Part 5

She became, as she had wished, the confidante of his work. When he had sketched on paper the plan of a composition, he played it to her, now on his violin, which he passionately loved, now on the piano, which he did not love; for its short tone, incapable of development, repulsed him, but which he respected and made use of as the most complete of all instruments. Although he played the piano, not with virtuosity, but with the helplessness of the composer, he could still bring out something of the "warm tone" which made his violin irresistible.

How eagerly she listened to his compositions! How much she rejoiced in them, and how severe she was to him! She would not let him pass over a single musical flaw. That she rejoiced and wept over the beauties in his compositions, that she boldly placed his genius near Beethoven and Schumann, that is to say, near what she ranked highest in the world, that was another thing! For that reason she was so severe. He laughed at her sometimes for her tender delusion. Then she took his head between her hands, and said, triumphantly: "That is all very well; only wait a little while, then the whole world will say that you have been the last musical poet: the others are only bunglers."

* * * * *

In the beginning of March he made a short artist tour through the interior of Russia. Naturally, he could not drag her around with him, for she could not endure the exhausting fatigues of his quick journeys, especially at that time. But how horrible, how unbearable the parting seemed to him! He wrote her every day. His writing was ugly and irregular, his orthography as deficient in French as in Russian; but what tenderness, what passion and poetry spoke from every uncultured, stormily written line. No one could better impress his whole heart in a short, insignificant letter than he; and what rapture, what wild, almost painful rapture at seeing her again! She had missed him much less than he had missed her. He reproached her for it, complained that the new love which now began to fill her whole existence left no place for the old. But then she measured him with such a tender, and, at the same time, a so deeply hurt look, that he was ashamed.

"You must not take it so," he whispered to her, appeasingly. "It is an old story that if two hearts hasten forward together in a race of love, one will naturally outdo the other, and still will be vexed that it is so. But it is quite natural and in order that I should cling more to you than you to me."

She smiled quite sadly. "We will see who will win the race in the end," murmured she.

* * * * *

Natalie no longer went into society. Her health was much impaired. She passed the entire month of April stretched on her lounge, in loose wrappers. She now reproached herself with having been foolish not to have spared herself before. The time of tormenting fancy approached for the young wife, the time of concealed anxiety for them both. In spite of the consoling assurances of the physician, Lensky was no longer himself, from anxiety and despair. But he did not let her notice it. When he was with her he had always a gay smile on his lips and a droll story for her diversion. He cared for her like a mother.

Then, toward the end of May, came the most tormenting hour he had ever lived through, until at last--when he already believed that all hope was lost--a little, thin, shrill sound smote his ear. It startled him, his heart beat loudly; still he did not venture to move, but listened, until at last the doctor came out of the adjoining room, and called to him: "All is over."

He misunderstood the words. "She is dead!" he gasped.

"No, no! Boris Nikolaivitch; everything is as well as possible. Come!"

He felt as would a man buried alive, if one should raise the lid from his coffin.

At the door of the bedroom a fat old woman, with a large cap, came toward him. "A son, a very fine young one!" said she, triumphantly, while she laid something tiny and rosy, wrapped in white cloth and lace, in his arms.

Tears fell from his eyes, and his hands trembled so that the nurse was horrified and took the child away from him.

He went up to Natalie, who, deathly pale and exhausted, but with a lovely, indescribable expression on her face, at once of tenderness and of a certain solemn pride, lay among the high-piled pillows. Quite softly, with a kind of timidity which his violent love had hitherto never known, he pressed her pale hand to his lips.

"Are you content?" she whispered, dreamily and scarcely audibly. "Are you content?"

* * * * *

She recovered rapidly. Her beauty had lost none of its charm, but had rather won an earnest--one might almost say consecrated--loveliness.

Her face reflected her happiness. That also had become a shade deeper, nobler. In spite of all her pampered habits, she insisted upon caring for the child herself. He let her have her way.

The former dressing-room was changed to a nursery. Sometimes, in the long, transparent twilight of the spring, he entered the room in which, in winter, he had passed so many charming hours by candle-light, and where now everything was so changed. A cradle stood in the place which formerly the toilet-table had occupied--ah, what a cradle--a dream of a cradle! A basket with a canopy of green silk, hung with a long, transparent lace veil, a costly nest for a young bird whose little eyes must be shielded, by all kinds of tender devices, from the bright light, which perhaps later would pain him so!

The air, quite filled with a pleasant, mild, damp vapor, was permeated by a weak perfume of iris and warming linen, and, besides that, with something quite strange, quite peculiarly sweet, stirring--the breath of a healthy, fresh, carefully cared-for little child.

