Then she went on to the servants" hall and ordered the samovar to be got ready, though it was not yet tea-time; she wanted to try her power over Foka, the old butler, the most morose and disobliging of all the servants. He could not believe his ears, and asked her if she really meant it. "What next will our young lady want?" muttered Foka, affecting to be very cross.
No one gave so many orders as Natacha, no one sent them on so many errands at once. As soon as a servant came in sight she seemed to invent some want or message; she could not help it. It seemed as though she wanted to try her power over them; to see whether, some fine day, one or another would not rebel against her tyranny; but, on the contrary, they always flew to obey her more readily than any one else.
"And now what shall I do, where can I go?" thought she, as she slowly went along the corridor, where she presently met the buffoon.
"Nastacia Ivanovna," said she, "if I ever have children, what will they be?"
"You! Fleas and gra.s.shoppers, you may depend upon it!"
Natacha went on. "Good G.o.d! have mercy, have mercy!" she said to herself. "Wherever I go it is always, always the same. I am so weary; what shall I do?"
Skipping lightly from step to step, she went to the upper story and dropped in on the Ioghels. Two governesses were sitting chatting with M.
and Mme. Ioghel; dessert, consisting of dried fruit, was on the table, and they were eagerly discussing the cost of living at Moscow and Odessa. Natacha took a seat for a moment, listened with pensive attention, and then jumped up again. "The island of Madagascar!" she murmured, "Ma-da-gas-car!" and she separated the syllables. Then she left the room without answering Mme. Schoss, who was utterly mystified by her strange exclamation.
She next met Petia and a companion, both very full of some fireworks which were to be let off that evening. "Petia!" she exclaimed, "carry me down-stairs!" And she sprang upon his back, throwing her arms round his neck; and, laughing and galloping, they thus scrambled along to the head of the stairs.
"Thank you, that will do. Madagascar!" she repeated; and, jumping down, she ran down the flight.
After thus inspecting her dominions, testing her power, and convincing herself that her subjects were docile, and that there was no novelty to be got out of them, Natacha settled herself in the darkest corner of the music-room with her guitar, striking the ba.s.s strings, and trying to make an accompaniment to an air from an opera that she and Prince Andre had once heard together at St. Petersburg. The uncertain chords which her unpractised fingers sketched out would have struck the least experienced ear as wanting in harmony and musical accuracy, while to her excited imagination they brought a whole train of memories. Leaning against the wall and half hidden by a cabinet, with her eyes fixed on a thread of light that came under the door from the rooms beyond, she listened in ecstasy and dreamed of the past.
Sonia crossed the room with a gla.s.s in her hand. Natacha glanced round at her and again fixed her eyes on the streak of light. She had the strange feeling of having once before gone through the same experience--sat in the same place, surrounded by the same details, and watching Sonia pa.s.s carrying a tumbler. "Yes, it was exactly the same,"
she thought.
"Sonia, what is this tune?" she said, playing a few notes.
"What, are you there?" said Sonia, startled. "I do not know," she said, coming closer to listen, "unless it is from "La Tempete";" but she spoke doubtfully.
"It was exactly so," thought Natacha. "She started as she came forward, smiling so gently; and I thought then, as I think now, that there is something in her which is quite lacking in me. No," she said aloud, "you are quite out; it is the chorus from the "Porteur d"Eau"--listen," and she hummed the air. "Where are you going?"
"For some fresh water to finish my drawing."
"You are always busy and I never. Where is Nicolas?"
"Asleep, I think."
"Go and wake him, Sonia. Tell him to come and sing."
Sonia went, and Natacha relapsed into dreaming and wondering how it had all happened. Not being able to solve the puzzle, she drifted into reminiscence once more. She could see him--_him_--and feel his impa.s.sioned eyes fixed on her face. "Oh, make haste back! I am so afraid he will not come yet! Besides, it is all very well, but I am growing old; I shall be quite different from what I am now! Who knows? Perhaps he will come to-day! Perhaps he is here already! Here in the drawing-room. Perhaps he came yesterday and I have forgotten."
She rose, laid down the guitar, and went into the next room. All the household party were seated round the tea-table,--the professors, the governesses, the guests; the servants were waiting on one and another--but there was no Prince Andre.
