I
It was a moonlight night in May, and the nightingales were singing, when the wife of Father Ignatius entered his chamber. Her countenance expressed suffering, and the little lamp she held in her hand trembled. Approaching her husband, she touched his shoulder, and managed to say between her sobs:
“Father, let us go to Verochka!”
Without turning his head, Father Ignatius glanced severely at his wife over the rims of his spectacles, and looked long and intently, till she waved her unoccupied hand and dropped on a low divan.
“That one toward the other should be so pitiless!” she pronounced slowly, with emphasis on the final syllables, and her good plump face was distorted with a grimace of pain and exasperation, as if thus she would express what stern people they were—her husband and daughter.
Father Ignatius smiled and arose. Closing his book, he took off his spectacles, put them in the case, and meditated. His long black beard, inwoven with silver threads, lay dignified on his breast, and slowly heaved at every deep breath.
“Well, let us go,” said he.
Olga Stepanovna quickly arose and entreated in an appealing, timorous voice:
“Only don’t revile her, Father! You know the sort she is.”
Vera’s chamber was in the attic, and the narrow, wooden stair bent and creaked under the heavy tread of Father Ignatius. Tall and ponderous, he bent his head to avoid striking the floor of the upper story, and frowned disdainfully when the white jacket of his wife brushed his face. Well he knew that nothing would come of their talk with Vera.
“Why do you come?” asked Vera, raising a bared arm to her eyes. The other arm lay on top of a white summer blanket, hardly distinguishable from the fabric, so white, translucent, and cold was its aspect.
“Verochka——” began her mother, but, sobbing, she grew silent.
“Vera,” said her father, making an effort to soften his dry and hard voice—“Vera, tell us, what troubles you?”
Vera was silent.
“Vera, do not your mother and I deserve your confidence? Do we not love you? And is there some one nearer to you than we? Tell us about your sorrow, and, take the word of an experienced old man, you’ll feel better for it. And we too. Look at your aged mother, how much she suffers!”
“Verochka!”
“And I——” The dry voice trembled, truly something had broken in it. “And I—do you think I find it easy? As if I did not see that some sorrow is gnawing at you—and what is it? And I, your father, do not know what it is. Do you think that right?”
Vera was silent. Father Ignatius very cautiously stroked his beard, as if afraid that his fingers would enmesh themselves involuntarily in it, and continued:
“Against my wish you went to St. Petersburg—did I pronounce a curse upon you, you who disobeyed me? Or did I deny you money? Or, perhaps, I have not been kind? Well, why, then, are you silent? There, you’ve had your St. Petersburg!”
Father Ignatius became silent, and there loomed before him an image of something huge, granite, and terrible, full of invisible dangers and of strange and indifferent people. And it was there that, alone and weak, his Vera had gone, and it was there they had lost her. An awful hatred against that terrible and mysterious city arose in the soul of Father Ignatius, and an anger against his daughter, who was silent—obstinately silent.
“St. Petersburg has nothing to do with it,” said Vera morosely, and closed her eyes. “And nothing is the matter with me. Better go to bed, it is late.”
“Verochka, my child,” whimpered her mother, “do tell me!”
“ Akh, Mamma!” Vera impatiently interrupted her.
Father Ignatius sat down on a chair and laughed.
“Well, then, it’s nothing?” he inquired ironically.
“Father,” sharply ejaculated Vera, raising herself from the pillow, “you know that I love you and Mother. Well, I do feel a little weary. But that will pass. Do go to sleep, and I also wish to sleep. And to-morrow, or some other time, we’ll have a chat.”
Father Ignatius arose so impetuously that the chair hit the wall, and he took his wife’s hand.
“Let us go.”
“Verochka!”
“Let us go, I tell you!” shouted Father Ignatius. “If she has forgotten God, shall we——”
Almost forcibly he led Olga Stepanovna out of the room, and when they descended the stairs, his wife, decreasing her gait, said in a harsh whisper:
“It was you, priest, who have made her such! From you she learned her ways. And you’ll answer for it. Akh, unhappy creature that I am!”
