"What is it, Liza?" he asked her tenderly and reassuringly; but she, still looking about her apprehensively, drew him into the furthest corner; she wanted to be hidden from them all.
"What is it, Liza? What's the matter?"
She was dumb, she could not bring herself to speak; she gazed fixedly with her blue eyes into his face, and every feature of her little face expressed nothing but frantic terror.
"He'll . . . hang himself!" she whispered, as though in delirium.
"Who will hang himself?" asked Velchaninov in dismay.
"He, he! He tried to hang himself with a cord in the night!" the child said breathlessly. "I saw him! He tried to hang himself with a cord, he told me so, he told me so! He meant to before, he always meant to . . . I saw him in the night. . . ."
"Impossible," whispered Velchamnov in amazement
She suddenly fell to kissing his hands; she cried, almost choking with sobs, begged and besought him, but he could make nothing of her hysterical whisperings. And the tortured face of that terror-stricken child who looked to him as her last hope remained printed on his memory for ever, haunting him awake and visiting his dreams.
"And can she, can she really love him so much?" he thought, jealously and enviously, as with feverish impatience he returned to town, "She had told him herself that morning that she loved her mother more . . . perhaps she hated him and did not love him at all! . . . And what did that mean: he will hang himself? What did she mean by that? Would the fool hang himself? . . . He must find out, he must certainly find out! He must get to the bottom of it as soon as possible—once and for all."
CHAPTER VII
The Husband and the Lover Kiss Each Other
He was in terrible haste "to find out."
"This morning I was so overwhelmed. This morning I hadn’t the time to realize the position," he thought, recalling his first sight of Liza, "but now I must find out." To find out more quickly he was on the point of telling the driver to take him to Trusotsky's lodging, but on second thoughts decided: "No,
