"You must be mistaken, it"s impossible!" I stammered.
The servant looked at me vacantly, and began to sweep.
I opened the letter; it was from Gaguine. Not a line from Annouchka!
In beginning, he begged me to forgive him for this hasty departure. He added that when I was calmer I would approve, no doubt, of his determination. It was the only means of getting out of an embarra.s.sing position, and one that might become dangerous.
"Yesterday evening," he said to me, "while we were waiting for Annouchka in silence, I was convinced of the necessity of a separation. There are prejudices that I respect; I can understand that you could not marry her. She has told me all, and for her sake I must yield to her urgent entreaties."
At the end of his letter he expressed regret at the breaking off of our friendly intercourse so soon; hoped that I would always be happy; pressed my hand, and begged me not to try and meet them again.
"A question of prejudices indeed!" I exclaimed, as if he could hear me.
"Folly all that! What right has he to take her away from me?" I clutched my head wildly.
The servant began to scream for her mistress, and her fright brought me to my senses. I felt that I had but one object: to find them again; to find them again at any cost. To bear such a blow; to resign myself; to see things end in this way was truly beyond my strength! I learned from the landlady that they went at six o"clock to take the steamboat down the Rhine. I went to the office; they told me that they had taken places for Cologne. I returned to my house to pack up and immediately follow them.
As I pa.s.sed Dame Louise"s house I heard some one call me. I raised my head and perceived the burgomaster"s widow at the window of the room where the previous evening I had seen Annouchka. Upon her lips hovered that disagreeable smile that I had noticed before. She beckoned to me. I turned away, and was about to go on, but she called out that she had something to give me. These words stopped me, and I entered the house.
How can I express to you my emotion, when I found myself again in that little room.
"To tell the truth," began the old woman, showing me a note, "I should only have given you this if you had come to my house of your own accord; but you are such a fine young man--there!"
I took the note; I read upon a little piece of paper the following lines, traced in haste with a pencil:--
"Farewell! we shall see each other no more. It is not through pride that I go away; I cannot do otherwise. Yesterday, when I wept before you, if you had said to me but one _word_, a _single word_, I would have remained. You did not say it.--Who knows? Perhaps it is for the best that it is so. Farewell forever!"
She had expected but "_one word_!" Fool that I was! That _word_ I said the previous evening again and again with many tears; I threw it to the wind; I cried it out in the midst of lonely fields: but I did not say it to her; I did not tell her that I loved her! Yes, it was then impossible for me to p.r.o.nounce that word. In this fatal room, where I found myself face to face with her, I was not yet fully conscious of my love; it did not awaken even then, when in a dull and gloomy silence I stood near her brother,--it only burst forth, sudden and irresistible, a few moments after, when, terrified by the thought of a misfortune, I began to seek her, calling aloud; but then already it was too late!--It is impossible, they will tell me;--I know not if it is impossible, but I know that it was so. Annouchka would not have gone if she had had the least coquetry, if she had not found herself in an essentially false position. An uncertain position that any other woman would have accepted she found intolerable. This did not occur to me. My evil genius, then, at my last interview with Gaguine, under his dark window, had checked that confession which was upon my lips, and thus the last thread that I could have seized had broken in my hands.
I returned the same day to L. with my traps, and started for Cologne. I often remember that at the moment when the steamboat left the sh.o.r.e, and when I said farewell to all those streets, to all those places that I should never forget, I perceived Hannchen, the little servant-maid.
She was seated upon a bench near the river bank: though yet pale, her face was no longer sorrowful. A handsome young fellow was by her side and laughing with her, whilst at the other side of the Rhine my little Madonna, concealed in the dark foliage of the old ash, followed me sadly with her glance.
XXII.
At Cologne I again came upon the track of Gaguine and his sister. I learned that they had gone to London. I immediately went to that city; all researches that I made there were in vain. For a long time I did not allow myself to be discouraged; for a long time I showed obstinate persistence, but finally was obliged to give up all hope of meeting them again.
I never saw them again! I never again saw Annouchka!--Later I heard some quite vague rumors of her brother; but as to her I have never heard her spoken of; I do not even know if she still lives.
Some years ago, while travelling, I caught sight for an instant, at the door of a railway-carriage, of a woman whose face had a little resemblance to those features that I shall never forget; but this resemblance was doubtless the result of chance. Annouchka lived in my memory as the young girl whom I saw at our last interview, pale and trembling, leaning upon the back of a wooden chair in the dark corner of a lonely room.
Besides, I must confess that the course of my grief was not of long duration. Soon I persuaded myself that fate had been favorable to me in preventing my marriage with her, and that a woman with such a disposition would certainly not make me happy. I was still young at this period, and that time so short and limited that they call the future appeared to me infinite. "That which has happened once to me upon my travels," I said to myself, "can I not meet it again, more charming and more delightful?" Since then I have known other women; but that feeling so tender that Annouchka had once awakened was never again aroused.
No--no glance has ever replaced the glance of those eyes fastened upon mine; I have never again clasped to my breast a heart to whose throbbing mine has responded with an ecstacy so joyful. Condemned to the solitary existence of a wandering man, without a home, I regard those days the saddest of my life; but I still preserve as a relic two little notes and a withered sprig of geranium that she once threw me from the window; it breathes even now a slight fragrance, whilst the hand that gave it to me, that hand that I pressed upon my lips only once, has, perhaps, long since returned to dust. And I, what have I become? What is there left in me of the man of former days, of the restlessness of youth, of my plans, of my ambitious hopes?--Thus the slight perfume of a blade of gra.s.s outlives all joys, all human griefs,--outlives even man himself.