"Ah, here she is," said her father. "Come and sit down here." But Natacha stopped by her mother without heeding his bidding.
"Oh, mamma, bring him to me, give him to me soon, very soon," she murmured, swallowing down a sob. Then she sat down and listened to the others. "Good G.o.d! always the same people! always the same thing! Papa holds his cup as he always does, and blows his tea to cool it as he did yesterday, and as he will to-morrow."
She felt a sort of dull rebellion against them all; she hated them for always being the same.
After tea Sonia, Natacha, and Nicolas huddled together in their favorite, snug corner of the drawing-room; that was where they talked freely to each other.
"Do you ever feel," Natacha asked her brother, "as if there was nothing left to look forward to; as if you had had all your share of happiness, and were not so much weary as utterly dull?"
"Of course I have. Very often I have seen my friends and fellow-officers in the highest spirits and been just as jolly myself, and suddenly have been struck so dull and dismal, have so hated life, that I have wondered whether we were not all to die at once. I remember one day, for instance, when I was with the regiment; the band was playing, and I had such a fit of melancholy that I never even thought of going to the promenade."
"How well I understand that! I recollect once," Natacha went on, "once when I was a little girl, I was punished for having eaten some plums, I think. I had not done it, and you were all dancing, and I was left alone in the school-room. How I cried! cried because I was so sorry for myself, and so vexed with you all for making me so unhappy."
"I remember; and I went to comfort you and did not know how; we were funny children then; I had a toy with bells that jingled, and I made you a present of it."
"Do you remember," said Natacha, "long before that, when we were no bigger than my hand, my uncle called us into his room, where it was quite dark, and suddenly we saw----"
"A negro!" interrupted Nicolas, smiling at her recollection. "To be sure. I can see him now; and to this day I wonder whether it was a dream or a reality, or mere fancy invented afterwards."
"He had white teeth and stared at us with his black eyes."
"Do you remember him, Sonia?"
"Yes, yes--but very dimly."
"But papa and mamma have always declared that no negro ever came to the house. And the eggs; do you remember the eggs we used to roll up at Easter; and one day how two little grinning old women came up through the floor and began to spin round the table?"
"Of course. And how papa used to put on his fur coat and fire off his gun from the balcony. And don t you remember----?" And so they went on recalling, one after the other, not the bitter memories of old age, but the bright pictures of early childhood, which float and fade on a distant horizon of poetic vagueness, midway between reality and dreams.
Sonia remembered being frightened once at the sight of Nicolas in his braided jacket, and her nurse promising her that she should some day have a frock trimmed from top to bottom.
"And they told me you had been found in the garden under a cabbage,"
said Natacha. "I dared not say it was not true, but it puzzled me tremendously."
A door opened, and a woman put in her head, exclaiming, "Mademoiselle, mademoiselle, they have fetched the c.o.c.k!"
"I do not want it now; send it away again, Polia." said Natacha.
Dimmler, who had meanwhile come into the room, went up to the harp, which stood in a corner, and in taking off the cover made the strings ring discordantly.
"Edward Karlovitch, play my favorite nocturne--Field"s," cried the countess, from the adjoining room.
Dimmler struck a chord. "How quiet you young people are," he said, addressing them.
"Yes, we are studying philosophy," said Natacha, and they went on talking of their dreams.
Dimmler had no sooner begun his nocturne than Natacha, crossing the room on tiptoe, seized the wax-light that was burning on the table and carried it into the next room; then she stole back to her seat, it was now quite dark in the larger room, especially in their corner, but the silvery moonbeams came in at the wide windows and lay in broad sheets on the floor.
"Do you know," whispered Natacha, while Dimmler, after playing the nocturne, let his fingers wander over the strings, uncertain what to play next, "when I go on remembering one thing beyond another, I go back so far, so far, that at last I remember things that happened before I was born, and----"
"That is metempsychosis," interrupted Sonia, with a reminiscence of her early lessons. "The Egyptians believed that our souls had once inhabited the bodies of animals, and would return to animals again after our death."
"I do not believe that," said Natacha, still in a low voice, though the music had ceased. "But I am quite sure that we were angels once, somewhere there beyond, or, perhaps, even here; and that is the reason we remember a previous existence."
"May I join the party?" asked Dimmler, coming towards them.
"If we were once angels, how is it that we have fallen lower?"