“Of course you are right,” he said at length, in an absent manner. “The classes not bred to sensitiveness cannot have the real sensibility—”
He broke off abruptly and came across to my couch.
“We were talking,” he began, with a sudden, bitter vehemence which startled me, “of real suffering. See! I have lived here silent in an alien land for long years; but to-day—to-day is an anniversary, and I have somehow lost the power to be silent any longer. If you care to listen, I will tell you what I mean by suffering; I will tell you what life has been to me.”
“If you will,” I responded, “I will try to understand.”
He seemed hardly to hear or to heed my words, but, walking up and down the chamber, he began at once, speaking with the outbursting eagerness of a man who has restrained himself long.
“My father,” he said, “was one of the small nobles in the neighborhood of Moscow. I was his only son, and when he died, in my seventeenth year, I had been his companion so much that I was as mature as most lads half a dozen years older. My mother was a gentle, good woman. I loved my mother, but she made little difference in my life. She was kind to me and she prayed for me a good deal. She thought her prayers answered when I grew up without debauchery. She may have been right; but I have lived to think that there are worse things than debauchery.”
He paused a moment, and then went on, looking downward.
“Once the little mother was frightened,” he went on again, with a strange mingling of bitterness and tenderness in his tone. “There was a girl, the daughter of the steward; her name was Alexandrina.”
His voice as he pronounced the stately name was full of feeling. He seemed to have forgotten me, and to be telling his story to an unseen hearer.
“Shurochka!” he said, dwelling on the diminutive with a fond, lingering cadence most pathetic to hear. “Shurochka! I loved her; I was mad for her; my blood was full of longing by day and of fire by night. It was the complete, mad passion of a boy grown into a man, and pure in spite of an ardent temperament. I used to stand under her window at night, and if it were stinging with cold or storm I was glad. I seemed to be doing something for her; you know the madness, perhaps, in spite of the cold temperament of your race. I did not for a moment really hope for her. Her family had betrothed her to her cousin, and it would have broken my mother’s heart for me to marry the descendant of serfs. I could n’t even show her that I loved her. My father out of his grave said to me what he had said again and again while he was alive: ‘Do not hurt those under you; and especially do not soil the purity of a maiden.’ I did not try to conceal from the little mother that I loved Shurochka, and maybe the servants gossiped, as they always do; but Shurochka herself I avoided. I was not sure that I could trust myself to see her. It was a happiness to the little mother when the girl was married and taken away to the home of her cousin in Moscow. She felt safe for me then, and she was very tender. Time, she said, would take this madness out of my heart.”