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The Genius

by Margaret Horton Potter · English · Gutenberg #22004 · 826,393 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Genius

Author: Margaret Horton Potter


        
Release date: July 5, 2007 [eBook #22004]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22004

Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GENIUS ***


E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



THE GENIUS

by

MARGARET POTTER

Author of
"The House of De Mailly" "Istar of Babylon" Etc. Etc.







London and New York
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1906
Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
Published March, 1906.



TO
MY BROTHER
EDWARD CLEMENT POTTER



CONTENTS

CHAP.                               PAGE

          Prologue                        3
   I.     The Czar's Ball                 8
   II.    Michael                        26
   III.   The Gregoriev Heir             42
   IV.    The Corps of Cadets            60
   V.     Death Joy                      75
   VI.    Nathalie                       90
   VII.   Spring and the Rose           105
   VIII.  In Camp                       126
   IX.    "Half-gods Go"                156
   X.     Self-Destiny                  184
   XI.    The Moscow Conservatoire      202
   XII.   The Gods Arrive               226
   XIII.  Student's Folly               255
   XIV.   The Third Section             272
   XV.    Engulfment                    285
   XVI.   Joseph                        302
   XVII.  Heritage                      319
   VIII.  Joseph the Sower              337
   XIX.   His Harvest                   353
   XX.    Madame Féodoreff              364
   XXI.   Tosca Regnant                 381
   XXII.  The Lion                      400
   XXIII. The Hermit                    427
          Epilogue                      446






THE GENIUS

THEMA


Hark, ye Great, that withdraw yourselves from the Multitude!
_Loneliness_ is written for your word. Alone shall ye strive to solve
the riddle of Creation.

Seek ye help of them that have gone before? Ye shall find it not. Dream
ye of sympathy, of praise, from those that watch your work to-day? They
shall give ye rather mockery. Finally, would ye leave to your children
legacies of wisdom that shall be as gold unto them? Lo! Such desire,
also, must be vain.

Dowered of Vision, Power or Wantonness, ye shall not escape this scourge
of Fate. Alone shall ye cut your way through the rock of Destiny up to
the High Place of Restitution. Yea! Solitary shall your labor be. But
out of solitude cometh, in good time, that Understanding of the Law that
all, at last, must seek--and find.






THE GENIUS

PROLOGUE

THE ANNUNCIATION


In the Western world of the revised calendar it was the evening of
January twelfth. In Russia it was New Year's night, of the year 1840.
The year was twenty-three hours old; for the bells of the three churches
in Klin had just chimed eleven times. But in "Maidonovo," a
country-place of the Gregorievs just outside the town, the mistress of
the house, Princess Sophia, had not yet gone to bed. She had been alone
in her bedroom for some time, and was now on her knees before a little
shrine presided over by a great, golden ikon, with its flaring colors,
and stiff, Byzantine figures of Mary and the infant Christ. There,
before the World-Mother, knelt the loneliest of unhappy women: daughter
of an old, impoverished Muscovite house, and wife, by necessity, of
Michael Gregoriev, a man of millions, chief of the Third Section in
Moscow: an official after the heart of the Iron Czar, and of Satan, his
master, too.

For nearly an hour the Princess had knelt on a heavily rugged floor, her
eyes lifted to the face of the Virgin, her lips revealing, in those
whispers that had become part of her life, the ever-living anguish of
her heart. She was in her thirty-third year, poor creature: had known
now sixteen years of married life--sixteen years of revelation, of
repulsion mental and physical, of misery not to be told. One by one her
little illusions, fancies, hopes, and, with them, all the graces of her
youth, had fallen from her, till there remained but a shadowy, faded
creature, holding, in the depths of her bruised soul, just one more
desire, one final hope, of which the very possibility was by this time
all but extinguished.

Yet it was of this hope she was speaking to-night to that distant,
shadowy Mary, who, her confessor had told her, can always understand and
always pity. Here, in the chill silence of her lonely rooms, while the
wide world without grew stiller and more still under its pale covering,
the wife had gathered her last resolution together, and dared a demand
of those High Immortals whose contact with humanity had ended so long
ago. They had hitherto been pitiless enough with her; though this she
would scarcely acknowledge even in her feeble rebellion. But she should
ask them, at last, to make her a tardy restitution.

Sophia was unaware that her wish was a selfish one. It seemed so natural
a thing she asked; and her mind, poor lady, was all upon herself, there
being no other soul to think for her. That the helpless life she longed
for would be ushered into a dreary world, too dark for bright innocence
to face, never occurred to her. Her outlook had grown strangely
one-sided during the past long years of constantly weakening defence.

"Mary-Mother--protect me! I have waited very long. I have done all Thy
will. I have kept the fasts: have made my confessions and been absolved.
I have striven so long for strength to endure--all that has been given
me to endure! I have not avoided any pain, or abuse, or disgrace. I have
borne without complaint all the isolation of _his_ life, till my very
family shuns me. Oh, Thy hand has lain heavy upon me, but I have not
complained! Therefore, in this New Year, I come to Thee, Holy Mother,
with my wish. Grant me, I beseech, that which has been given so many
times to others! Give me at last a companion in my life: one that cannot
leave me. Thou, holiest of women, intercede for me! Make me one with
Thee! Give me, too, a child!"

Once more, and over and over again, did the frail woman make her
request: so many times, indeed, and at last so fervidly, that her
excitement grew, and tears came. Little by little she drooped towards
the floor. Her face shone wet in the candle-light; and she clutched at
the little shelf below the ikon, where a handful of flowers stood in a
silver vase between the candles.

The minutes crept by. The few other lights in the big room burned low,
flared, flickered, and went out. There was a vast, muffled stillness in
the snow-filled air. The first night of the New Year was nearly dead. As
the light in her room grew ghostlier, Princess Sophia's voice became
gradually incoherent, dropped to a vague whisper, and finally ceased.
She slid gently from her knees to a sitting posture, her head resting
against the wall, under the little shrine. And then her eyes fell shut.
She slept.

For a quarter of an hour there was no sound in the room. The last candle
before the ikon at length followed the others, wavered high for an
instant, and then went out. Yet, strangely, the room was not left in
darkness. On the contrary, in the corner by the door had appeared a
soft, misty radiance which, second by second, grew visibly more
luminous. Far over the snow-fields came the clear chime of bells,
ringing the midnight hour. As their echoes died, the Princess, without
moving her body, opened her eyes again upon the form of a woman who had
emerged from the mist and now stood near at hand, looking down at her.

Tall she was, and classically robed, this visitor. Her face, shaded by
a drapery of dove blue, was as fair as sculptured marble. But there was
a fire of deep compassion in her dark eyes, and her mouth was curved
into the gentlest smile. The great pity in that wonderful face stirred
Sophia with a sudden pang of joy; and it was long before her gaze moved
from those features. But when they did, her lips parted in a faint cry;
for she saw that the Mary-Mother was not alone. Her left hand was
clasped by that of a child: a tiny, shadowy shape, sweet-faced and
slender-limbed. Looking, Sophia's breath came fast; and leaning forward
instinctively, she held out her arms. At that gesture, the stranger and
her charge came forward a little more, and the holy woman spoke:

"Sophia, I come to answer your prayer, bringing with me the soul of your
child."

The Princess bowed to the floor.

"Your eyes behold a little, lonely spirit, that is to be given into your
care. Guard it and guide it; for the way of its life stretches far, and
is difficult and long. Your paths meet for but a few years: for you are
yourself nearing the end of your unhappy journey; and during these last
years, comfort shall be given you. Look, then, upon the face of your
son."

Swiftly the little spirit left the protecting shadow of its holy guide,
and paused beside Sophia. She would have clasped the shadowy body in her
eager arms, but a sense outside herself forbade this, and she could only
gaze searchingly into the gentle, childish face.

"Thou art mine?--my son?" she whispered, softly.

The little creature looked up at Mary-Mother and then, at once, returned
to the sad mortal at its side. The little face brightened with a smile,
and the lips formed the dear word, "Mother!"

Then, immediately, darkness had fallen. The visitors from afar were
gone. Sophia lay upon the bare floor beneath the ikon, fast asleep.

In a few moments the door from the hall opened hastily, and a woman's
voice whispered in frightened haste:

"My lady! Khazyaceka! His Excellency Prince Michael is coming up-stairs!
He is almost here!"




CHAPTER I

THE CZAR'S BALL


After the night of what she came gradually to call the Holy Dream, the
years passed more swiftly, with less of inward tumult, for Sophia
Ivanovna Gregoriev. It was now the close of the year 1851; and the reign
of the Iron Czar was wavering towards its dark end. Meantime the son of
the chief of the secret section in Moscow was eleven years and three
months old: a straight-limbed, quiet child, the son of his mother. And
all Sophia's recent life, that life which had entwined itself wholly
about the promised babe, was mingled the inexplicable strangeness of her
dream-memory. To her, New Year's night had become a sacred time; and she
loved to keep a vigil through it in her own, lonely way. This year,
however, it was to be marked in a different manner. For Michael
Gregoriev had planned that, on the first night of 1852, he, and perforce
his wife, should make a final effort to obtain that social recognition
which had never been the accompaniment of his political advancement.

