They were English words.
They were English words spoken by a man who did not know a single word of English. They were sounds learned by ear, the vowels bent and flattened by a Russian mouth, every syllable set down carefully in its place like something very old and very breakable.
"Tell Laurie," Stepan said. "I was wrong to go like that. I wrote every day in my head. Tell him: open the windows."
There was a long silence. The rain beat against the glass.
"He says the captain made him learn those sounds on the last night," Anna whispered. "He does not know what they mean. He has said them to himself every night since, so that he would not lose a single piece of them. He says he hopes they are not a curse."
The Duke put out his hand to the mantelpiece as if the floor had moved under him. His lips moved; no sound came out. He looked at Stepan, and at Anna, and at the 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.
Stepan'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."