At first, really, in the first few days after her burial, he had thought the fever had left his veins. He no longer felt it. Miserable and weary, at that time, he had shut himself up for hours, for days in her room, in the room in which all had been left as it was before she had been carried out, in which all looked as if she must come back. And when he had at length resolved to leave Rome, he had pa.s.sed a few months quietly and soberly with his children. He had even tried to work again, to compose--but he had accomplished nothing. Then despair at his wasted genius had come over him, and with despair the fever. He could not bear quiet, he simply could not. He needed noise, incessant change, excitement and stunning.

He sent Mascha to relatives--Maschenka, his charming little daughter, whom he adored, and whom he now pushed out of his way with a violent haste, as if she were merely an inconvenient burden for him. And then-- then he took up life again exactly at the point where he had left it before Natalie died.

From city to city, from concert hall to concert hall, from hotel to hotel he rushed, always the same, restless, joyless, without peace, always idolized, raved over, only still madder in the waste of his life than formerly, because sadness was greater in him, and it needed more excitement to kill it.

Now all that was to some degree bearable, but how would it be in a couple of years? Involuntarily his glance wandered to a pile of papers which lay on the table in the centre of the room--thirty, forty copies of that number of _Figaro_ which contained the fable. He laughed at the people who had sent him this absurdity to flatter him.

"'I will lay a charm in your art which no one can resist,'" he murmured to himself. "Bah! how long could that yet last?" He did not deceive himself; things were going rapidly down with him, his violin playing, his health, all.

"The devil will no longer be able to use me," murmured he. "One will know nothing more of me; I am growing old!" he gasped out. Suddenly he seized his head and called: "But what does a man like me do when he is old?"

For the first time in his life he asked himself the question. "To grow old without the courage to calmly submit, to be like a languishing spendthrift who drinks repulsive sediment from emptied goblets."

How hateful, how horrible! Would it not be better to break with all, to devote himself to his children, to lead a prudent existence?

He laughed bitterly. A prudent existence--he, whom two hours of solitude brought almost to the boundaries of insanity! There could be no more talk of that; it was too late. To grow old! Vain spectre of fear! People like him never grow old--they die!

Yes, that was the end. To die, to leave nothing behind him, no name in art, no enduring work; to be forgotten, wiped out of the world. A little while longer, sunshine and air, and motion, color, and sound, and then all dark, a great black blur, nothing more--death. Yes, it was that. Perhaps it would come to-morrow, perhaps in a few years. Come it must; he also would not fight against it. But meanwhile--meanwhile he would live with every fibre, live with every drop of blood--live!

Then--around the window crept something like a sad, sighing, ghostly voice. His face took on a strained, listening, thirstily longing expression. It was like the sob of a tormented soul which has forgotten to take the way to heaven because a great love holds her back to earth--a great love and unrest at an unfulfilled task, an unlifted treasure.

Was it an over-excitement of his nerves of hearing, or the beginning of that mysticism to which, at a certain period of life, quite all great Russian minds fall victim? However this may be, he would have sworn that he heard her voice compa.s.sionately and tenderly. There, once more.

"Boris! Boris!"

He feels something strange, the calming of a loving presence. A pa.s.sionate, indescribable longing takes possession of him. He stretches out his arms--it is gone! He shakes as with frost, sweat stands upon his brow. He thought of the repellant coldness which had met his lips when he had raised the corpse from the lace-edged pillows of the coffin.

No; death took all, it lets nothing return. Weak-headed nervousness to believe in such a thing! There is nothing but life! And while the longing for the unattainable heavenly still consumes his heart, he murmurs hoa.r.s.ely: "Yes, to live, to live!"

VI.

To-day there is nothing left of Lensky's melancholy; at least for the present he has put it aside, has not had much time to devote to it.

Since nine o'clock in the morning he has been overwhelmed with visits.

At the moment there is no one with him but the gay violinist of yesterday, Monsieur Paul. As Lensky cannot remain unoccupied for a moment without being nervous, he has proposed to Monsieur Paul to play a game of piquet.

Just then Nikolai enters the room. He brings with him a cool, well-bred atmosphere, which disturbs the two musicians. All comfort is over for them. Monsieur Paul looks at his watch and declares that it is high time for him to go and have his hair cut. Father and son remain alone.

"So you show yourself at last, sluggard?" says Lensky, while he still mechanically shuffles the cards.

"I wished to present myself several times already," remarks Nikolai, "but I heard that you were engaged."