And there, where the cheval-glass had formerly reflected to him the lovely form of a proud queen of beauty, now sat in the same large arm-chair, a tender young mother, her child on her breast. The lines of her neck, from which the loose, white dress had slipped down a little so that the outline of the shoulders was visible, was charming; but what was it, to the lovely, attentive expression with which she looked down at the child?

Everything about her expressed tenderness: her look, her smile, the hands with which she held the child to her. It was just these small, white hands which Lensky could not cease to observe. How helpless they had formerly been--and now! She would scarcely let the nurse touch baby. He was never weary of watching how untiringly she touched the tiny, frail body of the infant, and did a thousand services for it which all resembled caresses.

* * * * *

"It is all very beautiful, but you have a manner of ignoring me in this little kingdom," said Lensky, jokingly, to the young mother, while he threw a look of humorous vexation at the young despot whom she just laid in the cradle.

She bent her head a little to one side, and whispered roguishly, while she came up to him and played with the lapel of his coat: "Do you see, Boris, this is my study. Everywhere else you are not only the first but the only one in the world for me; but here you must be content if I sometimes forget you for my calling."

He laughed.

"Do you know that you once said something similar to me; that time when I, for the first time, dared to enter your sanctuary?" she murmured, and repeated petulantly: "Do you know it?"

He kissed both of her hands, one after the other. "Do you then believe that I could ever forget such a thing, my angel?" whispered he. "I am no such spendthrift; oh, no! If you knew how I cherish this dear remembrance! That is pure happiness which we will keep for our old days, when the sun no longer seems to us to shine as brightly, and we must light a poor candle in order to find our path again to a suitable grave."

* * * * *

Natalie still thought of the poor laurel wreath in his study. But she did not venture to ask him a direct question about it.

He himself, of his own accord, at last told her the history of the pitiful relic.

He had never spoken to her of his childhood, but once a great impulse came over him to tell her the whole; to lay bare before her all the pitiableness of his past. What would she then say to it?

It was a clear summer night, out on the terrace of the country house near St. Petersburg, which they had hired for the summer, the terrace which looked out on the small but pretty and shady garden. They sat there, hand in hand; around them the dull, gray light of a day that will not die, sweet perfume of flowers, and in the tree tops the gentle rustling of the kissing leaves. She talked of gay, insignificant things; gave him a droll, laughing description of a visit to one of her friends. At first it amused him; then something, he could not have said what, irritated him against this monstrous principle of gliding so triflingly and mockingly through life without ever glancing into it more deeply.

"What would she say if she knew?" thought he. "Perhaps she would shun me!" A kind of madness overcame him. He felt the wish to risk his happiness in order to convince himself of its durability, to put his petted wife to the test. "How you butterflies, floating over flowers in the sunshine, must be horrified at the miserable worms who creep over the earth!" he began bitterly.

"What are you thinking of?" asked she, astonished.

"Nothing especial, only that I was originally just such a worm, creeping over the earth."

"Ah! that is long past!" she interrupted him hastily. She wished to keep him from long dwelling on an unpleasant thought, but he suspected that his insinuation of his humble antecedents vexed her, and that she felt the need of forgetting his derivation. He looked at her from head to foot, with an angry, wondering glance. Her richly embroidered white dress, the large diamonds in her ears,--how the diamonds sparkled in the dull evening light!

Then he began to speak of his childhood, dryly, with a smile on his lips as if it was a question of something quite indifferent and amusing.

In a large tenement at Moscow, overcrowded with all kinds of human vermin, had he grown up; in the half of a room that was divided by a sail, behind which another poor family hungered. His father he did not remember. His mother sang to the guitar in wine rooms. When he was five years old she had bought him a fiddle for four rubles, and then some one, a dissolute musician, who often came to them, had taught him to scrape on it a little. From that time he accompanied his mother when she sang in the wine rooms,--or even on the streets, as it happened.

She had been pretty; the drawing which hung in the laurel wreath, and which an artist in their horrible dwelling-place had made of her, was like her. Only she had quite unusually beautiful teeth which one could not see in the picture. He remembered these teeth very well, because she laughed so much, especially if there was little to eat and she made him take it all, and declared she had spoiled her appetite at a friend's house with fresh _pirogj_. Once the thought had occurred to him that she only said so because there was not enough for two, and then he could not eat anything more. If there was nothing at all to eat, either for him or for her, she told him a story.

Had he loved her? Yes, he believed so--how could it be otherwise? But the consciousness of what she really had been to him only came to him when he was no longer with her. How that happened he really did not know, but one fine day she took him in a part of the city which he had never known until then, in a handsome residence that seemed so beautiful to him that he only ventured to go around on tiptoes. At the door a fat, yellow man, with long, greasy, black hair, received him, and told his mother it was all right. Then she kissed him a last time, told him she would take him away in an hour, and went.

