Thick flaxen curls fell over her pretty rosy little
face, and on to her large sleepy black eyes; she smiled
and blinked her eyes at the light and laid a chubby
little hand on her mother’s neck.
“Ada, vois, c’est ton pere,” said
Varvara Pavlovna, pushing the curls back from her
eyes and kissing her vigorously, “pre le avec
moi.”
“C’est ca, papa?” stammered the
little girl lisping.
“Oui, mon enfant, n’est-ce pas que tu
l’aimes?”
But this was more than Lavretsky could stand.
“In such a melodrama must there really be a
scene like this?” he muttered, and went out
of the room.
Varvara Pavlovna stood still for some time in the
same place, slightly shrugged her shoulders, carried
the little girl off into the next room, undressed
her and put her to bed. Then she took up a book
and sat down near the lamp, and after staying up for
an hour she went to bed herself.
“Eh bien, madame?” queried her maid, a
Frenchwoman whom she had brought from Paris, as she
unlaced her corset.
“Eh bien, Justine,” se replied, “he
is a good deal older, but I fancy he is just the same
good-natured fellow. Give me my gloves for the
night, and get out my grey high-necked dress for to-morrow,
and don’t forget the mutton cutlets for Ada
. . . . I daresay it will be difficult to get
them here; but we must try.”
“A la guerre comme a la guerre,” replied
Justine as she put out the candle.
For more than two hours Lavretsky wandered about the
streets of town. The night he had spent in the
outskirts of Paris returned to his mind. His
heart was bursting and his head, dull and stunned,
was filled again with the same dark senseless angry
thoughts, constantly recurring. “She is
alive, she is here,” he muttered with ever fresh
amazement. He felt that he had lost Lisa.
His wrath choked him; this blow had fallen too suddenly
upon him. How could he so readily have believed
in the nonsensical gossip of a journal, a wretched
scrap of paper? “Well, if I had not believed
it,” he thought, “what difference would
it have made? I should not have known that Lisa
loved me; she would not have known it herself.”
He could not rid himself of the image, the voice, the
eyes of his wife . . . and he cursed himself, he cursed
everything in the world.
Wearied out he went towards morning to Lemm’s.
For a long while he could make no one hear; at last
at a window the old man’s head appeared in a
nightcap, sour, wrinkled, and utterly unlike the inspired
austere visage which twenty-four hours ago had looked
down imperiously upon Lavretsky in all the dignity
of artistic grandeur.
“What do you want?” queried Lemm.
“I can’t play to you every night, I have
taken a decoction for a cold.” But Lavretsky’s
face, apparently, struck him as strange; the old man
made a shade for his eyes with his hand, took a look
at his elated visitor, and let him in.
