826 827
and guidance in a matter he did not understand.
“No,” Countess Lidia Ivanovna interrupted him; “there are limits
to everything. I can understand immorality,” she said, not quite truth-
fully, since she never could understand that which leads women to
immorality; “but I don’t understand cruelty: to whom? to you! How can
she stay in the town where you are? No, the longer one lives the more
one learns. And I’m learning to understand your loftiness and her
baseness.”
“Who is to throw a stone?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, unmistak-
ably pleased with the part he had to play. “I have forgiven all, and so
I cannot deprive her of what is exacted by love in her—by her love for
her son....”
“But is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Admitting that you have
forgiven—that you forgive—have we the right to work on the feelings
of that angel? He looks on her as dead. He prays for her, and be-
seeches God to have mercy on her sins. And it is better so. But now
what will he think?”
“I had not thought of that,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, evidently
agreeing.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna hid her face in her hands and was silent.
she was praying.
“If you ask my advice,” she said, having finished her prayer and
uncovered her face, “I do not advise you to do this. Do you suppose I
don’t see how you are suffering, how this has torn open your wounds?
But supposing that, as always, you don’t think of yourself, what can it
lead to?—to fresh suffering for you, to torture for the child. If there
were a trace of humanity left in her, she ought not to wish for it herself.
No, I have no hesitation in saying I advise not, and if you will intrust it
to me, I will write to her.”
And Alexey Alexandrovitch consented, and Countess Lidia
Ivanovna sent the following letter in French:
“Dear Madame,
“To be reminded of you might have results for your son in leading
to questions on his part which could not be answered without implant-
ing in the child’s soul a spirit of censure towards what should be for him
sacred, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband’s refusal in
the spirit of Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy on
you. Countess Lidia”
This letter attained the secret object which Countess Lidia Ivanovna
had concealed from herself. It wounded Anna to the quick.
For his part, Alexey Alexandrovitch, on returning home from Lidia
Ivanovna’s, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual
pursuits, and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing which
he had felt of late.
The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him,
and towards whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia Ivanovna
had so justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not
easy; he could not understand the book he was reading; he could not
drive away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the mis-
take which, as it now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The
memory of how he had received her confession of infidelity on their
way home from the races (especially that he had insisted only on the
observance of external decorum, and had not sent a challenge) tor-
tured him like a remorse. He was tortured too by the thought of the
letter he had written her; and most of all, his forgiveness, which nobody
wanted, and his care of the other man’s child made his heart burn with
shame and remorse.
And just the same feeling of shame and regret he felt now, as he