The Darling and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 267 pages of information about The Darling and Other Stories.

The Darling and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 267 pages of information about The Darling and Other Stories.

It was past midnight.  Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o’clock at least.  He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist’s shop all over the house.  On such nights he became petty, ill-humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that it was very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the day before from his brother, though it contained nothing but Christmas greetings.

On the table of his wife’s room under the box of stationery he found a telegram, and glanced at it casually.  It was addressed to his wife, care of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel . . . .  The doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign language, apparently English.

“Who is this Michel?  Why Monte Carlo?  Why directed care of her mother?”

During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several times occurred to him, that his exercise at home had qualified him to become an excellent detective.  Going into his study and beginning to reflect, he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year and a half ago, and had lunched with an old school-fellow, a civil engineer, and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail Ivanovitch, with rather a curious short surname—­Riss.  Two months later the doctor had seen the young man’s photograph in his wife’s album, with an inscription in French:  “In remembrance of the present and in hope of the future.”  Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-law’s.  And that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at four or five o’clock in the morning, and was constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house which made him feel ashamed to face the servants.

Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going into consumption, and advised him to throw up everything and go to the Crimea.  When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much alarmed; she began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and that he had much better go to Nice, and that she would go with him, and there would nurse him, look after him, take care of him.

Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to Nice:  her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Darling and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.