She burst into tears, and, as her vision grew dim, her foot, missing a step, would descend with a sudden jolt, as if she were eager to fall into some abyss which waited below.
From that day Father Ignatius ceased to speak to his daughter, but she seemed not to notice it. As before, she lay in her room, or walked about, continually with the palms of her hands wiping her eyes, as if they contained some irritating foreign substance. And, crushed between these two silent people, the jolly, fun-loving wife of the priest quailed and seemed lost, not knowing what to say or do.
Occasionally Vera took a stroll. A week after the interview she went out in the evening, as was her habit. She was not seen again alive, as that night she threw herself under the train, and it cut her in two.
Father Ignatius himself directed the funeral. His wife was not present in church, for at the news of Vera’s death she was prostrated by a stroke. She lost control of her feet, hands, and tongue, and when the church bells rang out she lay motionless in the half-darkened room. She heard the people intone the chants as they issued out of church and passed the house, and she made an effort to raise her hand to make the sign of the cross, but her hand refused to obey; she wished to say, “Farewell, Vera!” but the tongue lay in her mouth huge and heavy. And her attitude was so calm that it gave one an impression of restfulness, or of sleep. Only, her eyes remained open.
At the funeral, in church, were many people who knew Father Ignatius, and many strangers. All bewailed Vera’s terrible death, and tried to detect in the movements and voice of Father Ignatius tokens of a deep sorrow. They did not love Father Ignatius, because of his severity and proud manners, his scorn of sinners, his unforgiving spirit, his envy and covetousness, his habit of utilizing every opportunity to extort money from his parishioners. They all wished to see him suffer, to see his spirit broken, to see him conscious in his two-fold guilt for the death of his daughter—as a cruel father and a bad priest—incapable of preserving his own flesh from sin. They cast searching glances at him, and he, feeling these glances directed toward his back, made efforts to hold erect its broad and strong expanse, and his thoughts were not concerning his dead daughter, but concerning his own dignity.
“A hardened priest!” with a shake of his head said Karzenoff, a carpenter, to whom Father Ignatius owed five rubles for frames.
And thus, hard and erect, Father Ignatius reached the burial-ground; and in the same manner he returned. Only at the door of his wife’s chamber did his backbone relax a little, but this may have been due to the fact that the height of the door was insufficient to admit his tall figure. The change from broad daylight made it hard for him to distinguish the face of his wife, but, after scrutiny, he was astonished at its calmness, and because the eyes showed no tears. And there was neither anger nor sorrow in the eyes—they were dumb, though they kept silent with difficulty, reluctantly, as did the entire round and helpless body that pressed against the feather bedding.
“Well, how do you feel?” inquired Father Ignatius.
But the lips were dumb; the eyes too were silent. Father Ignatius laid his hand on her forehead; it was cold and moist, and Olga Stepanovna did not show in any way that she had felt the contact of the hand. When Father Ignatius removed his hand there gazed at him, immobile, two deep gray eyes, from the dilated pupils seeming almost entirely dark, and there was neither sadness in them nor anger.
“I am going into my own room,” said Father Ignatius, who began to feel cold and terror.
He passed through the drawing-room, where, as usual, everything appeared neat and in order, and where, attired in white covers, stood tall chairs, like corpses in their shrouds. In one window hung an empty wire cage, with the door open.
“Nastasya,” shouted Father Ignatius. His own voice seemed to him coarse, and he felt ill at ease because he raised it to so high a pitch in these silent rooms, so soon after his daughter’s funeral.
“Nastasya!” he called more softly, “where is the canary?”
“It flew away, to be sure.”
“Why did you let it out?”
Nastasya began to weep, and, wiping her face with the edges of her calico headkerchief, said through her tears:
“It was my young mistress’s soul. Was it right to hold it?”
And it seemed to Father Ignatius that the happy little yellow canary, always singing with side-tilted head, was actually the soul of Vera, and if it had not flown away it wouldn’t have been possible to say that Vera had died. He became even more incensed at the maid-servant and shouted:
“Off with you!”
And because Nastasya did not vanish on the instant he added:
“Fool!”