Elena rushed out of the room, began calling for help; a waiter ran for a doctor. Elena clung to Insarov.
At that instant in the doorway appeared a broad-shouldered, sunburnt man, in a stout frieze coat and a low oil-skin hat. He stood still in bewilderment.
‘Renditch!’ cried Elena, ‘it’s you! Look, for God’s sake, he’s ill! What’s wrong? Good God! He went out yesterday, he was talking to me just now.’
Renditch said nothing and only moved on one side. There slipped quickly past him a little figure in a wig and spectacles; it was a doctor living in the same hotel. He went up to Insarov.
‘Signora,’ he said, after the lapse of a few minutes, ‘the foreign gentleman is dead—il Signore forestiere e morte—of aneurism in combination with disease of the lungs.’
XXXV
The next day, in the same room, Renditch was standing at the window; before him, wrapped in a shawl, sat Elena. In the next room, Insarov lay in his coffin. Elena’s face was both scared and lifeless; two lines could be seen on her forehead between her eyebrows; they gave a strained expression to her fixed eyes. In the window lay an open letter from Anna Vassilyevna. She begged her daughter to come to Moscow if only for a month, complained of her loneliness, and of Nikolai Artemyevitch, sent greetings to Insarov, inquired after his health, and begged him to spare his wife.
Renditch was a Dalmatian, a sailor, with whom Insarov had become acquainted during his wanderings in his own country, and whom he had sought out in Venice. He was a dry, gruff man, full of daring and devoted to the Slavonic cause. He despised the Turks and hated the Austrians.
‘How long must you remain at Venice?’ Elena asked him in Italian. And her voice was as lifeless as her face.