Continuous and cold as the grave, and mysterious as death, was the silence of his daughter. The silence itself seemed to share this suffering and struggled, as it were, with the terrible desire to pass into speech; however, something strong and cumbersome, as a machine, held it motionless and stretched it out as a wire.
And somewhere at the distant end, the wire would begin to agitate and resound subdued, feebly and plaintively. With joy, yet with terror, Father Ignatius would seize upon this engendered sound, and resting with his arms upon the arms of the chair, would lean his head forward, awaiting the sound to reach him. But the sound would break and pass into silence.
“How stupid!” muttered Father Ignatius, angrily, arising from the chair, still erect and tall. Through the window he saw, suffused with sunlight, the street, which was paved with round, even-sized stones, and directly across, the stone wall of a long, windowless shed. On the comer stood a cabdriver, resembling a clay statue, and it was difficult to understand why he stood there, when for hours there was not a single passer-by.
Considerable speech
Father Ignatius had occasion for considerable speech outside his house. There was talking to be done with the clergy, with the members of his flock, while officiating at ceremonies, sometimes with acquaintances at social evenings; yet, upon his return he would feel invariably that the entire day he had been silent. This was due to the fact that with none of those people could he talk upon that matter which concerned him most, and upon which he would contemplate each night: Whv did Vera die?
Father Ignatius did not seem to understand that now this could not be known, and still thought it was possible to know. Each night all his nights had become sleepless he would picture that minute when he and his wife, in dead midnight, stood near Vera` bed, and he entreated her: “Tell us!” And when in his recollection, he would reach these words, the rest appeared to him not as it was in reality. His closed eyes, preserving in their darkness a live and undimmed picture of that night, saw how Vera raised herself in her bed, smiled and tried to say something.
And what was that she tried to say? That unuttered word of Vera` which should have solved all, seemed so near, that if one only had bent his ear and suppressed the beats of his heart, one could have heard it, and at the same time it was so infinitely, so hopelessly distant. Father Ignatius would arise from his bed, stretch forth his joined hands and, wringing them, would exclaim:
“Vera!”
And he would be answered by silence.
One evening Father Ignatius entered the chamber of Olga Stepanovna, whom he had not come to see for a week, seated himself at her head, and turning away from that insistent, heavy gaze, said: “Mother! I wish to talk to you about Vera. Do you hear?
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