Aren’t you ashamed?
Surely . . .”
“Yes,” she whispered, in a voice hardly audible, and a tear trickled down her cheek.
“Yes . . .” I repeated after her.
“Nellie, darling, if I’ve not been good to you, forgive me and let us make friends.”
She looked at me, tears gushed from her eyes, and she flung herself on my breast.
At that instant Alexandra Semyonovna darted in.
“What?
She’s home?
Again?
Ach, Nellie, Nellie, what is the matter with you?
Well, it’s a good thing you’re at home, anyway. Where did you find her, Ivan Petrovitch?”
I signed to Alexandra Semyonovna not to ask questions and she understood me.
I parted tenderly from Nellie, who was still weeping bitterly, and asking kindhearted Alexandra Semyonovna to stay with her till I returned home, I ran off to Natasha’s.
I was late and in a hurry.
That evening our fate was being decided. There was a great deal for Natasha and me to talk over. Yet I managed to slip in a word about Nellie and told her all that had happened in full detail.
My story greatly interested Natasha and made a great impression on her, in fact.
“Do you know what, Vanya,” she said to me after a moment’s thought. “I believe she’s in love with you.”
“What ... how can that be?” I asked, wondering.
“Yes, it’s the beginning of love, real grownup love.”
“How can you, Natasha! Nonsense!
Why, she’s a child!”
“A child who will soon be fourteen.
This exasperation is at your not understanding her love; and probably she doesn’t understand it herself. It’s an exasperation in which there’s a great deal that’s childish, but it’s in earnest, agonizing.
Above all she’s jealous of me.
You love me so that probably even when you’re at home you’re always worrying, thinking and talking about me, and so don’t take much notice of her.
She has seen that and it has stung her.
She wants perhaps to talk to you, longs to open her heart to you, doesn’t know how to do it, is ashamed, and doesn’t understand herself; she is waiting for an opportunity, and instead of giving her such an opportunity you keep away from her, run off to me, and even when she was ill left her alone for whole days together.
She cries about it; she misses you, and what hurts her most of all is that you don’t notice it.
Now, at a moment like this, you have left her alone for my sake.
Yes, she’ll be ill tomorrow because of it.
And how could you leave her?
Go back to her at once. . .”
“I should not have left her, but . . .”
“Yes, I know. I begged you to come, myself.
But now go.”
“I will, but of course I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Because it’s all so different from other people.
Remember her story, think it all over and you will believe, it.
She has not grown up as you and I did.”
I got home late, however.
Alexandra Semyonovna told me that again Nellie had, as on the previous evening, been crying a great deal and “had fallen asleep in tears,” as before.
“And now I’m going, Ivan Petrovitch, as Filip Filippovitch told me.
He’s expecting me, poor fellow.”
I thanked her and sat down by Nellie’s pillow.
It seemed dreadful to me myself that I could have left her at such a moment.
For a long time, right into the night, I sat beside her, lost in thought.... It was a momentous time for us all.
But I must describe what had been happening during that fortnight.
Chapter V
AFTER the memorable evening I had spent with Prince Valkovsky at the restaurant, I was for some days in continual apprehension on Natasha’s account.