At this time--as, indeed, to-day, there stood, in the south-central part
of trans-Moskva Moscow, only two private buildings of any note. One of
these was the low-spreading palace of the Governor; the other that of
Prince Michael Petrovitch Gregoriev. The first had stood in its gardens
for a century and a half. The other was nearly fifty years older. The
dwelling of the Gregorievs was at some distance from its stately
neighbor, however; for it stood on the southeast corner of the Konnaia
Square, approachable by carriage only through the Serpoukhovskaia. Its
surroundings were of the humblest sort; for it was a long way south of
the Merchants' quarter, and so far from the sacred precincts of the
Kremlin that the voice of Ivan Veliki had melted into an echo ere it
reached the Gregoriev gateway.

It is certain that neither age nor environment made this old place less
grewsomely interesting: this ancient dwelling of a family whose unsavory
annals were lost in the gloom of Tátar rule. The Gregorievs were closely
bound to the gloomy stone pile; and would dwell there, in all
probability, as long as their line continued. Michael, the present
Prince, was loyal to his house. Yet its situation was one of the
greatest of crosses to this man, who had known and cast away many a
heavier burden during his career. Remote as he was from the fashionable
districts, there was neither man nor woman in the city, from the
proudest house in the Equerries' quarter to the outskirts of the Novaia
Andronovka, but knew and shuddered, agreeably, at the Gregoriev
reputation.

It was not strange, then, that the affair of New Year's night had become
the sensation of the season. For on this night Prince Gregoriev had
vowed a triumph over the massed society of the Mother City. He intended
to accomplish now what his wedding with a daughter of one of the oldest
and most honored families had failed to do: what no use of his
unscrupulous power could force, what all Moscow society, for once banded
unanimously together, had sworn he should never accomplish--enter their
ranks, the ranks of the old nobility of the Empire.

By New Year's morning, however, the numbers were admitting, bitterly,
their defeat. Once more Gregoriev was about to achieve the impossible.
Eighteen years before, Moscow society had defeated him, superbly. At the
time of his marriage to a daughter of the Blashkovs, the question of
his admission into the "court circle" had been violently agitated. But
at that time even his prospective father-in-law had not had the
hardihood to suggest an informal presentation of this man to his
Majesty. Nay, it was the bride, pale, pretty, sensitive Sophia, who,
when it was seen that she had no slightest influence over her dread
husband, had been, not, perhaps, without a sigh, dropped from their
acquaintance by her former associates: nay, by her very family, all save
one sister, a girl younger than herself.

For eighteen years, then, the Gregoriev palace had stood in its
isolation, echoing only to the revelry that money can always obtain. For
eighteen years its master, buying what the world had to sell, had been
secretly planning to obtain what was not for sale: had faced, unmoved,
an isolation which, to a nature less strong, would have been unbearable.

Now, at last, he was about to win. His amazing intrigue had succeeded.
Its results were for the eyes of all men. For Moscow society had been
suddenly _commanded_ to his house, to a ball, given on New Year's night,
in honor of his Imperial Majesty Nicholas I., who had decided, by his
appearance, to honor the house of his subject and immediate servant.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was eleven o'clock on that night of nights; and the bed and dressing
rooms of the Princess Sophia were lighted to suffocation with smoking
candles. Two maids and old Másha, general factotum of her mistress, were
bustling importantly from one room to the other, bearing to her, piece
by piece, their mistress's burden of jewels. At her dressing-table,
pale, still wearing, as always in public, her mask of emotionless
impenetrability, sat Sophia. Her neck and shoulders, which, according to
the rigid etiquette of court-dress, were fully exposed, were white, and,
considering her extreme slenderness, surprisingly round. A broad collar
of sapphires and diamonds clasped above an Oriental necklace of pearls,
successfully hid whatever there was to betray the too-visible marks of
the "certain" age. On her head she bore the oddly becoming kakoshnik,
which, in her case, was set with a triple row of superb diamonds. The
face below this gleaming structure, the delicate, weary face, robbed of
its customary frame of smoothly banded yellow hair, looked more sharply
pointed than usual, but surprisingly pretty. For there was actually a
fire--whether of pleasure, expectancy or nervousness--in her gray eyes;
and there had come a delicate flush to the usually pallid cheeks. Sophia
was, indeed, living with her dead to-night. Dreams of the old days held
her in a kind of spell. The woman of memories--memories of a brief
youth, a swiftly blighted flowering of life--had for once been forced
back to a forgotten theme. And she found, recalling the days of her
first balls, that the customary bitterness of contrast had suddenly
disappeared. There was much that was new in this present situation: she
was alive to sensations unfelt for years. There stirred in her heart
what she was only to define after it had gone again: that which for most
people forms the great staff of the inner life: on which she had been so
long unaccustomed to lean--the great Phoenix, Hope.

At length they had fastened the last pin in her veil, the last hook in
the heavy gown of cloth of silver. The maids stood off from her a
little, whispering. But she herself remained motionless, gazing absently
into her quaintly framed old mirror, lost in one of those reveries that
her servants had learned not to disturb. The pause had lasted some five
minutes when the door opening into the outer hall opened, vigorously,
and the Princess started suddenly up, her face changing pathetically, a
look of dread painfully contracting her features.

As their mistress rose, the three women shrank instinctively backward.
To one understanding it, the act was pathetically familiar. An instant
later, however, the Princess cried out, "Caroline! It is you, then?" and
so turned deathly white and reeled a little till old Másha came to her
support.

"Sophie! You are not ill--_to-night_!" The new-comer, who had spoken
in French, halted near the door, an expression of dismay on her face.

Madame Gregoriev, however, laughed faintly, and the color began to creep
back into her cheeks. As old Másha left her to hobble briskly out of the
room, she continued, "No, no! I am perfectly well. It was only that
you--startled me a little. I--I thought it was--Michael Petrovitch."

Once more the face of the other changed, but she said nothing as she
came slowly forward, examining her companion the while with a critical
eye. She was the Countess Dravikine, Sophia's younger sister, who, a
year or two after Sophia's misalliance, had herself married remarkably
well: a young diplomat of the capital, already high in the graces of the
official world, and destined to rise steadily, through the clever
management of his wife. The Countess Dravikine fitted her adopted world
extremely well. She was a woman whose one tender sentiment was that
which she held for the sister of her youth. Otherwise she had, not
entirely without justice, been called heartless. She was, in any case,
admirably adapted for the life she had chosen. And strife social and
political, as well as every move in the great game of state intrigue,
were as the breath of life to her. She had not come through the fires
unsinged. There had been, nay, still were, whispers about her in her
world. But they were whispers such as heightened rather than tarnished
the brilliance of her reputation. For, whether wrongly or not, her name
had more than once been linked with that of the Iron Ruler himself.
This may or may not have been the reason for her presence to-night in
Moscow, whither she had journeyed to stand beside her sister at the
anticipated triumph. But whatever her motive, no one could deny that the
evening would gain by her presence. Here, beside her glittering sister,
she was superb, in her magnificently poised maturity, the voluminous
gauzes of her Paris gown floating like clouds about her: the numberless
opals in her hair and at her breast only continuing the delicate
coloring of the green-and-white costume that was as unusual as it was
becoming to her _chic_ ugliness of feature. But to-night, for perhaps
the first time in her life, Caroline Dravikine was more interested in
the costume of another than in her own. She was determined that her
sister's appearance should be even more perfect than hers. And to this
end she went over the other's toilet detail by detail, only ending the
silent scrutiny as Másha reappeared with a slender glass of wine for her
mistress.

"Eh bien, Sophie,--yes! drink the wine. If you will not rouge you must
keep what color you have!--the sapphires are not in the least too heavy.
They have done you up very well. Sonya!" turning to one of the maids,
"catch up that curl over the right ear of the Princess. It spoils the
effect of severity that suits your face so well. So. Et maintenon, ma
chère, renvoyez vos femmes de chambre. Je veux causer avec vous en
particulier."

Sophia complied with the request: the maids, with the simple familiarity
of the Russian serf, taking their dismissal reluctantly. But Madame
Dravikine held them all in awe, and before her they did not dare the
protest that their Princess might have listened to. When the sisters
were alone, they crossed the room together and seated themselves on a
great sofa upholstered in a beautifully faded old brocade, made before
the birth of the great Catharine. And while Caroline, mindful of her
fresh gauzes, sat upright, like a bird poised for flight, her sister lay
back, wearily, crushing the veil of her headdress against a heap of
pillows.

There was a moment's pause; then the Countess began, resolutely: "Has
Michael Petrovitch seen you yet?"

"Oh no! He has not come up-stairs. I hope that he will not, Katrelka!
He--he would not be satisfied, you know."

