Page 786 - the-idiot

doctors declared that he could not be said to be out of dan-
ger. Varia and Nina Alexandrovna never left the sick man’s
bedside; Gania was excited and distressed, but would not go
upstairs, and seemed afraid to look at the patient. He wrung
his hands when the prince spoke to him, and said that ‘such
a misfortune at such a moment’ was terrible.
The prince thought he knew what Gania meant by ‘such
a moment.’
Hippolyte was not in the house. Lebedeff turned up late
in the afternoon; he had been asleep ever since his interview
with the prince in the morning. He was quite sober now,
and cried with real sincerity over the sick general—mourn-
ing for him as though he were his own brother. He blamed
himself aloud, but did not explain why. He repeated over
and over again to Nina Alexandrovna that he alone was to
blame—no one else—but that he had acted out of ‘pure ami-
able curiosity,’ and that ‘the deceased,’ as he insisted upon
calling the still living general, had been the greatest of ge-
niuses.
He laid much stress on the genius of the sufferer, as if this
idea must be one of immense solace in the present crisis.
Nina Alexandrovna—seeing his sincerity of feeling—
said at last, and without the faintest suspicion of reproach in
her voice: ‘Come, come—don’t cry! God will forgive you!’
Lebedeff was so impressed by these words, and the tone
in which they were spoken, that he could not leave Nina Al-
exandrovna all the evening—in fact, for several days. Till
the general’s death, indeed, he spent almost all his time at
his side.