“Elise, I want you.”
“Yes, madame, I shall come at once,” and I could hear her rising from her bed.
Then I ran back through the silent corridors, and when I passed Count Kamarowsky's door I trembled and shuddered and felt constrained to stop. I looked at his yellow boots—square and placid, with their mouths open and their tongues hanging out—and I experienced a wild sensation of fear and loathing for him and for them.
I made a grimace at those hateful boots and hurried away to shut myself in my room and await Elise.
She would come in, pale and tidy in her red woolen dressing-gown, with a little cap on her head. She sat down quietly by my bedside and held my hand. Sometimes she read aloud to me; sometimes she repeated Swiss poems and ballads that she remembered from her schooldays; and I soon grew calm again as I listened to her quiet voice and felt the clasp of her small roughened hand on mine.
Gradually a sort of frenzied fear of Kamarowsky took possession of me. I was obsessed continuously with the idea that I must escape from him at all costs, or die. My every fiber shrank at the slightest touch of his hand. I longed never to see him again. I longed to know that the world held him no more. It was a blind instinctive frenzy that I endured without reasoning about it. My constant and only preoccupation was to fly from him who spelt ruin, and to cling to Naumoff, my deliverer.
“Nicolas Naumoff! Nicolas Naumoff!” I repeated his name all day long like a kind of exorcism against Kamarowsky; sometimes I felt as if I were stifled, as if I must hold my breath until he was near.
On his side, Naumoff, who frequently came to see us, was reserved and shy, and did not venture to believe in what nevertheless he could not but read in my eyes. Knowing nothing of my insensate notion about the diviner's prophecy, and having no conception that to my fancy he was a rescuer sent to me by Providence, he thought I was making fun of him; or at other times he believed my predilection for him was merely the caprice of a frivolous creature accustomed to gratify every passing whim. So he held back, aggrieved and mistrustful.
And the more he held back the more was I impelled to pursue him, to hold and to vanquish him. The passionate gravity of his youthful face delighted me; I was thirsty for the unknown recesses of his soul as for a spring filled with mysterious sweetness. His voice perturbed me; his silence lashed my nerves; I lived in a perpetual quiver of rhapsodic sensibility.