He says he hopes they are not a curse. The Duke put out his hand to the mantlepiece as if the floor had moved under him. His lips moved. No sound came out. He looked at Stepan and Anna at the open long windows where the rain was running down in the dark.
Then he turned and walked out of the library. They heard the great front door open and close and his steps go away across the gravel into the storm. Stepp's face crumpled. He did not weep. It was worse than weeping.
He looked at the door the Duke had gone through and then at Anna and he nodded slowly as though a sentence had been read over him that he had long expected. "So," he said in Russian, "It is right. It is what I came for." "No," Anna said. She got up out of her chair so fast it rocked.
She went to him and took both his rough hands. "No, Stepan, you do not understand. Those words were not a curse. They were a message. The captain was asking his brother to forgive him.
He was saying that he was sorry. He was saying that he had written to him every day in his heart. And he was telling him to open the windows of this house again as their mother used to on the first fine day of spring. You brought him his brother back. That is why he could not stay in the room.
Stepan searched her face and she could not tell whether he believed her. He only pressed her hands and let them go and said he was tired and went slowly away up the stairs. Anna took a cloak from the hall and a lantern from the caretaker and went out after her husband. She found him on the path above the river mouth where the land ended and the rocks went down to the sea. He was standing bareheaded in the rain with his coat soaked black looking at the water.
She came and stood beside him with the lantern and for a while neither of them spoke. He crawled out on the ice. The Duke said at last his voice was raw. Everybody told him not to. Of course he did.
Of course he did. And I've spent a year and a half believing he went to the far end of that war to be as far away from me as he could get. That he died there hating me. He laughed. A terrible short sound.