XL.
On the third day after his death the burial took place, with great pomp and an immense crowd.
Only when one misses a dead man can one fully recognize his greatness, and to the artist world which assembled round Lensky's coffin in Rome it grew plain that they had buried a giant. At first the Russians would not consent that the body of their great man, who had so unspeakably loved his fatherland, should be confided to strange earth, but his children knew that he had wished to be buried near his wife in the strangers' cemetery at the foot of the Aventine, and they respected his last wishes.
Mascha's inner self was wholly shattered. Not only her husband, but also her mother-in-law, had come from Venice to be present at the funeral solemnities, to support, to console the broken young woman. She repelled every consolation.
In spite of her great physical exhaustion, she would not be prevented from accompanying the corpse to the edge of the grave. They were afraid that she would swoon when the body was lowered into the grave, but she stood up erect.
When the mourners returned from the burial to the hotel, the table was laid for them in the drawing-room. Sonia, who had been present in these sad times, and like a warm, mild sunbeam had assisted benevolently and unobtrusively, stood near the samovar. With loathing, Mascha turned away, and hurried to her room, where she shut herself in. She who had borne so much sadness and trouble without complaining, this time knew no bounds to her grief. Bärenburg, Nikolai, her mother-in-law--one after the other knocked at her door to say something loving to her, to console her. She admitted no one.
Stiff and erect, she sat there in the first chair she could find, deathly pale and tearless.
"Console!" said she to herself, bitterly. "Whom will they console?" They, none of whom understand what she has buried with the great, stormy heart that rests at the foot of the Aventine. She has lost the only person who fully understood her, whom she could wholly confide in. The man who has petted and indulged her, and cared for her like a little child who has hurt itself--had wrapped her warmly and securely in his protecting tenderness when the rest of the world turned from her. It seemed to her that life has paused around her. All is hard and cold.
Her husband at last won admittance to her. His flat words of consolation, his attempts to calm her with caresses, excited her almost to madness. She, who had formerly always tolerated him near her with the same even friendliness, repulsed him, no longer mistress of herself, this time with a furious roughness at which a deeper-thinking man would have been frightened. But he explained this violence by overstrained nerves, and withdrew with a last mild, kind word on his lips.
When the door had closed behind him, an indescribably painful feeling overpowered her. Never before had she felt his triteness so plainly as in this moment when her agony tore down, with its tyrannical ruthlessness, all her carefully piled-up deceptions. For the first time she realized the whole irremediable flatness and dryness in which her future must drag on--her future with this man who was a stranger to all her deeper thoughts and feelings.
Her last prop had fallen with her father. For love of him she had at least tried to appear happy; but now, for what purpose--why? She could no longer bear her existence. It was impossible to live longer.
Then she heard the steps of insecure little feet approaching her door; then the soft knocking of two tiny little fists, which wounded themselves on the hard wood; an indistinguishable tender word lisped by soft child's lips.
She started up and opened the door. Without stood Natascha and her nurse. The nurse drew back. The child stared at her mother, whose pale face and long mourning dress seemed strange to her; then she nestled in her dress and began to stroke and caress the black folds violently. The young wife raised the child in her arms. Natascha did not cease to embrace and kiss her mother with the touching, helpless tenderness of a little being in whom love has awakened before intellect, who suspects a pain which it does not yet understand, and would fain console before it can yet speak.
For the first time Mascha's pain dissolved in tears. Sobbing, she pressed the little girl to her breast. "Bear your cross patiently," she murmured, thinking of the words with which her father in that fearful night in Venice had calmed her heart, rebelling against its oppressive lot. "Bear your cross!"
She kissed the child again and again, and the grief for the dead met in her heart the love for this sweet young life.
And Nikolai?
He bore the great loss calmly, so calmly that Mascha, who suspected nothing of his feelings and who was without the key to them, ascribed utter indifference to him.
Really, his father had died to him before. He had lost him on that hot June day in Paris. He had only buried him in Rome.
While he watched by the coffin through the two mild spring nights, he had sought his pain and could not find it.
But now, after the restlessness which is always bound up with the last solemnities is over, after the dead one has been carried away, and he can fully measure the great chasm which the death of his father has rent in his existence, a sadness increasing with every hour overwhelms him. Weary from watching as he was, he nevertheless did not close his eyes in the night which followed the burial. His thoughts were constantly occupied with the dead as with a great riddle.
He saw the strange, great man before him in all his phases. He saw him as a young man, with his proud bearing, his dark, attractive, expressive face, his quick, energetic earnestness full of fire, and that irresistible gentleness and tenderness of very violent men, who are continually afraid of paining their loved ones by a rough word, a thoughtless wildness. He saw the change which slowly took place in the attractive face, and how it grew coarser, and still something of the old charm remained--yes, with advancing years became more evident--a charm which summarized an expression of unspeakably sad kindness.
There was something fairly startling about this kindness, this rich, unwearying compassion. It was as if destiny had punished him for all that he had done in his wild violence of life, by condemning him to forever bear about with him this great, warm, restless, sympathetic heart.
Nikolai would have so willingly grieved for his father from his whole heart, and thought of only the great and noble in him. He could not. The old, hateful story still tormented him, tormented him so much the more as he reproached himself with thinking of it now, and it seemed to him small and repulsive in every respect to remember any fault of his father after his death.
Early in the morning, before any one else was stirring, he went out, took a carriage, and drove to his father's grave.
He had to walk a long distance through the graveyard before he reached it. At last he discovered the grave. A mountain of wreaths covered it. At the foot kneeled a black form, bowed deeply over her hands, praying.
Was that Mascha? Could she have come before him? He hurried nearer. No, that was not Mascha. Slowly she rose; it was Nita. Her eyes met his. It thrilled him through and through. They were the same wonderfully beautiful eyes, the remembrance of which had followed him across the sea, which he loved so unspeakably, and--which had once so pained him. Some change had taken place in them. The shadow which had formerly darkened them had vanished. Ah! how loving and kind were those eyes now, somewhat sad indeed, but with the sadness of a great compassion, of a hearty forgiveness.
The bitterness of a hateful recollection had no place more in this pure, warmly beating heart.
He lowered his head before Nita's brilliant glance, quite ashamed. What thoughts could he have of his father if she could forgive!
She seemed surprised to see him, but she betrayed no embarrassment at meeting him at the grave of his father. As he silently removed his hat, she came up to him with all her old freedom and gave him her hand. She evidently remembered that she had once caused him pain, and was sorry for it. Then she spoke a few words to him in her sweet, soft voice, in an undertone, as one speaks near the dead; smiled at him, crossed herself once more before the grave, and went.
He looked after her as she moved away among the dark cypresses as lightly as if borne on clouds, ever further, further between the white tombstones; looked after her, astonished, thoughtfully. Then he bent down there, where she had knelt, pushed the flowers a little aside, and kissed the fresh earth.
All was calm within him. He had finished one great period of his life. It was not only his father whom he had buried there, under the flower-covered mound; it was the last trace of a foolish hope which had, until then, prevented him from turning his eyes from his beautiful youthful dream and looking reality courageously in the face.
He had never ceased to love Nita, he knew that he would always love her, but calmly and undesiringly as one loves a saint or the dead.
When, a half-hour later, he left the graveyard, he bore his head high, and had the earnest, resolute look of a man who has begun a new life.
The perpetual remembrance of his father which he carried with him into this new life was that of the pale, noble face, alienated from all earthly shortcomings of the dead.