"Where can she have gone? what could she have done?" I cried, in the impotent rage of despair.
Something whitish suddenly appeared at the edge of the water. I recognized the place. There, above the grave of a man who drowned himself seventy years before, arose a stone cross, half sunken in the ground, covered with characters almost illegible. My heart was beating as though it would break. The white figure had disappeared.
"Annouchka," I cried, in such a fierce voice, that I even frightened myself.
But no one answered; I finally decided to go and find out whether Gaguine had not found her.
Quickly going up the vineyard road, I perceived a light in Annouchka's room. This sight calmed me a little. I approached the house; the entrance door was closed. I knocked. A window that had no light opened softly in the lower story, and Gaguine thrust out his head.
"She has returned," he answered in a low voice. "She is in her room and is going to bed. All is for the best."
"God be praised!" I cried, in a paroxysm of indescribable joy. "God be praised! Then everything is all right; but you know we have not had our talk together."
"Not now," he answered, half closing the window; "another time. In the meanwhile, farewell!"
"To-morrow," I said, "to-morrow will decide everything."
I was upon the point of knocking at it,--I wished to speak to Gaguine one instant longer, to ask his sister's hand,--but a proposal of marriage at such an hour! "To-morrow," I thought, "to-morrow I shall be happy."
Happiness has no to-morrow; it has no yesterday; it remembers not the past; it has no thought of the future; it knows only the present, and yet this present is not a day, but an instant.
I know not how I returned to Z.--It was not my legs that carried me, it was not a boat that took me to the other side; I was wafted along, so to speak, by strong, large wings.
I passed a thicket where a nightingale was singing. I stopped, listened a long time; it seemed to be singing of my love and my happiness.
The next morning, on approaching the white house, I was astonished to see the windows open, also the entrance door. Some pieces of paper were scattered about the threshold; a servant, her broom in her hand, appeared at the door. I approached her.