"Sophie! Sophie! sometimes I cannot wonder that the man is a terror in
your life! Satisfied with you! Ciel! If Alexis Vassilyitch expressed
dissatisfaction with a toilet of mine, I should not speak to him for a
week. No! I should get him into such difficulties with the ministry that
he would come to me on his knees in three days! I tell you again,
Sophie, that you must assert yourself! Tell me--"

"Stop, Kasha, stop! I am too tired for all this just now. Say what you
will to-morrow. You know the thing is a great strain. Tell me only this:
Are you quite sure that his Majesty will come? Do you believe it
possible that at last everything is to be right--that we are to have
Moscow--our old Moscow--here again?"

Having with some little self-control waved aside the unusual rebuff of
Sophia's first words, Madame Dravikine listened to the last with a
smile, a trifle self-conscious; and in spite of her sister's look--a
stare that suggested coldness, the expression remained with her as she
answered: "Yes, at last you are safe, dear. You see--I am here from
Petersburg; though it has meant leaving Nathalie with her nurses, and
Alexis Vassilyitch to spend every night at the yacht-club at baccarat.
Besides, Moscow always bores his Majesty; and even the Czarevitch isn't
with him this time, you know."

"Caroline, I wish--" Madame Gregoriev's hesitating voice trailed into
silence. She knew that it was scarcely the hour for remonstrance of
that kind. After a moment she began again, "Do you remember how many
years it is since we were all at home together, in the Nijny Kislovsky?
I should hardly be able to name over the old families now. All the
leaders of our day--Madame Apúkhtin, Princess Osínin, the
Dowager-Countess Parakoff--they are all dead. It is the wife of the
younger Smirnoff--Alexander married a dancer who cannot be received--who
keeps up the name. Eugen married Olga Lodoroff. She was a child when I
was married. She wouldn't remember me at all now. But we have had not
one excuse. They are all to come. Kasha, I am happy to-night! Think--"

"Of course, Sophie, they are coming. One would think you a parvenue,
absolutely, to hear you!" broke in Caroline, sharply, still smarting a
little at her reading of that unfinished sentence.

Sophia colored at her sister's appellation, but had no time for
rejoinder; for at this moment an inner door was pushed gently open and a
boy entered.

Sophia rose, hastily. "Ivan! You were asleep two hours ago!"

"But I woke up. And Másha said you were so splendid with the diamonds
all on, that I came to see." He looked up at his mother, his big, black
eyes shining with interest as he inspected her unusual array. His aunt,
sharper-eyed than her sister, perceived that, under his eider-down
wrapper, the boy wore no night-flannel, but a more or less complete suit
of day-clothes. She said nothing, however, for, though she had no love
for children, Ivan was quiet enough to have won her liking.

"Eh bien, mon fils, tu m'as vu. Allez vous en! Retournez immédiatement
au lit. Tu vas prendre un rhume! Allez! Vite!" Laughing, she kissed the
boy--nor had far to stoop to reach his lips. Then, with a gentle hand,
she led him back to the door. The boy moved reluctantly, and, ere he
left the room, caught his mother round the neck and whispered in her ear
a question which was answered by a determined shake of the head.

When he had gone, the Princess stood for an instant looking after him,
all her heart in her unconscious eyes. Then, her eyes shining with a
softened light, she turned again to her sister, saying, with a smile:

"Come, Katrelka, let us go down. The opera must be over by this time;
and I must see the rooms before the first arrival."

"Just one moment more, then, Moussia." Madame Dravikine rose, crossed
the room, and laid her hand caressingly on the other's arm. "If Michael
Petrovitch should be out of temper when we meet him, do not be
disturbed. Do not, for the sake of our family, Sophie, betray yourself
by--by your face--to-night. Remember, if the scene should grow
unbearable I can always--"

"Yes, yes, Kasha. Thank you. But let us not speak of it further--just
now."

A moment's silence. Then suddenly, by a common impulse, the two women
threw themselves into each other's arms and kissed fervently. When they
had separated again, the eyes of the Countess were no less suspiciously
wet than those of her sister, the wife of Michael Gregoriev.

It was a pity that functions of formal magnificence were affairs of such
rarity in the Gregoriev palace; for no private dwelling in Russia was
better adapted to the purpose. The grand entrance opened into a hall of
royal dimensions, at the back of which rose a massive staircase, which,
ascending to a broad marble landing, separated there into two parts, one
of which wound upward to the right, the other to the left, to the upper
floor. Upon this landing, facing the hall below, stood the figure of a
Diana carved from Carrara marble, its exquisite Greek curves wreathed
to-night in smilax and white roses, brought up from the southern estates
of the Prince.

As the sisters descended the stairs together, each critically surveying
the decorations of the rooms below, Prince Michael himself appeared from
the direction of the great dining-room, accompanied by his major-domo, to
whom he was giving some final orders concerning the reception of his
Imperial Majesty.

A remarkable man was Michael Petrovitch, Prince Gregoriev; nominally a
chief of the Third Section under Ryeléff; actually head of the secret
police of the whole Moscow district; confidential adviser of the royal
Governor-General; and privately and intimately known to the Czar, who
had long been aware that he had at least one man in his Empire who would
balk at no order that should be given him.

In Prince Michael, as so seldom happens, the story of the mind was
plainly written upon the body. Six feet three inches he stood in his
stockings--two inches more in his regular dress; his head large in
proportion, and finely shaped; eyes black, glittering, and unfaceable;
mustache jet-black and upstanding, as if made of wire, from the set,
ugly mouth, below which jutted a square, blue-shaven chin. And the
appearance thus presented was not to be overshadowed, in any feature, by
the magnificence of the uniform he wore to-night. Tunic and trousers
were of heavy white cloth, the first garment so long, and so heavily
embroidered in gold, that his body seemed cased in a glittering sheath
down to where the edge of the coat met the top of the boots of softly
wrinkling black, that cased his legs almost to the thigh. On his breast
were ranged half a dozen orders; conspicuous among them that of St.
George, for gallant conduct on the field of action, won years before in
the streets of thrice-sacked Warsaw.

As the two women halted, Gregoriev finished his orders; and, turning
from the cringing serf, stood staring at his wife and her sister. Madame
Dravikine was smiling brightly; but Sophia's face was set, her cheeks
flaming, her burning eyes unwontedly hard.

"So! Madame, there is a hair-pin caught in the flounce below your right
ankle."

Involuntarily the Princess quivered, stooped, and extricated the fine
wire pin which even Caroline had not noted. Then she straightened up
hastily, sought to meet her husband's sneer with something like
resolution, faltered before him, and moved slowly away towards the
reception-rooms. The Countess, however, turned to her brother-in-law,
and covered her sister's retreat. Certainly Prince Michael gave her his
attention; and his manner with women of station was unresentable.
Nevertheless, the covert amusement in his voice and in the eyes that
looked after his wife, set even Caroline's experienced teeth on edge.
She talked with him on the prospects of the evening; and it was a theme
so interesting to both of them that neither perceived the little figure,
dressed in black velvet, that stole quietly down from the second floor
and concealed himself on the landing behind the floral drapery that
spread, star-fashion, from the statue of the goddess. An hour or two
before Ivan, filled with a vague excitement, had bribed his old nurse to
dress him in his best, and, having seen his mother and his aunt in their
court-dress, he had been seized with the desire for more. After waiting
in his room as long as he could, the boy had stolen down the staircase
to a point whence he could see the progress of that great ball which
was, in some mysterious way, to change the fortunes of his father's
house, and, with them, the long loneliness of his own, dreamy days.

So he crouched there through the hours, well concealed, a figure
unconsciously pathetic, his great, sad eyes--eyes begotten by his
mother, and with all her own woe in their liquid depths--glowing
brightly in the white, wistful, childish face; the suggestion of a smile
on his straight, delicately chiselled mouth. He had been in his place
barely ten minutes when the great doors opened to the first guests; and,
during the hour that followed, they were scarcely shut. The opera was
over. Fashionable Moscow, accustomed to live at night, swathed itself in
furs, and, grumbling at the unwonted distance, had spun across the city,
in open sleighs, to the distant Gregoriev palace.

Prince Michael, with his wife and his sister-in-law beside him, stood at
the entrance to the gold drawing-room, welcoming the men and women who
were announced in rapid succession: men and women whose names set
Sophia's heart beating with memory. There were few, indeed, that any
major-domo in Petersburg would not have shouted in his best voice. For
all of them were members of the great Russian world: Apúkhtin and
Mirski, Chipraznik, Smirnoff and the omnipresent Nikitenko--names that
had been the last to fade into, the first to reappear from, the baleful
night of Tátar rule. Not one of them all but had once known Sophia
Blashkov intimately: none but greeted Madame Dravikine as a familiar
acquaintance of to-day. But, for the first time since his wedding-day,
Michael Gregoriev felt himself slighted for that woman he had so long
despised. One and all, women and men alike, they slid by him as rapidly
as decency would permit, nor cared to notice him again, though, from far
corners and discreet retreating-places, they bestowed on him glances
that ran the gamut from curiosity to open horror. Not so did Sophia
fare. There was for her at least one hour when the immediate past was
blotted out, and her heart warmed and thrilled again as it had in that
long-past, joyous winter of her presentation.

