"What _rôle_?" Nikolai blushed. "None at all. We were always very pleasant to each other; we love each other quite like brother and sister."
"She cares for her as the tenderest mother."
"Yes; how often do you wish to hear it from me? My God, if she had said a kind word to me, but she fairly drove me away!" Nikolai's eyes sparkle quite angrily; then he adds, slowly, heavily, but speaking plainly: "I let myself be so carried away as to kiss her hand, and she shook me off as if she had a horror of me."
"So; did she? The simpleton! Do you really believe that a girl would so rudely refuse a boy like you if she were quite sure of her heart? Torment yourself no more, Colia."
"The thing is plain; she sacrifices herself from friendship for Sonia. You have done a fine thing, you shy lover, you." Lensky laughs. "Never mind, we will set it all right. To-morrow, in the course of the day, I will speak with her, and, if she pleases me--you must grant me that condition, my dear--if she pleases me, then," stretching out both hands to the young man, "what reward shall I obtain if I win your plaything for you?"
Colia did not answer, only buried his long, slender hands in his father's.
"The first kiss of your betrothed, do you hear, the first," jests Lensky. "I will not do it for less. You shall only receive the second."
"Fine!" Lensky has risen. "It is almost midnight; go to bed. When do you set out?"
"If I bring you a happy message, will you not concede another twenty-four hours?"
"Now be of good courage, you childish fellow; dream the most beautiful dreams, consoled. I will manage my affair well; and I will not tell her that I have seen you weep like a little girl on her account." This he whispers in his ear, while he once more embraces him before retiring.
This evening no one might have dared remind Nikolai of any of the excesses which he had formerly, not without bitterness, reproached his father with. All that had ever offended him in the great artist he had forgotten. To-day he understood the boundless love which his mother, despite all the injuries he had done her, had felt for this man. "What a wonderful man," he murmurs, "what a golden heart!"
He was really a wonderful man in his way, and generously good. Few knew how good he was. Like most prominent men, in the course of his life he had been much calumniated, by no one with more convincing cleverness than by himself. Roused by the flattery which he met everywhere to angry opposition, he ascribed his noblest actions to the lowest motives, and flatly denied every lofty emotion; and, as the Russian national peculiarity of self-depreciation is quite unknown in Western Europe, his listeners took all that he said about himself as plain truth.