Asbein Part 24

"Little mother, forgive me, oh, forgive me!" begged the child, embracing her mother with her soft, warm arms. "Sometimes it seems to me as if you love him as much as I, only you do not wish to. But why do you cover your soul with a veil; why? Oh, why did you separate yourself from him? He was not very much with us without that, but still it was so lovely to expect him and to rejoice over him from one time to another!" And Maschenka burst out in violent weeping.

Natalie remained silent, but she raised the child on her knee and kissed her, ah, how tenderly! Every tear she kissed away from the round little cheeks. And Maschenka never repeated her question.

Once, in the night--Maschenka's little room was next to her mother's bedroom--the child awoke; from the adjoining room sounded soft, whimpering, difficultly restrained sobs.

She wandered from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Nice, from Nice to Pau--all the European cities of refuge for uprooted existences she sought out. Nowhere could Natalie find rest. Sometimes she tried to distract herself. She never visited large entertainments, but she a.s.sociated with her old friends if she met them in their different exiles, gradually slid back into the old, aristocratic atmosphere in which she had been brought up; but, strange! she no longer felt at home therein, and in her inconsolable misery a feeling of insensible _ennui_ mingled itself.

His name never crossed her lips. Did she ever think of him? Day and night. The more she tried to accustom herself to other people the more she thought of him. How empty, how shallow, how insignificant were all the others in comparison to him; how cold, how hard!

Her health went rapidly downward. A short, nervous cough tormented her, her hands were now ice-cold, now hot with fever. a.s.sociated with that was something else strangely tormenting: she almost incessantly had the feeling that her heart was torn away from its natural place; she felt in her breast something like an uneasy fluttering, like the beating of the wings of a deathly weary, sinking bird.

She slept badly and was afraid of sleep, for always the whole spring of her love, with its entrancing charm and perfume of flowers, arose in her dreams again. Again vibrated through her soul the swelling musical, alluring call--Asbein. Little trifles, which in her waking condition she no longer remembered, came to her mind, and when she awoke she burned with fever and hid her face, gasping, in her pillows. She consumed herself in longing; a longing of which she was ashamed as of a sin, and which she fought as a sin.

Gradually she became wearier and more calm. His picture began to obliterate itself from her memory.

It was in Geneva, in a music shop. Natalie, who had gone out to attend to a few trifles, entered and desired the Chopin tudes, which she had promised to bring the extremely musical Maschenka. While a clerk looked for the music, she observed an elderly man--she divined the piano teacher in him--talking about a photograph which he held in his hand, to the woman who managed the business.

She glanced fleetingly at the photograph--she shuddered.

"So that is he; that is the way he looks now! _C'est qu'il a terriblement chang_," said the piano teacher.

"_Que voulez-vous_, with the existence which he leads?" replied the woman. "If one burns the candle of life at both ends!"

"But he should stop it, a married man, as he is," said the music teacher.

"My goodness; his marriage is so--so--he has been separated, who knows how long, already." The woman shrugged her shoulders.

"Ah! Who, then, is his wife?"

"Some great lady who has made enough out of him, and to whom he has become inconvenient," replied the old woman.

"So--h'm! that explains much," said the musician, and laying down the photograph, he added: "_enfin c'est un homme fini_." With that he seized the roll of music which had been prepared for him and left the shop. Natalie bought the photograph, without having the courage to look at it before strangers. Arrived at home, she unwrapped the portrait.

For the first time since that evening when she ran out of the Htel du Saxe she looked at a picture of him. She was frightened at the fearful physical deterioration designated in his features. Around the mouth and under the eyes hateful lines were drawn; but from the eyes still spoke the deep, seeking glance as formerly, and on the lips lay an expression of inconsolable goodness. "A great lady who has made enough out of him, and to whom he has become inconvenient," Natalie repeated to herself again and again. That truly was false from beginning to end. Still, a great uneasiness overcame her. The reproofs which she believed she had expiated once for all by the easy, tender confession that she had set aside her beloved husband on account of her scruples, now rose sharply and reprovingly before her.

A nervous condition, which culminated in a long-enduring cramp of the heart, befell her; the cramp was followed by an hour-long swoon which could not be lifted.

When she could again leave her bed, a great change had taken place in her. She no longer evaded the recollection of Lensky; the old love was dead, but a new love had risen from the ruins of the old, a new enlightened love, which was nothing more than a warm, compa.s.sionate pardon.

With the restlessness of those mortally ill, who in vain seek relief, she was again driven to leave Geneva, where at first she had intended to pa.s.s the whole winter. She longed for Rome.

The physicians laid no difficulties in the way. In the end, a dying person has the right to seek out the place where she will lay down her weary head for the last time.

In Rome, it seemed at first as if she would be better again. At the end of March, Nikolas came to visit her. He was now a young man, tall, slender, with great dreamy eyes in an aristocratically cut face, and with pretty, still somewhat embarra.s.sed manners.

Already he had twice come to foreign countries to visit his mother, but never had she been so glad to see him.

