Part 3

The heavily perfumed sultry air penetrated through the drawn curtains into the Assanows' drawing-room. The Jeliagins had brought a couple of Parisian friends with them, and naturally Pachotin was not missing. A deathly _ennui_ reigned. They spoke of Parisian fashions, of the Empress Eugenie's new court; they complained of the new cook in the Hotel de l'Europe, and of the heat.

Then they spoke of national dances. The Jeliagins had recently travelled in Spain and were enthusiastic about the fandango. The Parisians had heard there was nothing more graceful than a well-danced Polish mazurka; could none of the Russian ladies dance one for them?--a very bold request, but they were all friends.

The Jeliagins announced that Natalie danced the mazurka like a true woman of Warsaw. They left her no peace.

"Oh, I will put on no more airs," said she, "if one of the ladies will take a seat at the piano, so----"

To go to the piano, even were it only to play dance-music, in Lensky's presence! The ladies swooned at the mere thought.

"Very well, then you must give up the mazurka," said Natalie, decidedly.

"Ask Boris Nikolaivitch," whispered one of the St. Petersburg women. "If he is the first violinist of his time, he is also an excellent pianist."

"No, no," said Natalie, firmly, and then her great brilliant eyes met Lensky's.

Although at that time he maintained his artistic dignity with quite childish exaggeration, he smiled very good-naturedly and said, "I see very well that you place no confidence in me; you think I cannot catch your mazurka music."

"No, no, no!" said Natalie. "You shall not degrade your art."

"And do you really think it would be degrading to improvise a musical background for your performance? I should so like to see you dance." And he stood up and went to the piano.

Such pretty little phrases were formerly not his style. He had, as Natalie had often laughingly told him, no talent for _fioriture_ in conversation.

The Petersburg ladies looked at each other. "How polite he has become! You have changed him, Natascha," whispered they.

Meanwhile Pachotin gave Natalie his hand.

Lensky had seized the opportunity of admiring her grace with joy. He had never thought how painfully it would affect him to see her dance with another man. He did not take his eyes off her, and meanwhile improvised the most bewitching devil's music.

She wore a white dress, her neck and arms were bare, and around her waist was a Circassian girdle embroidered with gold and silver. One hand in her partner's, the other hanging loosely at her side, her head slightly on one side, she moved safely over the dangerously smooth surface of the marble floor. At the beginning, pale as usual, except her dark-red lips, she looked quite indifferent; gradually she became warmer and more animated, a slight blush crept into her cheeks, her eyes beamed as if in a happy dream, around her lips trembled the sad expression which the feeling of intense pleasure often causes us, and her movements at the same time had something indescribably gentle and supple.

Pachotin, most correctly attired, with a collar which reached to the tips of his ears and faultless yellow gloves, hopped around her in the true affected knightly grimacing Polish-mazurka manner.

"An ape!" thought Lensky to himself; "but how handsome, how distinguished he is! almost as handsome as she!" and suddenly the question occurred to him: "Is it my music or his presence which animates her? And if it were my music! Nevertheless, she will still marry him; yes, even if she were in love with me, still she would marry him, and not me! What a fool I was to imagine----"

After Pachotin had soberly placed his heels together and acknowledged his deep devotion to the lady by a suitable courtesy, the mazurka was at an end.

Quite beside themselves with enthusiasm, the Parisians surrounded Natalie. When she wished to thank Lensky he had disappeared. It was his manner many times to withdraw without taking leave, but still to-day it made Natalie uneasy. She was vibrating with a great excitement, the air seemed to her suffocatingly hot, she drew off her gloves; the noise of the prattling voices became unbearable to her, and she passed through the second empty drawing-room, into the arched loggia set with blooming orange-trees, from which one looked across the court-yard to the Tiber.

