The Sisters Tragedy | Page 9

arrived, is standing anxiously in the doorway of an antechamber with
his eyes fixed upon a lady in the costume of a maid of honor in the time
of Catherine II. The lady presently disengages herself from the crowd,
and passes near Count PANSHINE, who
impulsively takes her by the
hand and leads her across the threshold of the inner apartment, which is
unoccupied.
HE.
Pauline!
SHE.
You knew me?
HE.
How could I have failed?
A mask may hide your features, not your
soul.
There is an air about you like the air
That folds a star. A blind
man knows the night,
And feels the constellations. No coarse sense

Of eye or ear had made you plain to me.
Through these I had not
found you; for your eyes,
As blue as violets of our Novgorod,
Look
black behind your mask there, and your voice--
I had not known that

either. My heart said,
"Pauline Pavlovna."
SHE.
Ah! Your heart said that?
You trust your heart, then! 'Tis a serious
risk!--
How is it you and others wear no mask?
HE.
The Emperor's orders.
SHE.
Is the Emperor here?
I have not seen him.
HE.
He is one of the six
In scarlet kaftans and all masked alike.

Watch--you will note how every one bows down
Before those figures,
thinking each by chance
May be the Tsar; yet none knows which is
he.
Even his counterparts are left in doubt.
Unhappy Russia! No
serf ever wore
Such chains as gall our Emperor these sad days.
He
dare trust no man.
SHE.
All men are so false.
HE.
Spare one, Pauline Pavlovna.
SHE.
No; all, all!
I think there is no truth left in the world,
In man or
woman. Once were noble souls.--
Count Sergius, is Nastasia here
to-night?

HE.
Ah! then you know! I thought to tell you first.
Not here, beneath these
hundred curious eyes,
In all this glare of light; but in some place

Where I could throw me at your feet and weep.
In what shape came
the story to your ear?
Decked in the teller's colors, I'll be sworn;

The truth, but in the livery of a lie,
And so must wrong me. Only this
is true:
The Tsar, because I risked my wretched life
To shield a life
as wretched as my own,
Bestows upon me, as supreme reward--
O
irony!--the hand of this poor girl.
Says, HERE, I HAVE THE PEARL
OF PEARLS FOR YOU,
SUCH AS WAS NEVER PLUCKED
FROM OUT THE DEEP
BY INDIAN DIVER, FOR A
SULTAN'S CROWN.
YOUR JOY'S DECREED, and stabs me with
a smile.
SHE.
And she--she loves you?
HE.
I know not, indeed.
Likes me, perhaps. What matters it?--HER love!

The guardian, Sidor Yurievich, consents,
And she consents. No
love in it at all,
A mere caprice, a young girl's spring-tide dream.

Sick of her ear-rings, weary of her mare,
She'll have a
lover--something ready-made,
Or improvised between two cups of
tea--
A lover by imperial ukase!
Fate said her word--I chanced to be
the man!
If that grenade the crazy student threw
Had not spared me,
as well as spared the Tsar,
All this would not have happened. I'd have
been
A hero, but quite safe from her romance.
She takes me for a
hero--think of that!
Now by our holy Lady of Kazan,
When I have
finished pitying myself,
I'll pity her.
SHE.

Oh no; begin with her;
She needs it most.
HE.
At her door lies the blame,
Whatever falls. She, with a single word,

With half a tear, had stopt it at the first,
This cruel juggling with poor
human hearts.
SHE.
The Tsar commanded it--you said the Tsar.
HE.
The Tsar does what she wills--God fathoms why.
Were she his
mistress, now! but there's no snow
Whiter within the bosom of a
cloud,
Nor colder either. She is very haughty,
For all her fragile air
of gentleness;
With something vital in her, like those flowers
That
on our desolate steppes outlast the year.
Resembles you in some
things. It was that
First made us friends. I do her justice, see!
For
we were friends in that smooth surface way
We Russians have
imported out of France.
Alas! from what a blue and tranquil heaven

This bolt fell on me! After these two years,
My suit with Ossip
Leminoff at end,
The old wrong righted, the estates restored,
And
my promotion, with the ink not dry!
Those fairies which neglected
me at birth
Seemed now to lavish all good gifts on me--
Gold
roubles, office, sudden dearest friends.
The whole world smiled; then,
as I stooped to taste
The sweetest cup, freak dashed it from my lip.

This very night--just think, this very night--
I planned to come and
beg of you the alms
I dared not ask for in my poverty.
I thought me
poor then. How stript am I now!
There's not a ragged mendicant one
meets
Along the Nevski Prospekt but has leave
To tell his love, and
I have not that right!
Pauline Pavlovna, why do you stand there

Stark as a statue, with no word to say?

SHE.
Because this thing has frozen up my heart.
I think that there is
something killed in me,
A dream that would have mocked all other
bliss.
What shall I say? What would you have