Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Five/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
When Alekseï entered the Countess Lidia Ivanovna's cozy little boudoir, decorated with portraits and old porcelains, he failed to find his friend.
She was changing her gown.
On a round table covered with a cloth stood a Chinese tea-service and a silver teapot with an alcohol lamp. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch glanced perfunctorily at the numberless paintings that adorned the room; then he sat down near a table and took up a copy of the New Testament which lay on it. The rustling of the countess's silk dress put his thoughts to flight.
"Well now! We can be a little more free from disturbance," said the countess, with a smile, gliding between the table and the divan. "We can talk while drinking our tea."
After several words, meant to prepare his mind, she sighed deeply, and, with a tinge of color in her cheeks, she put Anna's letter into his hands.
He read it, and sat long in silence.
"I do not feel that I have the right to refuse her," he said timidly, raising his eyes.
"My friend, you never can see evil anywhere."
"On the contrary, I see everything is evil. But would it be fair to...."
His face expressed indecision, desire for advice, for support, for guidance, in a question so beyond his comprehension.
"No," interrupted the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, "there are limits to all things. I understand immorality," she said, not with absolute sincerity, since she did not know what could induce women to be immoral, "but what I do not understand is cruelty toward any one! Toward you! How can she remain in the same city with you? One is never too old to learn, and I learn every day your grandeur and her baseness!"
"Who shall cast the first stone?" asked Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, evidently satisfied with the part he was playing. "I have forgiven her for everything, and therefore I cannot deprive her of what is a need of her heart,—her love for her son." ....
"But is it love—my friend? Is it sincere? Let us agree that you have forgiven her, and that you still pardon her. But have we the right to vex the soul of this little angel? He believes that she is dead; he prays for her and asks God to pardon her sins. .... It is better so. What would he think now?"
"I had not thought of that," said Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, perceiving the justice of her words.
The countess covered her face with her hands and was silent; she was praying.
"If you ask my advice," she replied, after she had uttered her prayer and taken her hands from her face, "you will not do this. Do I not see how you suffer, how this opens all your wounds? But let us admit that you, as always, forget yourself, but where will it lead you? new sufferings for yourself, to torture for the child! If she were still capable of human feelings, she herself could not desire this. No! I have no hesitation about it, I advise you not to, and, if you give me your authority, I will reply to her."
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch consented, and the countess wrote, in French, this letter: -
Chère Madame:—Recalling your existence to your son would be likely to raise questions which it would be impossible to answer without obliging the child to criticize that which should remain sacred to him, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband's refusal in the spirit of christian charity. I pray the Omnipotent to be merciful to you.
Comtesse Lidia.
This letter accomplished the secret aim which the countess would not confess even to herself; it wounded Anna to the bottom of her soul.
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, on returning home from Lidia Ivanovna's, found himself unable to take up his ordinary occupations, or recover the spiritual calm of a believer who feels that he is among the elect.
The thought of his wife who had been so guilty toward him, and toward whom he had acted so like a saint, as the Counters Lidia Ivanovna had so well expressed it, ought not to have disturbed him, and yet he was ill at ease. He could not understand a word of the book he was reading, he could not drive away from his mind the cruel recollections of his relations to her, of the mistakes which, as it now seemed to him, he himself had made in his treatment of her. He remembered with a feeling like remorse the way he had received Anna's confession that day as they were returning from the races. Why had he demanded merely an outward observance of the proprieties? Why had he not challenged Vronsky to a duel? He was likewise tormented by his recollection of the letter which he wrote her at that time; especially his forgiveness of her, which had proved useless to any one, and the pains which he had wasted on the baby that was not his, all came back to his memory and seared his heart with shame and regret. And exactly the same feeling of shame and regret she experienced now in reviewing all his past with her, and remembering the awkward way in which, after long vacillating, he had offered himself to her.
"But how am I at fault?" he asked himself; and this question immediately gave rise to another: "Do other men feel differently, fall in love differently, and marry differently,—these Vronskys, Oblonskys .... these chamberlains with their handsome calves?"
His imagination called up a whole line of these vigorous men, self-confident and strong, who had always and everywhere attracted his curiosity and his wonder.
He drove away these thoughts; he strove to persuade himself that the end and aim of his life was not this world, but eternity, that peace and charity alone ought to dwell in his soul. But the fact that in this temporal, insignificant life he had, as it seemed to him, made some humiliating blunders, tortured him as much as if that eternal salvation in which he put his trust did not exist.
But this temptation was not long, and soon Alekseï Aleksandrovitch regained that serenity and elevation of mind by which he succeeded in putting away all that he wished to forget,