“Mother, mother!” he gasped, fixing his large frightened eyes upon me. “Why do you let me die?” Then he closed his eyes again.
I stood as if turned to stone. It was true. It was I, I who was letting him die. That idea had already flitted through my brain, but I had never dared to formulate the awful thought. As soon as he had fallen ill I had said to myself: “This is retribution. Did I not vow on Tioka's life?...”
I saw myself again at the theater on the evening of “The Merry Widow,” and Prilukoff pointing to the child's angel head and whispering: “If you break your word, it is he who will pay for it.”
Yes; Tioka was paying for it. He was paying for the iniquitous vow that had been wrung from me that night at Orel when the three men pursued me in the darkness. With his revolver pressed against his temple Prilukoff had bidden me: “Swear!” Ah, why had I not let his fate overtake him? Why had he not pulled the trigger and fallen dead at my feet? Naumoff would have rushed in, and Kamarowsky would have broken in the door, and the whole of the triple treachery and fraud and dishonor would have been revealed; but, at least, I should have been free—free to take my child and wander with him through the wide spaces of the world. Whereas, coward that I had been, the fear of disgrace had vanquished me, and the threat of ignominy and death had dragged the inhuman vow from my lips.... And now Tioka was paying for it.
The fierce primitive instinct of maternity awoke within me. Weakened by illness and wakefulness, my spirit lost itself again in the dark labyrinth of superstition. My frantic gaze passed from Tioka—lying wan and wasted on his pillows, gasping like a little dying bird—to Kamarowsky stretched out in an armchair, with his flaccid hands hanging at his sides and the corners of his mouth relaxed in sleep. I looked at him; I seemed to see him for the first time—this man to save whose life I was sacrificing my own child's. Yes, Tioka was dying in order that this stranger, this outsider, this enemy might live.
When I turned towards Tioka again I saw that his eyes were open and fixed upon me. I fell on my knees beside him and whispered wildly: “Darling, darling, I will not let you die. No, my soul, my own, I will save you. You shall get well again and run out and play in the sunshine.... The other one shall die—but not you, not you! Now you will get well immediately. Are you not better already, my love, my own? Are you not better already?”
And my boy, cradled in my arms, smiled faintly as my soft wild whispers lulled him to sleep.
This idea now took possession of my brain, to the exclusion of all others. I thought and dreamed of nothing else. Tioka had scarlet fever and the fluctuations in his illness seemed to depend solely upon me. When I told myself that I was firmly, irrevocably resolved to compass the death of Kamarowsky, the child's fever seemed to abate, his throat was less inflamed, the pains in his head diminished. But if, as I grew calmer and clung to hope again, I hesitated in my ruthless purpose, lo! the fever seized him anew, the rushing trains went thundering over his temples, and his tender throat swelled until he could hardly draw his breath.
Prilukoff followed the oscillations of my distracted spirit with weary resignation; he was benumbed and apathetic, without mind and without will. When in the fixity of my mania I insisted upon the necessity of the crime, he would answer languidly: “Oh, no. Leave it alone. Let things be.”
Then I grew more and more frenzied, weeping and tearing my hair.