Kabanata Kabanata 202 · 第202章

For a long time that night Princess Mary sat by the open window of her

room hearing the sound of the peasants’ voices that reached her from

the village, but it was not of them she was thinking. She felt that she

could not understand them however much she might think about them. She

thought only of one thing, her sorrow, which, after the break caused

by cares for the present, seemed already to belong to the past. Now she

could remember it and weep or pray.

After sunset the wind had dropped. The night was calm and fresh. Toward

midnight the voices began to subside, a cock crowed, the full moon began

to show from behind the lime trees, a fresh white dewy mist began to

rise, and stillness reigned over the village and the house.

Pictures of the near past—her father’s illness and last moments—rose

one after another to her memory. With mournful pleasure she now lingered

over these images, repelling with horror only the last one, the

picture of his death, which she felt she could not contemplate even in

imagination at this still and mystic hour of night. And these pictures

presented themselves to her so clearly and in such detail that they

seemed now present, now past, and now future.

She vividly recalled the moment when he had his first stroke and was

being dragged along by his armpits through the garden at Bald Hills,

muttering something with his helpless tongue, twitching his gray

eyebrows and looking uneasily and timidly at her.

“Even then he wanted to tell me what he told me the day he died,” she

thought. “He had always thought what he said then.” And she recalled in

all its detail the night at Bald Hills before he had the last stroke,

when with a foreboding of disaster she had remained at home against his

will. She had not slept and had stolen downstairs on tiptoe, and going

to the door of the conservatory where he slept that night had listened

at the door. In a suffering and weary voice he was saying something to

Tíkhon, speaking of the Crimea and its warm nights and of the Empress.

Evidently he had wanted to talk. “And why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t

he let me be there instead of Tíkhon?” Princess Mary had thought and

thought again now. “Now he will never tell anyone what he had in his

soul. Never will that moment return for him or for me when he might have

said all he longed to say, and not Tíkhon but I might have heard and

understood him. Why didn’t I enter the room?” she thought. “Perhaps he

would then have said to me what he said the day he died. While talking

to Tíkhon he asked about me twice. He wanted to see me, and I was

standing close by, outside the door. It was sad and painful for him

to talk to Tíkhon who did not understand him. I remember how he began

speaking to him about Lise as if she were alive—he had forgotten she

was dead—and Tíkhon reminded him that she was no more, and he shouted,

‘Fool!’ He was greatly depressed. From behind the door I heard how he

lay down on his bed groaning and loudly exclaimed, ‘My God!’ Why didn’t

I go in then? What could he have done to me? What could I have lost? And

perhaps he would then have been comforted and would have said that word

to me.” And Princess Mary uttered aloud the caressing word he had said

to her on the day of his death. “Dear-est!” she repeated, and began

sobbing, with tears that relieved her soul. She now saw his face before

her. And not the face she had known ever since she could remember and

had always seen at a distance, but the timid, feeble face she had seen

for the first time quite closely, with all its wrinkles and details,

when she stooped near to his mouth to catch what he said.

“Dear-est!” she repeated again.

“What was he thinking when he uttered that word? What is he thinking

now?” This question suddenly presented itself to her, and in answer she

saw him before her with the expression that was on his face as he lay

in his coffin with his chin bound up with a white handkerchief. And the

horror that had seized her when she touched him and convinced herself

that that was not he, but something mysterious and horrible, seized her

again. She tried to think of something else and to pray, but could do

neither. With wide-open eyes she gazed at the moonlight and the shadows,

expecting every moment to see his dead face, and she felt that the

silence brooding over the house and within it held her fast.

“Dunyásha,” she whispered. “Dunyásha!” she screamed wildly, and tearing

herself out of this silence she ran to the servants’ quarters to meet

her old nurse and the maidservants who came running toward her.