By half an hour past midnight the rooms were crowded and there had
settled over the company a hush: that peculiar stillness of expectancy
that is destruction to the nerves of a host. In this special pause,
however, lay something beyond the ordinary: a discomfort, a palpable
uneasiness, that sheathed a subtle threat. Sophia, with her woman's
instinct, was no quicker to perceive it than her husband. They, with
Countess Caroline and every other woman in the rooms, put the same
interpretation upon that significant lull. It spoke thus: "It is late,
and he whom we were commanded to meet is not here. His Imperial
Majesty's name forced us to this house. Now he has not come. Is the
thing a trick? Michael Petrovitch Gregoriev, have you been capable of
_this_? Dared you dream that such folly of deceit could really help
you?"

Such was the unmistakable sentiment in the air when, at a quarter before
one, the sisters met in a corner of the dining-room, and there passed
between them a white-faced look. Then Madame Dravikine whispered:

"Sophie, what does it mean? _Did_ Nicholas promise?"

The question was a mistake. Princess Gregoriev's lips went white, and
she seemed to speak with difficulty. "Caroline! Then _you_ were not
assured by him? You as well as Michael have deceived me?"

Madame Dravikine flushed scarlet. "I have never discussed your affairs
with his Majesty," she returned, haughtily.

Sophia made no reply. Her face, if possible, grew a little more livid,
her eyes a trifle more piteous.

Caroline, in spite of her resentment, was touched with pity and with
fear; so that, presently, she burst out, impulsively: "Then you are
_ruined_, Sophie! Absolutely ruined!"

Suddenly, Princess Sophia's lips curled into a bitter smile. "I have
been ruined, as you call it, for eighteen years. This--this fiasco
cannot make it any worse!" And, before that expressionless tone, Madame
Dravikine was still.

A moment or two after this encounter, however, there came a sudden stir.
Beyond the dining-room, in the central hall, was a visible flutter of
excitement, and whispers sped rapidly through the rooms.

"He has really come!"

"The Czar is here!"

"After all, his Majesty has arrived."

"Where is he, then?"

"In his dressing-room. The royal sleigh is at the gate."

"Ah! Then we must remain!"

During the first seconds of the excitement, the Prince and Princess
Gregoriev came together near the door of the specially prepared
antechamber where his Majesty was to have his furs removed. Sophia's
cheeks were flushed, her eyes burning again; but the face of Michael
Petrovitch had become once more impenetrable. There were three minutes
of the strained attention. Then, from the door of the antechamber,
appeared a stately man, clad in a magnificent uniform, his breast
covered with medals and crosses. When they were still many feet apart, a
look passed between him and Prince Michael; and, in that look, a new,
undying enmity was born in Gregoriev's fierce soul. For the guest from
the Kremlin was _not_ the Czar, but the Czar's most detested envoy: the
notorious Count Alderberg, Minister of the Imperial Household. And his
words to the host and hostess began with the infuriating, formal: "I
regret--"

Even through that moment of greeting, Princess Sophia scarcely
understood the full significance of this presence. Surely, if the Czar
had sent a proxy, it meant, at least, recognition. But as the Count
carried his cynical smile and gorgeous personality away in the
direction of the dining-room, and the poor lady turned to her husband,
she was stricken dumb at sight of the blind fury in his face. It was a
look that she had known before--too well. Yet never, perhaps, had such a
concentrated mixture of defeat, rage, and rebellion glared from those
eyes or straightened that heavy mouth. Now, indeed, she knew that they
were undone.

"Alderberg! Alderberg! By God and the devil, had I dreamed--" The
low-muttered words trailed off and were bitten into silence, while, by a
fierce contortion of the muscles, Michael straightened his face into a
semblance of calm. But the hands hanging at his sides were clinched till
the nails pierced his palms, and the veins started out, knotted and
purple, from his flesh.

For some moments the Princess stood irresolute, terrified lest her
guests should witness some part of this outbreak. Madame Dravikine was
first to emerge from the throng; and she came towards them, dismay
written in her face. She sent one glance at Michael; and then, biting
her lip, took her sister's hand in a gentle clasp.

"Ah! You, too, Katrelka!" whispered Sophia. "You, too, think it so bad?"

Caroline shook her head sadly. "We are helpless, Sophie. A fit of
Nicholas' laziness has lost the world to you. Look!"

There was no time for response; for, at this moment, the Prince and
Princess Mirski came up with chill good-nights that were passively
accepted. They were immediately followed by the Osínin, who barely
looked towards Michael, but had the grace to murmur some excuse to his
wife. On their heels hastened the Apúkhtin, who played the few seconds
of farce with angry hauteur. Then, injury to insult, Alderberg himself
approached, having been in the rooms a bare five minutes. And, as he
disappeared into the royal alcove, the throng in the rooms began to fly
the house as from a spot plague-smitten.

At the instant of Alderberg's appearance in the hall, word of the
defection of the Czar had swept like wildfire through the rooms. The
Minister of the Imperial Household was nearly as unpopular among the
court circle of Moscow as he was among the peasant class; and nothing
could have been more unfortunate than the choice of him as the proxy of
his Majesty. Within five minutes, whispers were everywhere. The drawing,
dining, and dressing rooms were full of the rippling hiss of talk which
in every case preceded either frowns or angry laughter. Ivan, from his
hiding-place on the stairway, caught many phrases the significance of
which he could not fathom; but which filled him with prescience of evil.
His troubled eyes sought the face of his mother in the hall below; and
he found there what he had feared. From his vantage-point he had a clear
view of the quickening rush of departure. Crowds were pouring up-stairs
to re-don their furs; though many of these people had not yet recovered
from the chill of their long drive from the Grand Theatre. Soon the
great staircase was so crowded that many who were still below made no
effort to ascend, deputing the bringing of their wraps to friends who
had forced an upward passage. For so bitter was the night that few had
pursued the usual custom of leaving their sables outside, on the arms of
patient footmen.

Ivan watched the good-nights to his father and mother; and noted also
the lack of them. He beheld the drooping, weary figure of the Princess,
in her blaze of gems, forcing piteous smiles of farewell. And he was
glad that there were so many who, under cover of the throng, evaded the
ordeal of the good-night, and slipped away from the brilliant rooms as
from a dwelling haunted with evil.

There was but one consolation for this misery--it was very brief. The
crowd that had taken a long hour to assemble, dispersed and melted away
into the darkness of the city within the space of fifteen minutes. There
had, indeed, been some who had arrived after his Excellency the Count.
These, perceiving the crowd out-streaming, divined calamity, and,
without so much as descending from their sleighs, turned about and
departed as they had come.

By half-past one o'clock three figures stood alone in the great hall;
while on the staircase, beside the motionless Diana, crouched a lonely,
frightened child, who still stared, as if with enchanted eyes, at his
mother's white, despairing face. Princess Sophia stood motionless, her
head bent, her hands clasped tightly before her, persistently avoiding
her husband's eyes. Caroline, with a half-protective air, was between
her sister and her brother-in-law. Michael, his face as colorless as
that of the statue, his eyes alight with the fire in his brain, stared
straight before him, into some bitter world of his own. About them was
the unbearable silence which Madame Dravikine, who alone was
unaccustomed to it, finally broke in desperation:

"Come, Sophie! Come to bed. You are too tired to stay down here. You'll
be ill."

But, at the moment, Sophia had, in her heart, the thought of another
than herself. At sight of some unwonted suggestion in his face of a pain
with which she had been long familiar, there had entered into her heart
a sudden pity for the man she so feared. Imbued with a momentary
courage, she advanced to her husband and took his hand. "Michael," she
murmured, "I--am sorry."

The man started in amazement, and then drew away from her, at the same
time turning upon her his burning eyes. "_Sorry!_ Good God! Then get to
your ikons and pray. For me--there's no sorrow for me. Nicholas has
played his game. Now mine begins. Sorrow for him, if you like. For, by
the help of Satan, he and Moscow shall know me yet!"

The low-spoken words ended with a snarl of inarticulate anger. And the
moment they were uttered, he turned brusquely, and, without another word
or look, disappeared in the direction of his offices, where, as his wife
knew, he would probably work till far into the next day.

The two women watched him go. Then, after a pause, they found themselves
clinging to each other, and in this fashion began the ascent of the
stairs. Both of them were weeping: not loudly; rather as the reaction
from the strain of the past hour. As they reached the landing, they were
joined by another. Ivan came openly from his hiding-place, and barred
their path, guilt-laden. But there was to be no rebuke to-night for his
disobedience. On the contrary, his mother took him into her arms and
clasped him close, as if his presence brought comfort for much immediate
pain. And the boy, feeling the hot tears from her eyes fall upon his
face, laid his arms about her neck, and yielded himself to a grief and a
terror that he understood vaguely, but could not as yet define.




