By degrees she grew calmer, but still did not raise her face to me. Twice her eyes flitted over my face, and there was a great softness and a sort of timorous and shrinking emotion in them.
At last she flushed and smiled.
“Are you better?” I asked, “my sensitive little Lenotchka, my sick little child!” “Not Lenotchka, no . . . ” she whispered, still hiding her face from me.
“Not Lenotchka? What then?” “Nellie.”
“Nellie? Why must it be Nellie? If you like; it’s a very pretty name. I’ll call you so if that’s what you wish.”
“That’s what mother called me. And no one else ever called me that, no one but she. . . . And I would not have anyone call me so but mother. But you call me so. I want you to. I will always love you, always.”
“A loving and proud little heart,” I thought. “And how long it has taken me to win the right to call you Nellie!”
But now I knew her heart was gained for ever.
“Nellie, listen,” I said, as soon as she was calmer. “You say that no one has ever loved you but your mother. Is it true your grandfather didn’t love you?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Yet you cried for him; do you remember, here, on the stairs?” For a minute she did not speak.
“No, he didn’t love me. . . . He was wicked.” A look of pain came into her face.
“But we mustn’t judge him too harshly, Nellie, I think he had grown quite childish with age. He seemed out of his mind when he died. I told you how he died.”
“Yes. But he had only begun to be quite forgetful in the last month. He would sit here all day long, and if I didn’t come to him he would sit on for two or three days without eating or drinking. He used to be much better before.”
“What do you mean by ‘before’?” “Before mother died.”
“Then it was you brought him food and drink, Nellie?” “Yes, I used to.”
“Where did you get it? From Mme. Bubnov?”
“No, I never took anything from Bubnov,” she said emphatically, with a shaking voice.
“Where did you get it? You had nothing, had you?”
Nellie turned fearfully pale and said nothing; she bent a long, long look upon me.
“I used to beg in the streets. . . . When I had five kopecks I used to buy him bread and snuff . . . .”
“And he let you! Nellie! Nellie!”
“At first I did it without telling him, But when he found out he used to send me out himself. I used to stand on the bridge and beg of passers-by, and he used to walk up and down near the bridge, and when he saw me given anything he used to rush at me and take the money, as though I wanted to hide it from him, and were not getting it for him.”
As she said this she smiled a sarcastic, bitter smile.
“That was all when mother was dead,” she added. “Then he seemed to have gone quite out of his mind.”
“So he must have loved your mother very much. How was it he didn’t live with her?
“No, he didn’t love her. . . . He was wicked and didn’t forgive her . . . like that wicked old man yesterday,” she said quietly, almost in a whisper, and grew paler and paler.
I started. The plot of a whole drama seemed to flash before my eyes. That poor woman dying in a cellar at the coffin-maker’s, her orphan child who visited from time to time the old grandfather who had cursed her mother, the queer crazy old fellow who had been dying in the confectioner’s shop after his dog’s death.
“And Azorka used to be mother’s dog,” said Nellie suddenly, smiling at some
reminiscence. “Grandfather used to be very fond of mother once, and when mother went away from him she left Azorka behind. And that’s why he was so fond of Azorka. He didn’t forgive mother, but when the dog died he died too,” Nellie added harshly, and the smile vanished from her face.
“What was he in old days, Nellie?” I asked her after a brief pause.
“He used to be rich. . . . I don’t know what he was,” she answered. “He had some sort of factory. So mother told me. At first she used to think I was too little and didn’t tell me everything. She used to kiss me and say, ‘You’ll know everything, the time will come when you’ll know everything, poor, unhappy child!’ She was always calling me poor and unhappy. And sometimes at night when she thought I was asleep (though I was only pretending to be asleep on purpose) she used to be always crying over me, she would kiss me and say ‘poor, unhappy child’!”
“What did your mother die of?”
“Of consumption; it’s six weeks ago.”
“And you do remember the time when your grandfather was rich?”
“But I wasn’t born then. Mother went away from grandfather before I was born.” “With whom did she go?
“I don’t know,” said Nellie softly, as though hesitating. “She went abroad and I was born there.”
“Abroad? Where?”
“In Switzerland. I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been in Italy and in Paris too.” I was surprised.
“And do you remember it all, Nellie?” “I remember a great deal.”
“How is it you know Russian so well, Nellie?
“Mother used to teach me Russian even then. She was Russian because her mother was Russian. But grandfather was English, but he was just like a Russian too. And when we came to Russia a year and a half ago I learnt it thoroughly. Mother was ill even then. Then we got poorer and poorer. Mother was always crying. At first she was a long time looking for grandfather here in Petersburg, and always crying and saying that she had behaved badly to him. How she used to cry! And when she knew grandfather was poor she cried more than ever. She often wrote letters to him, and he never answered.”
“Why did your mother come back here? Was it only to see her father?”
“I don’t know. But there we were so happy.” And Nellie’s eyes sparkled. “Mother used to live alone, with me. She had one friend, a kind man like you. He used to know her before she went away. But he died out there and mother came back . . .”
“So it was with him that your mother went away from your grandfather?” “No, not with him. Mother went away with someone else, and he left her . . .” “Who was he, Nellie?”
Nellie glanced at me and said nothing. She evidently knew the name of the man with whom her mother had gone away and who was probably her father. It was painful to her to speak that name even to me.
I did not want to worry her with questions. Hers was a strange character, nervous and fiery, though she suppressed her impulses, lovable, though she entrenched herself behind a barrier of pride and reserve. Although she loved me with her whole heart, with the most candid and ingenuous love, almost as she had loved the dead mother of whom she could not speak without pain, yet all the while I knew her she was rarely open with me, and except on that day she rarely felt moved to speak to me of her past; on the contrary, she was, as it were, austerely reserved with me, but on that day through convulsive sobs of misery that interrupted her story, she told me in the course of several hours all that most distressed and tortured her in her memories, and I shall never forget that terrible story, but the greater part of it will be told later. . . .
It was a fearful story. It was the story of a woman abandoned and living on after the wreck of her happiness, sick, worn out and forsaken by everyone, rejected by the last creature to whom she could look — her father, once wronged by her and crazed by intolerable sufferings and humiliations. It was the story of a woman driven to despair, wandering through the cold, filthy streets of Petersburg, begging alms with the little girl whom she regarded as a baby; of a woman who lay dying for months in a damp cellar, while her father, refusing to forgive her to the last moment of her life, and only at the last moment relenting, hastened to forgive her only to find a cold corpse instead of the woman he loved above everything on earth.
It was a strange story of the mysterious, hardly comprehensible relations of the crazy old man with the little grandchild who already understood him, who already, child as she was, understood many things that some men do not attain to in long years of their smooth and carefully guarded lives. It was a gloomy story, one of those gloomy and
distressing dramas which are so often played out unseen, almost mysterious, under the heavy sky of Petersburg, in the dark secret corners of the vast town, in the midst of the giddy ferment of life, of dull egoism, of clashing interests, of gloomy vice and secret crimes, in that lowest hell of senseless and abnormal life. . . .
But that story will be told later. . .
