“Daria Alexeyevna also has a villa at Pavlofsk.”
“Well?”
“A certain person is very friendly with her, and intends to visit her pretty
often.”
“Well?”
“Aglaya Ivanovna…”
“Oh stop, Lebedeff!” interposed Muishkin, feeling as if he had been
touched on an open wound. “That… that has nothing to do with me. I should
like to know when you are going to start. The sooner the better as far as I
am concerned, for I am at an hotel.”
They had left the garden now, and were crossing the yard on their way to
the gate.
“Well, leave your hotel at once and come here; then we can all go
together to Pavlofsk the day after tomorrow.”
“I will think about it,” said the prince dreamily, and went off.
The clerk stood looking after his guest, struck by his sudden absent-
mindedness. He had not even remembered to say goodbye, and Lebedeff
was the more surprised at the omission, as he knew by experience how
courteous the prince usually was.
III.
It was now close on twelve o’clock.
The prince knew that if he called at the Epanchins’ now he would only
find the general, and that the latter might probably carry him straight off to
Pavlofsk with him; whereas there was one visit he was most anxious to
make without delay.
So at the risk of missing General Epanchin altogether, and thus
postponing his visit to Pavlofsk for a day, at least, the prince decided to go
and look for the house he desired to find.
The visit he was about to pay was, in some respects, a risky one. He was
in two minds about it, but knowing that the house was in the Gorohovaya,
not far from the Sadovaya, he determined to go in that direction, and to try
to make up his mind on the way.
Arrived at the point where the Gorohovaya crosses the Sadovaya, he was
surprised to find how excessively agitated he was. He had no idea that his
heart could beat so painfully.
One house in the Gorohovaya began to attract his attention long before
he reached it, and the prince remembered afterwards that he had said to
himself: “That is the house, I’m sure of it.” He came up to it quite curious
to discover whether he had guessed right, and felt that he would be
disagreeably impressed to find that he had actually done so. The house was
a large gloomy-looking structure, without the slightest claim to architectural
beauty, in colour a dirty green. There are a few of these old houses, built
towards the end of the last century, still standing in that part of St.
Petersburg, and showing little change from their original form and colour.
They are solidly built, and are remarkable for the thickness of their walls,
and for the fewness of their windows, many of which are covered by
gratings. On the ground-floor there is usually a money-changer’s shop, and
the owner lives over it. Without as well as within, the houses seem
inhospitable and mysterious—an impression which is difficult to explain,
unless it has something to do with the actual architectural style. These
houses are almost exclusively inhabited by the merchant class.
Arrived at the gate, the prince looked up at the legend over it, which ran:
“House of Rogojin, hereditary and honourable citizen.”
He hesitated no longer; but opened the glazed door at the bottom of the
outer stairs and made his way up to the second storey. The place was dark
and gloomy-looking; the walls of the stone staircase were painted a dull red.
Rogojin and his mother and brother occupied the whole of the second floor.
The servant who opened the door to Muishkin led him, without taking his
name, through several rooms and up and down many steps until they
arrived at a door, where he knocked.
Parfen Rogojin opened the door himself.
On seeing the prince he became deadly white, and apparently fixed to the
ground, so that he was more like a marble statue than a human being. The
prince had expected some surprise, but Rogojin evidently considered his
visit an impossible and miraculous event. He stared with an expression
almost of terror, and his lips twisted into a bewildered smile.
“Parfen! perhaps my visit is ill-timed. I—I can go away again if you
like,” said Muishkin at last, rather embarrassed.
“No, no; it’s all right, come in,” said Parfen, recollecting himself.
They were evidently on quite familiar terms. In Moscow they had had
many occasions of meeting; indeed, some few of those meetings were but
too vividly impressed upon their memories. They had not met now,
however, for three months.
