Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 17
Alexey Alexandrovitch decided that he would go to Petersburg and see his wife.
If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing and go away again. If she was really
in danger, and wished to see him before her death, he would forgive her if he found
her alive, and pay her the last duties if he came too late.
All the way he thought no more of what he ought to do.
With a sense of weariness and uncleanness from the night spent in the train, in the
early fog of Petersburg Alexey Alexandrovitch drove through the deserted Nevsky
and stared straight before him, not thinking of what was awaiting him. He could not
think about it, because in picturing what would happen, he could not drive away
the reflection that her death would at once remove all the difficulty of his position.
Bakers, closed shops, night-cabmen, porters sweeping the pavements flashed past
his eyes, and he watched it all, trying to smother the thought of what was awaiting
him, and what he dared not hope for, and yet was hoping for. He drove up to the
steps. A sledge and a carriage with the coachman asleep stood at the entrance. As
he went into the entry, Alexey Alexandrovitch, as it were, got out his resolution from
the remotest corner of his brain, and mastered it thoroughly. Its meaning ran: “If it’s
a trick, then calm contempt and departure. If truth, do what is proper.”
The porter opened the door before Alexey Alexandrovitch rang. The porter, Kapitonitch,
looked queer in an old coat, without a tie, and in slippers.
“How is your mistress?”
“A successful confinement yesterday.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch stopped short and turned white. He felt distinctly now
how intensely he had longed for her death.
“And how is she?”
Korney in his morning apron ran downstairs.
“Very ill,” he answered. “There was a consultation yesterday, and the doctor’s
here now.”
“Take my things,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, and feeling some relief at the news
that there was still hope of her death, he went into the hall.
On the hatstand there was a military overcoat. Alexey Alexandrovitch noticed it
and asked:
“Who is here?”
“The doctor, the midwife, and Count Vronsky.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch went into the inner rooms.
In the drawing room there was no one; at the sound of his steps there came out of
her boudoir the midwife in a cap with lilac ribbons.
She went up to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and with the familiarity given by the approach
of death took him by the arm and drew him towards the bedroom.
“Thank God you’ve come! She keeps on about you and nothing but you,” she
said.
“Make haste with the ice!” the doctor’s peremptory voice said from the bedroom.
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