Why did her heart beat so loudly? Why did the light pain her so? Why was it as if she could never raise her eyes to any one? Aimlessly, with weary steps, she crept about her room. She put out the light and got into bed and turned her face to the wall.
And the hours dragged on and would not end. How long the night was!
Toward morning she fell asleep. She dreamed that her mother came to her bed, in a white dress and with large, beautiful wings, and whispered to her:
"Wake up, wake up, long sleeper; have you forgotten that to-day is your wedding-day? I have come down from heaven to dress you and to bless you!" And then she sprung out of her bed, and her mother dressed her. Ah! how sweet it was to feel the soft, delicate hands once more about her as formerly! All at once her mother grew uneasy. "I cannot find your wreath," she murmured, and wandered round the room seeking the wreath, and wept bitterly.
"Here it is, little mother, there," cried Mascha, and handed her the wreath which she had worn to the ball. Then the mother was frightened and said:
"Oh, no, that is not your wreath, it is torn and red with shame; hide it, Maschenka, hide it. Your wreath must be white as my wings, and like a crown, so round and firm, a crown of thorns concealed under roses; that is the bridal wreath, thus we bind it for you poor mortals in heaven. I will bring you one from above, and will break out all the thorns for you, my treasure, my darling!" And her mother wished to spread out her wings and ascend, but she could not, her wings were broken. And she looked at Mascha with such large, helpless, sad, deathly, frightened eyes, and then turned away.
"Mother!" cries Mascha, in her sleep; "mother!" She awoke. The sunbeam which waked her every morning penetrated the curtains of her bed.
If it had seemed to Bärenburg, on the evening before the duel, that there could be no more endurable hours for him without Mascha, and as if the betrothal with Sylvia Anthropos, which had been forced upon him, must be broken off at the cost of the roughest brutality even, on the day after the duel, when he lay in bed with a wounded shoulder, he had other views.
The recollection of his adventure with Mascha filled him with vexation, almost with rage. If Mascha had formerly been for him the most peculiarly charming being whom he had ever met, she was now in his eyes nothing more than a pretty, badly watched, badly brought up being, whom in his magisterial Austrian manner he described as a true Russian.