Then when you’ve drunk your tea, find some good excuse and get away.
But be sure to come tomorrow and tell me everything. And run round early!
Good heavens!
Something dreadful may have happened already!
Though how could things be worse than they are, when you come to think of it!
Why, Nikolay Sergeyitch knows everything, my heart tells me he does.
I hear a great deal through Matryona, and she through Agasha, and Agasha is the goddaughter of Marya Vassilyevna, who lives in the prince’s house ... but there, you know all that.
My Nikolay was terribly angry today.
I tried to say one thing and another and he almost shouted at me. And then he seemed sorry, said he was short of money.
Just as though he’d been making an outcry about money. You know our circumstances.
After dinner he went to have a nap.
I peeped at him through the chink (there’s a chink in the door he doesn’t know of). And he, poor dear, was on his knees, praying before the shrine.
I felt my legs give way under me when I saw it.
He didn’t sleep, and he had no tea; he took up his hat and went out. He went out at five o’clock.
I didn’t dare question him: he’d have shouted at me.
He’s taken to shouting – generally at Matryona, but sometimes at me. And when he starts it makes my legs go numb, and there’s a sinking at my heart.
Of course it’s foolishness, I know it’s his foolishness, but still it frightens me.
I prayed for a whole hour after he went out that God would send him some good thought.
Where is her note? Show it me!”
I showed it.
I knew that Anna Andreyevna cherished a secret dream that Alyosha, whom she called at one time a villain and at another a stupid heartless boy, would in the end marry Natasha, and that the prince, his father, would consent to it.
She even let this out to me, though at other times she regretted it, and went back on her words.
But nothing would have made her venture to betray her hopes before Nikolay Sergeyitch, though she knew her husband suspected them, and even indirectly reproached her for them more than once.
I believe that he would have cursed Natasha and shut her out of his heart for ever if he had known of the possibility of such a marriage.
We all thought so at the time.
He longed for his daughter with every fibre of his being, but he longed for her alone with every memory of Alyosha cast out of her heart.
It was the one condition of forgiveness, and though it was not uttered in words it could be understood, and could not be doubted when one looked at him.
“He’s a silly boy with no backbone, no backbone, and he’s cruel, I always said so,” Anna Andreyevna began again.
“And they didn’t know how to bring him up, so he’s turned out a regular weathercock; he’s abandoning her after all her love.
What will become of her, poor child?
And what can he have found in this new girl, I should like to know.”
“I have heard, Anna Andreyevna,” I replied, “that his proposed fiancee is a delightful girl. Yes, and Natalya Nikolaevna says the same thing about her.”
“Don’t you believe it!” the mother interrupted.
“Delightful, indeed!
You scribblers think every one’s delightful if only she wears petticoats.
As for Natasha’s speaking well of her, she does that in the generosity of her heart.
She doesn’t know how to control him; she forgives him everything, but she suffers herself.
How often he has deceived her already.
The cruelhearted villains!
I’m simply terrified, Ivan Petrovitch!
They’re all demented with pride.
If my good man would only humble himself, if he would forgive my poor darling and fetch her home!
If only I could hug her, if I could look at her!
Has she got thinner?”
“She has got thin, Anna Andreyevna.”
“My darling!
I’m in terrible trouble, Ivan Petrovitch!
All last night and all today I’ve been crying ... but there! ...
I’ll tell you about it afterwards.
How many times I began hinting to him to forgive her; I daren’t say it right out, so I begin to hint at it, in a tactful way.