FAMILY HAPPINESS

(1859)

PART FIRST

CHAPTER I

SONYA; and I were in m,

ONYA and I were in mourning for our mother, who

had died in the autumn, and we had spent the whole

winter in the country alone with Katya.

Katya was an old family friend, our governess, who had brought all of us up, and whom I had known and loved ever since my memory began. Sonya was my younger sister.

The winter at our old house at Pokrovskoye had been dreary and forlorn. The weather had been cold and windy, so that the snowdrifts were heaped high above our windows; the panes had been almost constantly covered with frost, so that nothing could be seen out of them, and we had been kept housed almost all the time. It was rare that any friends came to see us, and, if they did, they brought no increase of joy or cheer to our home. All wore long faces, and spoke with subdued voices, as if afraid of awakening some one; all refrained from laughing, but they sighed, and often shed tears and looked solemnly at me, and especially at little Sonya, in her black frock.

The presence of death still seemed to be felt in the house; the grief and horror of death were in the very atmosphere.

Mamma's chamber was shut up, and I felt a sensation

of pain, and also a strange impulse to look into that cold and empty chamber, when I passed by it on my way to

bed.

At that time I was seventeen, and mamma, the very year that she died, was intending to move to the city for the sake of "bringing me out."

The loss of my mother was a terrible grief for me; but I must confess that there was associated with it the feeling that I was young and pretty for everybody told me so and that it was a pity to have wasted another winter alone in the country. Before the end of the winter this painful sense of loneliness and tedium increased to such a degree that I refused to leave my room, I kept the piano shut, and never took up a book.

When Katya advised me to do this thing or that, I replied: "I don't wish to, I can't," and the question arose in my soul, "Why? Why do anything, when the best days of my life are thus going to waste? Why?" And to this question there was no other answer than

tears.

They told me that I was growing thin, and losing my beauty, but even that made no difference to me.

Why? Who was to see?

It seemed to me that my whole life was destined to be spent in this dull solitude and helpless gloom, from which I had no power or even desire to make my escape.

Toward the end of the winter, Katya began to worry about me, and resolved, when the opportunity offered, to take me abroad. But in order to do this we needed money; and we had a very dim idea of what our mother had left us, and therefore we waited from day to day for our guardian to come and settle up our affairs.

In March he came.

"Now, thank the Lord!" said Katya to me, one day, as I was wandering about, from room to room, like a shadow, idle, listless, aimless; "Sergyer Mikhaïluitch has come; he sends to inquire after us, and will be here to dinner. Come, now! show a little energy, my dear Masha," she added. "Otherwise, what will he think of you? He is so fond of you both!"

Sergyer Mikhailuitch was a near neighbor of ours, and a friend of our late father, though he was much his junior. Not only would his coming change all our plans, and enable us to leave the country, but from childhood I had been accustomed to love and honor him; and so, when Katya advised me to "show a little energy," she knew very well that it would mortify me more to appear in an unfavorable light before him than before any other of our friends. Moreover, not only did I share the traditional attachment for him felt by every one in the house, from Katya and Sonya (whose godfather he was) down to the stable-boy, but in my eyes he had a special interest, owing to a word which mamasha had dropped in my hearing. She said that she would like to find such a man as a husband for me.

At that time her words struck me as strange and disagreeable, for my hero was a quite different sort of man. My ideal was graceful, slender, pale, and melancholy, while Sergyer Mikhailuitch was no longer young, was tall and stout, and, as it seemed to me, always cheerful; but nevertheless those words of mamasha's had struck my imagination, and, as long as six years before, when I was eleven and he had addressed me by the familiar tui, thou, had romped with me, and called me "little maidviolet," I had asked myself, not without dread, what I should do if he suddenly asked me to become his wife.

Before dinner, for which Katya had prepared a cream pie and a spinach sauce, Sergyer Mikharluitch arrived. From the window I saw him drive up toward the house, in his light sleigh; but, as soon as he disappeared around the corner, I hastened into the drawing-room, wishing to make it appear that I was not too eagerly expecting him.

.

But as soon as I heard the sound of his feet in the anteroom, and his hearty voice and Katya's steps, I could not restrain myself, but ran out to meet him. He was holding Katya by the hand, and talking in his deep voice. A smile was on his face.

When he saw me, he paused and gazed at me for 1 Dyevotchka-fiyalka.

1