“Dear friend!” she said in a voice breaking with emotion. “You ought not to give way to grief. Your sorrow is a great one, but you ought to find consolation.”
“I am crushed, I am annihilated, I am no longer a man!” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, letting go her hand, but still gazing into her brimming eyes. “My position is so awful because I can find nowhere, I cannot find within me strength to support me.”
“You will find support; seek it—not in me, though I beseech you to believe in my friendship,” she said, with a sigh. “Our support is love, that love that He has vouchsafed us. His burden is light,” she said, with the look of ecstasy Alexey Alexandrovitch knew so well. “He will be your support and your succor.”
Although there was in these words a flavor of that sentimental emotion at her own lofty feelings, and that new mystical fervor which had lately gained ground in Petersburg, and which seemed to Alexey Alexandrovitch disproportionate, still it was pleasant to him to hear this now.
“I am weak. I am crushed. I foresaw nothing, and now I understand nothing.”
“Dear friend,” repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
“It’s not the loss of what I have not now, it’s not that!” pursued Alexey Alexandrovitch. “I do not grieve for that. But I cannot help feeling humiliated before other people for the position I am placed in. It is wrong, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it.”
“Not you it was performed that noble act of forgiveness, at which I was moved to ecstasy, and everyone else too, but He, working within your heart,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, raising her eyes rapturously, “and so you cannot be ashamed of your act.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch knitted his brows, and crooking his hands, he cracked his fingers.
“One must know all the facts,” he said in his thin voice. “A man’s strength has its limits, countess, and I have reached my limits. The whole day I have had to be making arrangements, arrangements about household matters arising” (he emphasized the word arising) “from my new, solitary position. The servants, the governess, the accounts.... These pinpricks have stabbed me to the heart, and I have not the strength to bear it. At dinner ... yesterday, I was almost getting up from the dinner-table. I could not bear the way my son looked at me. He did not ask me the meaning of it all, but he wanted to ask, and I could not bear the look in his eyes. He was afraid to look at me, but that is not all....” Alexey Alexandrovitch would have referred to the bill that had been brought him, but his voice shook, and he stopped. That bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he could not recall without a rush of self-pity.