“Sergei Grigorievitch!” gasped Irene.
“Well? You think that is not a drawing-room expression? Very well—I take it back, and I beg your pardon—but it expresses my idea excellently. However, don’t let us continue the conversation; it is time to go to bed. Here we are at your door. I wish you a good night!”
XXI
Gzhatski’s good wish, however, was not destined to be fulfilled. Was it the music or the black coffee that was to blame? It is difficult to say. But however it may be, Irene found it impossible to go to sleep. She tried drinking sugared water, applied cold compresses to her head, turned from side to side, got up and paced the room, opened the window—all in vain, for sleep obstinately refused to answer her call. At last, towards four o’clock in the morning, she threw on her dressing-gown, sat down on the sofa with a book, and hoped to fall asleep with the dawn, as frequently happened to her after a wakeful night.
Even the book, however, failed to interest her—her excited brain refusing to follow the tangled thread of the sugary English novel. Leaving the heroine to drink a twentieth cup of tea on the lawn in company with the hero, who had just won a set of tennis, Irene threw down the book and lost herself in her own thoughts. Russia, her departure from Petrograd, her first impressions of Rome, Père Etienne, her meeting with Gzhatski—all this and many other confused recollections passed through her mind.
“How unexpectedly everything has arranged itself,” she thought, with a quiet smile. “How foolish we all are when we make plans, and arrange and fuss and worry, and seriously imagine we can direct our own destinies! God does everything in His own way, and always for the best, since our needs and our characters are far better known to Him than to ourselves. There was I, for instance, imagining that I had nothing more to live for, and, suddenly, God sent me so incomparable a lover, so immense a happiness. In my fairest dreams, I had never seen so ideal a husband—so handsome, so clever, so good, so noble. What a contrast, indeed, between him and the worthless Petrograd officials, with their vulgar ambitions, their greed for money, and their mean and petty spites and jealousies! My noble Sergei! You are like the sun, in comparison to those worms!
“And he has such high ideals!” continued Irene dreamily to herself. “How severely he judged that unhappy woman! A little too severely perhaps, but that only proves how seriously he looks upon love. Oh! my dear one, my dear one!
“All the priests were wrong when they found my faith pagan. I knew I was right! God wanted to try me with long and dark years of despair and suffering, but finding that I was not embittered, and that I had remained, in spite of everything, honest and good, He has sent me this wonderful happiness as a reward. My faith was the right one, my God has triumphed!”