Rogojin listened to the end, and then burst out laughing:
“Why, prince, I declare you must have had a taste of this sort of thing yourself—haven’t you? I have heard tell of something of the kind, you know; is it true?”
“What? What can you have heard?” said the prince, stammering.
Rogojin continued to laugh loudly. He had listened to the prince’s speech with curiosity and some satisfaction. The speaker’s impulsive warmth had surprised and even comforted him.
“Why, I’ve not only heard of it; I see it for myself,” he said. “When have you ever spoken like that before? It wasn’t like yourself, prince. Why, if I hadn’t heard this report about you, I should never have come all this way into the park—at midnight, too!”
“I don’t understand you in the least, Parfen.”
“Oh, she told me all about it long ago, and tonight I saw for myself. I saw you at the music, you know, and whom you were sitting with. She swore to me yesterday, and again today, that you are madly in love with Aglaya Ivanovna. But that’s all the same to me, prince, and it’s not my affair at all; for if you have ceased to love her, she has not ceased to love you. You know, of course, that she wants to marry you to that girl? She’s sworn to it! Ha, ha! She says to me, ‘Until then I won’t marry you. When they go to church, we’ll go too—and not before.’ What on earth does she mean by it? I don’t know, and I never did. Either she loves you without limits or—yet, if she loves you, why does she wish to marry you to another girl? She says, ‘I want to see him happy,’ which is to say—she loves you.”
“I wrote, and I say to you once more, that she is not in her right mind,” said the prince, who had listened with anguish to what Rogojin said.
“Goodness knows—you may be wrong there! At all events, she named the day this evening, as we left the gardens. ‘In three weeks,’ says she, ‘and perhaps sooner, we shall be married.’ She swore to it, took off her cross and kissed it. So it all depends upon you now, prince, You see! Ha, ha!”
“That’s all madness. What you say about me, Parfen, never can and never will be. Tomorrow, I shall come and see you—”