The deathlike pallor, and a sort of slight convulsion about the lips, had
not left Rogojin’s face. Though he welcomed his guest, he was still
obviously much disturbed. As he invited the prince to sit down near the
table, the latter happened to turn towards him, and was startled by the
strange expression on his face. A painful recollection flashed into his mind.
He stood for a time, looking straight at Rogojin, whose eyes seemed to
blaze like fire. At last Rogojin smiled, though he still looked agitated and
shaken.
“What are you staring at me like that for?” he muttered. “Sit down.”
The prince took a chair.
“Parfen,” he said, “tell me honestly, did you know that I was coming to
Petersburg or no?”
“Oh, I supposed you were coming,” the other replied, smiling
sarcastically, “and I was right in my supposition, you see; but how was I to
know that you would come today?”
A certain strangeness and impatience in his manner impressed the prince
very forcibly.
“And if you had known that I was coming today, why be so irritated
about it?” he asked, in quiet surprise.
“Why did you ask me?”
“Because when I jumped out of the train this morning, two eyes glared at
me just as yours did a moment since.”
“Ha! and whose eyes may they have been?” said Rogojin, suspiciously. It
seemed to the prince that he was trembling.
“I don’t know; I thought it was a hallucination. I often have
hallucinations nowadays. I feel just as I did five years ago when my fits
were about to come on.”
“Well, perhaps it was a hallucination, I don’t know,” said Parfen.
He tried to give the prince an affectionate smile, and it seemed to the
latter as though in this smile of his something had broken, and that he could
not mend it, try as he would.
“Shall you go abroad again then?” he asked, and suddenly added, “Do
you remember how we came up in the train from Pskoff together? You and
your cloak and leggings, eh?”
And Rogojin burst out laughing, this time with unconcealed malice, as
though he were glad that he had been able to find an opportunity for giving
vent to it.
“Have you quite taken up your quarters here?” asked the prince
“Yes, I’m at home. Where else should I go to?”
“We haven’t met for some time. Meanwhile I have heard things about
you which I should not have believed to be possible.”
“What of that? People will say anything,” said Rogojin drily.
“At all events, you’ve disbanded your troop—and you are living in your
own house instead of being fast and loose about the place; that’s all very
good. Is this house all yours, or joint property?”
“It is my mother’s. You get to her apartments by that passage.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“In the other wing.”
“Is he married?”
“Widower. Why do you want to know all this?”
The prince looked at him, but said nothing. He had suddenly relapsed
into musing, and had probably not heard the question at all. Rogojin did not
insist upon an answer, and there was silence for a few moments.
“I guessed which was your house from a hundred yards off,” said the
prince at last.
“Why so?”
“I don’t quite know. Your house has the aspect of yourself and all your
family; it bears the stamp of the Rogojin life; but ask me why I think so,
and I can tell you nothing. It is nonsense, of course. I am nervous about this
kind of thing troubling me so much. I had never before imagined what sort
of a house you would live in, and yet no sooner did I set eyes on this one
than I said to myself that it must be yours.”
“Really!” said Rogojin vaguely, not taking in what the prince meant by
his rather obscure remarks.
The room they were now sitting in was a large one, lofty but dark, well
furnished, principally with writing-tables and desks covered with papers
and books. A wide sofa covered with red morocco evidently served Rogojin
for a bed. On the table beside which the prince had been invited to seat
himself lay some books; one containing a marker where the reader had left
off, was a volume of Solovieff’s History. Some oil-paintings in worn gilded
frames hung on the walls, but it was impossible to make out what subjects
they represented, so blackened were they by smoke and age. One, a life-
sized portrait, attracted the prince’s attention. It showed a man of about
fifty, wearing a long riding-coat of German cut. He had two medals on his
breast; his beard was white, short and thin; his face yellow and wrinkled,
with a sly, suspicious expression in the eyes.
“That is your father, is it not?” asked the prince.
“Yes, it is,” replied Rogojin with an unpleasant smile, as if he had
expected his guest to ask the question, and then to make some disagreeable
remark.
