The next day Lavretsky went to morning service. Liza was already in the church when he entered. He remarked her, though she did not look towards him. She prayed fervently; her eyes shone with a quiet light; quietly she bowed and lifted her head.
He felt that she was praying for him also, and a strange emotion filled his soul. The people standing gravely around, the familiar faces, the harmonious chant, the odor of the incense, the long rays slanting through the windows, the very sombreness of the walls and arches—all appealed to his heart. It was long since he had been in church—long since he had turned his thoughts to God. And even now he did not utter any words of prayer—he did not even pray without words; but nevertheless, for a moment, if not in body, at least in mind, he bowed clown and bent himself humbly to the ground. He remembered how, in the days of his childhood, he always used to pray in church till he felt on his forehead something like a kind of light touch. "That" he used then to think, "is my guardian angel visiting me and pressing on me the seal of election." He looked at Liza. "It is you who have brought me here," he thought. "Touch me—touch my soul!" Meanwhile, she went on quietly praying. Her face seemed to him to be joyous, and once more he felt softened, and he asked, for another's soul, rest—for his own, pardon. They met outside in the porch, and she received him with a friendly look of serious happiness. The sun brightly lit up the fresh grass in the church-yard and the many-colored dresses and kerchiefs of the women. The bells of the neighboring churches sounded on high; the sparrows chirped on the walls. Lavretsky stood by, smiling and bare-headed; a light breeze played with his hair and Liza's, and with the ends of Liza's bonnet strings. He seated Liza and her companion Lenochka, in the carriage, gave away all the change he had about him to the beggars, and then strolled slowly home.
XXX.
The days which followed were days of heaviness for Lavretsky. He felt himself in a perpetual fever. Every morning he went to the post, and impatiently tore open his letters and newspapers; but in none of them did he find anything which could confirm or contradict that rumor, on the truth of which he felt that so much now depended. At times he grew disgusted with himself. "What am I," he then would think, "who am waiting here, as a raven waits for blood, for certain intelligence of my wife's death?"
He went to the Kalitines' every day; but even there he was not more at his ease. The mistress of the house was evidently out of humor with him, and treated him with cold condescension. Panshine showed him exaggerated politeness; Lemm had become misanthropical, and scarcely even returned his greeting; and, worst of all, Liza seemed to avoid him. Whenever she happened to be left alone with him, she manifested symptoms of embarrassment, instead of the frank manner of former days. On such occasions she did not know what to say to him; and even he felt confused. In the course of a few days Liza had become changed from what he remembered her to have been. In her movements, in her voice, even in her laugh itself, a secret uneasiness manifested itself—something different from her former evenness of temper. Her mother, like a true egotist, did not suspect anything; but Marfa Timofeevna began to watch her favorite closely.
Lavretsky often blamed himself for having shown Liza the newspaper he had received; he could not help being conscious that there was something in his state of feeling which must be repugnant to a very delicate mind. He supposed, moreover, that the change which had taken place in Liza arose from a struggle with herself, from her doubt as to what answer she should give to Panshine.
One day she returned him a book—one of Walter Scott's novels—which she had herself asked him for.
"Have you read it?" he asked.
"No; I am not in a mood for books just now," she answered, and then was going away.
"Wait a minute," he said. "It is so long since I got a talk with you alone. You seem afraid of me. Is it so?"