"Yes, madame." Elise Perrier always answered immediately, as if she
never slept.
"Elise, I want you."
"Yes, madame, I shall come at once," and I could hear her rising from
her bed.
Then I ran back through the silent corridors, and when I passed Count
Kamarowsky's door I trembled and shuddered and felt constrained to stop.
I looked at his yellow boots--square and placid, with their mouths open
and their tongues hanging out--and I experienced a wild sensation of fear
and loathing for him and for them.
I made a grimace at those hateful boots and hurried away to shut myself
in my room and await Elise.
She would come in, pale and tidy in her red woolen dressing-gown, with a
little cap on her head. She sat down quietly by my bedside and held my
hand. Sometimes she read aloud to me; sometimes she repeated Swiss poems
and ballads that she remembered from her schooldays; and I soon grew
calm again as I listened to her quiet voice and felt the clasp of her
small roughened hand on mine.
Gradually a sort of frenzied fear of Kamarowsky took possession of me. I
was obsessed continuously with the idea that I must escape from him at
all costs, or die. My every fiber shrank at the slightest touch of his
hand. I longed never to see him again. I longed to know that the world
held him no more. It was a blind instinctive frenzy that I endured
without reasoning about it. My constant and only preoccupation was to
fly from him who spelt ruin, and to cling to Naumoff, my deliverer.
"Nicolas Naumoff! Nicolas Naumoff!" I repeated his name all day long
like a kind of exorcism against Kamarowsky; sometimes I felt as if I
were stifled, as if I must hold my breath until he was near.
On his side, Naumoff, who frequently came to see us, was reserved and
shy, and did not venture to believe in what nevertheless he could not
but read in my eyes. Knowing nothing of my insensate notion about the
diviner's prophecy, and having no conception that to my fancy he was a
rescuer sent to me by Providence, he thought I was making fun of him; or
at other times he believed my predilection for him was merely the
caprice of a frivolous creature accustomed to gratify every passing
whim. So he held back, aggrieved and mistrustful.
And the more he held back the more was I impelled to pursue him, to hold
and to vanquish him. The passionate gravity of his youthful face
delighted me; I was thirsty for the unknown recesses of his soul as for
a spring filled with mysterious sweetness. His voice perturbed me; his
silence lashed my nerves; I lived in a perpetual quiver of rhapsodic
sensibility.
I was in this frame of mind when Kamarowsky resolved to invite all his
friends in Orel to a banquet in order to announce to them our imminent
marriage.
At this banquet Naumoff also was present. Doubtless he already knew the
announcement that his friend was going to make, yet when the Count rose
to speak and laid his hand with a placid air of ownership upon mine, I
saw Nicolas Naumoff turn pale. I watched with deep emotion the color
slowly receding from his face; in its pallor his youthful countenance
appeared to me still more beautiful; he looked indeed like the supreme
deliverer--the angel of death.
I did not comprehend a word of Paul Kamarowsky's speech; I know that
when it was ended he turned to me and placed a magnificent diamond ring
upon my finger, and every one applauded and cheered.
Then the guests rose in turn to congratulate Kamarowsky, and to kiss my
hand and wish me joy; and I know that I smiled and thanked them.
Naumoff alone had not left his place, but in the gay chatter and stir
that surrounded us no one noticed it. He soon went away; he disappeared
without taking leave of any one.
Toasts and speeches followed. The waiters came and went, carrying fruits
and wines and sometimes leaving the large double doors of our
dining-room open behind them.
Suddenly as I raised my eyes I saw a man standing on the threshold and
gazing in at us.
It was Prilukoff.