第119章

When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the carriage, and, making an effort to master himself, took leave of her with his usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to nothing; he said that tomorrow he would let her know his decision.

His wife's words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel pang to the heart of Alexei Alexandrovich. That pang was intensified by the strange feeling of physical pity for her engendered by her tears.

But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexei Alexandrovich, to his surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.

He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at once that what has so long envenomed his existence and enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and think again, and take an interest in other things besides his tooth. This feeling Alexei Alexandrovich was experiencing. The agony had been strange and terrible, but now it was over;he felt that he could live again and think of something other than his wife.

`No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,' he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before - now these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman. `I made a mistake in linking my life to hers;but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy.

It's not I who am to blame,' he told himself, `but she. But I have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me.'

All that would befall her and her son, toward whom his sentiments were as much changed as toward her, ceased to interest him. The only thing that interested him now was the question in what way he could best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and so with most justice, shake clear the mud with which she had spattered him in her fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and useful existence.

`I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman has committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of the difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall find it,' he said to himself, frowning more and more. `I'm neither the first nor the last.' And to say nothing of historical instances dating from Menelaus, recently revived in the memory of all by La Belle Hélène , a whole list of contemporary examples of husbands with unfaithful wives in the highest society rose before Alexei Alexandrovich's imagination. `Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram... Yes, even Dram... such an honest, capable fellow... Semionov, Chagin, Sigonin,' Alexei Alexandrovich remembered.

`Admitting that a certain quite irrational ridicule falls to the lot of these men, yet I never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt sympathy for it,' Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself, though indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt sympathy for misfortunes of that kind, but the more often he had heard of instances of unfaithful wives betraying their husbands, the more highly he had thought of himself. `It is a misfortune which may befall anyone. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only thing to be done is to make the best of the situation.' And he began passing in review the methods of proceeding of men who had been in the same position that he was in.

`Daryalov fought a duel....'

The duel had particularly fascinated the thoughts of Alexei Alexandrovich in his youth, just because he was physically a fainthearted man, and was himself well aware of the fact. Alexei Alexandrovich could not without horror contemplate the idea of a pistol aimed at himself, and never made use of any weapon in his life. This horror had in his youth set him often pondering on dueling, and picturing himself in a position in which he would have to expose his life to danger. Having attained success and an established position in the world, he had long ago forgotten this feeling; but the habitual bent of feeling reasserted itself, and dread of his own cowardice proved even now so strong that Alexei Alexandrovich spent a long while thinking over the question of dueling in all its aspects, and hugging the idea of a duel, though he was fully aware beforehand that he would never under any circumstances fight one.