"And to think how she died! Why, her death was worthy of a saint," he lied to himself, not knowing, though, whether he lied or spoke the truth. "Without ailment, without trouble—just so.
She heaved a sigh, and before we knew it, she was no more.
Oh, mother dear!
And her smile, and the glow of her cheeks! Her hands placed together as if she wanted to confer a blessing. She shut her eyes and—good-by!"
But in the very heat of his sentimental babblings, something would suddenly prick him.
That filthy business again. Fi, fi!
"And really why didn't she wait a while!
It was only a matter of a month or so, and now, look what she did!"
For some time he attempted to pretend ignorance, and answered Ulita's inquiries just as he had answered his mother's, "I don't know, I don't know anything."
But Ulita, an impudent woman, who had suddenly become conscious of her power, could not be dismissed like that.
"Do I know? Have I brought this business on?" she cut him short. And then he realized that from that moment on the happy combination of the role of adulterer with the role of the unconcerned observer of the consequences of his adultery had become quite impossible.
Nearer and nearer came the disaster, inevitable, tangible.
It pursued him relentlessly and—what was worst of all—it paralyzed his idle mind.
He exerted all possible efforts to rid himself of the thought of the approaching calamity, to drown it in a torrent of idle words, but he succeeded only in part.
He tried to hide behind the infallibility of the law of Providence and, as was his custom, turned it into a ball of thread which he could wind and unwind without end. There was the parable of the hair falling from a man's head, and the legend of the house built on sand; but just at the moment when his idle thoughts were about to roll down into a kind of mysterious abyss, when the endless winding of the ball seemed quite assured, a single word suddenly jumped out from the ambush and broke the thread.
Alas! That one word was "adultery" and designated an act of which Yudushka did not wish to confess himself guilty even to himself.
When all his efforts to forget the disaster or to do away with it proved futile, when he realized at last that he was caught, his soul became filled with anguish.
He walked back and forth in the room, thinking of nothing, and he felt that something inside of him trembled and ached.
It was a check that his idle mind felt for the first time.
Up to now, wherever his idle and empty imagination carried him, it always found boundless space, space that gave room to all possible kinds of combinations.
Even the deaths of Volodka and Petka, even the death of Arina Petrovna had not baffled his flow of idle thoughts and words.
Those were common, well recognized situations, met by well recognized, well established forms—requiems, funeral dinners, and the like.
All this he had done in strict accordance with the custom and thus vindicated himself, so to speak, before the laws of man and Providence.
But adultery—what was that?
Why, that meant an arraignment of his entire life, the showing up of its inner sham.
Though he had formerly been known as a pettifogger, even as a Bloodsucker, gossip had had so little legal background that he could safely retort, "Prove it!"
And now, all of a sudden—adulterer!
A known, convicted adulterer. He had not even resorted to "measures," so great had been his confidence in Arina Petrovna; he had not even worked up a story to cover the thing. And on a Lenten day at that. The shame of it!
In these inner talks with himself, in spite of their confusion, there was something like an awakening of conscience.
But the question was whether Yudushka would continue along that path or whether his idle mind would even in this grave matter perform its usual function of finding a loophole through which he could crawl out and emerge unscathed.
While Yudushka was thus smarting under his own mental vacuity, Yevpraksia was undergoing an unexpected inner change.
Evidently the anticipation of motherhood untied the mental fetters that had hitherto held her bound.
Up to that time she had been indifferent to everything and regarded Porfiry Vladimirych as a "master" in relation to whom she was a mere subordinate.
Now, for the first time, she grasped a definite idea. It began to dawn on her that here was a state of affairs where she was the most important figure, and where she could not be driven about with impunity.
As a consequence, even her face, usually blank and stolid, became lighted up and intelligent.
The death of Arina Petrovna had been the first fact in her semi-conscious life that produced a sobering effect upon her.
No matter how peculiar the attitude of the old mistress to Yevpraksia's prospective motherhood was, still there were glimpses of sympathy in it and nothing of the disgusting evasiveness of Yudushka.
So Yevpraksia had begun to see a protector in Arina Petrovna, as if expecting that some kind of attack was being planned against her.
The forebodings of that attack were all the more persistent since they were not illuminated by consciousness, but merely filled the whole of her being with vague anxiety.
Her mind was not vigorous enough to tell her definitely the point from which the attack would come and the form it would take; but her instincts had already been so aroused that the very sight of Yudushka filled her with an inexplicable fear.
"Yes, that's where it will come from," reverberated in the inner chambers of her soul—from that coffin filled with dead dust, from that coffin she had so long been tending like a hireling, from that coffin which by some miracle had become the father and lord of her child!
The feeling this thought awakened in her was akin to hatred and would inevitably have passed into hatred had it not been diverted by the sympathy and interest of Arina Petrovna, who, by constant chatter, never gave Yevpraksia a chance to think.
But Arina Petrovna retired to Pogorelka, and then vanished entirely.
The feeling of anxiety and uneasiness in Yevpraksia became still more intense.
The stillness in which the Golovliovo manor became engulfed was broken only by a rustle announcing that Yudushka was stealing through the corridors, listening at the doors.
Or sometimes, some one of the servants would come running from the yard and bang the door of the maids' room.
But then stillness would again creep in from all sides.
It was a dead stillness that filled Yevpraksia's being with superstitions and anguish. And since she was nearing her time, she had not even the sleepy feeling to look forward to that came in the evening after a day of household chores.
She tried once or twice to be affectionate with Porfiry Vladimirych and engage his kindly sympathies. Her attempts only resulted in brief but mean scenes that reacted painfully even on her crude sensibilities.
All that was left to her was to sit with her arms folded and think, that is, be alarmed.