CHAPTER II

MICHAEL


Up to the time of Prince Gregoriev's marriage, that peculiar man had
used his huge dwelling as a gypsy uses a moor: he had wandered about,
living for three months in the west wing, three more in the east, again
for six high up in the central portion of the great building, taking
with him the rather simple impedimenta of his state, and arranging them
as he chose. The presence of Sophia had, however, made at least one
change in his existence. Little either of time or attention as he gave
her, Michael was driven, by mere consciousness of her proximity, to fix
upon some certain suite of rooms for the pursuit of his personal labors
and his peculiar recreations. And, after the first irritation of
necessity had worn away, he found the arrangement to possess unforeseen
advantages. Unlike his class, he was a man of simple, even austere
habits in his working hours. Luxury at such times meant annoyance to
him; and only the barest necessities of furniture and attire were
admitted to his periods of solitary labor. Upon his establishment in his
now permanently arranged suite in the eastern wing of the palace, he
found that certain papers and written references--kept hitherto under
lock and key, and guarded from every eye--could at last find a permanent
place in that work-room which no one was permitted to enter, even for
purposes of cleaning. For twenty-eight years, now, this had formed one
of his six rooms, of which two on the second floor were connected with
those below by a private staircase. By degrees, his habits had become as
fixed at those of a woman. His many vices were as strong, as severe, as
his few virtues; and more than one man had remarked that, so far as was
known, there was not a single balancing weakness in the nature of this
iron man.

At two o'clock on the morning after the ball, Michael had seated
himself at the great table in his sanctum, and prepared for work.
He had no idea of bed; for sleep in his present state, his brain
afire with the fury of unwonted defeat, would have been impossible.
But he could still pin his thoughts down to the composition of two
or three state documents--reports requiring a liberal use of
imagination--before allowing himself the luxury of setting about
arranging his plan of retaliation: retaliation upon the great Czar,
his master. Thus it was that dawn, the late, wintry dawn, rising
seven hours later, fell upon his dishevelled figure stretched out
in a chair beside the paper-piled table, his heavy brows drawn down
in deep thought, his lungs filled with deep draughts of smoke drawn
from the pipe between his teeth.

The passage which led down to this dread room of his, opened also into
the office in which he conducted business with his colleagues, and which
was decorated and furnished with Oriental magnificence. The inner room,
of which only Piotr, his body-servant, had ever had so much as a
glimpse--the room that had sheltered this master of men and of evil at
the ebb and the flood of his power--was bare of ornament, and held not
one unnecessary article. The two windows were uncurtained; but outside
the customary double panes, the cracks of which were filled with pounded
wool, stretched a significant iron net-work which was embedded far in
the stones at the window-edges. Within, the four walls were covered with
staring, yellow plaster; only one side of it, that opposite the
working-chair, being partly covered--and that only by two big maps: one
of the Russian Empire, with its dependencies; the other covered with a
mass of line-tracery and unreadable jottings, written in what was
evidently a cipher. The key to this was hidden in the brain of the man
who had composed it.

Michael himself had dubbed this square of parchment a map: his map of
men. And it contained mention of some members in almost every great
family in the Empire. Nicholas himself was there, side by side with his
valet--a man, indeed, of vast importance in that ministerial world to
which a Gregoriev still aspired.

Finally, beside these things, high up in a corner of the east wall, was
the inevitable, dingy little daub meant for the blessed and blessing
Virgin: a superstitious but universal custom which even Michael
submitted to, and which represented, perhaps, his single remaining shred
of religion. For the rest, a huge table, a single chair, and two
bookcases filled with a small, but remarkably well-chosen collection of
reference-books, finished the characteristic arrangement of the room.

Here, this morning, the gray light of a winter dawn mingled with the
dull flare of the hanging-lamp increasing the ghastliness of his
appearance, sat Michael Gregoriev, in the stale bitterness of a
night-old rage and mortification. On the floor, in an unceremonious
heap, lay his heavily embroidered coat, with its medals still upon it.
In its stead the Prince had wrapped himself in a worn robe of old
brocade, fur-lined. Heavy felt slippers shod his feet. His hair was
tumbled over his head in a leonine mass. His features were gray; but his
eyes still glowed above the dark, purplish circles that shadowed his
cheeks. His documents were finished. He had sat for two hours and more
in this present brown study; and, tested as his endurance had been, his
concentration was still absolute. On the table, near at hand, stood a
flask of vodka, nearly empty, and a jar of water scarcely touched.

Nevertheless, the Prince of the lonely house was not drunk: was not even
misty-headed. At a quarter after eight there came a knock at the door,
and his hoarse, "Enter!" was as immediate as was the return to his
reverie. Nor did he lift his eyes as Piotr entered softly, arranged the
steaming samovar at his master's elbow, placed bread, fresh butter, and
a dish of lentils beside it, and then departed as noiselessly as he had
come.

For five minutes the man beside the table did not stir. Then he rose,
still preoccupied, crossed the room to his cipher map, and ran his
finger down a certain line of hieroglyphics till he found what he
sought, and paused to read one passage carefully, twice. Then, when his
face had straightened till his lips actually stretched themselves into
the semblance of a sardonic smile, he dropped the subject of his
thoughts, returned to the table, and made himself some tea. Glass after
glass of this he drank, steaming hot. But no solid food passed his lips;
and in twenty minutes he reseated himself and set about the writing of
two letters, on the envelope of each of which he placed, in the lower
corner, a peculiar mark--a sign of the Third Section, known to a few
men, and signifying privacy and importance.

These letters were the result of his recent cogitation; and both
concerned the affair of the previous night. He had realized his
situation to the full; and he knew that it must be faced. His sensations
were unfamiliar, however; for it was many years since he had had to
acknowledge a defeat so absolute and so grave. Never before, however,
had he pitted himself against a force that strong men will not take
seriously because it is never to be logically reckoned with.
Nevertheless, that force must, sooner or later, be acknowledged by every
human being. Michael Gregoriev especially should have taken it into
consideration long before; for it was many years since he began his
preparations for what last night was to have brought him: a place in the
last unconquered world of power. His preparation, however, had led him
only through ways peopled by men: and for men and their deeds he was
more than a match. Their caprices, their follies, their faithlessness,
their treachery even, he had learned long since to calculate and to cope
with. Women, also, he had known: many women; experienced, innocent,
negative, or wicked. And those who had ventured upon his ground, he had
not failed to conquer. It was in the knowledge of these experiences that
he had stood; by its light preparing a _coup_ that was to carry the last
fortress of that upper world which still held out against him: that
peculiar body of women and men called "society."

Years before, with this same purpose in his mind, he had married a
daughter of this class, whose only dower was her birth, and whose only
covetable possession her place among her kind. And this effort had
failed, entirely. Sophia Blashkov, a quiet, gentle, blue-blooded, little
débutante, had found herself utterly unequal to the task either of
forcing a place in those glittering, scornful ranks for her
black-blooded, much-condemned husband, or of keeping her own, now that
she bore his name. True, her marriage had, probably, made possible her
younger sister's exceptional and unhoped-for match. But Michael himself
felt that he had sadly bungled a most important affair. Perceiving his
wife's uselessness for his purpose, all the little admiration he had
ever had for the fragile girl changed speedily into an angry despite.
For the moment, he put her and his social ambitions away together, and
turned back to that world of official intrigue and promotion which had
actually occupied him from that distant time until within the last few
weeks. The old defeat had long since been buried under a heap of newly
gained official honors. But of these, alas! he had now had his fill. For
the first time he was tasting to the full a measure of bitterness as
rank as any the world has to offer. For there is something in the
deliberate rejection by one's kind: a mortification, a sickening sense
of helplessness, of rage, of revolt, that belongs to this experience
alone. It is a kind of suffering in which women frequently become
connoisseurs. But its taste is none the less nauseous to the man on whom
Fate forces it.

Michael Gregoriev, then, a furious man of men, was to-day enduring that
which has turned many a woman soul-sick and weary of existence. All the
amazement of unforeseen repulse: the agonized acceptance of an unjust
superiority, a scorn, a pitiless disdain; the totally capricious setting
of one's self apart from one's fellows as something too despicable for
consideration; above all, one's utter powerlessness against this
arbitrary judgment--all these things he felt, and every one of them cut
him to the quick. For Michael Gregoriev's egotism had grown with every
year.

In his black hour he did not fail to indulge in the usual, useless
revilement of the superior class: an act as natural as it is ridiculous.
Was that society that he had sought out and thought to grasp so pure, so
free from corruption, so spotlessly fair, that his, Prince Gregoriev's
peccadilloes must needs bar him from its gatherings? Certainly this
reputation of his was one thing that had kept the door he knocked on
closed. But there were other reasons--innumerable ones, in fact; some of
them adequate, others entirely inconsistent, that Princess Mirski or
Madame Apúkhtin might have named. Yet, in the final summing-up, there
would probably have been a traditional indefiniteness about the
wherefore of the Gregoriev ostracism. It was simply understood,
instinctively, throughout Moscow, that no person of that name was
knowable. And this fact, _mirabile dictu_, had, after long cogitation,
been at last borne in upon Michael--man as he was.

