“Ai! how sad all this is, how sad!”
“Very well,” said Pan Stanislav; “send me your address, and I will report to you how matters turn. But since the grievous mission falls to me of telling Ignas what has happened, lighten it for me. It is necessary that he receive information not from a third person, or a fourth, but from some one who saw everything. If he hears of the event from me, he may think that I represent the affair inaccurately. In such cases a man grasps at every shadow of a hope. Sit down and write to him. I will give him your letter in support of what I tell him; otherwise he may be ready to fly after them to Scheveningen. I consider such a letter indispensable.”
“Will he not come here soon?”
“No; his father is sick, and he is with him. He thinks that I shall be here only in the afternoon. Write to him surely.”
“You are right, perfectly right,” said Osnovski. And he sat down at the writing-desk.
“Irony of life, irony of life!” thought Pan Stanislav; “bloody irony is this which has met Pan Ignas. What is such a person as Panna Castelli, with her bearing of a swan, and her instincts of a chambermaid,—that ‘chosen of God,’ as Vaskovski said only yesterday? What is Pani Bronich, and Osnovski, with faith in his wife, and the nervous attacks of that wife, caused by the mere contact with evil, of such a pure soul, and the indignation of Pani Mashko? Nothing but a ridiculous human comedy, in which some are deceiving others, and others deceiving themselves; nothing but deceived and deceivers; nothing but mistakes, blindness, and errors, and lies of life, and victims of error, victims of deceit, victims of illusions; a complication without issue; a ridiculous, farcical, and desperate irony, covering the feelings, the passions, and hopes of people, just as snow covers fields in winter—and that is life.”
These thoughts were for Pan Stanislav more grievous because, rising on a basis purely personal, they became at once a kind of reckoning with his conscience. He was enough of an egoist to refer everything to himself; and he was not fool enough not to see that in that most ironical human comedy he was playing a rôle immensely abject. His position was of that sort that he wished with all the power of his breath to hiss that Panna Castelli; and still he understood that if there was any one who was not free to judge her, it was he. In what was he better? In what was he less vile? She had betrayed a man for a fool; he had betrayed his wife for a brainless puppet. She had followed her instincts of a milliner; he had followed his instincts of an ape. But she had trampled on artificial phrases merely, with which she deceived herself and others; he had trampled on principles. She had betrayed confidence, and broken her word; he had betrayed confidence also, and broken more than a word,—he had broken an oath. And in view of this what can he say? Has he the right to condemn her? If there is no way to justify her, if he is ready to acknowledge that it would be unjust and deserving of indignation for a person like her to become the wife of Pan Ignas, with what right is he the husband of Marynia? If he can find even one word of condemnation for Panna Castelli,—and it is impossible not to find it,—and he wishes to be consistent, he should separate from Marynia, which he will never have either the will or the power to do. There is a vicious circle for you. Pan Stanislav had passed many bitter moments because of his success; but this moment was so grievous that it even filled him with amazement. By degrees it became simply a torture. At last, through the simple instinct of self-preservation, he began to seek for something to give him even momentary relief. But in vain did he say to himself that such people as Kopovski would not have taken his position to heart so. That was the same consolation to him as if he had thought that a cat or a horse would not have taken it to heart so either. In vain he remembered the words of Balzac: “Infidelity, when undiscovered, is nothing; when discovered, it is a trifle.” “That’s a lie,” repeated he, gritting his teeth, “a pleasant nothing, which burns so!” He understood, it is true, that behind the fact itself there may be something which heightens or lessens its criminality; and he understood also that in his case all the circumstances are of a kind to make the fault immense and unpardonable. “Here,” thought he, “it takes from me the right of judging, the right of serving with may conscience. Those women sacrificed a man of the loftier kind for an idiot; they trampled him; they pushed him into misfortune, into tragedy, which may break him; they did this in a mean and abject manner, and I cannot, even in my soul, brand such a woman as Panna Castelli.” And never before had the truth become to him so nearly tangible that as a man for certain crimes is deprived of a share in public life, so he now had become deprived of a share in moral life. He had had remorse enough already, but now he saw still new desolations, which he had not noted at first. The more he thought over the tragedy of Pan Ignas, and took in its extent with growing clearness, the more he was seized by a dull alarm, and a kind of prescience that in virtue of a higher and mysterious logic, something terrible must happen in his fate as well. For the man who bears in his system the germs of mortal disease, death is a question of time simply.
At last, however, he found this relief, that his thoughts turned exclusively to the present, and to Pan Ignas. How will Pan Ignas receive the news? How will he hear it? In view of the man’s exaltation, in view of his deep, blind faith in Lineta, and the love which he feels for her, these questions were simply terrible. “Everything in him will be broken; all will slide away from under his feet in a moment,” thought Pan Stanislav. It seemed to him that there was something repulsive and monstrous in this, that even those relations of life which do not bear in them germs of tragedy, and which ought to end well, end badly without any reason; and that life is, as it were, a forest in which misfortunes hunt a man more venomously than dogs hunt a wild beast, for they hunt in silence. Pan Stanislav felt suddenly that besides faith in himself, which he had lost already, there might fail in him various other things too, which are more important, because they are more fundamental.
In this moment, however, he thought more of Pan Ignas than of anything else. He had a good heart, and Pan Ignas was near him; hence he was touched sincerely by his misfortune. “But that man is simply writing his sentence,” thought he, as he heard the squeak of Osnovski’s pen in the next room. “Poor fellow! And this is so undeserved.”
Osnovski finished the letter at last, and, opening the door, said,—