The storm still hung on the horizon. Heavy masses of clouds, shot through by pale lightning, towered, on the other side of the river, above the gloomy architecture of the Trastevere. They had not yet reached the moon, which, palely shining, stood high in the heavens. Its light illumined the court, with its statues and bas-reliefs. The air was sultry.

Natalie drew a deep breath. Suddenly she discovered Lensky. He was staring down on the Tiber, which, rolling by in its bed, incessantly sighed, as if from sorrow at its sad lot, which compelled it continually to hasten past everything.

Could one really take it amiss in the stream if it sometimes overflowed its banks in order to carry away with it some of the beautiful objects, near which, condemned to perpetual wandering, it might not remain standing?

"Ah! you here?" said Natalie. "I thought you had taken French leave. I was vexed with you."

"So!"

"Yes, because--because I was sorry not to be able to thank you. It was really----"

"Do not speak so," said he, quite roughly; "just as if you did not know that there is nothing in the world, nothing in my power that I would not do for you!"

She bent her head back a little and smiled at him in a friendly way, but as if his words had not surprised her in the slightest. "You are very good to me," said she.

He felt strangely thus alone with her in this sweet-perfumed, melancholy, intoxicating sultriness, alone with this happiness that was so near him, and which he was afraid of frightening away by an unseemly imprudence. He felt by turns hot and cold. Why did she not go?

She rested her hands on the marble balustrade of the loggia and bending over it she murmured: "How beautiful! oh, how wonderfully beautiful! And it is so tiresome in there; do you not find it so, Boris Nikolaivitch?"

His throat contracted, he felt that he was about to lose control of himself.

"Shall I play?" he asked. "I will do it willingly for you."

"Oh, no! Why should you play to those stupid people in there?" replied she. "I would be prepared to hear, in the middle of the G minor concerto, the question: 'Before I forget it, can you not give me the address of a good shoemaker in Rome?' You know how such things vex me."

"Is she coquetting with me, or--?" he asked himself again.

She stood before him with her enchanting face, and her tender glance met his. She did not know that she tormented him. In spite of her twenty-one years, she had the boundless innocence of a girl whose mind has never been desecrated by the knowledge of passion, a degree of innocence in which men do not believe.

"Is she coquetting?" His heart beat to bursting, and suddenly, when she quite unconstrainedly came one step nearer him, he took her hand. "Oh, you dear, dear girl!" he murmured, with hoarse, scarcely audible voice, and pressed it to his lips.

Crimsoning, she tore away her hand. "For Heaven's sake, what are you thinking of?" said she, and started back with a proud, almost scornful gesture.

Then a horrible anger overcame him.

"I was stupid, I was mistaken in you. You think no more nobly or better than the others!" he burst out.

"I do not understand you. What do you mean?" murmured she.

What else had she to ask? Why did she not go, but stood before him, as if paralyzed, with her pale, seductive loveliness, surrounded by moonlight?

"I mean that if you observe our relations from this conventional standpoint, your behavior to me was a heartless, arrogant abomination."

"But, Boris Nikolaivitch, that is all foolishness. You do not know what you are saying," she stammered, quite beside herself.

"So! I do not know what I am saying?" He had now stepped close up to her. "And if I, mistaking your coquetries--yes, that is the word; blush now and be a little ashamed--if I, mistaking your coquetries, have permitted myself to petition for your hand? Oh, how you start! Naturally, you had never thought of such a thing!"

His voice was hoarse and rasping, his face very calm and as if petrified by anger and such a mental torment as he had never before experienced. "But go! Why do you stay and torture me? I will no longer look at you. I abominate you, and still I love you so passionately, so madly!"

Yes, why did she still not go? He could endure it no longer--he clasped her to his breast and kissed her with his hot, burning lips. Then she pushed him from her and fled.

He looked after her. Now all was over. For one moment he remained standing on the same spot, then, with deeply bowed head, dragging his feet along slowly, he passed through the vestibule and left, without thinking of his hat, which he had left in the drawing-room.

