Let my mind linger for an instant on those springtide days—the last for me, though I did not know it, of unalloyed serenity. The children and I used to rise at dawn and go into the vast garden all a-shimmer with dew. On the glittering lawn, among the flower-beds, down the shady avenues of the park the two little elfin figures flitted before me, calling to me, eluding me, darting to and fro like twin will-o'-the-wisps; then turned and ran towards me with wind-light steps and gilt locks afloat, to shelter in my outstretched arms. Oh! my children, my little boy and girl, when you remember your mother I pray that God may lead your memories back to those clear morning hours, and may the rest be blotted out and dark.
Vassili was inexpressibly bored with rural solitude and sought new means of diversion. His latest fad was target-shooting. He filled the house with rifles and revolvers and invited every one in the neighboring country houses to take part in shooting matches in our grounds. From morning to night, in the garden, in the courtyard, even from the windows of the house, there was a ceaseless crackling of firearms.
One afternoon when the house was filled with guests, Dr. Stahl and Bozevsky arrived in their troika from the neighboring castle of the Grigorievskys, where they had been staying. To my astonishment, Vassili received them jubilantly and embraced them both. He had quite forgotten the reasons which had led to our departure from Kieff.
Bozevsky came to greet me at once, and for the rest of the day never left my side. He enveloped me in a whirlwind of ecstatic tenderness. His infatuation, which he sought neither to conceal nor to control, disquieted me deeply.
I noticed that his friend Dr. Stahl watched us continually. I had not seen the doctor for many months, and he struck me as strangely altered. His very light eyes, in which the pupils were contracted until they seemed mere pin-points, followed me continuously.
“Doctor,” I said to him, “what strange eyes you have! Just like the eyes of a cat when it looks at the sun!”
“I do not look at the sun,” he answered slowly, speaking with great stress. “I look into an abyss, the abyss of annihilation and oblivion. Some day, if ever you are irremediably unhappy, come to me and I will open to you, also, the doors of my unearthly paradise—of this chasm of deadly joy which engulfs me.”
“Shame on you, Stahl! How dare you suggest such a thing!” exclaimed Bozevsky, casting a look almost of hatred upon the morphinomaniac. “Why must you and your kind always seek to drag others down into your own gehenna?”
Stahl sighed. “It is terrible, I know. But it is a characteristic of our malady.”
I listened without comprehending. I did not then know of Stahl's enslavement to the drug. “What are you speaking of? What malady? I do not understand.”