‘Whim, or will, I am sure Boganof was grateful?’ asked Melville.
Her voice softened: ‘Oh yes, poor soul! But he died six months afterwards of tubercular consumption, brought on by exposure and bad food in Siberia. You see, imperial pardons may arrive too late, even if one carry them oneself!’
‘But he died at home,’ said Melville; ‘think how much that is!’
‘For the sentimentalists,’ she added, with her cruel little smile, but her eyes were dim as she glanced upward at the stars in the north.
‘Poor Boganof!’ she said, after a pause, with a vibration of unresisted emotion in her voice. ‘There is another problem to set beside your Rose. The world is full of them. Your Christianity does not explain them. He was the son of a country proprietor, a poor one, but he had a little estate, enough for his wants. He was a man of most simple tastes and innocent desires: he might have lived, as Tourguenieff might have lived, happy all his humble days on his own lands; but he had genius, or something near it. He believed in his country and in mankind; he had passionate hopes and passionate faiths; he knew he would lose all for saying the truth as he saw it, but he could not help it; the truth in him was stronger than he, he could not restrain the fire that was in him—a holy fire, pure of all personal greed. Well, he has died for being so simple, being so loyal, being so impersonal and so unselfish. If he had been an egotist, a time-server, a sycophant, he would have lived in peace and riches. Your Christianity has no explanation of that! Musset’s “être immobile qui regarde mourir” is all we see behind the eternal spectacle of useless suffering and unavailing loss.’
She turned and drew her laces closer about her head, and passed quickly through the shadows to the house.
Melville in answer sighed.
That night, when Melville stood at his windows looking over the immense flat landscape, green with waving corn and rolling grass lands and low birch woods which stretched before him silvered by the effulgence of a broad white moon, he thought of Nadine Napraxine curiously, wistfully, wonderingly, as a man who plays chess well puzzles over some chess problem that is too intricate for him. The explanation we give of ourselves is rarely accepted by others, and he did not accept hers of herself; that she was the creature of the impression of the moment. It seemed to him rather that hers was a nature with noble and heroic impulses crusted over by the habits of the world and veiled by the assumption rather than the actuality of egotism. She, too, could have been a sister of Læna, he thought.
What waste was here of a fine nature, sedulously forcing itself and others to believe that it was worthless, wearied by the pleasures which yet made its only kingdom, cynical, lonely, incredulous, whilst at the height of youth and of all possession!