“Your brother? Your brother—little Peter?” I stammered.
“Yes, yes! Peter,” shouted Vassili. “My brother! What have you to do with his death?”
“Nothing, nothing.” I groaned. “I swear it—nothing!”
And Olga, realizing at last that she stood in the presence of a genuine tragedy and not of the jest we had plotted, darted forward and caught his arm.
“Vassili, you are mistaken. She knows nothing about it; nothing whatever. We had planned a joke to play on you, and we thought—” She pursued her agitated and incoherent explanations.
Vassili looked from one to the other of us, scanning our faces, hardly hearing what Olga was saying. Suddenly he seemed to understand, and loosening his hold on my arm he fell upon the couch and buried his face in his hands.
The telegram had dropped on the carpet. Olga picked it up and read it; then she handed it to me:
Peter hanged himself last night. Come at once.
Tarnowsky.
We left for Kieff the same evening. Throughout the entire journey Vassili never spoke. I sat mournful and silent opposite him and thought of my brother-in-law, Peter. Not of the pale youth, already corrupted by absinthe and women, whom we had left at Kieff a few months before, but of the child Peter, in his short velvet suit and lace collar, whom I had loved so dearly in the days of my girlhood—little Peter who used to run to meet me in the sun-splashed avenues of the Villa Tarnowsky, trotting up with his little bare legs and serious face, stopping to be kissed and then trotting hurriedly off again, the nape of his neck showing fair and plump beneath the upturned brim of his sailor-hat.