“What’s the matter with you?” cried Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, almost enraged.
But her panic lasted only one instant, her face worked with a sort of strange smile, suspicious and unpleasant.
“I beg you, prince, get up and come in,” she brought out suddenly, in a firm, emphatic voice.
“Come in? Where am I to come in?”
“I’ve been fancying for five years how he would come in. Get up and go out of the door into the other room. I’ll sit as though I weren’t expecting anything, and I’ll take up a book, and suddenly you’ll come in after five years’ travelling. I want to see what it will be like.”
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch ground his teeth, and muttered something to himself.
“Enough,” he said, striking the table with his open hand. “I beg you to listen to me, Marya Timofyevna. Do me the favour to concentrate all your attention if you can. You’re not altogether mad, you know!” he broke out impatiently. “Tomorrow I shall make our marriage public. You never will live in a palace, get that out of your head. Do you want to live with me for the rest of your life, only very far away from here? In the mountains in Switzerland, there’s a place there.… Don’t be afraid. I’ll never abandon you or put you in a madhouse. I shall have money enough to live without asking anyone’s help. You shall have a servant, you shall do no work at all. Everything you want that’s possible shall be got for you. You shall pray, go where you like, and do what you like. I won’t touch you. I won’t go away from the place myself at all. If you like, I won’t speak to you all my life, or if you like, you can tell me your stories every evening as you used to do in Petersburg in the corners. I’ll read aloud to you if you like. But it must be all your life in the same place, and that place is a gloomy one. Will you? Are you ready? You won’t regret it, torment me with tears and curses, will you?”
She listened with extreme curiosity, and for a long time she was silent, thinking.
“It all seems incredible to me,” she said at last, ironically and disdainfully. “I might live for forty years in those mountains,” she laughed.
“What of it? Let’s live forty years then …” said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, scowling.