The Precipice Part 42

"It comes not from me, but from a woman, and not from her head, but from her heart. My Aunt...."

"The old lady has a sound heart. I must go and breakfast with her one day. It is a pity she has ama.s.sed so many foolish ideas. Now I am going.

Look after Koslov, if not personally, through some one else. The day before yesterday his head had to be cooled all day, and at night cabbage leaves should be laid on it. I was a little disturbed, because in his dazed state he got the cabbage and began to eat it. Good-bye! I have neither slept nor eaten, though Avdotya has treated me to a horrible brew of coffee...."

"Allow me to send the coachman home to fetch some supper," said Raisky.

"I would rather eat at home."

"Perhaps you have no money," said Raisky nervously drawing out his pocket book.

"I have money," said Mark enigmatically, hardly able to restrain a callous laugh, "I am going to the bath-house before I have my supper, as I haven't been able to undress here. I have changed my quarters, and now live with a clerical personage."

"You look ill, thin, and your eyes...."

Mark's face grew more evil and sinister than before.

"You too look worse," he said. "If you look in the gla.s.s you will see yellow patches and hollow eyes."

"I have many causes of anxiety."

"So have I. Good-bye," said Mark, and was gone.

Raisky went into the study and walked up to the bed on tiptoe.

"Who is there?" asked Leonti feebly.

When Leonti recognised Raisky he pushed his feet out of bed, and sat up.

"Is he gone?" he asked weakly. "I pretended to be asleep. You have not been for so long, and I have been expecting you all the time. The face of an old comrade is the only one that I can bear to see."

"I have been away, and heard when I returned of your illness."

"It is gossip. There is a conspiracy to say I am ill, which is all foolish talk. Mark, who even fetched a doctor, has been hanging about here as if he were afraid I should do myself an injury," said Leonti and paced up and down the room.

"You are weak, and walk with difficulty," said Raisky. "It would be better for you to lie down."

"I am weak, that is true," admitted Leonti.

He bent over the chair-back to Raisky, embraced him, and laid his face against his hair. Raisky felt hot tears on his forehead and cheeks.

"It is weakness," sobbed Leonti. "But I am not ill, and have not brain fever. They talk, but don't understand. And I understood nothing either, but now that I see you, I cannot keep back my tears. Don't abuse me like Mark, or laugh at me, as they all do, my colleagues and my sympathetic visitors. I can discern malicious laughter on all their faces."

"I respect and understand your tears and your sorrow," said Raisky, stifling his own tears.

"You are my kind old comrade. Even at school you never laughed at me, and do you know why I weep?"

Leonti took a letter from his desk and handed it to Raisky. It was the letter from Juliana Andreevna of which Tatiana Markovna had spoken.

Raisky glanced through it.

"Destroy it," he said. "You will have no peace while it is in your possession."

"Destroy it!" said Leonti, seizing the letter, and replacing it in the desk. "How is it possible to think of such a thing, when these are the only lines she has written me, and these are all that I have as a souvenir?"

"Leonti! Think of all this as a malady, a terrible misfortune, and don't succ.u.mb to it. You are not an old man, and have a long life before you."

"My life is over, unless she returns to me," he whispered.

"What! You could, you would take her back!"

"You, too, Boris, fail to understand me!" cried Leonti in despair, as he thrust his hands into his hair and strode up and down. "People keep on saying I am ill, they offer sympathy, bring a doctor, sit all night by my bedside, and yet don't guess why I suffer so wildly, don't even guess at the only remedy there is for me. She is not here," he whispered wildly, seizing Raisky by the shoulders and shaking him violently. "She is not here, and that is what const.i.tutes my illness. Besides, I am not ill, I am dead. Take me to her, and I shall rise again. And you ask whether I will take her back again! You, a novelist, don't understand simple things like that!"

"I did not know that you loved her like that," said Raisky tenderly.

"You used to laugh and say that you had got so used to her that you were becoming faithless to your Greeks and Romans."

"I chattered, I boasted," laughed Leonti bitterly, "and was without understanding. But for this I never should have understood. I thought I loved the ancients, while my whole love was given to the living woman.

Yes, Boris, I loved books and my gymnasium, the ancients and the moderns, my scholars, and you, Boris; I loved the street, this hedge, the service tree there, only through my love for her. Now, nothing of all this matters. I knew that as I lay on the floor reading her letter. And you ask whether I would receive her. G.o.d in Heaven! If she came, how she should be cherished!" he concluded, his tears flowing once more.

"Leonti, I come to you with a request from Tatiana Markovna, who asks you," he went on, though Leonti walked ceaselessly up and down, dragging his slippers and appeared not to listen, "to come over to us. Here you will die of misery."

"Thank you," said Leonti, shaking his head. "She is a saint. But how can a desolate man carry his sorrow into a strange house?"

"Not a strange house, Leonti, we are brothers, and our relation is closer than the ties of blood."

Leonti lay down on the bed, and took Raisky's hand.

"Pardon my egoism," he said. "Later, later, I will come of my own accord, will ask permission to look after your library, if no hope is left me."

"Have you any hope?"

"What! Do you think there is no hope?"

Raisky, who did not wish to deprive his friend of the last straw, nor to stir useless hope in him, hesitated, before he answered after a pause: "I don't know what to say to you exactly, Leonti. I know so little of your wife that I cannot judge her character."

"You know her," said Leonti in a dull voice. "It was you who directed my attention to the Frenchman, but then I did not understand you, because nothing of the kind had entered my head. But if he leaves her," he said, with a gleam of hope in his eyes, "she will perhaps remember me."

"Perhaps," said Raisky. "To-morrow I will come to fetch you. Good-bye for the present. To-night I will either come myself or send someone who will stay with you."

Leonti did not hear, and did not even see Raisky go.

When he reached home, Raisky gave his aunt an account of Leonti's condition, telling her that there was no danger, but that no sympathy would help matters. Yakob was sent to look after the sick man and Tatiana Markovna did not forget to send an abundant supper, with tea, rum, wine and all sorts of other things.

"What are these things for, Grandmother?" asked Raisky. "He doesn't eat anything."

"But the other one, if he returns?"

"What other one?"

"Who but Markushka? He will want something to eat. You found him with our invalid."