Prince Gregoriev, though he was generally looked upon as a parvenu, had
not, like most of that type, been born in the gutter. On the contrary,
there was behind him a long line of recluses, eccentrics, hermits
almost, bearing the strongest resemblance to one another by reason of
their oddities. One special trait, stronger than any other, served to
bind them all together, father and son, through generations. This was
their constant and unconquerable sense of personal isolation: of
loneliness. Crowds of friends and sycophants might surround the
Gregoriev. He was none the less bitterly alone. It was, perhaps, a
morbid perception of individuality, of the inevitable isolation of every
soul. But whatever its cause, this sense, in more than one of the race,
had developed into extreme stages of melancholia.

The palace in Konnaia Square had been founded in the year 1679, by the
third of the line, Alexis Gregorievitch, who had purposely placed the
dwelling of his race in this far corner of the city, out of the possible
range of decent dwellings. And none of the succession of Peters and
Mikhails that followed, ever thought to reproach this act of their
ancestor. The details of the life of one of these men would have
sufficed for all, until the breaking of the direct line. But the last
Prince had died childless; and the estate descended by entail to
Michael, eldest son of the dead Prince's dead brother. And though in the
present Gregoriev the instincts of his race survived, they had been in a
large measure altered and redirected. For when, at the age of twenty,
Michael had come into his inheritance, he had, in the first hour of his
new estate, set himself a certain goal, at the same time turning an
iron will and dire traits towards its attainment. Russia was then just
entering upon the rule of the Iron Czar. Iron men, therefore, were soon
in demand, to replace the more vacillating officials who had served the
first Alexander. Prince Gregoriev came forward at once with the request
for a position. And immediately he became involved in that species of
underhand, almost underground, business (necessary to most governments
and to all absolute monarchies) which reached its extreme depth in the
tyranny that ruled Russia during the next thirty years.

It did not take many months for Nicholas to perceive that there lived in
Moscow a supreme performer of questionable transactions. Upon test, the
man showed himself to be all the Czar had thought--and more. He was a
man without a conscience. And the official world rejoiced, and put much
work upon him: so much, that lo! a Gregoriev soon became necessary to
the governmental world. And Michael had worked to more purposes than
one. His great master had no fault to find with his performance of duty.
Thus it was not until too late that more than one of the ministers
discovered the fact that it may be better to have certain things bungled
than to have them carried through by a man so clever that he can put
knowledge amassed by the way to double--sometimes triple, uses. This was
what Gregoriev could, and did, do. He was, _par excellence_, a man of
his time: in many ways even in advance of it. And he had by no means
begun to approach his goal before all the men with whom he came in daily
contact, and many of those considerably above him, had come to stand in
terrible fear of his accurate and tabulated knowledge of things they had
believed to be unsuspected by any human being beyond themselves.

But there was one man in the Empire who, as yet, remained in ignorance
of this trait of his official: who had never felt the faintest scratch
beneath the velvet of his favorite cat's-paw. Thus it was that Michael's
momentary defeat had come about. Czar Nicholas crossed him openly; put
upon him an affront unbearable; lowered him in the eyes of three hundred
puny men and women over whom he had no power for revenge. It was, then,
as a result of this, that treason had begun to surge through the mind of
a brilliantly wicked man. And had he been able to read certain thoughts
passing through his subject's head, it is possible that the Iron One
might have felt a certain uneasiness of mind at possibilities of the
future; and a rather poignant regret at his negligence of the evening
before.

       *       *       *       *       *

Two hours had gone by since Piotr had carried his master's first meal to
that master's work-room. Michael had finished his letters. His first
anger was gone and his plan of "payment" already under way. With his
mind thus relieved, then, he suddenly began to feel the fatigue of
thirty hours of sleeplessness. With a comforting sense of relaxation, he
ascended to his bedroom, partly undressed himself, lay down on the bed,
and within five minutes had fallen into a sound sleep.

And it was two hours later and Ivan Veliki had rung the hour of eleven,
when the silence of the room was broken by the entrance of Piotr, who,
at sight of his master asleep at this unwonted hour, halted in surprise
and confusion. It took him ten minutes to nerve himself to the waking of
the Prince. But it was only ten more before Michael, who had sworn at
his valet steadily, meantime, for the delay, entered his public office,
fully dressed, to greet General Ryúmin, a member of the Imperial staff,
just now sent as an envoy from the Kremlin. Michael, who chose to greet
him with all the courtesy he could command, hurried forward, his hands
out-stretched, and gave the greetings of the day.

"So! I roused you from sleep, Prince? However, I come direct from the
Kremlin; and his Majesty commands an audience of you at half-past noon.
He is here ex-officio, of course, with only Alderberg, Zelanoi, and
ourselves, on the matter of the forestry ukase. But about you--there's
another matter he wants you for: the petition for the families of
convict-exiles to follow them to Siberia. The Council has rejected it
twice; but Benckendorf is still agitating the question. His Majesty
still seems to object, strongly. You, too, I suppose?"

"If the wife or the daughter be pretty--of course," returned Gregoriev,
lightly. And Ryúmin, seeing that he was not to be drawn, hastily forced
a laugh.

They passed thence into a discussion of local affairs in which they had
recently acted as allies when Ryumin had been Lieutenant-Governor of the
Moscow province. No undercurrent of enmity marred their intercourse.
Gregoriev was certainly an adept at applying or loosening his screws.
His guest had felt them sharply once or twice before to-day. He knew
Gregoriev's power; and Michael asked no more. He had soon made the
General entirely at his ease, and the half-hour passed most agreeably.
At last, however, Ryúmin rose, tacitly to remind his host of the
Imperial audience. They had now, indeed, by driving as fast as possible,
barely time to reach the Kremlin. Gregoriev, nevertheless, paid no
attention to the other's movement.

"Come, Boris Vassilyitch, one more cigar! We may as well settle now the
details of this Pahlen affair. You wish a conviction in any case, I
understand?"

"My dear Prince, it can wait. His Majesty's wishes are more important
than mine, you know."

Gregoriev leaned back in his chair and took three leisurely puffs before
he observed, lazily: "I don't agree with you. However, I must not keep
you if you have some other appointment. I shall hardly start for the
Kremlin before one.

"But--but my dear Gregoriev! The Czar! Your audience!--You see you
forget, my good fellow!"

"I forget nothing whatever, General: not even promises that are not
kept."

Ryúmin stared, open-mouthed, as Gregoriev's gloomy eyes met his. Then,
with a thrill of wonder, he understood that the man before him had the
superb audacity thus openly to rebuke his Emperor.

Certainly Gregoriev's suggestion was no empty threat. Nicholas Romanoff
actually waited something more than an hour for the arrival of the
Moscow police official. When at last Prince Gregoriev was ushered into
the royal presence, the voice of the master of ceremonies shook as he
announced the name; and, while he closed the door that shut this madman
from his sight, he longed and yet dreaded to hear his Majesty's first
words. Should he--had he time to--rush forth and spread abroad the news
of Gregoriev's fall, before the broken man should issue from that
ominously quiet room? Fortunately for himself, the master of ceremonies
was hardly of an adventurous disposition. He cogitated the matter till
he felt it too late to perform the errand and get back in time to see
Gregoriev's expression as he emerged from the Presence. Nevertheless,
minute after minute went by, till an hour had passed: time for a
comprehensive reproof and dismissal, truly! But the feeble-minded one
was prepared for anything by the time the miracle happened. It was three
o'clock before he beheld, issuing from the audience-chamber, side by
side and chatting together in tones of intimacy, Michael Petrovitch
Gregoriev and Nicholas I., Emperor of Russia. Nor was that all. For it
was the face not of the official but of his Imperial Majesty, that wore
an expression of uneasiness, of disquietude, almost--of alarm.

Gregoriev left the Kremlin, by the Gate of the Saviour, on foot. He had
dismissed his sleigh upon his arrival. But, though the afternoon was yet
young, the light of the brief winter day was almost gone. Lights were
appearing in the shop-windows of the Tverskaia as Michael, muffled
comfortably in his sables, entered the celebrated street and walked
along it, leisurely, in a direction leading directly away from his
distant palace. He had no definite goal in mind. He was in the high
humor of immediate success. Many-colored Moscow lay all about him: his
city, wherein he was known to and feared by, nearly every man. Labyrinth
though it was, there was scarcely a corner, an alley, a court-yard in
that most jumbled of cities that he did not know. Moscow belonged to him
as London to Dickens, Paris to Balzac. And, like the great novelists,
his walks, always a delight, played also an important part in his
profession. It was, however, rare that he issued forth in his present
guise. The Iákiminskaia, for instance, saw him oftenest as a petty
merchant; the Piatnitskaia as a Jewish or Tátar trader; the Basmanaia as
a soldier, or petty officer off duty; other quarters as a member of a
workingman's artel, a university hanger-on, or a loafer, as the
neighborhood demanded. To-day, however, being himself, he directed his
steps towards the fashionable part of the town, passing from the
shopping district into the old Equerries' quarter lying behind, and west
of, the Kremlin hill. It was possible that he had some hazy idea of
startling his wife's family by an unwelcome visit; and from them gaining
the latest gossip concerning last night's ball. But the idea remained
nebulous. Nicholas had responded too readily to his touch, the few lines
of cipher on his map had proved too disturbing to the royal mind, for
the tormentor's pride not to have been restored by such evidence of his
power. He knew well that their recent talk, in which he had played his
difficult part with genius, had left his Majesty fearful, not of
revelations concerning mere peculations or juggled laws, but of
something touching his very seat upon the throne; a certain disclosure
that might bring up again that old, forgotten matter of his unnatural
accession to the throne in place of his elder brother Constantine. And
Michael had an unfounded belief that the Czar would, therefore, in some
unknown way, bring him, peaceably, the social power he now trebly
desired. Therefore it was not difficult to turn him from his half-formed
purpose.

