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And she tossed about on the bed.

The doctors said that it was puerperal fever, and that ninety-nine chances in a hundred it would end in death. The whole day long there was fever, delirium, and unconsciousness. At midnight the patient lay without consciousness, and almost without pulse.

The end was expected every minute.

Vronsky had gone home, but in the morning he came to inquire, and Alexei Alexandrovich, meeting him in the hall, said: `Better stay, she might ask for you,' and himself led him to his wife's boudoir. Toward morning there was a return again of excitement, rapid thought and talk, and again it ended in unconsciousness. On the third day it was the same thing, and the doctors said there was hope. That day Alexei Alexandrovich went into the boudoir where Vronsky was sitting, and, closing the door, sat down opposite him.

`Alexei Alexandrovich,' said Vronsky, feeling that a statement of the situation was coming, `I can't speak, I can't understand. Spare me! However hard it is for you, believe me, it is more terrible for me.'

He would have risen; but Alexei Alexandrovich took him by the hand and said:

`I beg you to hear me out; it is necessary. I must explain my feelings, the feelings that have guided me, and will guide me, so that you may not be in error regarding me. You know I had resolved on a divorce, and had even begun to take proceedings. I won't conceal from you that in beginning this I was in uncertainty, I was in misery; I will confess that I was pursued by a desire to revenge myself on you and on her. When I got the telegram, I came here with the same feelings; I will say more - I longed for her death. But...' He paused, pondering whether to disclose or not to disclose his feelings. `But I saw her and forgave her. And the happiness of forgiveness has revealed to me my duty. I forgive completely. I would offer the other cheek, I would give my cloak if my coat be taken. I pray to God only not to take from me the bliss of forgiveness!'

Tears stood in his eyes, and the luminous, serene look in them impressed Vronsky.

`This is my position: you can trample me in the mud, make me the laughingstock of the world - I will not abandon her, and I will never utter a word of reproach to you,' Alexei Alexandrovich went on. `My duty is clearly marked for me; I ought to be with her, and I will be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it would be better for you to go away.'

He got up, and sobs cut short his words. Vronsky too was getting up, and in a stooping, not yet erect posture, looked up at him from under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich's feeling, but he felt that it was something higher, and even unattainable for him with his view of life.

[Next Chapter] [Table of Contents]TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 4, Chapter 18[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 18 After the conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out on the steps of the Karenins' house and stood still, with difficulty remembering where he was, and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of washing away his humiliation.

He felt thrust out of the beaten track along which he had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the habits and rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and inapplicable. The betrayed husband, who had figured till that time as a pitiful creature, an incidental and somewhat ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and on the pinnacle that husband had shown himself - not malignant, not false, not ludicrous - but kind and straightforward and grand. Vronsky could not but feel this, and the roles were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt the other's elevation and his own abasement, the other's truth and his own falsehood. He felt that the husband was magnanimous even in his sorrow, while he had been base and petty in his deceit. But this sense of his own humiliation before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his misery.

He felt unutterably wretched now, for his passion for Anna, which had seemed to him of late to be growing cooler, now that he knew he had lost her forever, was stronger than ever it had been. He had seen all of her in her illness, had come to know her very soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And now, when he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had lost her forever, leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful memory.

Most terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful position when Alexei Alexandrovich had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face. He stood on the steps of the Karenins' house like one distraught, and did not know what to do.

`A hack, sir?' asked the porter.

`Yes - a hack.'

On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without undressing, lay prone on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his head on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of the strangest description followed one another with extraordinary rapidity and vividness.

First it was the medicine he had poured out for the patient and spilled out of the spoon; then the midwife's white hands; then the queer posture of Alexei Alexandrovich on the floor beside the bed.