"You do not understand! This is no question of love, but of high-treason! What would it matter to me if a Circassian Princess chose to fall in love with my lowest groom? He would probably be too good for her! But do you know why Pushkin has married this girl? In order to discover the Czar's secrets, which he confided to his daughter, and which were repeated to her friend Bethsaba. Now these secrets, through Pushkin, will become the common property of the Czar's enemies! Thus, you ruin yourself if you are on the side of the Czar; or the Czar, if you conspire against him. And this is what you two have done!"
Prince Ghedimin stood as if turned to stone. His wife had triumphed. Her words bore so clearly the stamp of truth that defence was not to be thought of.
"Yes. It was a plot among you all!" continued his wife, furiously. "You availed yourselves of the illness of the one to entice the other from me. In order to detain me at home, and to prevent my watching over the child intrusted to my care, you sent Pushkin to me with a poem, and, instead of coming to receive his answer, the cowardly fellow steals away with a foolish, inexperienced girl from the very death-chamber of her friend. Out with such people! Such treachery, deceit, betrayal! You are worthy one of another. A pack of actors and actresses! Out of my room! Away with you!"
When women take to abuse, men are nowhere. Their reasoning powers are gone. Prince Ghedimin was a wise and good man, and innocent as a child of this crime; which, after all, was no crime at all. Yet after this torrent of abuse he felt a very criminal who had brought about an act of the greatest, most irreparable evil with the coldest calculation, and, in this frame of mind, was glad to be permitted to leave his home and seek his gondola.
We who are in the secret can aver that he did not even now know who Sophie Narishkin's mother was. But this Korynthia did not believe. She looked upon the whole scene as expressly got up to torture her—from the appearance of her husband at the very hour of the rendezvous, when he shed upon her love-lorn heart first the ice-drops of the funeral scene, then poured in the poison of the faithlessness of the man she adored.
It was a deadly poison, killing inwardly and outwardly. When Ghedimin left her, Korynthia, clasping her two hands above her head, threw herself on the ground, sobbing bitterly. Then, as there was no one to raise her, she assumed a kneeling posture, her long plaits hanging like serpents over her bosom; and, lifting three fingers to heaven, she gasped out, with hideous vengeance:
"Oh that I may repay you this some day!"
Her lips parted; the gnashing of her clinched teeth was audible. She was meditating something; her eyes flashed fire; she rose, and bared her white, exquisitely formed arm to the shoulder. Then she pressed the rounded muscle of the upper part of her arm between her teeth, and bit into it until the blood flowed from it, and sucked the blood she had drawn. It is the Russian superstition that whoever would insure the fulfilment of his curse must, after uttering it, drink of his own blood.
The melancholy hum of the death's-head moth in the corner of the picture-frame sounded like the murmur of a lost soul.