He found a change in her. She seemed to have
become more contemplative. She blamed him for
stopping away; and she asked him if he would not go
to church the next day—the next day being
Sunday.
“Do come,” she continued, before he had
time to answer. “We will pray together
for the repose of her soul.” Then
she added that she did not know what she ought to
do—that she did not know whether she had
any right to make Panshine wait longer for her decision.
“Why?” asked Lavretsky.
“Because,” she replied, “I begin
to suspect by this time what that decision will be.”
Then she said that she had a headache, and went to
her room, after irresolutely holding out the ends
of her fingers to Lavretsky.
The next day Lavretsky went to morning service.
Liza was already in the church when he entered.
He remarked her, though she did not look towards him.
She prayed fervently; her eyes shone with a quiet light;
quietly she bowed and lifted her head.
He felt that she was praying for him also, and a strange
emotion filled his soul. The people standing
gravely around, the familiar faces, the harmonious
chant, the odor of the incense, the long rays slanting
through the windows, the very sombreness of the walls
and arches—all appealed to his heart.
It was long since he had been in church—long
since he had turned his thoughts to God. And even
now he did not utter any words of prayer—he
did not even pray without words; but nevertheless,
for a moment, if not in body, at least in mind, he
bowed clown and bent himself humbly to the ground.
He remembered how, in the days of his childhood, he
always used to pray in church till he felt on his
forehead something like a kind of light touch.
“That” he used then to think, “is
my guardian angel visiting me and pressing on me the
seal of election.” He looked at Liza.
“It is you who have brought me here,”
he thought. “Touch me—touch my
soul!” Meanwhile, she went on quietly praying.
Her face seemed to him to be joyous, and once more
he felt softened, and he asked, for another’s
soul, rest—for his own, pardon. They
met outside in the porch, and she received him with
a friendly look of serious happiness. The sun
brightly lit up the fresh grass in the church-yard
and the many-colored dresses and kerchiefs of the
women. The bells of the neighboring churches
sounded on high; the sparrows chirped on the walls.
Lavretsky stood by, smiling and bare-headed; a light
breeze played with his hair and Liza’s, and
with the ends of Liza’s bonnet strings.
He seated Liza and her companion Lenochka, in the carriage,
gave away all the change he had about him to the beggars,
and then strolled slowly home.
The days which followed were days of heaviness for
Lavretsky. He felt himself in a perpetual fever.
Every morning he went to the post, and impatiently
tore open his letters and newspapers; but in none of
them did he find anything which could confirm or contradict
that rumor, on the truth of which he felt that so
much now depended. At times he grew disgusted
with himself. “What am I,” he then
would think, “who am waiting here, as a raven
waits for blood, for certain intelligence of my wife’s
death?”
