Now, when the end was drawing close, her heart began to ache. Now for the first time did Anninka grasp the significance of her past and begin to hate it truly.
The drinking lasted far into the night, and had it not been for the drunken confusion of both thoughts and words, it might have resulted in something frightful.
But if alcohol opened the well-springs of pain in these shattered hearts, it also appeased them.
The further the night advanced, the more incoherent became their talk and the more impotent their hatred.
Toward the end of the debauch, the aching disappeared and their surroundings vanished from their eyes, supplanted by a shining void.
They faltered, their eyes closed, they grew muscle-bound.
Uncle and niece would then rise from their places and retire to their rooms with tottering steps.
Of course, these night adventures could not remain a secret.
Before long the notion of crime became associated with them in the minds of the servants.
Life abandoned the vast Golovliovo manor-house. Nothing stirred even in the morning.
Uncle and niece rose late and till the midday meal Anninka's racking cough, accompanied by curses, rang from one end of the house to the other.
Yudushka listened to the harrowing sounds in terror and a vague presentiment of his own impending doom stirred in him.
It seemed that all the Golovliovo victims were now creeping from out of the nooks and crannies of the deserted house. Gray apparitions stirred everywhere.
Here was old Vladimir Mikhailovich, in his white nightcap, making wry faces and citing Barkov; here was Simple Simon and Pavel the Sneak; here were Lubinka and the last offshoots of the Golovliovo stock, Volodya and Petka. All were drunk, lustful, weary and bleeding. And over all these ghosts there brooded a living phantom, Porfiry Vladimirych Golovliov, the last representative of the decadent family.
_____ CHAPTER V
The continual reverting to the past and its victims was bound to have its effect on Yudushka.
The natural outcome—was it fear?—No, rather the awakening of conscience.
He discovered he had a conscience, and oblivion and contempt, although blunting its sensitiveness, could not destroy it. The awakening of a torpid conscience is usually fraught with pain. It brings no peace, holds no promise of a new life, but merely tortures, endlessly and fruitlessly.
Man sees himself immured in a narrow prison, a helpless victim of the agonies of repentance, with no hope of ever returning to life.
And he perceives no other way of allaying his gnawing pain than to break his head against the stony walls of the prison cell.
Never in the course of his long, useless life had it occurred to Yudushka that dire tragedies were interwoven with his existence.
He had lived peacefully and calmly, with a constant prayer on his lips, and the thought had been far from him that this manner of life had caused so much sorrow.
Least of all could he imagine that he himself had been the source of these tragedies.
Suddenly the terrible truth was revealed to his conscience, but all too late—too late for him to make amends for the crimes of his life.
He was unsociable, old, with one foot in the grave, and there was not a single human being who approached him with loving pity.
Why was he alone? Why did he see nothing but indifference and hatred around him? Why was it that everything he touched had perished?
This estate of Golovliovo was once so full, a human nest. How had it happened that now there was not a trace, not a feather left?
Of the fledgelings nursed there his niece was the only one that remained alive, and she had come back only to sneer at him and deal him his deathblow.
Even Yevpraksia, simple as she was, hated him.
She lived at Golovliovo because Porfiry sent her father, the sacristan, provisions every month, but undoubtedly she hated him.
He had made her unhappy, too, by robbing her of her child.
What was the outcome of his existence?
Wherefore had he lied, babbled, persecuted, hoarded?
Who would inherit his wealth? Who was to enjoy the fruits of his life?
Who? I repeat, his conscience had awakened.
Yudushka waited for the evening with feverish impatience not only in order to get bestially drunk, but also to drown his conscience.
He hated the "dissolute wench," who lacerated his wounds with such cold cynicism, yet he was drawn to her irresistibly, as if there was still something to be said between them and some wounds to be torn open.
Every evening he made Anninka retell the story of Lubinka's death, and every evening the idea of self-destruction became riper in his mind.
At first, the idea occurred to him casually. But as his iniquities became more apparent to him, it sank deeper and deeper into his being and soon was the sole shining spot in all the gloom he saw ahead of him.
And his health began to decline rapidly.
He coughed violently and at times had spells of asthma that in themselves were sufficient to make life intolerable, let alone the moral pangs from which he suffered.
All the symptoms of the malady that had sent his brothers to their graves were present. He heard the groans of his brother Pavel, as he choked in the entresol of the Dubrovino manor-house.
Still Yudushka was doggedly tenacious of life. His sunken, emaciated chest held out against the pain that grew from hour to hour. It was as if his body too were resisting with unexpected vigor so as to take revenge on him for his crimes.
"Is this the end?" he would wonder hopefully, whenever he felt the approach of a paroxysm. But death was slow in coming.
Evidently it would be necessary to use violence to hasten the end.
All his accounts with life were settled—it was both painful and useless to him.
What he needed was death, but, to his sorrow, death was slow in coming.
There is something mean and treacherous in the teasing hesitancy of death when it is called upon with all the strength of one's soul. _____
It was late in March and Passion Week was nearing its end.
However abject Yudushka's condition was, he preserved an attitude of reverence toward the sanctity of these days implanted in him in his childhood.