"That need not have prevented you," replies the virtuoso. "Your discretion has deprived you of great enjoyment, _per primo_, the praises sung of a young lady whose voice I really could not well judge, because she, as her companion told me, had been hoa.r.s.e for six months from unhappy love. I did not really learn what she wished to get from me--a stipend, an engagement at the opera in St. Petersburg, or that I should cure her of her unhappy love; but, apropos, I am really a little tired of playing the Brahmin who gives his body prey to vermin for penance. You can ring the bell. I will tell the waiter he shall admit no one else."

The waiter has appeared and disappeared again. Father and son can be a.s.sured not to be disturbed. They can now talk unrestrainedly together.

But the somewhat forced, humorous flow of speech of his father has ceased. Stronger than yesterday is apparent the mutual lack of confidence of the two, a lack of confidence which in the young Lensky betrays itself by a quite exaggerated deference; in the older by a grumbling roughness. He cannot understand this son. Not that anything about him displeases him; his eyes rest not without pride and satisfaction on the young giant with the slender, delicate hands, the fine, aristocratic face. The most exacting father would be content with this son. He has studied with distinction; he has never made debts; he is scarcely twenty-three years old, _attache_ to the Russian emba.s.sy in Paris, and a thoroughly good fellow. What more can Lensky wish, what does he miss in Nikolai? A little imprudent enthusiasm, hot-blooded frivolity, a little youthfulness--that he misses in him. Nikolai is old at twenty-three.

And then these perpetual well-bred manners. Lensky could never bear men of the world, and Nikolai is one; that enrages him.

"How did the Jeliagin welcome my little tomboy?" he asks his son at last.

"Very graciously," replies Nikolai.

"That pleases me."

Nikolai is silent.

After a while Lensky begins anew.

"Yes, yes, I am very glad that things went well with the little one. I was worried. No one can less easily bear loveless treatment than our kobold."

Nikolai looks straight in his father's eyes.

"Do you imagine that Aunt Barbara will treat her lovingly?" he asks, dryly.

"Well, you said--" says Lensky.

"I said that she received our Mascha graciously, _voila tout!_" says Nikolai. "Her manner to the child did not please me. As the Countess d'Olbreuse insisted upon pleading Mascha's cause, and as she is, as Aunt Barbara informed me later, in spite of her apparent eccentricities, very well accredited in the Faubourg St. Germain, the warmth with which she defended Mascha may have made some impression. In any case, aunt pleased herself with laughing at Mascha's exaltation.

She and her lovable daughter were about to go out, and it was arranged that I should accompany them, but I would have preferred to remain with Mascha to lecture her a little as she deserved for her over-haste."

Lensky frowned. "So you would have liked to scold the poor child! What a narrow-hearted philister you are; have copied in everything your distinguished uncle, the correct statesman, under whose protection you are making a career, he who tore us apart--your mother and me. Poor little Mascha! Poor little dove! But she was charming with her foolish, childish anxiety and her incredible innocence." Lensky struck his fist on the table. "I would have liked to box their ears, all of them, as they sat there, the scoundrels who dared to wink at her tale," called he.

"So should I, father, but still they did all wink," said Nikolai, dryly.

"The idiots!"

"Yes, indeed, idiots--but----"

"Well, what will you say?" asked Lensky, roughly.

"I will say that Mascha will still meet many idiots in life who will misunderstand her innocence, and that she may once meet a rascal who will misuse her innocence."

"Nonsense! nonsense!" murmurs Lensky. "You do not understand your sister. If she were frivolous, then she would need strict surveillance.

But our Mascha is not frivolous; she is given to exaggeration, tender, romantic. And, between ourselves, life is so common, so boundlessly common and dirty, that it seldom affords a temptation to a truly exalted nature. No, no; I have no fear for my pretty defiant one. I do not believe in the necessity of strict guarding."

"I think that young girls should be watched," said Nikolai, earnestly.

"Our Mascha has no more worldly knowledge than a six-year-old child.

She does not suspect that there is a danger in the world which she must avoid."

"But that is beautiful, wonderfully beautiful!" the virtuoso thunders at his son. "Would you wish it otherwise? Not I. No; I would not have our little gipsy differ by a hair from what she is."

"Nor I, on the whole," says Nikolai; "but under the existing sad circ.u.mstances----"

"What sad circ.u.mstances?" Lensky interrupts him. "Well, yes, that she has lost her mother is sad; I can never replace her to her. A mother cannot be replaced, least of all, one like hers; there is not another one like her in the world. But otherwise I think she does not fare badly. One pardons her wherever she goes; she is always treated like a little princess, always well cared for."

"Well cared for!" Nikolai bursts out. "Well cared for! I think she cannot be worse cared for than with the Jeliagins."