“Was he one of the Old Believers?”
“No, he went to church, but to tell the truth he really preferred the old
religion. This was his study and is now mine. Why did you ask if he were
an Old Believer?”
“Are you going to be married here?”
“Ye-yes!” replied Rogojin, starting at the unexpected question.
“Soon?”
“You know yourself it does not depend on me.”
“Parfen, I am not your enemy, and I do not intend to oppose your
intentions in any way. I repeat this to you now just as I said it to you once
before on a very similar occasion. When you were arranging for your
projected marriage in Moscow, I did not interfere with you—you know I
did not. That first time she fled to me from you, from the very altar almost,
and begged me to ‘save her from you.’ Afterwards she ran away from me
again, and you found her and arranged your marriage with her once more;
and now, I hear, she has run away from you and come to Petersburg. Is it
true? Lebedeff wrote me to this effect, and that’s why I came here. That you
had once more arranged matters with Nastasia Philipovna I only learned last
night in the train from a friend of yours, Zaleshoff—if you wish to know.
“I confess I came here with an object. I wished to persuade Nastasia to go
abroad for her health; she requires it. Both mind and body need a change
badly. I did not intend to take her abroad myself. I was going to arrange for
her to go without me. Now I tell you honestly, Parfen, if it is true that all is
made up between you, I will not so much as set eyes upon her, and I will
never even come to see you again.
“You know quite well that I am telling the truth, because I have always
been frank with you. I have never concealed my own opinion from you. I
have always told you that I consider a marriage between you and her would
be ruin to her. You would also be ruined, and perhaps even more hopelessly.
If this marriage were to be broken off again, I admit I should be greatly
pleased; but at the same time I have not the slightest intention of trying to
part you. You may be quite easy in your mind, and you need not suspect me.
You know yourself whether I was ever really your rival or not, even when
she ran away and came to me.
“There, you are laughing at me—I know why you laugh. It is perfectly
true that we lived apart from one another all the time, in different towns. I
told you before that I did not love her with love, but with pity! You said
then that you understood me; did you really understand me or not? What
hatred there is in your eyes at this moment! I came to relieve your mind,
because you are dear to me also. I love you very much, Parfen; and now I
shall go away and never come back again. Goodbye.”
The prince rose.
“Stay a little,” said Parfen, not leaving his chair and resting his head on
his right hand. “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”
The prince sat down again. Both were silent for a few moments.
“When you are not with me I hate you, Lef Nicolaievitch. I have loathed
you every day of these three months since I last saw you. By heaven I
have!” said Rogojin. “I could have poisoned you at any minute. Now, you
have been with me but a quarter of an hour, and all my malice seems to
have melted away, and you are as dear to me as ever. Stay here a little
longer.”
“When I am with you you trust me; but as soon as my back is turned you
suspect me,” said the prince, smiling, and trying to hide his emotion.
“I trust your voice, when I hear you speak. I quite understand that you
and I cannot be put on a level, of course.”
“Why did you add that?—There! Now you are cross again,” said the
prince, wondering.
“We were not asked, you see. We were made different, with different
tastes and feelings, without being consulted. You say you love her with pity.
I have no pity for her. She hates me—that’s the plain truth of the matter. I
dream of her every night, and always that she is laughing at me with
another man. And so she does laugh at me. She thinks no more of marrying
me than if she were changing her shoe. Would you believe it, I haven’t seen
her for five days, and I daren’t go near her. She asks me what I come for, as
if she were not content with having disgraced me—”
“Disgraced you! How?”
“Just as though you didn’t know! Why, she ran away from me, and went
to you. You admitted it yourself, just now.”
“But surely you do not believe that she…”
“That she did not disgrace me at Moscow with that officer,
Zemtuznikoff? I know for certain she did, after having fixed our marriage-
day herself!”
“Impossible!” cried the prince.
“I know it for a fact,” replied Rogojin, with conviction.
