“But we’ll make an appeal for you,” said I. “They will acquit you.”
“But why?” objected the old man. “No one grieves over my sentence, and no one will go bail for me, and isn’t it just the same where I shall think about Nina—in a doss-house or in a prison?”
I didn’t know what to answer, but the old man suddenly looked up at me with his strange and faded eyes and went on:
“Only one thing worries me. What if Nina never existed, and it was merely my poor mind, weakened by alcohol, which invented the whole story of this love whilst I was looking at the little marble head?”
FOR HERSELF OR FOR ANOTHER
I
“IT is she! No, it can’t be, but yet of course it is!” said Peter Andreyevitch Basmanof to himself, as a lady who had previously attracted his attention passed for the fifth or sixth time the little table at which he was sitting.
He no longer doubted that it was Elizavieta. Certainly, they had not met for nearly twelve years, and no woman’s face could remain unchanged during such a period. The features, formerly thin and sharply defined, had become somewhat fuller; the glance, once confiding as a child’s, was now cold and stern, and in the whole face there was an expression of self-confidence which used not to be there. But were they not the same eyes which Basmanof had loved to liken to St. Elma’s fires, was it not that same oval which by its purity of outline alone had often calmed his passion, were they not the same tiny ears which he had found so sweet to kiss? Yes, it must be Elizavieta: there could not be two women so much alike—as much alike as the reflections in two adjoining mirrors!
Basmanof’s mind went quickly over the history of his love for Elizavieta. Not for the first time did he thus survey it, for of all his memories none was dearer or more sacred than this love. The young advocate, just stepping forth into life, had met a woman somewhat older than himself who had loved him with all the blindness of a fierce, unreasoning, ecstatical passion. Elizavieta’s whole soul had been absorbed by this love, and nothing else in the world had mattered to her except this one thing—to possess her beloved, give herself to him, worship him. She had been prepared to sacrifice all the conventions of their “set,” she had begged Basmanof to allow her to leave her husband and go to live with him; and in society not only had she not been ashamed of her connection with him—which, of course, had been talked about—but she had, as it were, gloried in it. Basmanof had never since come across a love so self-forgetful, so ready to sacrifice itself, and he could not have doubted that if at any time he had demanded of Elizavieta that she should kill herself she would have fulfilled his behest with a calm submissive rapture.
How had Basmanof profited by such a love, which comes to us only once in life? He had been afraid of it, afraid of its immensity and its strength. He had understood that where infinite sacrifices are made they are necessarily accompanied by great demands. He had been afraid to accept this love because it would have been necessary to give something in exchange for it, and he felt himself spiritually lacking. And he had been afraid that his just-blossoming career might be checked.... Basmanof, like a thief, had stolen half a year’s love, which could not have been his had he been frank and shown his real character from the first, and then he had taken advantage of the first trifling excuse to “break off the connection.”