He was taken in a room with gay furniture, and there greeted by a fat woman with a thick gold chain over the bosom of her violet silk dress, and with rings on all her short, stumpy, wrinkled fingers, and was entertained with tea, cake, and honey. He had never before enjoyed a similar repast. He felt in an elevated frame of mind.

When the fat man--he was a mediocre musician who had married a rich merchant's daughter, who gave him none of her money, however--told him that he should always stay with him, and never go back to his mother, he was glad, and felt the consciousness of having taken a step forward in the world.

Did that surprise Natalie? He could not help it, it was still so. "Strange what roughness men show before a little bit of civilization has taught them to conceal it," he added reflectively.

Did he not feel anxiety later? Natalie wished to know. Yes, for his new life contained nothing of that which he had promised himself. That he should live in the beautiful rooms with the master and mistress and eat with them, as he had thought at first, had been an illusion. Only the two children of the fat daughter of the merchant could tumble around on the sofas, with their fiery-red, woolen, damask covering, and could help themselves from all the dishes.

He lived on charity; they told him that every day. The musician had bought him of his mother for fifty rubles, as Lensky afterward learned, as a speculation, in order to make money out of him as a prodigy. The time which he did not devote to his musical practice he must spend helping the maid in the kitchen.

He slept, with an old sofa pillow under his head, on the floor, in a gloomy little room, without window, only with dirty panes of glass in the door--a room in which the cook put all kinds of rubbish. Dampness ran down the walls, and every evening from all corners crept out a whole regiment of black beetles, and spread themselves over the boards. The food? Well, it was sparing. Sometimes he only received what the family had left on their plates.

Was he not angry at this treatment? No. He found it quite in order at that time. The well-fed, warmly dressed people impressed him, especially the cap of Vauvara Ivanovna--that was the name of his mistress. He felt a respectful shudder pass over him every time he saw this structure of blonde, red flowers, and green ribbon. Except the Kremlin, nothing impressed him so much as this house.

When the whole family, in festival attire, went to church on Sunday, he stood at the door, quite oppressed by the feeling of modest wonder, and looked after the well-dressed, well-fed people. He did his best to make himself useful and agreeable, and to please them. Yes, he was just so small and pitiable, as a half-starved six-year-old pigmy. And then, in conclusion, one day he simply could bear it no longer and ran back to his mother. He found the way. With that quite animal sense of locality and traces, which only children of the lowest classes of men have, he found it. His mother was at home; she was frightened when she saw him. Had they turned him out? Yes, she was frightened. In the first moment she was frightened; then--here Lensky stammered in his confession--naturally she was glad; for, what use of losing words?--naturally she was glad. How she kissed him and caressed him with her poor, rough, toil-worn, and still such gentle, warm hands. He still felt her hands sometimes on him, in dreams, especially behind his ears and on his neck. Then she fed him. She spread a red and white flowered cloth over the table in his honor, and after that she gave him a holy picture. Then she said it could not be otherwise; he must go back to Simon Ephremitsch; it was for his own good. When he had become a great artist, then he would come to fetch her in a coach with four horses.

That impressed him. And in order to calm him completely, she promised to visit him very soon.

But she did not come; and when he ran back to her, after about a month, she was no longer in her old abode; he never found her! Soon afterward she sent him two pretty little shirts, delicately embroidered in red and blue. But she herself did not come. Never!

At his first appearance in public--he had performed his piece with the anxious assiduity of a little monkey that fears a blow, he asserted--to his great astonishment, he was applauded. In the midst of the hand-clapping he suddenly heard a sob. He was convinced that his mother had been at the concert.

At the conclusion they handed him a laurel wreath, the same which now hung in his room; quite a poor woman had brought it, they said. He guessed immediately that the wreath came from his mother; and suddenly, just as a couple of music-lovers had stepped on the stage, in order to see the wonderful little animal near by, he began to stamp his feet and clench his fists, to scream and to sob, until every one crowded around him. His principal threatened him with blows; a very pretty young lady in a blue-silk dress took him on her lap to quiet him; but all was of no use.

He saw his mother once more--in her coffin.

His benefactor told him that she was dead, and that, after all, it was suitable that he should show her the last honors. The coffin stood on a table, surrounded by thin, poorly-burning candles, and she lay within, so small and thin, her hands folded on her breast, in a poor shroud, that they had bought ready made for a few copecks.

In the beginning, Natalie had interrupted him with questions, but now she had long been silent. He looked at her challengingly, at every pitiful, repulsive detail, especially if it brought forward a trace of his own insignificance. It was quite as if he expressly tried to pain her. But when he came to speak of the death of his mother, whose form, in the midst of his glaring, sharp description, he drew so tenderly and vaguely, obliterating everything disturbing, as if he saw her, in remembrance, only through tears, he closed his eyes.