“It is not like her, you say? My friend, that’s absurd. Perhaps such an act
would horrify her, if she were with you, but it is quite different where I am
concerned. She looks on me as vermin. Her affair with Keller was simply to
make a laughing-stock of me. You don’t know what a fool she made of me
in Moscow; and the money I spent over her! The money! the money!”
“And you can marry her now, Parfen! What will come of it all?” said the
prince, with dread in his voice.
Rogojin gazed back gloomily, and with a terrible expression in his eyes,
but said nothing.
“I haven’t been to see her for five days,” he repeated, after a slight pause.
“I’m afraid of being turned out. She says she’s still her own mistress, and
may turn me off altogether, and go abroad. She told me this herself,” he
said, with a peculiar glance at Muishkin. “I think she often does it merely to
frighten me. She is always laughing at me, for some reason or other; but at
other times she’s angry, and won’t say a word, and that’s what I’m afraid of.
I took her a shawl one day, the like of which she might never have seen,
although she did live in luxury and she gave it away to her maid, Katia.
Sometimes when I can keep away no longer, I steal past the house on the
sly, and once I watched at the gate till dawn—I thought something was
going on—and she saw me from the window. She asked me what I should
do if I found she had deceived me. I said, ‘You know well enough.’”
“What did she know?” cried the prince.
“How was I to tell?” replied Rogojin, with an angry laugh. “I did my best
to catch her tripping in Moscow, but did not succeed. However, I caught
hold of her one day, and said: ‘You are engaged to be married into a
respectable family, and do you know what sort of a woman you are? That’s
the sort of woman you are,’ I said.”
“You told her that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, go on.”
“She said, ‘I wouldn’t even have you for a footman now, much less for a
husband.’ ‘I shan’t leave the house,’ I said, ‘so it doesn’t matter.’ ‘Then I
shall call somebody and have you kicked out,’ she cried. So then I rushed at
her, and beat her till she was bruised all over.”
“Impossible!” cried the prince, aghast.
“I tell you it’s true,” said Rogojin quietly, but with eyes ablaze with
passion.
“Then for a day and a half I neither slept, nor ate, nor drank, and would
not leave her. I knelt at her feet: ‘I shall die here,’ I said, ‘if you don’t
forgive me; and if you have me turned out, I shall drown myself; because,
what should I be without you now?’ She was like a madwoman all that day;
now she would cry; now she would threaten me with a knife; now she
would abuse me. She called in Zaleshoff and Keller, and showed me to
them, shamed me in their presence. ‘Let’s all go to the theatre,’ she says,
‘and leave him here if he won’t go—it’s not my business. They’ll give you
some tea, Parfen Semeonovitch, while I am away, for you must be hungry.’
She came back from the theatre alone. ‘Those cowards wouldn’t come,’ she
said. ‘They are afraid of you, and tried to frighten me, too. “He won’t go
away as he came,” they said, “he’ll cut your throat—see if he doesn’t.”
Now, I shall go to my bedroom, and I shall not even lock my door, just to
show you how much I am afraid of you. You must be shown that once for
all. Did you have tea?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘and I don’t intend to.’ ‘Ha, ha! you are
playing off your pride against your stomach! That sort of heroism doesn’t
sit well on you,’ she said.
“With that she did as she had said she would; she went to bed, and did
not lock her door. In the morning she came out. ‘Are you quite mad?’ she
said, sharply. ‘Why, you’ll die of hunger like this.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘No,
I won’t, and I won’t marry you. I’ve said it. Surely you haven’t sat in this
chair all night without sleeping?’ ‘I didn’t sleep,’ I said. ‘H’m! how sensible
of you. And are you going to have no breakfast or dinner today?’ ‘I told you
I wouldn’t. Forgive me!’ ‘You’ve no idea how unbecoming this sort of thing
is to you,’ she said, ‘it’s like putting a saddle on a cow’s back. Do you think
you are frightening me? My word, what a dreadful thing that you should sit
here and eat no food! How terribly frightened I am!’ She wasn’t angry long,
and didn’t seem to remember my offence at all. I was surprised, for she is a
vindictive, resentful woman—but then I thought that perhaps she despised
me too much to feel any resentment against me. And that’s the truth.