Leaving the great street for the comparatively quiet Nikolskaia, he
presently encountered one of the unofficial companions of his leisure
hours: a retired army officer, with a reputation at cards which few
gamblers cared to ignore. Colonel Lodoroff greeted the Prince with a
customary effusion, and found little difficulty in drawing him on to a
certain small club, maintained by twenty members, of which the very
existence was unknown to outsiders. Here, by day or by night, could be
found companions for any carousal, partners for any known game of skill
or chance; in short, that species of person which the ordinary club does
its best to exclude. The small building's exquisitely decorated rooms
were not, however, unfamiliar to the eyes of certain members of the
opposite sex, whose eligibility to admittance consisted only in certain
powers of attraction and entertainment.

Within the discreet recesses of this nameless organization, Michael
Petrovitch spent two or three agreeable hours. And finally, at six
o'clock--more than an hour after despatching a short message to Piotr,
in Konnaia Square--Gregoriev, with Lodoroff, three other men, and
Mesdames Nathalie, Anna, and Celéstine, whose last names were as
changeable as their complexions, set off, in four public droschkies, for
the Gregoriev palace.

Piotr, on receipt of his master's note, carried it at once to his wife,
who was one of the half-dozen serfs educated through the influence of
Princess Sophia. And upon her explanation of its contents he rushed off
to set the kitchens in a hum of preparation. It was no novelty, this
order: a dinner for eight to be served at an hour's notice in his
excellency's dining-room, that the Princess need not be "disturbed." The
chef--a Frenchman, not a serf, chattered with excitement and displeasure
while he composed his hurried menu. Piotr and Sósha, the major-domo, set
to work together in the round dining-room in the Prince's wing, both of
them thinking drearily of the task that must be theirs in that same room
on the following morning. And all through the servants' quarters might
be heard, from time to time, a certain blasphemous little prayer,
uttered in the expressionless tone that bespoke long familiarity: "God
be merciful to us!"--the sign of the cross made in the air--"and cause
the devil soon to take unto himself his own!"

But the lord of the underworld had evidently no present need of the soul
of the head of the Gregoriev house. It was a quarter before seven when
the Prince's special suite was invaded by the noisy party, already in
the first state of reckless exhilaration induced by an extravagant use
of golden fluid so dear to the Russian palate. Piotr, Sósha, and three
or four of the older serfs who were accustomed to these entertainments,
were in attendance, all of them drooping with the fatigue of the
previous day, but none of them pausing to marvel at the vitality of
their master. The table was satisfactorily decorated. The ladies were
pleased to praise their corsage bouquets of camellias so hurriedly
obtained; and all the party partook heartily of the _hors d'oeuvres_
and liqueurs served on a side-table, according to the old Muscovite
custom. Gregoriev was the only one of them all who appeared to be quite
unaffected by what he had drunk. But he was, nevertheless, the evil
genius of the company, flattering the women, taunting the men, to
continually increasing libations.

Meantime, on the second floor of the palace, not far away from that
dining-room beneath, a very different meal was in progress. Princess
Gregoriev, her sister, and Ivan, her boy, sat together at a small, round
table, waited on by women. Only one of the three made much pretence at
eating. Madame Gregoriev, red-eyed, but very calm, sat beside her
sister, whose face also bore traces of recent tears. Both of the ladies
continually pressed food upon the boy, who, as he ate with boyish
heartiness, talked to them with the pleasant and wonderful
unconsciousness of childhood. The difficult hour was nearly over before
sounds of the affair below first began to be audible to them. But at the
first, muffled scream of laughter, Madame Gregoriev started, violently,
all the color flying from her face, and a ghastly pallor taking its
place. The Countess Dravikine, after one instant of puzzled
consideration, leaned forward, and began a hastily animated conversation
with her nephew, upon all sorts of boyish affairs. Fortunately the
effort was needed only for a moment or two, for presently, Alexei,
Ivan's special serf, a combination of playfellow and valet, who had been
summoned by the tactful Másha appeared in the doorway, waiting an order
to remove his young master. It was time. Madame Dravikine's voice could
no longer override the noise from below. Moreover, Ivan had now ceased
to eat, and was sitting motionless, his mouth drawn into a pitiful line,
a spot of vivid red flaming from each pale cheek, his great eyes
wistfully, anxiously, seeking those of his mother, which as persistently
avoided them. Suddenly there came from below a piercing scream: a scream
holding in it a note at which Caroline, forgetting everything else,
sprang suddenly to her feet, crying:

"Sophia, the thing is unbearable! How can you possibly permit yourself
to endure it? For God's sake, pull yourself up, and leave this--"

"Ivan! Alexei is waiting for you. Go at once!" broke in the Princess,
sharply, her eyes fixed upon her sister with a light of bitter reproof
in their weary depths. At the same time, she held out both hands to her
son.

Without a word, the boy rose and went to his mother. A kiss passed
between them. Then he turned and walked straight to the door. He did not
once look back. But neither woman failed to perceive that his delicate
hands were clinched so tightly that the bloodless knuckles were tinged
with blue.

When the door closed behind him, Sophia Ivanovna answered her sister's
unfinished question: "You think I should leave this house. Do you for an
instant imagine that he would permit his son to go with me? Am I then to
leave my child here--to _that_?"

With a low exclamation, Caroline went forward and fell upon her knees
beside her sister, asking for pardon between her shaking sobs.




CHAPTER III

THE GREGORIEV HEIR


The west wing of the palace in the Serpoukhovskaia sheltered two beings
whose outward and inner lives, though divergent in every detail, were
nevertheless bound fast together by the most powerful tie of nature and
of law. But it was at the other end of the huge building that there
dwelt the solitary offspring of this unnatural union, a boy now in the
eleventh year of childhood, companionless, physically inactive, mentally
over-quick, perceptive, and quaintly imaginative.

Despite the fact that solitude was as much the keynote of his existence
as of that of his father and mother, many eyes were concentrated upon
the development, spiritual and mental, of Ivan Gregoriev. Upon him had
been fastened the hopes even of the Gregoriev serfs, who were as devoted
to him and to his mother as they were miserably afraid of their master.
An hour's observation was enough to make plain the fact that Ivan had in
him not one of his father's characteristics. For this reason he was said
to resemble his mother. But as a matter of fact this statement was
hardly more true than one of the paternal resemblance would have been.
The boy certainly worshipped his mother; who had been his one staff
during that fearful and lonely pilgrimage of his through dark caverns of
speculation concerning the mysteries of his own and his mother's
isolation: facts of which he had been cognizant at a startling age. From
the first, indeed, he had stood, as it were, apart: a silent, observant
young creature, not morbid nor markedly unnatural, yet holding within
himself possibilities not to be found in the usual hobbledehoy of his
age. And though it is probable that, in after years, he felt his
aloofness far more keenly than at the present period, it was in his
early boyhood that his sense of it was most apparent to others.

That Ivan should, from the first, have been a lonely child, was
inevitable, considering his parentage. In the Russia of that day sons of
noble families were not often kept under tutors. They were more
frequently sent to select private schools, where they would meet only
their own class, till they were of age to enter one or another of the
"corps" or academies, started by Nicholas for the noble youths whom he
wished to officer his army and people the royal households. Young
Gregoriev, however, had, up to this time--the new year of 1852--worked,
studied and dreamed by himself under the direction, first of his mother,
recently of his tutor, Monsieur Ludmillo, the son of a Polish exile,
educated in France, and only permitted to re-enter Russia upon the death
of his father, in 1847. This man, a gentle, melancholy idealist, like so
many of his race, had early taken a sincere liking for his young pupil,
nor found, as the years passed, anything special to complain of in
Ivan's performance of his tasks or his obedience during their many hours
together. Of all, in short, who had to do with the young Prince, one
person only, and that his father, felt any displeasure with him. But
Prince Michael looked upon his son with a kind of bitter, resentful
scorn as a creature of his mother's type: weak in character, and holding
within him not one of those fierce and reckless traits which the
traditional Gregoriev proudly claimed for his own.

