Asbein Part 5

"Why has 'your genius' so suddenly tired of Rome? He leaves to-day,"

remarked the Jeliagins, who had come to lunch the next morning in the Palazzo Morsini.

They were staying at the same hotel as Lensky--that is to say, in the "Europe"--and had spoken to him in the court of the hotel. "He looked miserably," they added, with a haughty glance. "Either he has Roman fever or you have broken his heart."

Then they spoke of other things. Soon after lunch they went away.

Meanwhile Lensky stumbled up and down, up and down, in his room. A sick lady whose room was beneath his, at last sent up by the waiter and begged him to be quiet.

His departure was fixed for seven o'clock; it struck one, it struck four.

Should he leave without having made a parting call upon the Princess a.s.sanow run away like any fellow who has borrowed thirty rubles? "But they will not receive me," he thought, "if the princess has told her mother. But, no, she will have said nothing; she is too proud. What a lovely being! How could I only-- Oh, if I might at least ask her pardon! But what kind of a pardon would it be? Such a thing a woman pardons only if she loves, and how should she love me, a beast as I am?

She must have an aversion for me."

He resolved to take leave by letter. He tried it in French and Russian, but could complete nothing. Ashamed of his laughable incapacity, he tore up the different sheets of letter-paper adorned with "_Des circonstances imprvues_," or "_La reconnaissance sincre que_."

Five o'clock! He hastened across the courtyard, sprang into a carriage.

"Palazzo Morsini, Via Giulia," he called to the coachman, and commanded him to drive fast.

When he ascended the well-known stairs he asked himself a last time if he would be received.

The servant conducted him to the boudoir of the old princess. She broke off her game of patience to greet him, only betrayed a slight astonishment at his sudden departure, and said that she and Natalie should soon follow his example and go North, probably to Baden-Baden, for the heat in Rome began to be unbearable. Then she rang for the maid, whom she commissioned to tell the princess that Boris Nikolaivitch had come to take leave.

Lensky waited in breathless excitement. The maid came back with the decision: The princess was very ill and had lain down with a headache.

"Quite as I expected," thought Lensky, while the princess remarked politely, "She will be very sorry."

Then he kissed the old lady's hand, she touched his forehead with her lips in the Russian custom, wished him a pleasant journey, he thanked her a last time for all the friends.h.i.+p she had shown him, and went--went quite slowly through the large empty room, in which the dust danced in a broad sunbeam which lay across the marble floor, and in which the flowers which she had arranged so charmingly yesterday now stood withered in their vases.

"Shall I never see her again, never--never?" he asked himself. He would have given his life for a last friendly glance from her. What use was it to think of that--it was all over!

Then suddenly he heard something near him like the rustling of an angel's wings. He looked up. Natalie stood before him, deathly pale, with black rings around her eyes, with carelessly arranged hair. A pa.s.sionate pity, a tender anxiety overcame him. "How she has suffered through my offence!" he told himself and rushed up to her. "Natalie, can you forgive me?" he called.

Her great, sad eyes were raised to him with an expression of helpless, ashamed tenderness, as if they would say, "And you ask that!" She moved her lips, but no word came.

He held her little hands trembling with fever in his. She did not draw them away. He grew dizzy. For one moment they were both silent, then he whispered, drawing her closer to him, "Do you love me, then? Could you resolve to bear my name, to share my whole existence?"

Scarcely audibly she whispered, "Yes."

We are sometimes frightened at the sudden fulfilment of a wish which we have believed unattainable.

And as Lensky under the weight of his new, strange happiness sank at the feet of his betrothed and covered the hem of her dress with tears and kisses, in the midst of his happiness he felt an oppressed anxiety, a great fear.

A few days after Natalie's betrothal there was a short, imperious ring at the door of the artistic gray anteroom, in which the imposing butler, as usual, sat majestically intrenched behind his newspaper.

Monsieur Baptiste raised his eyebrows; he did not like this imperious manner of ringing a bell, and did not hurry at all to open the door.

Only when the ring was repeated did he unlock it. His face changed color from surprise, and he bowed quite to the ground when he recognized in the entering gentleman the young prince, the eldest brother of Natalie, Sergei Alexandrovitch a.s.sanow.

