‘Perhaps; but how do you love me? Remember all your words, Dmitri Nikolaitch. You told me: “Without complete equality there is no love.”... You are too exalted for me; I am no match for you.... I am punished as I deserve. There are duties before you more worthy of you. I shall not forget this day.... Good-bye.’
‘Natalya Alexyevna, are you going? Is it possible for us to part like this?’
He stretched out his hand to her. She stopped. His supplicating voice seemed to make her waver.
‘No,’ she uttered at last. ‘I feel that something in me is broken. ... I came here, I have been talking to you as if it were in delirium; I must try to recollect. It must not be, you yourself said, it will not be. Good God, when I came out here, I mentally took a farewell of my home, of my past—and what? whom have I met here?—a coward... and how did you know I was not able to bear a separation from my family? “Your mother will not consent... It is terrible!” That was all I heard from you, that you, you, Rudin?—No! good-bye.... Ah! if you had loved me, I should have felt it now, at this moment.... No, no, goodbye!’
She turned swiftly and ran towards Masha, who had begun to be uneasy and had been making signs to her a long while.
‘It is you who are afraid, not I!’ cried Rudin after Natalya.
She paid no attention to him, and hastened homewards across the fields. She succeeded in getting back to her bedroom; but she had scarcely crossed the threshold when her strength failed her, and she fell senseless into Masha’s arms.
But Rudin remained a long while still standing on the bank. At last he shivered, and with slow steps made his way to the little path and quietly walked along it. He was deeply ashamed... and wounded. ‘What a girl!’ he thought, ‘at seventeen!... No, I did not know her!... She is a remarkable girl. What strength of will!... She is right; she deserves another love than what I felt for her. I felt for her?’ he asked himself. ‘Can it be I already feel no more love for her? So this is how it was all to end! What a pitiful wretch I was beside her!’
The slight rattle of a racing droshky made Rudin raise his head. Lezhnyov was driving to meet him with his invariable trotting pony. Rudin bowed to him without speaking, and as though struck with a sudden thought, turned out of the road and walked quickly in the direction of Darya Mihailovna’s house.
Lezhnyov let him pass, looked after him, and after a moment’s thought he too turned his horse’s head round, and drove back to Volintsev’s, where he had spent the night. He found him asleep, and giving orders he should not be waked, he sat down on the balcony to wait for some tea and smoked a pipe.