A certain time (about a month after the breaking with Lula)
Augustinovich, waking up late in the night, saw Yosef dressed yet and
sitting with a book. The clock in the silent night told the fleeting
moments untiringly. A lamp burnt with a clear, bright flame, and by its
light the ruddy side whiskers and pale face of Yosef were outlined
clearly on the black cover of the chair. He was sitting with head bent
back and closed eyes, but he was not sleeping, his raised brows and the
color of his face testified to this. His face had an expression of
unspeakable bliss; some kind of dream, like a golden butterfly, was
sitting on his brain and melting into misty mildness the sharp lines of
his features.
Augustinovich looked at him carefully, then rose in the bed silently
with a face full of indignation and anger. "What is he doing?" thought
he. "Thou art tempting thyself! May I be hanged if I don't throw a
pillow at thy head. Thou booby! Yes, I will throw the pillow! break the
lamp--Hei!"
He had finished in a moment these warlike preparations, and was making
ready to give the terrible blow, when he pushed under the blanket
quickly; Yosef opened his eyes.
"I am curious to know what will happen now," muttered Augustinovich,
pretending to sleep like a dead man. Meanwhile his astonishment grew in
earnest.
Yosef looked at him suspiciously, then looked around like a criminal;
finally he pulled out a drawer of the table and searched in it for some
object.
"Ei! if he only does not want to shoot himself in the head, or poison
himself," thought Augustinovich, terrified.
But Yosef had no thought of shooting or poisoning himself. The object
which he drew forth was a glove. One small yellow wrinkled glove. Ei! a
poor little memorial, a historical gift with which one says remember me.
_Addio! addio! caro mio!_ Remember me. Yosef, like that Emrod of old,
would have gone for the glove "among two leopards and a tiger for it,"
but the question remained as to whether he went away after that and
never returned. In point of stupidity the centuries agree oftener than
in sound judgment.
Yosef raised the glove to his lips.
"Be ashamed, old man!" roared Augustinovich.
In truth, there was something humiliating in this, and afterward Yosef
was greatly ashamed of his act. Next morning he went out before daylight
to avoid Augustinovich, who was seriously angry and indignant. It seemed
to him that he had been deceived in Yosef.
"That dunce," said he, "is like others." This idea roused that distaste
in him which we feel usually on beginning to lose regard for a man whom
we have thus far respected.
More important still was it that after that event Augustinovich grew
convinced that Yosef would return to Lula. "Let the other die or go
mad," said he of the widow. "They will take each other, let her die--Ei,
let her die" (Augustinovich always tried to persuade himself that he did
not like women), "there will be one less of them. Yosef will go back to
Lula, he will."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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