A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [79]
One minute, just to see her for one more minute, to bid farewell, to squeeze her hand . . . I prayed, I cursed, I wept, I laughed . . . No, nothing could express my troubled mind, my desperation! . . . Before the possibility of losing her forever, Vera became dearer to me than everything in the world—dearer than life itself, than honor, than happiness! God knows what peculiar, what mad ideas swarmed in my head . . . And meanwhile, I continued to ride at a furious pace, spurring my horse mercilessly onward. And then I started to notice that my horse was breathing more heavily. He had already stumbled twice on even ground . . . There were five versts more to Essentukov—a Cossack station, where I could exchange my horse.
All would have been saved had my horse had enough strength for another ten minutes! But suddenly, passing up out of a small gully, at an egress from the mountains, on a tight bend, he crashed to the ground. I swiftly jumped off—at this point I wanted to get him up and was holding the reins—all in vain. A faint moan escaped from between his clenched teeth; after a few minutes, he expired. I was left alone on the Steppe, having lost my last hope. I tried to continue on foot; my legs gave way, exhausted with the distress of the day and insomnia, then I fell onto the wet grass and cried like an infant.
For a long time I lay motionless and wept bitterly, not making any attempt to restrain my tears and sobbing. I thought that my breast would explode. All my hardness, all my cool indifference, disappeared like smoke. My soul lost its strength, my reason went quiet, and if someone had seen me at that minute, they would have turned away in disdain.
When the dew of night and the mountain wind had refreshed my hot head, and my thoughts had returned to regular order, I understood that chasing after a perished happiness was useless and heedless. What did I need? To see her? Why? Had not everything ended between us? One bitter departing kiss wouldn’t distill my memories, and would only make it harder to part ways thereafter.
It was pleasant, to me, however, that I could cry! As for the rest, it may be that the cause of this was shattered nerves, a night without sleep, two minutes in the face of a pistol’s muzzle, and an empty stomach.
All will be better! This new suffering, to use a military idiom, has given me a fortunate diversion. Weeping is healthy. And moreover, it is likely that, had I not set off on horseback, and not been made to walk fifteen versts back, then sleep wouldn’t have closed my eyes that night.
I returned to Kislovodsk at five o’clock in the morning, threw myself on my bed, and slept the sleep of Napoleon after Waterloo.
When I wakened, it was already dark in the courtyard. I sat by the open window, unbuttoned my arkhaluk, and the mountain wind refreshed my breast, which had still not calmed with the heavy sleep of fatigue. The lights of the fortress and the slobodka twinkled in the distance, beyond the river, through the tops of the thick linden trees that overshadowed it. All was quiet in our courtyard; it was dark in the house of the Princess Ligovsky.
The doctor came by. His brow was crossed, and he did not extend his hand to me as he would usually.
“Where have you come from, Doctor?”
“From the Princess Ligovsky. Her daughter is ill—with a weakening of the nerves . . . But that is not the matter, this is: the town authorities have guessed the truth, even though they can’t positively prove anything. However, I advise you to be more careful. The Princess Ligovsky was telling me today that she knows that you dueled for her daughter’s sake. That little old man told her everything . . . what was his name? He was witness to your skirmish with Grushnitsky in the restaurant. I have come to warn you. Farewell. It may be that we will never see each other again, that they will dispatch you somewhere.”
He stopped at the threshold. He wanted to shake my hand . . . and if I had given him the slightest indication of such a desire on my part, he would have thrown his arms around