“She came up to me and said, ‘Do you know who the Pope of Rome is?’
‘I’ve heard of him,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’ve read the Universal History,
Parfen Semeonovitch, haven’t you?’ she asked. ‘I’ve learned nothing at all,’
I said. ‘Then I’ll lend it to you to read. You must know there was a Roman
Pope once, and he was very angry with a certain Emperor; so the Emperor
came and neither ate nor drank, but knelt before the Pope’s palace till he
should be forgiven. And what sort of vows do you think that Emperor was
making during all those days on his knees? Stop, I’ll read it to you!’ Then
she read me a lot of verses, where it said that the Emperor spent all the time
vowing vengeance against the Pope. ‘You don’t mean to say you don’t
approve of the poem, Parfen Semeonovitch,’ she says. ‘All you have read
out is perfectly true,’ say I. ‘Aha!’ says she, ‘you admit it’s true, do you?
And you are making vows to yourself that if I marry you, you will remind
me of all this, and take it out of me.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘perhaps I was
thinking like that, and perhaps I was not. I’m not thinking of anything just
now.’ ‘What are your thoughts, then?’ ‘I’m thinking that when you rise from
your chair and go past me, I watch you, and follow you with my eyes; if
your dress does but rustle, my heart sinks; if you leave the room, I
remember every little word and action, and what your voice sounded like,
and what you said. I thought of nothing all last night, but sat here listening
to your sleeping breath, and heard you move a little, twice.’ ‘And as for
your attack upon me,’ she says, ‘I suppose you never once thought of that?’
‘Perhaps I did think of it, and perhaps not,’ I say. ‘And what if I don’t either
forgive you or marry, you?’ ‘I tell you I shall go and drown myself.’ ‘H’m!’
she said, and then relapsed into silence. Then she got angry, and went out. ‘I
suppose you’d murder me before you drowned yourself, though!’ she cried
as she left the room.
“An hour later, she came to me again, looking melancholy. ‘I will marry
you, Parfen Semeonovitch,’ she says, not because I’m frightened of you, but
because it’s all the same to me how I ruin myself. And how can I do it
better? Sit down; they’ll bring you some dinner directly. And if I do marry
you, I’ll be a faithful wife to you—you need not doubt that.’ Then she
thought a bit, and said, ‘At all events, you are not a flunkey; at first, I
thought you were no better than a flunkey.’ And she arranged the wedding
and fixed the day straight away on the spot.
“Then, in another week, she had run away again, and came here to
Lebedeff’s; and when I found her here, she said to me, ‘I’m not going to
renounce you altogether, but I wish to put off the wedding a bit longer yet—
just as long as I like—for I am still my own mistress; so you may wait, if
you like.’ That’s how the matter stands between us now. What do you think
of all this, Lef Nicolaievitch?”
“‘What do you think of it yourself?” replied the prince, looking sadly at
Rogojin.
“As if I can think anything about it! I—” He was about to say more, but
stopped in despair.
The prince rose again, as if he would leave.
“At all events, I shall not interfere with you!” he murmured, as though
making answer to some secret thought of his own.
“I’ll tell you what!” cried Rogojin, and his eyes flashed fire. “I can’t
understand your yielding her to me like this; I don’t understand it. Have you
given up loving her altogether? At first you suffered badly—I know it—I
saw it. Besides, why did you come post-haste after us? Out of pity, eh? He,
he, he!” His mouth curved in a mocking smile.
“Do you think I am deceiving you?” asked the prince.
“No! I trust you—but I can’t understand. It seems to me that your pity is
greater than my love.” A hungry longing to speak his mind out seemed to
flash in the man’s eyes, combined with an intense anger.
