a cigarette. What is the news?"

"Great news with me, for to-morrow," said the other, bending his head as he stooped over the nickel-plated lamp on the counter, in which a tiny flame burned for the convenience of customers. "To-morrow, at this time, I shall be on my way to Petersburg."

"Well, I hope so, for your sake," was the good-humoured reply. "But I am afraid it will always be to-morrow, Herr Graf."

The Count shook his head after staring for a few seconds at his employer, and then smoked quietly, as though he attached no weight to the remark.

Fischelowitz looked curiously at him, and during a brief moment the smile faded from his face.

"You have not been long at supper," he remarked, after a pause. The observation was suggested by the condition of his own appet.i.te.

"Supper?" repeated the Count, rather vaguely. "I believe I had forgotten all about it. I will go presently."

"The Count is reserving himself for to-morrow," said an ironical voice in the background. Akulina entered the shop from the workroom, a guttering candle in a battered candlestick in one hand, and a number of gaily coloured pasteboard boxes tucked under the other arm. "What is the use of eating to-day when there will be so many good things to-morrow?"

Neither Fischelowitz nor the Count vouchsafed any answer to this thrust.

For the second time, since the Count had entered, however, the tobacconist wore an expression approaching to gravity. The Count himself kept his composure admirably, only glancing coldly at Akulina, and then looking at his cigarette. Akulina is a broad, fat woman, with a flattened Tartar face, small eyes, good but short teeth, full lips and a dark complexion.

She reminds one of an over-fed tabby cat, of doubtful temper, and her voice seems to reach utterance after traversing some thick, soft medium, which lends it an odd sort of guttural richness. She moves quietly but heavily and has an Asiatic second sight in the matter of finance. In matters of thrift and foresight her husband places implicit confidence in her judgment. In matters of generosity and kindness implying the use of money, he never consults her.

"It is amazing to see how much people will believe," she said, putting out her candle and snuffing it with her thumb and forefinger. Then she began to arrange the boxes she had brought, setting them in order upon the shelves. Still neither of the men answered her. But she was not the woman to be reduced to silence by silence.

"I am always telling you that it is all rubbish," she continued, turning a broad expanse of alpaca-covered back upon her audience. "I am always telling you that you are no more a count than Fischelowitz is a grand duke, that the whole thing is a foolish imagination which you have stuck into your head, as one sticks tobacco into a paper sh.e.l.l. And it ought to be burned out of your head, or starved out, or knocked out, or something, for if it stays there it will addle your brains altogether. Why cannot you see that you are in the world just like other people, and give up all these ridiculous dreams and all this chatter about counts and princes and such like people, of whom you never spoke to one in your life, for all you may say?"

The Count glanced at the back of Akulina's head, which was decently covered by a flattened twist of very shining black hair, and then he looked at Fischelowitz as though to inquire whether the latter would suffer a gentleman to be thus insulted in his presence and on his premises. Fischelowitz seemed embarra.s.sed, and coloured a little.

"You might choose your language a little more carefully, wife," he observed in a rather timid tone.

"And you might choose your friends with a better view to your own interests," she answered without hesitation. "If you allow this sort of thing to go on, and four children growing up, and you expecting to open another shop this summer--why, you had better turn count yourself," she concluded, triumphantly, and with that nice logical perception peculiar to her kind.

"If you mean to say that the Count's valuable help has not been to our advantage--" began Fischelowitz, making a desperate effort to give a more pleasant look to things.

"Oh, I know that," laughed Akulina, scornfully. "I know that the Count, as you call him, can make his two thousand a day as well as any one. I am not blind. And I know you, and I know that it is a sort of foolish pleasure to you to employ a count in the work and to pay your money to a count, though he does not earn it any better than any one else, nor any worse, to be just. And I know the Count, and I know his friends who borrow fifty marks of you and pay you back in stuffed dolls with tunes in them. I know you, Christian Gregorovitch"--at the thought of the lost money Akulina broke at last into her native language and gave the reins to her fury in good Russian--"yes, I know you, and him, and his friends and your friends, and I see the good yellow money flying out of the window like a flight of canary birds when the cage is opened, and I see you grinning like Player-Ape over the vile Vienna puppet, and winding up its abominable music as though you were turning the key upon your money in the safe instead of listening to the tune of its departure. And then because Akulina has the courage to tell you the truth, and to tell you that your fine Count is no count, and that his friends get from you ten times the money he earns, then you turn on me like a bear, ready to bite off my head, and you tell me to choose my language! Is there no shame in you, Christian Gregorovitch, or is there also no understanding? Am I the mother of your four children or not? I would like to ask. I suppose you cannot deny that, whatever else you deny which is true, and you tell me to choose my language! _Da_, I will choose my language, in truth! _Da_, I will choose out such a swarm of words as ought to sting your ears like hornets, if you had not such a leathery skin and such a soft brain inside it. But why should I? It is thrown away. There is no shame in you. You see nothing, you care for nothing, you hear no reason, you feel no argument. I will go home and make soup. I am better there than in the shop. Oh yes! it is always that. Akulina can make good things to eat, and good tea and good punch to drink, and Akulina is the Archangel Michael in the kitchen. But if Akulina says to you, 'Save a penny here, do not lend more than you have there,' Akulina is a fool and must be told to choose her language, lest it be too indelicate for the dandified ears of the high-born gentleman! I should not wonder if, by choosing her language carefully enough, Akulina ended by making the high-born gentleman understand something after all.

His perception cannot possibly be so dull as yours, Christian Gregorovitch, my little husband."

Akulina paused for breath after her tremendous invective, which, indeed, was only intended by her for the preface of the real discourse, so fertile was her imagination and so thoroughly roused was her eloquence by the sense of injury received. While she was speaking, Fischelowitz, whose terror of his larger half was only relative, had calmly risen and had wound up the "Wiener Gigerl" to the extreme of the doll's powers, placing it on the counter before him and sitting down before it in antic.i.p.ation of the amus.e.m.e.nt he expected to derive from its performance. In the short silence which ensued while Akulina was resting her lungs for a second and more deadly effort, the wretched little musical box made itself heard, clicking and scratching and grinding out a miserable little polka. At the sound, the sunny smile returned to the tobacconist's face. He knew that no earthly eloquence, no scathing wit, no brutal reply could possibly exasperate his wife as this must. He resented everything she had said, and in his vulgar way he was ashamed that she should have said it before the Count, and now he was glad that by the mere turning of a key he could answer her storm of words in a way to drive her to fury, while at the same time showing his own indifference. As for the Count himself, he had moved nearer to the door and was looking quietly out into the irregularly lighted street, smoking as though he had not heard a word of what had been said. As he stood, it was impossible for either of the others to see his face, and he betrayed no agitation by movement or gesture.

Akulina turned pale to the lips, as her husband had antic.i.p.ated. It is probable that the most tragic event conceivable in her existence could not have affected her more powerfully than the tw.a.n.g of the musical box and the twisting and turning of the insolent little wooden head. She came round to the front of the counter with gleaming eyes and clenched fists.