Who told you?” she asked, quickly interrupting me.
“I thought your grandfather couldn’t live alone, abandoned by everyone.
He was so old and feeble; I thought someone must be looking after him . . .
Here are your books, take them.
Are they your lessonbooks?”
“No.”
“What do you want with them, then?”
“Grandfather taught me when I used to see him.”
“Why did you leave off coming then?”
“Afterwards . . . I didn’t come. I was ill,” she added, as though defending herself.
“Tell me, have you a home, a father and mother?”
She frowned suddenly and looked at me, seeming almost scared.
Then she looked down, turned in silence and walked softly out of the room without deigning to reply, just as she had done the day before.
I looked after her in amazement.
But she stood still in the doorway.
“What did he die of?” she asked me abruptly, turning slightly towards me with exactly the same movement and gesture as the day before, when she had asked after Azorka, stopping on her way out with her face to the door.
I went up to her and began rapidly telling her.
She listened mutely and with curiosity, her head bowed and her back turned to me.
I told her, too, how the old man had mentioned Sixth Street as he was dying.
“I imagine” I added, “that someone dear to him live there, and that’s why, I expected someone would come to inquire after him.
He must have loved, you, since he thought of you at the last moment.”
“No,” she whispered, almost unconsciously it seemed; “he didn’t love me.”
She was strangely moved.
As I told my story I bent down and looked into her face.
I noticed that she was making great effort to suppress her emotion, as though too proud to let me see it.
She turned paler and paler and bit her lower lip But what struck me especially was the strange thumping of her heart.
It throbbed louder and louder, so that one could hear it two or three paces off, as in cases of aneurysm.
I thought she would suddenly burst into tears as she had done the day before but she controlled herself.
“And where is the fence?”
“What fence?”
“That he died under.”
“I will show you . . . when we go out.
But, tell me, what do they call you?”
“No need to.”
“No need towhat?”
“Never mind . . . it doesn’t matter. . . . They don’t call me anything,” she brought out jerkily, seeming annoyed, an she moved to go away.
I stopped her.
“Wait a minute, you queer little girl!
Why, I only want to help you. I felt so sorry for you when I saw you crying in the corner yesterday.
I can’t bear to think of it. Besides, your grandfather died in my arms, and no doubt he was thinking of you when he mentioned Sixth Street, so it’s almost as if he left you in my care.
I dream of him. . . . Here, I’ve kept those books for you, but you’re such a wild little thing, as though you were afraid of me.
You must be very poor and an orphan perhaps living among strangers; isn’t that so?”
I did my utmost to conciliate her, and I don’t know how it was she attracted me so much.
There was something beside pity in my feeling for her.
Whether it was the mysteriousness of the whole position, the impression made on me by Smith, or my own fantastic mood – I can’t say; but something drew me irresistibly to her.
My words seemed to touch her. She bent on me a strange look, not severe now, but soft and deliberate, then looked down again as though pondering.
“Elena,” she brought out unexpectedly, and in an extremely low voice.
“That’s your name, Elena?”
“Yes.”
“Well, will you come and see me?”