"Do you suppose that it was a pleasure to write them?" Emma asked, with some bitterness.
Strachinsky immediately assumed an injured air. "You are irritable again. One cannot venture upon the slightest jest with you. Do you suppose that I enjoy being forced to ask you to write the letters? Good heavens! it is hard enough, but--circumstances will have it so." He passed his hand over his eyes, and stroked his whiskers with an air of great dignity.
She was silent. He watched her for a while, and then said, "That eternal sewing is very bad for you. Come to bed."
"I cannot. I am not sleepy," she replied, plying her needle; "and, moreover, I must finish this frock; let me go on with it." She bent over her work with the air of one determined to complete a task.
Strachinsky stood beside her for a while longer, hesitating and uncertain: he picked up each small article upon the table, looked at it and laid it down again after the fashion of a man who does not know what to do with himself, then he sighed profoundly, yawned, sighed again, and without another word left the room with heavy, lagging footsteps.
When he was gone she laid aside her sewing, and went to the open window to breathe the fresh air. The bluish moonlight shone full upon the whitewashed walls of the peasants' cots crowned with their dark clumsy thatch; in the distance twinkled the little stream winding its plashing way directly across the village towards the river, its banks bordered with curiously-distorted willows that looked like crouching lurking gnomes, and spanned by the huge useless bridge. Bridge, willows, and cots all threw pitch-black shadows out into the glaring splendour of the moonlit night, which was absolutely free from mist and damp. Beyond the village stretched fields of grain and stubble in endless perspective, a surface of tarnished dull gold.
The song was still informing the silence.
At last it ceased, and shortly afterwards heavy, regular steps were heard passing along the road. The reapers were going home. They passed by Emma's windows, a little dark gray crowd of men; the scythes over their shoulders glimmered in the moonlight; then came a couple of women, bowed and weary, almost dropping asleep as they walked; and last of all the overseer, a young fellow whose hand clasped that of a girl at his side. How he bent over her! A low tender whispering sound reached Emma's ears through the dry August air which the night had scarcely cooled. She turned away, frowning. "How happy they look! and why?" she murmured to herself. Suddenly she smiled bitterly. Had she any right to sneer thus at others?--she? Surely if ever a woman lived who had believed in love and had married for love, she was that woman.
And whom had she loved? A poor weakling, who had never been worthy to unloose the latchet of her shoe!
Not only little precocious Erika, every sensible human being who had ever come in contact with the married pair had asked how such a union had been possible. And yet it was so simple a story,--so simple and commonplace,--the story of a woman lacking beauty, but gifted, enthusiastic, prone to romantic exaggeration, whose longing for affection had wrought her ruin.