“Your love is mingled with hatred, and therefore, when your love passes,
there will be the greater misery,” said the prince. “I tell you this, Parfen—”
“What! that I’ll cut her throat, you mean?”
The prince shuddered.
“You’ll hate her afterwards for all your present love, and for all the
torment you are suffering on her account now. What seems to me the most
extraordinary thing is, that she can again consent to marry you, after all that
has passed between you. When I heard the news yesterday, I could hardly
bring myself to believe it. Why, she has run twice from you, from the very
altar rails, as it were. She must have some presentiment of evil. What can
she want with you now? Your money? Nonsense! Besides, I should think
you must have made a fairly large hole in your fortune already. Surely it is
not because she is so very anxious to find a husband? She could find many
a one besides yourself. Anyone would be better than you, because you will
murder her, and I feel sure she must know that but too well by now. Is it
because you love her so passionately? Indeed, that may be it. I have heard
that there are women who want just that kind of love… but still…” The
prince paused, reflectively.
“What are you grinning at my father’s portrait again for?” asked Rogojin,
suddenly. He was carefully observing every change in the expression of the
prince’s face.
“I smiled because the idea came into my head that if it were not for this
unhappy passion of yours you might have, and would have, become just
such a man as your father, and that very quickly, too. You’d have settled
down in this house of yours with some silent and obedient wife. You would
have spoken rarely, trusted no one, heeded no one, and thought of nothing
but making money.”
“Laugh away! She said exactly the same, almost word for word, when
she saw my father’s portrait. It’s remarkable how entirely you and she are at
one now-a-days.”
“What, has she been here?” asked the prince with curiosity.
“Yes! She looked long at the portrait and asked all about my father.
‘You’d be just such another,’ she said at last, and laughed. ‘You have such
strong passions, Parfen,’ she said, ‘that they’d have taken you to Siberia in
no time if you had not, luckily, intelligence as well. For you have a good
deal of intelligence.’ (She said this—believe it or not. The first time I ever
heard anything of that sort from her.) ‘You’d soon have thrown up all this
rowdyism that you indulge in now, and you’d have settled down to quiet,
steady money-making, because you have little education; and here you’d
have stayed just like your father before you. And you’d have loved your
money so that you’d amass not two million, like him, but ten million; and
you’d have died of hunger on your money bags to finish up with, for you
carry everything to extremes.’ There, that’s exactly word for word as she
said it to me. She never talked to me like that before. She always talks
nonsense and laughs when she’s with me. We went all over this old house
together. ‘I shall change all this,’ I said, ‘or else I’ll buy a new house for the
wedding.’ ‘No, no!’ she said, ‘don’t touch anything; leave it all as it is; I
shall live with your mother when I marry you.’
“I took her to see my mother, and she was as respectful and kind as
though she were her own daughter. Mother has been almost demented ever
since father died—she’s an old woman. She sits and bows from her chair to
everyone she sees. If you left her alone and didn’t feed her for three days, I
don’t believe she would notice it. Well, I took her hand, and I said, ‘Give
your blessing to this lady, mother, she’s going to be my wife.’ So Nastasia
kissed mother’s hand with great feeling. ‘She must have suffered terribly,
hasn’t she?’ she said. She saw this book here lying before me. ‘What! have
you begun to read Russian history?’ she asked. She told me once in
Moscow, you know, that I had better get Solovieff’s Russian History and
read it, because I knew nothing. ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘you go on like
that, reading books. I’ll make you a list myself of the books you ought to
read first—shall I?’ She had never once spoken to me like this before; it was
the first time I felt I could breathe before her like a living creature.”
“I’m very, very glad to hear of this, Parfen,” said the prince, with real
feeling. “Who knows? Maybe God will yet bring you near to one another.”
“Never, never!” cried Rogojin, excitedly.
