Here he was seized with a long painful fit of coughing, which the illness had left him. His face grew livid, his eyes protruded, sweat stood on his brow, his veins swelled. He choked, and like small children who have not learnt to cough, he choked from his vain, frantic efforts to expectorate. There was something ludicrous, and at the same time terrible, in this mixture of childishness and old age. Lisette was roused, she lifted up her head and looked at her master with wistful pitying gaze. The Tsarevitch also looked at his father, and suddenly he felt a stab at his heart, “The dog has some pity for him,” he mused, “while I——”
At last Peter got the phlegm up and spat it out. He swore, and mopping his brow and eyes, continued where he had left off; his voice, though huskier, was still passionless and even, as if he were reading aloud a written decree:
“Once more I repeat, so that you may know——”
He dropped his handkerchief; he was going to pick it up, but Alexis forestalled him; he stooped, lifted it, and gave it to his father. This little action brought to his mind that shy, tender, almost loving feeling he once had for his father.
“Father,” he exclaimed with such an agitated expression in his face and voice, that Peter looked at him fixedly and then cast down his eyes, “God is my witness that towards you I have been guilty of no vile action or design. I do not feel fit for the throne, and fear to undertake responsibilities which I could not fulfil. How can I? and am I, father ... for thee ... O Lord!”
His voice broke. He raised his hands convulsively in despair, as if about to clutch his head, and so he remained, pale and trembling, with a strange distracted smile on his face. He did not know himself what it was, he only felt how something grew, rose, and was struggling forth from his breast with terrible force. One word, one look, one sign from his father and his son would have fallen at his feet, would have embraced them and sobbed with such tears, as would have melted and broken down that terrible wall between them, like sunshine upon ice. He would have explained everything, he would have found words which would have made his father forgive, understand how all his life through he had loved him, him alone, and even now continued to love him with a love stronger than ever, and that he wanted nothing but to be allowed to go on loving him, to die for him had he but once caressed him and said, as he used to say to the child, pressing him to his heart: “Aliósha, my darling boy!”
“Drop this childishness,” he heard Peter saying gruffly; yet it seemed to be assumed roughness, in reality he was moved, and tried to conceal his emotion. “Don’t try to find excuses, prove your faith by your deeds; words cannot be trusted. It is written: ‘An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit.’”
To avoid his son’s gaze Peter looked aside, and yet there was something flitting and trembling in his face, as if the true face, familiar and loved by the Tsarevitch, were peering through a dead mask. But Peter had already mastered his emotion; as he went on talking, his face grew severe, his voice relentless:—
“Nowadays idlers are not high in my favour! He who eats bread and is unprofitable to Tsar and country is like the worm, which brings everything into decay, and confers no benefit upon mankind. Even the Apostle saith: ‘If any man will not work neither shall he eat.’ You have shown yourself to be an idler——”
Alexis did not heed the words; yet every sound wounded his soul, cut into it with insufferable pain, as a knife stabbing a living body. This was akin to murder; he meant to cry, stop his father, yet he felt that his father would understand nothing, would hear nothing. Again the wall rose up, an abyss yawned between them. Every word removed his father further, further, more and more irrevocably from him, as the dead recede from the living.