‘There’s no need of that, but I wanted to ask you—don’t be angry with me, Andrei Petrovitch—don’t go to him to-morrow!’
Bersenyev bit his lip.
‘Ah! yes, I understand; very well, very well,’ and, adding two or three words more, he quickly took leave.
‘So much the better, so much the better,’ he thought, as he hurried home. ‘I have learnt nothing new, but so much the better. What possessed me to go hanging on to the edge of another man’s happiness? I regret nothing; I have done what my conscience told me; but now it is over. Let them be! My father was right when he used to say to me: “You and I, my dear boy, are not Sybarites, we are not aristocrats, we’re not the spoilt darlings of fortune and nature, we are not even martyrs—we are workmen and nothing more. Put on your leather apron, workman, and take your place at your workman’s bench, in your dark workshop, and let the sun shine on other men! Even our dull life has its own pride, its own happiness!”’
The next morning Insarov got a brief note by the post. ‘Expect me,’ Elena wrote to him, ‘and give orders for no one to see you. A. P. will not come.’
XXVIII
Insarov read Elena’s note, and at once began to set his room to rights; asked his landlady to take away the medicine-glasses, took off his dressing-gown and put on his coat. His head was swimming and his heart throbbing from weakness and delight. His knees were shaking; he dropped on to the sofa, and began to look at his watch. ‘It’s now a quarter to twelve,’ he said to himself. ‘She can never come before twelve: I will think of something else for a quarter of an hour, or I shall break down altogether. Before twelve she cannot possibly come.’
The door was opened, and in a light silk gown, all pale, all fresh, young and joyful, Elena came in, and with a faint cry of delight she fell on his breast.
‘You are alive, you are mine,’ she repeated, embracing and stroking his head. He was almost swooning, breathless at such closeness, such caresses, such bliss.