"Are the ladies at home?" he asked shortly in a high, somewhat vexed voice without further noticing the respectful greeting of the servant.

"The princess is still in bed, but the Princess Natalie is already up."

"Good. Do not disturb the princess, and announce me to Princess Natalie," said a.s.sanow, and with that he followed the butler, who was hastening before him, into the drawing-room. There he sat down in a mahogany arm-chair upholstered in faded yellow damask, crossed his legs, rested his tall s.h.i.+ning hat on his knee and looked around him. On one of his hands was a gray glove, the other was bare. It was a long, slender, aristocratic hand, very well cared for, too white for a man's hand, but bony, and with strongly marked veins on the back--a hand which one saw would certainly hold firmly what it had once grasped, and a hand which was capable of no caress. For the rest it would have been hard to judge anything from the exterior of the prince. He was a tall slender man of about thirty, with light-brown hair that was already thin on the top of the head, and a face--smoothly shaven except a long mustache--which in the cut of the delicate regular features resembled his sister's not unnoticeably. But the expression, that animating soul of beauty which lent Natalie's pale face more charm than the regularity of the lines, was lacking in him. Everything about him was as correct as his profile--his high stiff collar, the drab gaiters which showed beneath his trousers, his light-gray gloves with black st.i.tching. He was the type of the Russian state official of the highest category, the type of men who in public life only permit themselves to think as far as will not injure their advancement.

As he was a very clever, sharp, judging man withal, he revenged himself for the discomfort which the systematic crippling of his intellectual capacity in the service of the state caused him, by devoting all the superfluity of his unneeded intellect to shedding an unpleasantly glaring intellectual light about him, and condemning as absolute foolishness all those little poetic, pleasant trifles which make life beautiful.

He called this manner of pleasing himself doing his duty.

Strangely enough, with all his sterile dryness he was a true lover of music. He played the cello as well as a man of the world can permit himself to--that is to say, with an elegant inaccuracy, together with pedantic bursts of virtuosity, and in consequence had cultivated Lensky's acquaintance a.s.siduously.

While he waited for his sister he looked around the room distrustfully with his handsome dark but unpleasantly piercing eyes. He grew uneasy.

The atmosphere of the whole room was quite permeated with happiness.

Everything seemed to feel happy here--the shabby furniture, the music which lay somewhat confusedly on the piano. On the table near which Sergei Alexandrovitch sat stood a basket of pale Malmaison roses, under the piano was a violin case.

Sergei Alexandrovitch frowned. Then Natalie entered the room; he rose, went to meet her, kissed and embraced her. It seemed strange to her that she did not feel as glad to see him as formerly, but rather felt a kind of chill. Which of them had changed, he or she?

"What a surprise!" said she, and felt herself that her voice had a forced sound. "It has not formerly been your custom to appear so unexpectedly."

"My journey was only decided upon last month," replied he, somewhat hesitatingly; and with his dull smile he added, "I hope I do not arrive inopportunely, Natalie?"

"How can you ask such a thing!" said she. "But sit down and put your hat away--you are at home."

He remarked the uneasiness of her manner. He coughed twice, and then sat down again near the table on which the basket of roses stood.

Natalie sat down. Both hands resting on the red surface of the mahogany table, she bent over the flowers, and slowly with a kind of tenderness inhaled the dreamy, melancholy perfume.

"Have you had a pleasant winter?" began Sergei Alexandrovitch.

"I do not know," replied she without looking at him; "I have forgotten, but the spring was wonderfully beautiful, wonderfully beautiful," and she bent over the flowers again.

"Hm! So you prefer Rome to Naples?" said he condescendingly.

"Yes."

"You seem to have been very comfortably fixed here," he remarked, with a glance around. "You have very pretty rooms. Those are beautiful roses which you have there."

"Boris Lensky sent them to me," said she, while she at the same time pulled a rose from the basket to fasten it in the bodice of her light foulard dress. Then she sat down opposite Sergei. War was declared.

"Lensky seems to be a great deal with you," said a.s.sanow, condescendingly.

"Yes."

"I heard of it through acquaintances in Petersburg," began the prince.

"It did not quite please me."