Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 30
“Mistress, darling!” began the nurse, going up to Anna and kissing her hands
and shoulders. “God has brought joy indeed to our boy on his birthday. You aren’t
changed one bit.”
“Oh, nurse dear, I didn’t know you were in the house,” said Anna, rousing herself
for a moment.
“I’m not living here, I’m living with my daughter. I came for the birthday, Anna
Arkadyevna, darling!”
The nurse suddenly burst into tears, and began kissing her hand again.
Seryozha, with radiant eyes and smiles, holding his mother by one hand and his
nurse by the other, pattered on the rug with his fat little bare feet. The tenderness
shown by his beloved nurse to his mother threw him into an ecstasy.
“Mother! She often comes to see me, and when she comes...” he was beginning,
but he stopped, noticing that the nurse was saying something in a whisper to his
mother, and that in his mother’s face there was a look of dread and something like
shame, which was so strangely unbecoming to her.
She went up to him.
“My sweet!” she said.
She could not say good-bye, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood.
“Darling, darling Kootik!” she used the name by which she had called him
when he was little, “you won’t forget me? You...” but she could not say more.
How often afterwards she thought of words she might have said. But now she
did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. But Seryozha knew all she
wanted to say to him. He understood that she was unhappy and loved him. He
understood even what the nurse had whispered. He had caught the words “always
at nine o’clock,” and he knew that this was said of his father, and that his father and
mother could not meet. That he understood, but one thing he could not understand–
why there should be a look of dread and shame in her face?... She was not in fault,
but she was afraid of him and ashamed of something. He would have liked to put a
question that would have set at rest this doubt, but he did not dare; he saw that she
was miserable, and he felt for her. Silently he pressed close to her and whispered,
“Don’t go yet. He won’t come just yet.”
The mother held him away from her to see what he was thinking, what to say to
him, and in his frightened face she read not only that he was speaking of his father,
but, as it were, asking her what he ought to think about his father.
“Seryozha, my darling,” she said, “love him; he’s better and kinder than I am, and
I have done him wrong. When you grow up you will judge.”
“There’s no one better than you!...” he cried in despair through his tears, and,
clutching her by the shoulders, he began squeezing her with all his force to him, his
arms trembling with the strain.
“My sweet, my little one!” said Anna, and she cried as weakly and childishly as
he.
At that moment the door opened. Vassily Lukitch came in.
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