"Oh, unapproachable saint! You who rejected his heart that you might save his head. Speak, counsel me, how shall I set about doing that which you have charged me to do. It is so difficult. How shall I carry it out, that my work be successful?"
And Zeneida, raising the young bride, began to whisper the sensible advice to her that experienced women are wont to give their inexperienced younger sisters.
"Give up to him in everything. Do not contradict him. If he change his mind seven times in a day, change yours with him. Divine his thoughts and forestall his wishes. If you know one thought of his, you can guess the others. If he be out of temper, do not irritate him with questions as to the reason. In such a mood the dearest face is unwelcome. Requite his love with your whole soul, and do not hide your joy from him. But do not flatter him, for that would turn him from you. Do your utmost to make his home pleasant to him. Let your house and his surroundings be pure and peaceful, yourself be ever cheerful and loving; never let him hear your voice raised harshly to your servants. If he desire to show hospitality, see that you make a good hostess. Do not keep him back from his manly pursuits. Never ask where he is going, whence he comes. Above all, never betray jealousy. What woman is there who can sufficiently stifle jealousy as not to feel it? Therefore must her heart, his advocate, keep watch that it clear him, even if eyes and ears accuse him. Never meet him with tearful eyes, but keep a strict watch over your own actions. It is not necessary to play the prude with strangers and to be always flying to your husband for protection; that would only render him ridiculous, and lead to many disagreeables. But never, whether from high spirits or feminine vanity, allow other men to pay you attentions which might arouse your husband's jealousy. If anything annoy you, tell it him gently and at once. Do not brood over it until it grows and he reads the trouble in your face. Be easily pacified. Throughout, be yourself, equable, ever the same; for, in an evil hour, some fatal moment may suffice to recall his forsaken love, Eleutheria, to his mind, and to throw him again into her arms."
The little bride listened to her words as though they were the words of Holy Scripture.
"I will help you to keep him at home and from returning to St. Petersburg. I will write you letters saying that the Czar is furious that he whom he had chosen as his daughter's husband should have been capable of marrying another on the very day of her funeral. It will not be true, for I shall show the Czar Sophie's will, and it will disarm him, but Pushkin must be made to believe that he is in disgrace, and dare not return to St. Petersburg without special permission. And we will expunge his name from 'the green book,' that he receive no more invitations to meetings. Let him be hidden in your arms until better times dawn or—what I far rather believe in—until the day of our extinction. When all is over, then you may come back to the world. Until then we must keep him in the belief that for him, exiled by his Czar, vilified by his peers, there is no other world than his love and his Olympus. And are they not, in themselves, two worlds—two heavens?"
Pushkin entered.
"Not ready yet?"
"Leave us alone! I am just about to spoil your wife. I am advising her how to keep you under her thumb. You are not to listen."
"All very fine. The first hour we are together she will tell me all about it."
The choristers in the chamber of death now began their solemn chant. It was a long ceremony, but it, too, came to an end. The priest, taking the two candlesticks, held them over the cross while he spake the blessing, walked three times round the coffin waving incense, then placed the parchment containing the list of sins, at the end of which was inscribed the absolution, into the dead child's hands as her passport into eternity; after which the candles on the catafalque were extinguished. The two doves upon the crucifix continued their billing and cooing.