These words seemed to pierce my dizzy brain like red-hot needles. “As long as he lives I shall not escape him. As long as he lives—!”
I raised my eyes and looked at him; then I drooped my lashes—and smiled.
The subtle cunning of madness stirred within me.
XXXI
Paul Kamarowsky appeared not to notice it. He continued to speak agitatedly, holding my unwilling hand in his.
“I know, Mura, that you have done many unworthy things in the course of your life; I know that you are not what I would have you be; but my pity for your misfortunes is far greater than my resentment at your faults. I know that you are ill; I know that you have had none but rakes and reprobates around you; it shall be my duty to strengthen you and uphold you with my love. I will help you, Mura, whether you wish it or not; I will save you in spite of yourself.”
Ah, miserable creature that I was, why did I not throw myself upon his mercy and confide my doubts and my despair to his generous heart? Why did I not surrender my poor sick soul to his keeping? This was indeed the last time that salvation opened its haven to my shipwrecked soul; but I knew it not, and like a boat adrift in the darkness I swept on towards the storm.
He continued to speak. “If I have not wanted to know about your past, it has not been from cowardice nor from the fear of any man; but from distrust of my own heart, Mura, for fear lest my love for you should wane. Whereas it is my duty and my mission to love you, Marie Nicolaevna, to love and save you from your own weakness and the iniquity of the world. You are still so young—hardly less of a child than little Tioka—notwithstanding the storms of passion and sin that have passed over your head. All you need is to live among right-minded people who will love you. I shall love you, Mura; and my mother, gentle soul that she is, will take you to her heart; and so will my sisters. Then when you find yourself surrounded by such pure, kind and simple affections, you, too, will become simple, kind and pure again.”
His voice broke. “We shall be so happy; and Tioka and Grania will be happy; and so will your good old father. He shall come and live with us. How is it you never think of your father, Mura? The generous, broken-hearted old man in that desolate house of Otrada?”
Hot tears rushed to my eyes. My father! My stately father, with his venerable white hair, and his proud blue eyes—the “terrible O'Rourke,” living in that deserted house, widowed, desolate and alone. There was no one to coax him out of his grief or his anger; no arms went round his neck, no laughing voices cried to him: “Father, don't be the terrible O'Rourke!” I covered my face with my hands.
Kamarowsky bent over me. “Is it not wickedness, Mura, to throw away one's life as you do? To rush from place to place, from emotion to emotion, from misery to despair? Is it not more than wickedness—is it not madness?”
“Madness!” As if the word had rent a veil before my eyes, I looked my calamity full in the face. Yes, it was madness; it was the hereditary curse of my mother's people. I was like my mother's two wild-faced, frenzied sisters, whom we used to run away from and laugh at when we were children, Olga and I.... Madness! In my delicate blue veins it had taken root again, and now its monstrous flower opened its crashing petals in my brain. I was mad, there was no doubt of it and no help for it. I was mad.
I spoke the words softly to myself, and the very sound of them made me laugh. It amused me to think that no one knew my thoughts. I felt like a naughty little girl hiding in a dark cupboard while everybody is looking for her. The dark cupboard was my mind, and I had discovered madness there.
Undoubtedly I was bereft of reason; and my mother's sisters, now for so many years entombed in an asylum at Warsaw, were assuredly not more mad than I. The thought of this, also, made me laugh. I whispered to myself: “I am cleverer than they. I am as mad as they are, but no one shall ever know it!”
I have no other explanation to give, no other justification. I was demented, and I knew it. Sometimes in the night I started up wide awake, and the horror of the thought that I was alone with myself—with myself who was mad!—froze me into a statue of ice. As soon as I could stir a limb I would creep from my bed, steal out into the silent corridors of the hotel, and run with chattering teeth along the red-carpeted passages between the long double rows of boots, which to my eyes appeared like little monsters crouching at the thresholds; then up the great staircase, turning round every moment to look behind me, until I reached the fourth floor and the room of Elise and the children.
Softly I would tap at the door, and calclass="underline" —“Elise!”
“Yes, madame.” Elise Perrier always answered immediately, as if she never slept.
“Elise, I want you.”
“Yes, madame, I shall come at once,” and I could hear her rising from her bed.
Then I ran back through the silent corridors, and when I passed Count Kamarowsky's door I trembled and shuddered and felt constrained to stop. I looked at his yellow boots—square and placid, with their mouths open and their tongues hanging out—and I experienced a wild sensation of fear and loathing for him and for them.
I made a grimace at those hateful boots and hurried away to shut myself in my room and await Elise.
She would come in, pale and tidy in her red woolen dressing-gown, with a little cap on her head. She sat down quietly by my bedside and held my hand. Sometimes she read aloud to me; sometimes she repeated Swiss poems and ballads that she remembered from her schooldays; and I soon grew calm again as I listened to her quiet voice and felt the clasp of her small roughened hand on mine.
Gradually a sort of frenzied fear of Kamarowsky took possession of me. I was obsessed continuously with the idea that I must escape from him at all costs, or die. My every fiber shrank at the slightest touch of his hand. I longed never to see him again. I longed to know that the world held him no more. It was a blind instinctive frenzy that I endured without reasoning about it. My constant and only preoccupation was to fly from him who spelt ruin, and to cling to Naumoff, my deliverer.
“Nicolas Naumoff! Nicolas Naumoff!” I repeated his name all day long like a kind of exorcism against Kamarowsky; sometimes I felt as if I were stifled, as if I must hold my breath until he was near.
On his side, Naumoff, who frequently came to see us, was reserved and shy, and did not venture to believe in what nevertheless he could not but read in my eyes. Knowing nothing of my insensate notion about the diviner's prophecy, and having no conception that to my fancy he was a rescuer sent to me by Providence, he thought I was making fun of him; or at other times he believed my predilection for him was merely the caprice of a frivolous creature accustomed to gratify every passing whim. So he held back, aggrieved and mistrustful.
And the more he held back the more was I impelled to pursue him, to hold and to vanquish him. The passionate gravity of his youthful face delighted me; I was thirsty for the unknown recesses of his soul as for a spring filled with mysterious sweetness. His voice perturbed me; his silence lashed my nerves; I lived in a perpetual quiver of rhapsodic sensibility.
I was in this frame of mind when Kamarowsky resolved to invite all his friends in Orel to a banquet in order to announce to them our imminent marriage.
At this banquet Naumoff also was present. Doubtless he already knew the announcement that his friend was going to make, yet when the Count rose to speak and laid his hand with a placid air of ownership upon mine, I saw Nicolas Naumoff turn pale. I watched with deep emotion the color slowly receding from his face; in its pallor his youthful countenance appeared to me still more beautiful; he looked indeed like the supreme deliverer—the angel of death.
I did not comprehend a word of Paul Kamarowsky's speech; I know that when it was ended he turned to me and placed a magnificent diamond ring upon my finger, and every one applauded and cheered.