Resurrection Leo Tolstoy (ebook reader for pc .txt) 📖

“That you mean to marry me? It will never be. I’ll rather hang myself. So there!”

“Well, still I shall go on serving you.”

“That’s your affair, only I don’t want anything from you. I am telling you the plain truth,” she said. “Oh, why did I not die then?” she added, and began to cry piteously.

Nekhlúdoff could not speak; her tears infected him.

She lifted her eyes, looked at him in surprise, and began to wipe her tears with her kerchief.

The jailer came up again and reminded them that it was time to part.

Máslova rose.

“You are excited. If it is possible, I shall come again tomorrow; you think it over,” said Nekhlúdoff.

She gave him no answer and, without looking up, followed the jailer out of the room.

“Well, lass, you’ll have rare times now,” Korabléva said, when Máslova returned to the cell. “Seems he’s mighty sweet on you; make the most of it while he’s after you. He’ll help you out. Rich people can do anything.”

“Yes, that’s so,” remarked the watchman’s wife, with her musical voice. “When a poor man thinks of getting married, there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip; but a rich man need only make up his mind and it’s done. We knew a toff like that duckie. What d’you think he did?”

“Well, have you spoken about my affairs?” the old woman asked.

But Máslova gave her fellow-prisoners no answer; she lay down on the shelf bedstead, her squinting eyes fixed on a corner of the room, and lay there until the evening.

A painful struggle went on in her soul. What Nekhlúdoff had told her called up the memory of that world in which she had suffered and which she had left without having understood, hating it. She now feared to wake from the trance in which she was living. Not having arrived at any conclusion when evening came, she again bought some vodka and drank with her companions.

“So this is what it means, this,” thought Nekhlúdoff as he left the prison, only now fully understanding his crime. If he had not tried to expiate his guilt he would never have found out how great his crime was. Nor was this all; she, too, would never have felt the whole horror of what had been done to her. He only now saw what he had done to the soul of this woman; only now she saw and understood what had been done to her.

Up to this time Nekhlúdoff had played with a sensation of self-admiration, had admired his own remorse; now he was simply filled with horror. He knew he could not throw her up now, and yet he could not imagine what would come of their relations to one another.

Just as he was going out, a jailer, with a disagreeable, insinuating countenance, and a cross and medals on his breast, came up and handed him a note with an air of mystery.

“Here is a note from a certain person, your honour,” he said to Nekhlúdoff as he gave him the envelope.

“What person?”

“You will know when you read it. A political prisoner. I am in that ward, so she asked me; and though it is against the rules, still feelings of humanity⁠—” The jailer spoke in an unnatural manner.

Nekhlúdoff was surprised that a jailer of the ward where political prisoners were kept should pass notes inside the very prison walls, and almost within sight of everyone; he did not then know that this was both a jailer and a spy. However, he took the note and read it on coming out of the prison.

The note was written in a bold hand, and ran as follows: “Having heard that you visit the prison, and are interested in the case of a criminal prisoner, the desire of seeing you arose in me. Ask for a permission to see me. I can give you a good deal of information concerning your protégée, and also our group.⁠—Yours gratefully, Véra Doúkhova.”

Véra Doúkhova had been a schoolteacher in an out-of-the-way village of the Nóvgorod Government, where Nekhlúdoff and some friends of his had once put up while bear hunting. Nekhlúdoff gladly and vividly recalled those old days, and his acquaintance with Doúkhova. It was just before Lent, in an isolated spot, forty miles from the railway. The hunt had been successful; two bears had been killed; and the company were having dinner before starting on their return journey, when the master of the hut where they were putting up came in to say that the deacon’s daughter wanted to speak to Prince Nekhlúdoff. “Is she pretty?” someone asked. “None of that, please,” Nekhlúdoff said, and rose with a serious look on his face. Wiping his mouth, and wondering what the deacon’s daughter might want of him, he went into the host’s private hut.

There he found a girl with a felt hat and a warm cloak on⁠—a sinewy, ugly girl; only her eyes with their arched brows were beautiful.

“Here, miss, speak to him,” said the old housewife; “this is the prince himself. I shall go out meanwhile.”

“In what way can I be of service to you?” Nekhlúdoff asked.

“I⁠—I⁠—I see you are throwing away your money on such nonsense⁠—on hunting,” began the girl, in great confusion. “I know⁠—I only want one thing⁠—to be of use to the people, and I can do nothing because I know nothing⁠—” Her eyes were so truthful, so kind, and her expression of resoluteness and yet bashfulness was so touching, that Nekhlúdoff, as it often happened to him, suddenly felt as if he were in her position, understood, and sympathised.

“What can I do, then?”

“I am a teacher, but should like to follow a course of study; and I am not allowed to do so. That is, not that I am not allowed to; they’d allow me to, but I have not got the means. Give them to me, and when I have finished the course I shall repay you. I am thinking the rich