My father shot a swift glance at me.—“I did not drop it,”—he said,—“I threw it away.”—He reflected for a space and dropped his head ... and then, for the first and probably for the last time, I saw how much tenderness and compunction his stern features were capable of expressing.
He set off again at a gallop, and this time I could not keep up with him; I reached home a quarter of an hour after him.
“That’s what love is,”—I said to myself again, as I sat at night before my writing-table, on which copy-books and text-books had already begun to make their appearance,—“that is what passion is!... How is it possible not to revolt, how is it possible to endure a blow from any one whomsoever ... even from the hand that is most dear? But evidently it can be done if one is in love.... And I ... I imagined....”
The last month had aged me greatly, and my love, with all its agitations and sufferings, seemed to me like something very petty and childish and wretched in comparison with that other unknown something at which I could hardly even guess, and which frightened me like a strange, beautiful but menacing face that one strives, in vain, to get a good look at in the semi-darkness....
That night I had a strange and dreadful dream. I thought I was entering a low, dark room.... My father was standing there, riding-whip in hand, and stamping his feet; Zinaída was crouching in one corner and had a red mark, not on her arm, but on her forehead ... and behind the two rose up Byelovzóroff, all bathed in blood, with his pale lips open, and wrathfully menacing my father.
Two months later I entered the university, and six months afterward my father died (of an apoplectic stroke) in Petersburg, whither he had just removed with my mother and myself. A few days before his death my father had received a letter from Moscow which had agitated him extremely.... He went to beg something of my mother and, I was told, even wept,—he, my father! On the very morning of the day on which he had the stroke, he had begun a letter to me in the French language: “My son,”—he wrote to me,—“fear the love of women, fear that happiness, that poison....” After his death my mother sent a very considerable sum of money to Moscow.
XXII
Four years passed. I had but just left the university, and did not yet quite know what to do with myself, at what door to knock; in the meanwhile, I was lounging about without occupation. One fine evening I encountered Maidánoff in the theatre. He had contrived to marry and enter the government service; but I found him unchanged. He went into unnecessary raptures, just as of old, and became low-spirited as suddenly as ever.
“You know,”—he said to me,—“by the way, that Madame Dólsky is here.”
“What Madame Dólsky?”