I have watched you, studied you, and am at last convinced that my suspicions were groundless.
I have learnt that you are cut off from your family. I know, too, that your father is utterly opposed to your marriage with my son, and the mere fact that, having such an influence, such power, one may say, over Alyosha, you have not hitherto taken advantage of that power to force him to marry you – that alone says much for you.
And yet I confess it openly, I was firmly resolved at that time to hinder any possibility of your marriage with my son.
I know I am expressing myself too straight forwardly, but, at this moment straightforwardness on my part is what is most needed. You will admit that yourself when you have heard me to the end.
Soon after you left your home I went away from Petersburg, but by then I had no further fears for Alyosha.
I relied on your generous pride.
I knew that you did not yourself want a marriage before the family dissensions were over, that you were unwilling to destroy the good understanding between Alyosha and me – for I should never have forgiven his marriage with you – that you were unwilling, too, to have it said of you that you were trying to catch a prince for a husband, and to be connected with our family.
On the contrary, you showed a positive neglect of us, and were perhaps waiting for the moment when I should come to beg you to do us the honour to give my son your hand.
Yet I obstinately remained your illwisher.
I am not going to justify myself, but I will not conceal my reasons.
Here they are. You have neither wealth nor position.
Though I have property, we need more; our family is going downhill.
We need money and connexions.
Though Countess Zinaida Fyodorovna’s stepdaughter has no connexions, she is very wealthy.
If we delayed, suitors would turn up and carry her off. And such a chance was not to be lost. So, though Alyosha is still so young, I decided to make a match for him.
You see I am concealing nothing.
You may look with scorn on a father who admits himself that from prejudice and mercenary motives he urged his son to an evil action; for to desert a generous hearted girl who has sacrificed everyone to him, and whom he has treated so badly, is an evil action.
But I do not defend myself.
My second reason for my son’s proposed marriage was that the girl is highly deserving of love and respect.
She is handsome, welleducated, has a charming disposition, and is very intelligent, though in many ways still a child.
Alyosha has no character, he is thoughtless, extremely injudicious, and at twoandtwenty is a perfect child. He has at most one virtue, a good heart, positively a dangerous possession with his other failings.
I have noticed for a long time that my influence over him was beginning to grow less; the impulsiveness and enthusiasm of youth are getting the upper hand, and even get the upper hand of some positive duties.
I perhaps love him too fondly; but I am convinced that I am not a sufficient guide for him.
And yet he must always be under some good influence.
He has a submissive nature, weak and loving, liking better to love and to obey than to command.
So he will be all his life.
You can imagine how delighted I was at finding in Katerina Fyodorovna the ideal girl I should have desired for my son’s wife.
But my joy came too late. He was already under the sway of another influence that nothing could shake – yours.
I have kept a sharp watch on him since I returned to Petersburg a month ago, and I notice with surprise a distinct change for the better in him.
His irresponsibility and childishness are scarcely altered; but certain generous feelings are stronger in him. He begins to be interested not only in playthings, but in what is lofty, noble, and more genuine.
His ideas are queer, unstable, sometimes absurd; but the desire, the impulse, the feeling is finer, and that is the foundation of everything; and all this improvement in him is undoubtedly your work.
You have remodelled him.
I will confess the idea did occur to me, then, that you rather than anyone might secure his happiness.
But I dismissed that idea, I did not wish to entertain it.
I wanted to draw him away from you at any cost. I began to act, and thought I had gained my object.
Only an hour ago I thought that the victory was mine.
But what has just happened at the countess’s has upset all my calculations at once, and what struck me most of all was something unexpected: the earnestness and constancy of Alyosha’s devotion to you, the persistence and vitality of that devotion – which seemed strange in him.
I repeat, you have remodelled him completely.
I saw all at once that the change in him had gone further than I had supposed.
He displayed today before my eyes a sudden proof of an intelligence of which I had not the slightest suspicion, and at the same time an extraordinary insight and subtlety of feeling.
He chose the surest way of extricating himself from what he felt to be a difficult position.
He touched and stirred the noblest chords in the human heart – the power of forgiving and repaying good for evil.
He surrendered himself into the hands of the being he was injuring, and appealed to her for sympathy and help.
He roused all the pride of the woman who already loved him by openly telling her she had a rival, and aroused at the same time her sympathy for her rival, and forgiveness and the promise of disinterested, sisterly affection for himself.
To go into such explanations without rousing resentment and mortification – to do that is sometimes beyond the capacity of the subtlest and cleverest; only pure young hearts under good guidance can do this.
I am sure, Natalya Nikolaevna, that you took no part by word or suggestion in what he did today.
You have perhaps only just heard of it from him.
I am not mistaken.
Am I?”
“You are not mistaken,” Natasha assented. Her face was glowing, and her eyes shone with a strange light as though of inspiration.