第147章

Nekhludoff would have left Petersburg on the evening of the same day, but he had promised Mariette to meet her at the theatre, and though he knew that he ought not to keep that promise, he deceived himself into the belief that it would not be right to break his word.

"Am I capable of withstanding these temptations?" he asked himself not quite honestly. "I shall try for the last time."

He dressed in his evening clothes, and arrived at the theatre during the second act of the eternal Dame aux Camelias, in which a foreign actress once again, and in a novel manner, showed how women die of consumption.

The theatre was quite full. Mariette's box was at once, and with great deference, shown to Nekhludoff at his request. A liveried servant stood in the corridor outside; he bowed to Nekhludoff as to one whom he knew, and opened the door of the box.

All the people who sat and stood in the boxes on the opposite side, those who sat near and those who were in the parterre, with their grey, grizzly, bald, or curly heads--all were absorbed in watching the thin, bony actress who, dressed in silks and laces, was wriggling before them, and speaking in an unnatural voice.

Some one called "Hush!" when the door opened, and two streams, one of cool, the other of hot, air touched Nekhludoff's face.

Mariette and a lady whom he did not know, with a red cape and a big, heavy head-dress, were in the box, and two men also, Mariette's husband, the General, a tall, handsome man with a severe, inscrutable countenance, a Roman nose, and a uniform padded round the chest, and a fair man, with a bit of shaved chin between pompous whiskers.

Mariette, graceful, slight, elegant, her low-necked dress showing her firm, shapely, slanting shoulders, with a little black mole where they joined her neck, immediately turned, and pointed with her face to a chair behind her in an engaging manner, and smiled a smile that seemed full of meaning to Nekhludoff.

The husband looked at him in the quiet way in which he did everything, and bowed. In the look he exchanged with his wife, the master, the owner of a beautiful woman, was to be seen at once.

When the monologue was over the theatre resounded with the clapping of hands. Mariette rose, and holding up her rustling silk skirt, went into the back of the box and introduced Nekhludoff to her husband.

The General, without ceasing to smile with his eyes, said he was very pleased, and then sat inscrutably silent.

"I ought to have left to-day, had I not promised," said Nekhludoff to Mariette.

"If you do not care to see me," said Mariette, in answer to what his words implied, "you will see a wonderful actress. Was she not splendid in the last scene?" she asked, turning to her husband.

The husband bowed his head.

"This sort of thing does not touch me," said Nekhludoff. "I have seen so much real suffering lately that--"

"Yes, sit down and tell me."

The husband listened, his eyes smiling more and more ironically.

"I have been to see that woman whom they have set free, and who has been kept in prison for so long; she is quite broken down."

"That is the woman I spoke to you about," Mariette said to her husband.

"Oh, yes, I was very pleased that she could be set free," said the husband quietly, nodding and smiling under his moustache with evident irony, so it seemed to Nekhludoff. "I shall go and have a smoke."

Nekhludoff sat waiting to hear what the something was that Mariette had to tell him. She said nothing, and did not even try to say anything, but joked and spoke about the performance, which she thought ought to touch Nekhludoff. Nekhludoff saw that she had nothing to tell, but only wished to show herself to him in all the splendour of her evening toilet, with her shoulders and little mole; and this was pleasant and yet repulsive to him.

The charm that had veiled all this sort of thing from Nekhludoff was not removed, but it was as if he could see what lay beneath.