For the remainder of the evening Natalie's whole being betrayed only haste and uneasiness. She spoke more and quicker than formerly, laughed frequently, and told the gayest stories.

When her Petersburg cousins wished to tease her with Lensky's enthusiasm for her, and laughingly called him "your genius," she mentioned him indifferently, quite disapprovingly, shrugged her shoulders over his talent as composer--yes, even found fault with his playing. She was friendly, quite inviting, to Pachotin; she no longer knew what she did, only when he wished to give the conversation a more earnest turn she broke it off suddenly and remorselessly.

When at last, at last, the drawing-room was empty and she might withdraw, she locked herself in her room, threw herself down before the holy picture before which she always said her evening prayer. But, however she tried to pray, she could not. She did not know for what she should pray. Her cheeks burned with dreadful shame. How could he have so far forgotten himself with her!

She threw open a window. What did it matter to her that they said the Roman night air was poisonous? She would have liked to take the Roman fever, would have liked to die. Her window opened on the street. The Via Giulia was divided by the moonlight into two parts, one light and one dark. All was quiet, empty, deserted. Then there was a sound of slow, dragging steps, and two lowered voices whispered down there in the silent solitude. It was probably a pair of belated lovers, and suddenly there was a soft, tender sound through the mild May night. She caught her breath, closed the window, and turned back to her room. Half-undressed, she sat on the edge of her little cool white bed and thought again and again--of the same thing--of his kiss.

* * * * *

"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 Assanow 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 imprevues_," or "_La reconnaissance sincere 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 friendship 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 passionate 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 Assanow.

"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 Assanow, 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 shining 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 stitching. 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 assiduously.

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 Assanow, condescendingly.

"Yes."

"I heard of it through acquaintances in Petersburg," began the prince. "It did not quite please me."

Natalie only shrugged her shoulders, with an expression as if she would say: "I am very sorry, but that does not change matters at all." In spite of that she secretly trembled before her brother. The announcement which she had to make to him would not cross her lips.

"It is hard to speak of certain things to you," he continued, while he tried to make his thin high voice sound confidential. He did not wish to make his sister refractory by overhasty roughness. "I have no prejudices." It had recently become the fashion in his set, and especially for the upper ten thousand, to boast of a kind of harmless liberality. "No one can accuse me of smallness. I am always in favor of attracting young artists into society--first, because they form an animating element in our circles, and secondly, because one should give them an opportunity to improve their manners a little; but all in moderation. Too great intimacy in such cases is bad for both parties. You are too much carried away by the generosity of your heart. I know that in reality your immoderate kindness to Lensky does not mean much, but----"

Her wonderfully beautiful eyes met his.

"I am betrothed to Boris Nikolaivitch," said she wearily but very distinctly.

"Betrothed!" he burst out. "You to Lensky? You are crazy!"

"Not at all."

"Does mother know of it?"

"Certainly."

"And she has given her consent?"

"At first she was surprised; she cried a whole afternoon. I was very sorry to pain her. Then she gave way. She is very fond of him. Every one must be fond of him who learns to know him well." Natalie's eyes beamed with animation.

Sergei Alexandrovitch pulled at his mustache. "Hm, hm," he murmured; "we will leave that undecided. As it happens, I am one of those who know him well; there are few in our set who know him as intimately as I, and--hm--I do not know that he has caused me any very enthusiastic feelings. As artist I rank him very high, not so high as has been the fashion lately, for as a _beau dire il manque de style_, he lacks style! But that has nothing to do with this. But if he united in himself the genius of Beethoven and Paganini, I would still look upon the possibility of your alliance with him as unheard of, and I tell you frankly, that I shall do all that is in my power to prevent it." He had taken up again the hat which he had formerly laid down, and held it on his knee as if paying a call of state. While he spoke the last words, he knocked on the top of it with malicious decision.

Natalie crossed her arms.

"I knew that you would oppose the mesalliance," said she, "but----"