Volume I Part 6 (1/2)
”You should try your fortune in the bathroom over there; that is enough to frighten you!” said an old maid who lived with the Melukows.
”Why?” said the eldest girl.
”Oh! you would never dare to do it; you must be very brave.”
”Well, I will go,” said Sonia.
”Tell us what happened to that young girl, you know,” said the youngest Melukow.
”Once a young girl went to the bath, taking with her a c.o.c.k and two plates with knives and forks, which is what you must do; and she waited.
Suddenly she heard horses' bells--some one was coming; he stopped, came up-stairs, and she saw an officer walk into the room; a real live officer--at least so he seemed--who sat down opposite to her where the second cover was laid.”
”Oh! how horrible!” exclaimed Natacha, wide-eyed. ”And he spoke to her--really spoke?”
”Yes, just as if he had really been a man. He begged and prayed her to listen to him, and all she had to do was to refuse him and hold out till the c.o.c.k crowed; but she was too much frightened. She covered her face with her hands, and he clasped her in his arms; luckily some girls who were on the watch rushed in when she screamed.”
”Why do you terrify them with such nonsense?” said Pelaguea Danilovna.
”But, mamma, you know you wanted to try your fortune too.”
”And if you try your fortune in a barn, what do you do?” asked Sonia.
”That is quite simple. You must go to the barn--now, for instance--and listen. If you hear thras.h.i.+ng, it is for ill-luck; if you hear grain dropping, that is good.”
”Tell us, mother, what happened to you in the barn.”
”It is so long ago,” said the mother, with a smile, ”that I have quite forgotten; besides, not one of you is brave enough to try it.”
”Yes, I will go,” said Sonia. ”Let me go.”
”Go by all means if you are not afraid.”
”May I, Madame Schoss?” said Sonia to the governess.
Now, whether playing games or sitting quietly and chatting, Nicolas had not left Sonia's side the whole evening; he felt as if he had seen her for the first time, and only just now appreciated all her merits.
Bright, bewitchingly pretty in her quaint costume, and excited as she very rarely was, she had completely fascinated him.
”What a simpleton I must have been!” thought he, responding in thought to those sparkling eyes and that triumphant smile which had revealed to him a little dimple at the tip of her mustache that he had never observed before.
”I am afraid of nothing,” she declared. She rose, asked her way, precisely, to the barn, and every detail as to what she was to expect, waiting there in total silence; then she threw a fur cloak over her shoulders, glanced at Nicolas, and went on.
She went along the corridor and down the back-stairs; while Nicolas, saying that the heat of the room was too much for him, slipped out by the front entrance. It was as cold as ever, and the moon seemed to be s.h.i.+ning even more brightly than before. The snow at her feet was strewn with stars, while their sisters overhead twinkled in the deep gloom of the sky, and she soon looked away from them, back to the gleaming earth in its radiant mantle of ermine.
Nicolas hurried across the hall, turned the corner of the house, and went past the side door where Sonia was to come out. Half-way to the barn stacks of wood, in the full moonlight, threw their shadows on the path, and beyond, an alley of lime-trees traced a tangled pattern on the snow with the fine crossed lines of their leafless twigs. The beams of the house and its snow-laden roof looked as if they had been hewn out of a block of opal, with iridescent lights where the facets caught the silvery moonlight. Suddenly a bough fell cras.h.i.+ng off a tree in the garden; then all was still again. Sonia's heart beat high with gladness; as if she were drinking in not common air, but some life-giving elixir of eternal youth and joy.
”Straight on, if you please, miss, and on no account look behind you.”
”I am not afraid,” said Sonia, her little shoes tapping the stone steps and then crunching the carpet of snow as she ran to meet Nicolas, who was within a couple of yards of her. And yet not the Nicolas of every-day life. What had transfigured him so completely? Was it his woman's costume with frizzed-out hair, or was it that radiant smile which he so rarely wore, and which at this moment illumined his face?
”But Sonia is quite unlike herself, and yet she is herself,” thought Nicolas on his side, looking down at the sweet little face in the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the fur cloak that wrapped her, and drew her to him, and he kissed her lips, which still tasted of the burned cork that had blackened her mustache.