“No, no, on my salvation I swear I shan’t! And no one will ever know but me—I, you and she, and one other lady, her great friend.”
“Never mind the lady! Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch, at a moment like this you must listen, for you can’t understand what these two hundred roubles mean to me now.” The poor fellow went on rising gradually into a sort of incoherent, almost wild enthusiasm. He was thrown off his balance and talked extremely fast, as though afraid he would not be allowed to say all he had to say.
“Besides its being honestly acquired from a ‘sister,’ so highly respected and revered, do you know that now I can look after mamma and Nina, my hunchback angel daughter? Doctor Herzenstube came to me in the kindness of his heart and was examining them both for a whole hour. ‘I can make nothing of it,’ said he, but he prescribed a mineral water which is kept at a chemist’s here. He said it would be sure to do her good, and he ordered baths, too, with some medicine in them. The mineral water costs thirty copecks, and she’d need to drink forty bottles perhaps; so I took the prescription and laid it on the shelf under the icons, and there it lies. And he ordered hot baths for Nina with something dissolved in them, morning and evening. But how can we carry out such a cure in our mansion, without servants, without help, without a bath, and without water? Nina is rheumatic all over, I don’t think I told you that. All her right side aches at night, she is in agony, and, would you believe it, the angel bears it without groaning for fear of waking us. We eat what we can get, and she’ll only take the leavings, what you’d scarcely give to a dog. ‘I am not worth it, I am taking it from you, I am a burden on you,’ that’s what her angel eyes try to express. We wait on her, but she doesn’t like it. ‘I am a useless cripple, no good to anyone.’ As though she were not worth it, when she is the saving of all of us with her angelic sweetness. Without her, without her gentle word it would be hell among us! She softens even Varvara. And don’t judge Varvara harshly either, she is an angel too, she, too, has suffered wrong. She came to us for the summer,