‘Pavel Yakovlitch, I shall be angry! Helene
was coming with me,’ she went on, ’but
she stopped in the garden. The heat frightened
her, but I am not afraid of the heat. Come along.’
She moved forward along the path, slightly swaying
her slender figure at each step, and with a pretty
black-mittened little hand pushing her long soft curls
back from her face.
The friends walked after her (Shubin first pressed
his hands, without speaking, to his heart, and then
flung them higher than his head), and in a few instants
they came out in front of one of the numerous country
villas with which Kuntsovo is surrounded. A small
wooden house with a gable, painted a pink colour,
stood in the middle of the garden, and seemed to be
peeping out innocently from behind the green trees.
Zoya was the first to open the gate; she ran into the
garden, crying: ‘I have brought the wanderers!’
A young girl, with a pale and expressive face, rose
from a garden bench near the little path, and in the
doorway of the house appeared a lady in a lilac silk
dress, holding an embroidered cambric handkerchief
over her head to screen it from the sun, and smiling
with a weary and listless air.
Anna Vassilyevna Stahov—her maiden name
was Shubin—had been left, at seven years
old, an orphan and heiress of a pretty considerable
property. She had very rich and also very poor
relations; the poor relations were on her father’s,
the rich on her mother’s side; the latter including
the senator Volgin and the Princes Tchikurasov.
Prince Ardalion Tchikurasov, who had been appointed
her guardian, placed her in the best Moscow boarding-school,
and when she left school, took her into his own home.
He kept open house, and gave balls in the winter.
Anna Vassilyevna’s future husband, Nikolai Artemyevitch
Stahov, captured her heart at one of these balls when
she was arrayed in a charming rose-coloured gown,
with a wreath of tiny roses. She had treasured
that wreath all her life. Nikolai Artemyevitch
Stahov was the son of a retired captain, who had been
wounded in 1812, and had received a lucrative post
in Petersburg. Nikolai Artemyevitch entered the
School of Cadets at sixteen, and left to go into the
Guards. He was a handsome, well-made fellow,
and reckoned almost the most dashing beau at evening
parties of the middling sort, which were those he
frequented for the most part; he had not gained a footing
in the best society. From his youth he had been
absorbed by two ideals: to get into the Imperial
adjutants, and to make a good marriage; the first
ideal he soon discarded, but he clung all the more
closely to the second, and it was with that object
that he went every winter to Moscow. Nikolai
Artemyevitch spoke French fairly, and passed for being
a philosopher, because he was not a rake. Even
while he was no more than an ensign, he was given
to discussing, persistently, such questions as whether
it is possible for a man to visit the whole of the
globe in the course of his whole lifetime, whether
it is possible for a man to know what is happening
at the bottom of the sea; and he always maintained
the view that these things were impossible.