As the day was beautiful, and she felt better than usual, she proposed a drive. "To the Via Giulia," she ordered the coachman. "I will show you the Palazzo Morsini, in which we lived when your father was betrothed to me," she said to her children. Mascha looked at her mother in astonishment; it was the first time in quite three years that she had mentioned her father before her.

So they drove in the Via Giulia, on a bright March afternoon they drove there. But Natalie in vain sought the Palazzo Morsini; she did not find it. A pile of rubbish stood in its place, surrounded by a board fence.

Disappointed almost to tears, with that childish, foolish disappointment such as only those mortally ill know, she turned away.

On the way, it occurred to her to order the coachman to stop at the Trevi fountain. She quite started with delight when she saw the irregular collection of statues again. "Here I met your father for the first time in Rome; it is just twenty years ago," said she, and rested a strange, brilliant, dreamy glance on the old wall. The sculpturing was still blacker and more weather-worn than twenty years before, but the silver cascade rushed down more arrogantly than ever in the gray stone basin, and the sky, which arched over the time-blackened walls, was as blue as formerly. "Ah, how much beauty, n.o.bility, and immortality there still is in the world, together with the bad that pa.s.ses away," murmured Natalie, softly; then pa.s.sing her hand over her eyes, and as if speaking to herself, she added: "It is thus with great men, and therefore I think, considerately overlooking their earthly failings, one should rejoice over that which is immortal in them!"

Maschenka had not quite understood the words, but Nikolas sought by a glance the eyes of his mother, and raised her hand to his lips.

It was evening of the same day, in Natalie's pretty apartment on the Piazza di Spagna, opposite the church of Trinit dei Monti, and the sick woman, relieved of her constricting and heavy street-clothes, lay, in a white, lace-trimmed wrapper, on a lounge. Mother and son were alone. He had read her a couple of verses from Musset, which she particularly loved--_les souvenirs_--but it had become dark during the reading; he laid the book away. For a while they were both quiet, silently happy in each other's presence, as very nearly related people when they are together after a long separation; but then Nikolas laid his hand on that of his mother and said, softly: "Little mother--do you know that it was really papa who sent me to you?"

The hand of the mother trembles, and softly draws itself out from under the son's. Nikolas is silent. But what was that? After a while his mother's hand voluntarily stole back into his, and the young man continued: "Yes, papa sent me here, so that I might accurately report to him how you are. You really cannot imagine how he always asks after you, worries about you."

The hand of the poor woman trembles in that of her son, like an aspen leaf. After a pause, quite as if he had waited so that his words might sink warmly and deeply into her heart, he continues: "Father commissioned me to bring before you a request from him--namely, whether you would not permit him to visit you?"

Again Natalie drew her hand away from her son, but more hastily than the first time. Her breath comes quickly and pantingly, for a few moments she remains silent, then she says slowly, wearily: "No! it must not be; tell him all love and kindness from me, and that I think only with emotion of the great consideration which he always shows me, but it must not be--it is better so!"

After she had made this decision, which had a sad and intimidating effect upon the inexperienced boy, she remained for the rest of the evening taciturn and with that, out of temper and irritable, as one had never formerly seen her.

In the night she had one of her fearful attacks; the doctor must be sent for. When the horrible oppression of breath and shuddering had subsided, as usual, she fell into a condition of pale, cold numbness, which resembled a deep swoon.

Nikolas, who had watched by the sick one, accompanied the physician without. He begged him, in the name of his father, to tell him the truth about the condition of the sufferer. The physician told him that her condition was very serious, and a recovery absolutely out of the question. It might last a few weeks still, perhaps only a few days.

When Nikolas, with difficulty restraining his tears, came up to his mother's bed, she lay exactly in the same position as when he left the room; still, something about her had changed. Her eyes were closed, but around her beautiful mouth trembled a smile whose happy loveliness he never forgot.

After a while she looked up and said in a quite weak voice: "Perhaps only a few days"--she had heard the doctor's speech. After a pause, she added: "Write your father--write--he must hurry--only a few more days!"

Nikolas telegraphed to St. Petersburg.

The consciousness of her near death had given her back her lack of embarra.s.sment toward Lensky. She insisted that he should stay in her house, that they should prepare a room for him.

One day she was well enough to overlook the preparations herself. But the improvement did not last. Quite every night came on an attack, shorter and weaker, but still very painful; in between she slept, and always had the same dream. It seemed to her as if she could fly, but only about two feet from the ground; if she wished to rise higher, she awoke. Of the young happiness of her love, she dreamed never more.

Lensky had telegraphed back that he would set out immediately. They counted the days and nights which must elapse before his arrival--Kolia and she; they consulted railroad time-tables together--so long to Eydtkuhnen--so long to Berlin--so long to Vienna--so long to Rome. They were twelve hours apart in their reckoning. Natalie expected Lensky already on the morning of the fifth day, Nikolas not until the evening.

On the fourth day she was so well that she wished to undertake a walk.

"I would so like to see the spring once more," said she.

Nikolas begged her to save herself until his father had come, in order not to aggravate her heart by excitement--that great, rich heart through which she lived, and of which she was now dying. "We will bring the spring in to you," said he tenderly.