Oh, there is nothing to tell her. I shall tell her husband that I, scoundrel that I am, have been deceiving him.
I shall dispose of the inheritance in such a way as to acknowledge the truth.
I shall tell her, Katusha, that I am a scoundrel and have sinned towards her, and will do all I can to ease her lot.
Yes, I will see her, and will ask her to forgive me.
"Yes, I will beg her pardon, as children do." . . . He stopped—-"will marry her if necessary."
He stopped again, folded his hands in front of his breast as he used to do when a little child, lifted his eyes, and said, addressing some one:
"Lord, help me, teach me, come enter within me and purify me of all this abomination."
He prayed, asking God to help him, to enter into him and cleanse him; and what he was praying for had happened already: the God within him had awakened his consciousness.
He felt himself one with Him, and therefore felt not only the freedom, fulness and joy of life, but all the power of righteousness.
All, all the best that a man could do he felt capable of doing.
His eyes filled with tears as he was saying all this to himself, good and bad tears: good because they were tears of joy at the awakening of the spiritual being within him, the being which had been asleep all these years; and bad tears because they were tears of tenderness to himself at his own goodness.
He felt hot, and went to the window and opened it.
The window opened into a garden.
It was a moonlit, quiet, fresh night; a vehicle rattled past, and then all was still.
The shadow of a tall poplar fell on the ground just opposite the window, and all the intricate pattern of its bare branches was clearly defined on the clean swept gravel.
To the left the roof of a coach-house shone white in the moonlight, in front the black shadow of the garden wall was visible through the tangled branches of the trees.
Nekhludoff gazed at the roof, the moonlit garden, and the shadows of the poplar, and drank in the fresh, invigorating air.
"How delightful, how delightful; oh, God, how delightful," he said, meaning that which was going on in his soul.
CHAPTER XXIX. MASLOVA IN PRISON.
Maslova reached her cell only at six in the evening, tired and footsore, having, unaccustomed as she was to walking, gone 10 miles on the stony road that day. She was crushed by the unexpectedly severe sentence and tormented by hunger.
During the first interval of her trial, when the soldiers were eating bread and hard-boiled eggs in her presence, her mouth watered and she realised she was hungry, but considered it beneath her dignity to beg of them.
Three hours later the desire to eat had passed, and she felt only weak.
It was then she received the unexpected sentence.
At first she thought she had made a mistake; she could not imagine herself as a convict in Siberia, and could not believe what she heard.
But seeing the quiet, business-like faces of judges and jury, who heard this news as if it were perfectly natural and expected, she grew indignant, and proclaimed loudly to the whole Court that she was not guilty.
Finding that her cry was also taken as something natural and expected, and feeling incapable of altering matters, she was horror-struck and began to weep in despair, knowing that she must submit to the cruel and surprising injustice that had been done her.
What astonished her most was that young men—or, at any rate, not old men—the same men who always looked so approvingly at her (one of them, the public prosecutor, she had seen in quite a different humour) had condemned her.
While she was sitting in the prisoners' room before the trial and during the intervals, she saw these men looking in at the open door pretending they had to pass there on some business, or enter the room and gaze on her with approval.
And then, for some unknown reason, these same men had condemned her to hard labour, though she was innocent of the charge laid against her.
At first she cried, but then quieted down and sat perfectly stunned in the prisoners' room, waiting to be led back.
She wanted only two things now—tobacco and strong drink.
In this state Botchkova and Kartinkin found her when they were led into the same room after being sentenced.
Botchkova began at once to scold her, and call her a "convict."
"Well! What have you gained? justified yourself, have you?
What you have deserved, that you've got.
Out in Siberia you'll give up your finery, no fear!"
Maslova sat with her hands inside her sleeves, hanging her head and looking in front of her at the dirty floor without moving, only saying:
"I don't bother you, so don't you bother me.
I don't bother you, do I?" she repeated this several times, and was silent again.
She did brighten up a little when Botchkova and Kartinkin were led away and an attendant brought her three roubles.
"Are you Maslova?" he asked. "Here you are; a lady sent it you," he said, giving her the money.
"A lady—what lady?"
"You just take it. I'm not going to talk to you."
This money was sent by Kitaeva, the keeper of the house in which she used to live.
As she was leaving the court she turned to the usher with the question whether she might give Maslova a little money.
The usher said she might.
Having got permission, she removed the three-buttoned Swedish kid glove from her plump, white hand, and from an elegant purse brought from the back folds of her silk skirt took a pile of coupons, [in Russia coupons cut off interest-bearing papers are often used as money] just cut off from the interest-bearing papers which she had earned in her establishment, chose one worth 2 roubles and 50 copecks, added two 20 and one 10-copeck coins, and gave all this to the usher.
The usher called an attendant, and in his presence gave the money.
"Belease to giff it accurately," said Carolina Albertovna Kitaeva.
The attendant was hurt by her want of confidence, and that was why he treated Maslova so brusquely.