"but I don't understand cruelty: to whom? to you! How can she stay in the
town where you are? No, the longer one lives the more one learns. And I'm
learning to understand your loftiness and her baseness."
"Who is to throw a stone?" said Alexey Alexandrovitch, unmistakably
pleased with the part he had to play. "I have forgiven all, and so I cannot
deprive her of what is exacted by love in her--by her love for her son...."
"But
is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Admitting that you have
forgiven--that you forgive--have we the right to work on the feelings of that
angel? He looks on her as dead. He prays for her, and beseeches God to
have mercy on her sins. And it is better so. But now what will he think?"
"I had not thought of that," said Alexey Alexandrovitch, evidently agreeing.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna hid her face in her hands and was silent. she was
praying.
"If you ask my advice," she said, having finished her prayer and uncovered
her face, "I do not advise you to do this. Do you suppose I don't see how
you
are suffering, how this has torn open your wounds? But supposing that,
as always, you don't think of yourself, what can it lead to?--to fresh
suffering for you, to torture for the child. If there were a trace of humanity
left in her, she ought not to wish for it herself. No, I have no hesitation in
saying I advise not, and if you will intrust it to me, I will write to her."
And Alexey Alexandrovitch consented, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna sent
the following letter in French:
"Dear Madame,
"To be reminded of you might have results for your son in leading to
questions on his part which could not be answered without implanting in
the child's soul a spirit of censure towards
what should be for him sacred,
and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband's refusal in the spirit of
Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy on you. Countess
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Lidia"
This letter attained the secret object which Countess Lidia Ivanovna had
concealed from herself. It wounded Anna to the quick.
For his part, Alexey Alexandrovitch, on returning home from Lidia
Ivanovna's, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual pursuits,
and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing which he had felt of
late.
The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him, and
towards whom he had been so saintly, as Countess
Lidia Ivanovna had so
justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not easy; he
could not understand the book he was reading; he could not drive away
harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the mistake which, as it
now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The memory of how he had
received her confession of infidelity on their way home from the races
(especially that he had insisted only on the observance of external decorum,
and had not sent a challenge) tortured him like a remorse. He was tortured
too by the thought of
the letter he had written her; and most of all, his
forgiveness, which nobody wanted, and his care of the other man's child
made his heart burn with shame and remorse.
And just the same feeling of shame and regret he felt now, as he reviewed
all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in which, after long
wavering, he had made her an offer.
"But how have I been to blame?" he said to himself. And this question
always excited another question in him--whether they felt differently, did
their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys and Oblonskys...these
gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine calves.
And there passed
before his mind a whole series of these mettlesome, vigorous, self-
confident men, who always and everywhere drew his inquisitive attention
in spite of himself. He tried to dispel these thoughts, he tried to persuade
himself that he was not living for this transient life, but for the life of
eternity, and that there was peace and love in his heart.
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But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it seemed to
him, a few trivial mistakes tortured him as though
the eternal salvation in
which he believed had no existence. But this temptation did not last long,
and soon there was reestablished once more in Alexey Alexandrovitch's
soul the peace and the elevation by virtue of which he could forget what he
did not want to remember.
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