Suddenly he heard near him a suppressed sound of pain, then something like the falling of the over-abundant load of blossoms from a tree among whose spring adornment there yet moves no breath of air.

He started, looked up--there was Natalie on her knees before him, the beauty, the queenly, proud one, and had embraced him with both arms, as if she would shield him from all the woes of earth, and sobbed as if she could not console herself for his past suffering.

"Natalie! my angel, do you really love me so?"

"One cannot love you enough, or recompense you enough for all that you have missed," whispered she.

And he had really for one moment suspected that----

He raised her on his knees. They did not speak another word. Through the garden at their feet the birches rustled in the mild night breeze, and from the distance one heard the sad voice of a marsh bird, who with heavy beating wings flew to the neighboring pond.

The most beautiful love will always be that which has been sanctified by a great compassion. In that mild summer night, while all around them was fragrance and veiled light, Natalie's love had received its consecration.

* * * * *

Three, four years passed; a second little child lay in the pretty, veiled cradle, from which little Nikolai first made his solemn observation of the world--a dear little plump maiden, whom they baptized Mascha, after the grandmother, and whom Boris particularly idolized. There was still nothing to report of Natalie's married life but love, happiness, and beauty. Lensky kept every unpleasant impression far from her, surrounded her with the most touching care, overwhelmed her with the most poetic attentions. Her life at his side unrolled itself like a long, secret, passionate love-poem.

Natalie's family had reconciled themselves to her marriage. Even for the wise and arrogant Sergei Alexandrovitch it had the appearance that he had been mistaken in his discouraging prediction, as happens even to the wisest men, if with their predictions they have only the sober probability in view, without thinking of the possibility of some underlying miracle. After four years of married life Natalie was as happy as a bride.

Still, Lensky's happiness was not as unclouded as that of his wife. A great unpleasantness became ever more significant to him, the quite universal coldness of his artistic relations.

It would be wrong to believe that Natalie, with systematic jealousy, had wished to estrange him from the world of artists. On the contrary, she had complied with his wish to make her acquainted with his colleagues and their families, had herself asked it of him, flatteringly.

The world of artists interested her. There, everything was more animated, more meaning, than the eternal sameness of good society which she knew by heart, quite by heart, she assured him tenderly. She made it her ambition to win his acquaintances for hers. But strangely enough, in spite of all her seductive loveliness, she succeeded only very incompletely.

She had already known the _elite_ among the artists. There is nothing further to be said of her relations with these favored of the gods, exceptional existences, than that she always felt honored by intercourse with them, and pleased, and that, when with them she ever vexed herself over the worn-out old commonplace, that one should avoid the acquaintance of famous men in order to prevent disappointment--a commonplace which was probably invented for the consolation of those who, in advance, are excluded from intercourse with celebrities. That Natalie always succeeded in winning the sympathies of these exceptional natures stands for itself.

But when it was a question of that great crowd of artists, of the mixture of sickly vanity, embarrassed affairs, depressing relations, etc., then it was hard to build up a friendship between Lensky's wife and his old colleagues.

Envy of Lensky, envy which had reference largely to his artistic results, and in a less degree to his marriage and social position, peeped out everywhere from these people, and had its own results in soon completely embittering the not very pleasant relations between them and Natalie.

In a truly friendly, touchingly friendly manner, they only met her in quite modestly circumstanced families--families of a few true artists who yet could accomplish nothing with their work but to honestly and poorly provide for their seven or eight children. Families of simple people, who had formerly been good to Lensky in the difficult beginning of his career, and to whom he always showed the most faithful adherence, the most prodigal generosity. She also felt happy among these plain people.

What wonder that these people would all have gone through fire for him! They would also have all given of their best for Natalie, whom without envy they worshipped with enthusiasm as a queen. They rejoiced that Lensky, their pride, their idol, possessed such a beautiful and distinguished wife--in their eyes the daughter of the emperor would not have been too good for him.

Natalie thanked them for their great attachment, as well as she could; she reckoned it a special favor to receive these modest people in her home, to invite them with their wives and children, to entertain them with distinction, to stuff all the children's pockets full of bonbons, and give them little parting presents.

But intercourse with these poor devils was in reality only a sentimental game, even as intercourse with the artistic _elite_ was nothing but an ideal recreation. Neither the one nor the other sufficed to firmly knit the band between Lensky's wife and his former world, or to keep up his popularity in that world.

* * * * *

Of all the opposition and difficulty which would arise therefrom for Lensky's future and especially for his yet to be won future as composer, Natalie still suspected nothing. For her, the whole heaven was still blue.