For a while Lensky remains alone in the garden, then he goes in the house. Fear of disturbing his daughter in her happiness, longing to rejoice in the sight of this happiness, alike agitate him.
From the drawing-room sound voices--very softly, interrupted with long pauses.
The drawing-room door is not tightly closed; Lensky looks through the crack.
Happiness? Where is the happiness? They sit near each other, hand in hand; he embarrassed; she humiliated, shy.
"That cannot remain thus; it is not possible that it should remain thus," Lensky's warm, wild heart cries out. "Take her in your arms," he would like to call to the young man; "bury her shame in your tenderness, raise her broken self-respect by your love!"
It must still happen thus, he must clasp her to his breast, kiss and console her.
Lensky waits, waits breathlessly, fairly spying for a change of affairs; but nothing changes. And suppressing a deep sigh, he turns away.
"That is a rehabilitation, but no happiness!"
A November day--a November day in Venice, and what weather! The plaster wet, the wall smoking with dampness, the water in the canals cloudy, the atmosphere gray and cold, filled with gray mist, and nowhere a sunbeam.
In a large, desolate room, with picturesque bow-windows, sets Mascha at a writing-table. She is reckoning, evidently racking her brains over the great problem how to make ten francs pay for a hundred francs' worth. Sometimes she pauses thoughtfully. Then she pushes the account-book from her, and begins to write a letter. The letter will not come to an end.
She lays aside the pen, and with a quick, angry gesture crumples the sheet. "No, I cannot--I cannot inflict that upon you, father!" she murmurs to herself. She leans her head on her hand; the pen lies unused beside-her.
More than four years have passed since Mascha's marriage to Karl Bärenburg. When at that time the news had first circulated in Austria of the distinguished marriage which the daughter of the Russian violinist was to make, many envious, malicious words fell from the lips of ambitious maidens. But in initiated circles it was known that the existence of the young Countess Bärenburg offered little that was enviable. Her husband's parents denied their daughter-in-law, and cut off all subsidies from their son. Mascha's very large dowry from Lensky made the whole material basis of the young household. Shortly after his marriage, Bärenburg had had himself transferred to Japan; from there to Rio. Now, for almost two years, he had been without a post; led with his family--now in Pau, now in Nice, at length in Venice--the unsteady, incessantly striving for something better, wandering existence of a man who is no longer at ease in his social relations.