She was left in a frame of mind that was a novel experience to her. Her pity was lingering about a stalwart military figure with the gloom and glint of martyrdom on his face—the face of Alexander II. Quite apart from this was the sense of having been initiated into a strange ecstasy of thought and feeling—of bold ideas and broad human sympathies. She was in an unwonted state of mental excitement. Pavel seemed to be a weightier personage than ever. The haze that enveloped him was thickening. Nevertheless his strictures upon Russia’s incapacity left her rankling with a desire to refute them. That national self-conceit which breeds in every child the conviction that his is the greatest country in the world and that its superiority is cheerfully conceded by all other nations, reasserted itself in the countess with resentful emphasis. To be sure, all the skill, ingenuity and taste of the refined world came from abroad, but this did not lessen her contempt for foreigners any more than did the fact that all acrobats and hair-dressers were Germans or Frenchmen. Her childhood had been spent in foreign countries and she knew their languages as well as she did her own; nevertheless her abstraction of a foreigner was a man who spoke broken Russian—a lisping, stammering, cringing imbecile. She revolted to think of Russia as being inferior to wretches of this sort, and when the bridge incident swept back upon her in all the clearness of fact, her blood ran chill again. “He is the man I saw in the waggon after all,” she said to herself, in dismay.
She went to bed, but tossed about in an agony of restlessness. When the darkness of her room began to thin and the brighter objects loomed into view, she slipped on a wrapper and seated herself at a window, courting composure in the blossom-scented air that came up from the garden; but all to no purpose. Ever and anon, after a respite of tranquillity she would be seized with a new rush of consternation. Pasha was the man she had seen on the bridge, disguised as an artisan; he was a Nihilist.
While Anna Nicolayevna was thus harrowed with doubt, Pavel was pacing his room, his heart on the point of bursting with a desire to see his mother again and to make a clean breast of it. The notion of her being outwitted and made sport of touched him with pity. Come what might, his poor noble-hearted mother must be kept in the dark no longer. She would appreciate his feelings. He would plead with her, with tears in his eyes he would implore her to open her eyes to the appalling inhumanity of the prevailing adjustment of things. And as he visioned himself making this plea to her, his own sense of the barbarity of the existing regime set his blood simmering in him, and quickened his desire to lay it all before his mother.
Presently somebody rapped on his door. It was Anna Nicolayevna.
“I must speak to you, Pasha; I can’t get any sleep,” she said.
They went into a newly-built summer house. The jumble of colour and redolence was invaded with light that asserted its presence like a great living spirit. The orchard seemed to be worlds away from itself.
As a precaution, they spoke in French.
“Pasha, you are the man I saw on the bridge,” she said. “You are a Nihilist.”