CHAPTER XXI — A SUSPECTED HOUSE
The Countess Lanovitch and Catrina were sitting together in the too-luxurious drawing-room that overlooked the English Quay and the Neva. The double windows were rigorously closed, while the inner panes were covered with a thick rime. The sun was just setting over the marshes that border the upper waters of the Gulf of Finland, and lit up the snow-clad city with a rosy glow which penetrated to the room where the two women sat.
Catrina was restless, moving from chair to chair, from fire-place to window, with a lack of repose which would certainly have touched the nerves of a less lethargic person than the countess.
“My dear child!” that lady was exclaiming with lackadaisical horror, “we cannot go to Thors yet. The thought is too horrible. You never think of my health. Besides, the gloom of the everlasting snow is too painful. It makes me think of your poor mistaken father, who is probably shovelling it in Siberia. Here, at all events, one can avoid the window—one need not look at it.”
“The policy of shutting one’s eyes is a mistake,” said Catrina.
She had risen, and was standing by the window, her stunted form being framed, as it were, in a rosy glow of pink.
The countess heaved a little sigh and gazed idly at the fire. She did not understand Catrina. She was afraid of her. There was something rugged and dogged which the girl had inherited from her father—that Slavonic love of pain for its own sake—which makes Russian patriots and thinkers strange, incomprehensible beings.
“I question it, Catrina,” said the elder lady; “but perhaps it is a matter of health. Dr. Stantovitch told me, quite between ourselves, that if I had given way to my grief at the time of the trial he would not have held himself responsible for the consequences.”
“Dr. Stantovitch,” said Catrina, “is a humbug.”