Doruntine Read Online Free PDF Page B

it,” said Stres.
    The clinking of dishes got louder.
    â€œAnyway,” his wife went on, “why is it so important to find out who that awful girl came home with anyway?” This time the reproach was aimed in part at Stres.
    â€œAnd what makes her so awful?” he said evenly.
    â€œWhat, you don’t think so? A girl who spends three years wallowing in her own happiness without so much as a thought for her poor mother stricken with the most dreadful grief? You don’t think she’s an ingrate?”
    Stres listened, head down.
    â€œMaybe she didn’t know about it.”
    â€œOh, she didn’t know? And how did she happen to remember so suddenly three years later?”
    Stres shrugged. His wife’s hostility to Doruntine was nothing new. She had shown it often enough; once they had even fought about it. It was two days after the wedding, and his wife had said, “How come you’re sitting there sulking like that? Are all of you so sorry to see her go?” It was the first time she had ever made such a scene.
    â€œShe left her poor mother alone in her distress,” she went on, “and then suddenly took it into her head to come back just to rob her of the little bit of life she had left. Poor woman! What a fate!”
    â€œIt’s true,” Stres said, “such a desert—”
    â€œSuch a hellish solitude, you mean,” she broke in. “To see her daughters-in-law leave one after the other, most of them with small children in their arms, her house suddenly dark as a well. But her daughters-in-law, after all, were only on loan, and though they were wrong to abandon their mother-in-law in her time of trouble, who can cast a stone at them when the first to abandon the poor woman was her only daughter?”
    Stres sat looking at the copper candelabrum, astonishingly similar to the ones he had seen that memorable morning in the room where Doruntine and her mother languished. He now realized that everyone, each in his own way, would take some stand in this affair, and that each person’s attitude would have everything to do with his station in life, his luck in love or marriage, his looks, the measure of good or ill fortune that had been his lot, theevents that had marked the course of his life, and his most secret feelings, those a person sometimes hides even from himself. Yes, that would be the echo awakened in these people by what had happened, and though they would believe they were passing judgment on someone else’s tragedy, in reality, they would simply be giving expression to their own.
    In the morning a messenger from the prince’s chancellery delivered an envelope to Stres. Inside was a note stating that the prince, having been informed of the events of October eleventh, ordered that no effort be spared in bringing the affair to light so as to forestall what Stres himself feared, any uneasiness or misapprehension among the people.
    The chancellery asked that Stres notify the prince the moment he felt that the matter had been resolved.
    â€œHmm,” Stres said to himself after reading the laconic note a second time. The moment he felt that the matter had been resolved. Easy enough to say. I’d like to see you in my shoes.
    He had slept badly, and in the morning he again encountered the inexplicable hostility of his wife, who had not forgiven him for failing to endorse her judgment of Doruntine with sufficient ardor, though he had been careful not to contradict her. He had noticed that this sort of friction, though itdid not lead to explosions, was in fact more pernicious than an open dispute, which was generally followed by reconciliation. Friction of this kind, on the contrary, could fester for days on end in search of good reasons to rise to the surface. And since the pretext was usually irrelevant and unjustified, the resentments and misunderstandings aroused by it were far more bitter than the consequences of any ordinary