Bärenburg left the room. "He gambles!" said Lensky, looking Mascha straight in the eyes.
Mascha lowered her eyes. "Only since our marriage," murmured she.
"The miserable fellow!" burst out Lensky.
"Do not be too severe with him," said Mascha. "He is indeed almost as much to be pitied as I. Ah, father, father!" She wrung her hands, then suddenly, with a gesture of unspeakable despair, pushing back the hair from her temples, she cried: "If I only had the courage to hold my Natascha close to my heart and kiss her for a last time, and spring down into the water with her--there--" She points to a window; she has evidently already busied herself with the thought. "But how can I have the courage when she smiles at me, and twitches her little limbs so gayly, and so rejoices in life!"
Lensky laid his arm round the young wife and leaned the head of the unhappy woman on his shoulder. "It will be better; he will change in time. You only must not yield too much to him; you must take the reins in your hand, must have head and character for two. Forget the old story, demand your right of him; then all will go well, believe me. As for your pecuniary affairs, I will take counsel. Only this--" He took the pearl necklace which had remained on the table and let it slide caressingly through his fingers. "Do not give this away; that you must not inflict upon me--only not that. I will take counsel, do not worry yourself."
XXXIV.
Yes, he would take counsel. It was harder than he thought. By the necessary inquiry into his affairs, it turned out that nothing more of his fortune was left to him. Where had it gone? He had lived so simply these last years, quite like a beggar. Where was the money?
The great sympathy which he had always felt for every living being, for everything that feels pain, had latterly become morbid and exaggerated in character. He gave and gave to every one who turned to him; gave without reckoning, without thinking, assisted every need, every weakness, every burden, in order to alleviate a grief, were it only for an hour. He gave until he had nothing more to give. The only thing that was left him to procure relief for his unhappy child was to again appear before the public. So he took up anew the wanderer's staff.
This time also he allowed his former manager, Herr Braun, to plan his foreign tour. He gave his first concert beyond the frontier in Königsberg. He did not feel anxious about the audience. With the thundering applause which had everywhere fallen to his share at his last concert tour still ringing in his ears, he quite did not comprehend the possibility of a fiasco. Another kind of discomfort tormented him.
In the recently flown years, which he had earnestly and solitarily passed in the effort to listen once more to the inner voices, which had been silenced in the mad whirl of his virtuoso life, but which anew, at first hesitatingly, but then ever more powerfully, more enthusiastically, vibrated through his mind--in these four years of exclusively creative activity, virtuosity had lost its nimbus for him. This kind of triumph seemed to him small, quite degrading. He was really ashamed to appear before the public with his old arts. But--he did it for his child.