“Look here, Parfen; if you love her so much, surely you must be anxious
to earn her respect? And if you do so wish, surely you may hope to? I said
just now that I considered it extraordinary that she could still be ready to
marry you. Well, though I cannot yet understand it, I feel sure she must
have some good reason, or she wouldn’t do it. She is sure of your love; but
besides that, she must attribute something else to you—some good qualities,
otherwise the thing would not be. What you have just said confirms my
words. You say yourself that she found it possible to speak to you quite
differently from her usual manner. You are suspicious, you know, and
jealous, therefore when anything annoying happens to you, you exaggerate
its significance. Of course, of course, she does not think so ill of you as you
say. Why, if she did, she would simply be walking to death by drowning or
by the knife, with her eyes wide open, when she married you. It is
impossible! As if anybody would go to their death deliberately!”
Rogojin listened to the prince’s excited words with a bitter smile. His
conviction was, apparently, unalterable.
“How dreadfully you look at me, Parfen!” said the prince, with a feeling
of dread.
“Water or the knife?” said the latter, at last. “Ha, ha—that’s exactly why
she is going to marry me, because she knows for certain that the knife
awaits her. Prince, can it be that you don’t even yet see what’s at the root of
it all?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Perhaps he really doesn’t understand me! They do say that you are a—
you know what! She loves another—there, you can understand that much!
Just as I love her, exactly so she loves another man. And that other man is—
do you know who? It’s you. There—you didn’t know that, eh?”
“I?”
“You, you! She has loved you ever since that day, her birthday! Only she
thinks she cannot marry you, because it would be the ruin of you.
‘Everybody knows what sort of a woman I am,’ she says. She told me all
this herself, to my very face! She’s afraid of disgracing and ruining you, she
says, but it doesn’t matter about me. She can marry me all right! Notice
how much consideration she shows for me!”
“But why did she run away to me, and then again from me to—”
“From you to me? Ha, ha! that’s nothing! Why, she always acts as though
she were in a delirium now-a-days! Either she says, ‘Come on, I’ll marry
you! Let’s have the wedding quickly!’ and fixes the day, and seems in a
hurry for it, and when it begins to come near she feels frightened; or else
some other idea gets into her head—goodness knows! you’ve seen her—
you know how she goes on—laughing and crying and raving! There’s
nothing extraordinary about her having run away from you! She ran away
because she found out how dearly she loved you. She could not bear to be
near you. You said just now that I had found her at Moscow, when she ran
away from you. I didn’t do anything of the sort; she came to me herself,
straight from you. ‘Name the day—I’m ready!’ she said. ‘Let’s have some
champagne, and go and hear the gipsies sing!’ I tell you she’d have thrown
herself into the water long ago if it were not for me! She doesn’t do it
because I am, perhaps, even more dreadful to her than the water! She’s
marrying me out of spite; if she marries me, I tell you, it will be for spite!”
“But how do you, how can you—” began the prince, gazing with dread
and horror at Rogojin.
“Why don’t you finish your sentence? Shall I tell you what you were
thinking to yourself just then? You were thinking, ‘How can she marry him
after this? How can it possibly be permitted?’ Oh, I know what you were
thinking about!”
“I didn’t come here for that purpose, Parfen. That was not in my mind—”
“That may be! Perhaps you didn’t come with the idea, but the idea is
certainly there now! Ha, ha! well, that’s enough! What are you upset about?
Didn’t you really know it all before? You astonish me!”
“All this is mere jealousy—it is some malady of yours, Parfen! You
exaggerate everything,” said the prince, excessively agitated. “What are you
doing?”
“Let go of it!” said Parfen, seizing from the prince’s hand a knife which
the latter had at that moment taken up from the table, where it lay beside the
history. Parfen replaced it where it had been.
“I seemed to know it—I felt it, when I was coming back to Petersburg,”
continued the prince, “I did not want to come, I wished to forget all this, to
uproot it from my memory altogether! Well, good-bye—what is the
matter?”
