"Console!" said she to herself, bitterly. "Whom will they console?" They, none of whom understand what she has buried with the great, stormy heart that rests at the foot of the Aventine. She has lost the only person who fully understood her, whom she could wholly confide in. The man who has petted and indulged her, and cared for her like a little child who has hurt itself--had wrapped her warmly and securely in his protecting tenderness when the rest of the world turned from her. It seemed to her that life has paused around her. All is hard and cold.
Her husband at last won admittance to her. His flat words of consolation, his attempts to calm her with caresses, excited her almost to madness. She, who had formerly always tolerated him near her with the same even friendliness, repulsed him, no longer mistress of herself, this time with a furious roughness at which a deeper-thinking man would have been frightened. But he explained this violence by overstrained nerves, and withdrew with a last mild, kind word on his lips.
When the door had closed behind him, an indescribably painful feeling overpowered her. Never before had she felt his triteness so plainly as in this moment when her agony tore down, with its tyrannical ruthlessness, all her carefully piled-up deceptions. For the first time she realized the whole irremediable flatness and dryness in which her future must drag on--her future with this man who was a stranger to all her deeper thoughts and feelings.
Her last prop had fallen with her father. For love of him she had at least tried to appear happy; but now, for what purpose--why? She could no longer bear her existence. It was impossible to live longer.
Then she heard the steps of insecure little feet approaching her door; then the soft knocking of two tiny little fists, which wounded themselves on the hard wood; an indistinguishable tender word lisped by soft child's lips.
She started up and opened the door. Without stood Natascha and her nurse. The nurse drew back. The child stared at her mother, whose pale face and long mourning dress seemed strange to her; then she nestled in her dress and began to stroke and caress the black folds violently. The young wife raised the child in her arms. Natascha did not cease to embrace and kiss her mother with the touching, helpless tenderness of a little being in whom love has awakened before intellect, who suspects a pain which it does not yet understand, and would fain console before it can yet speak.
For the first time Mascha's pain dissolved in tears. Sobbing, she pressed the little girl to her breast. "Bear your cross patiently," she murmured, thinking of the words with which her father in that fearful night in Venice had calmed her heart, rebelling against its oppressive lot. "Bear your cross!"
She kissed the child again and again, and the grief for the dead met in her heart the love for this sweet young life.
And Nikolai?