From the time of his babyhood, Ivan had lived in the extreme eastern end
of the house--as far as possible from his father's rooms. In this
putting of him away even from her own proximity, Sophia had shown the
self-sacrifice of devotion. During many a night had the unhappy woman
lain thinking of her child, hungering for the pressure of his young head
upon her breast, his little body by her side, nay, the sound of his
sleeping breath in the same room with her. But she was determined to
keep him as unfamiliar as possible with the details of his father's
existence; and only in this way was it to be done. By day, however, she
lived in the room that was first nursery, later school and living room,
making herself the companion of her boy in his every occupation,
patiently, from day to day, searching his childish face for incipient
signs of unhappiness or melancholy. But it was not until she was too
familiar with his every expression that such signs began to appear; and
then, through very over-intimacy, she failed to perceive the marks of
those peculiar characteristics that had already begun to mould his
nature.

At eleven, Ivan was tall and well grown, shapely of limb, delicate of
hand and foot, large-eyed, clear-skinned. In certain ways his face did
suggest the face of his mother. But the fine chiselling of her features
was augmented in the sensitiveness of his lip and nostril; and for the
rest, his eyes, that resembled soft, black pansies, and his jet-black,
stubborn hair, that grew like a thick, velvet cap above his smooth
forehead, were all his own. His hands, likewise, were such as had never
been seen upon a Blashkov. They were white and hard, but pliable as
rubber, their fingers extraordinarily long. In fact, they were hands for
which any musician, teacher or virtuoso, would, had such commodities
been marketable, have bought at any price. And this fact had early been
recognized by Ivan's tutor, and by him eagerly seized upon and used.

Monsieur Ludmillo was hardly the typical lazy, effeminate, creature
whose only interests in life were holidays and the society of such
ladies as would receive him. On the contrary he was conscientious,
retiring to a point of absolute self-effacement, and able to forget
himself only in his one great passion: music. He was a Pole of the
Chopinesque type: and it was in spite of himself that he gave his pupil,
besides the regular studies, a very thorough grounding in the classical
masters, taught him something of the spirit of Schumann and Schubert,
and even permitted in Ivan's repertoire such bits of Glinka and Sérov as
were to be managed by the boyish hands. Happily, Ludmillo had not lived
enough in the fashionable world for him to endure the vapid floridities
of the late Italian school; but there rose in him a secret delight when
he heard his charge, left to himself, return again and again to the wild
and haunting melodies of little Russia, Lithuania, and, above and beyond
all, of rebellious, crushed, poetic Poland.

The instrument on which Ivan gained his first understanding of the art
that he was to make his own, was one that had come into the palace upon
the marriage of his mother. In the days before the complete stifling of
her talents, Sophia had been wont often to dissipate the misery of her
earlier disillusions in music. But there arrived a time when grief
became too deep for such sentimental balm; and then the piano's painted
cover had been closed, as she believed, for good, and the instrument, at
her orders, carried away to the unused room where, years afterwards,
Ludmillo discovered it and put it into some sort of order. Madame
Gregoriev's assent to his timid request to have it moved to Ivan's rooms
had been indifferently granted. But later, when, in the candle-lit dusk,
Ivan and his tutor drew instinctively together before the instrument,
they were more and more often joined by another figure, silently
stealing, who would listen to the half-forgotten melodies of other
years that were, for her, ghost-haunted, till further endurance became
impossible, and she would leave the twain again, and, through the lonely
night, weep away some of the still-rankling bitterness, the incurable
smart, of her many wounds. Later, however, came days when the memories
held less of sadness, and, in those rich, slow harmonies, she began to
discern vague thoughts, faintest hopes that, somewhere, perhaps deep in
the fire-heart of God, she should learn His excuse for suffering: be
taught the wherefore of the present: receive that compensation that must
exist, to balance the account held for her by eternity. In time she came
even to think a little of the music-maker: that silent man to whom her
own existence seemed a thing peaceful and fine in its absolute security
from any form of want. She realized, through him, those other thousands
in the world who had lived through lifetimes of conscious insignificance
and unattainable desire, nor thought these serious evils. In short she
was given a horizon whereon she began to see things properly
proportioned. And there, at last, she beheld also her son, and all the
possibilities in the future of those for whom the road of life lies all
ahead. But even she, who knew him best of all, knew little of Ivan's
inner self. She never surmised his strange consciousness of the mighty
void within his soul: the aching gap that his life could never fill: the
unspoken question that waited in him, fulminating, till he should at
last demand his answer from the most high God.

In the face of such things it is difficult to reiterate the denial that
Ivan was a morbid boy. True, he bore an inheritance from his mother. The
life she had led before his birth had certainly left its mark upon him.
But that instinctive sadness had in her been tinged with an inner joy:
the joy of eager motherhood. And in Ivan this joy found its repetition
in a vein of practical gayety. There were days when his mischief was as
diabolical as one could wish it: when Ludmillo, tormented, was still
brought to laugh at his piquant, irresistible nonsense. Nor was the boy
without other traits of his sex and age. There were weeks when he was
full of the wildest plans for his future career; being all for the joys
of the physical, beside which mental labor was to play a most
unimportant rôle. He would be an explorer. Siberia, North America,
Central Africa, were to open before his determined efforts. Or the
Celestial Empire might be penetrated to its innermost recesses by him in
his undetectable disguise; and he was to come home by the caravan route
laden with costliest treasures. Again it was all his wish to be another
Nimrod: Indian tigers, American buffaloes, African elephants were to go
down in thousands before his imaginary gun. While once more (this when
his every spare moment was divided between _Peter the Great_ and the
_Arabian Nights_), he saw himself, at the head of a Cossack army,
storming Constantinople and carrying away the most beautiful Princess
ever enslaved in royal harem. And while the boy silently performed these
great deeds, he was also engaged upon a few simpler, but more salutary
physical feats in a neighboring gymnasium, whence he emerged with
muscles fairly well-developed, and a hand and eye unusually quick at the
foils.

His days were kept wisely full. At that time it was the custom to cram
children rather unmercifully. But Sophia and Ludmillo together made
saner disposal of Ivan's hours. He was made to know thoroughly what he
knew. And it was their great effort to keep him busy enough to prevent a
real appreciation of his isolated life. Their plans were made skilfully
and carried out to the letter. Wherefore the fact that their end was not
actually accomplished, could be charged only to the merciless quickness
of the boy's own apperceptions.

How early it was that he learned the difference between himself and
others, it would be nearly impossible to say. His mother, indeed, was
probably spared the discovery of his knowledge. For he was reserved
beyond his years, and a violent secret pride was his one unsuspected
Gregoriev trait. However it happened, Ivan learned, as a very little
boy, that only in his life was no provision ever made for visits to and
from others of his kind. He knew that he had been left out of the lives
of his class: that the young Mirskies, Blashkovs, Kropotkins, Osínin,
visiting almost daily among themselves, never came to, never asked for,
him. He even divined the one or two half-hearted attempts on his
mother's part to obtain for him at least the occasional companionship of
her own nephews and second-cousins. But what it was that hurt him so
unconscionably about this knowledge he did not realize until after he
had come into manhood. It was doubtful if even his mother, suffering for
him, had a greater sense of unhappiness than he, in his blind sense of
injustice somewhere. For to Sophia, ostracism had long since become a
kind of second nature. But for her son it still had all the misery of
perennial newness.

Nevertheless, despite the deadening of time, the mother-yearning over
her child's loneliness never wholly left the poor Princess. In the case
of the ball, for instance, if her labor for its success, if the care
spent on its details, the summoning of Caroline from Petersburg, the
unwonted extravagance of her Paris costume, had one and all been
suggested by her husband, they had been carried out by her not for his
sake nor for her own; but for the sake of all that it might afterwards
accomplish for Ivan. Once she and Prince Michael were actually accepted,
their son must naturally find his new place. Thus, for weeks before the
event, she had seen Ivan, in her dreams, taking his place among as yet
unknown companions: outstripping all rivals in brilliance and in
popularity. And after the ball, though some of her dreary disappointment
had, unquestionably, been for herself, the better part of it, also, had
been for the child whose protector she had always been. It was almost a
pity that she was so careful never to drag him into the shadows of her
life. Had he once surmised them, the two, mother and son, might have
found a companionship in sorrow that would mean more to them both than
all their separate, painful pretence of happiness--or contentment.

Everything considered, Ivan saw much of his mother; and next to nothing
of his father. And because of the apparent mystery with which the Prince
was surrounded before his son: his mother's reluctance in speaking of
him, the serfs' sign for avoidance of the evil-eye when the master was
mentioned, even Monsieur Ludmillo's careful reticence on the subject,
Michael came, by degrees, to play a foremost part in his son's
imaginings: a part at once heroic and terrible. Ivan knew very well that
his father was not a good man: that he frequently did hateful things
that seriously hurt his mother. Nevertheless, there was a strong
fascination about such a personality. Gigantic, fierce, wild, darkly
omniscient, mysteriously terrible, he stalked in a mental lime-light
through Ivan's dreams. His existence, in the boyish imagination, was
more adventurous than that of any hero of Scheherazade. And perhaps the
greatest charm of all was the fact that, in all seriousness, Ivan
believed his father actually capable of most of the deeds he arranged in
his thoughts.

The boy had been told of his father's importance to the Government; his
power in Moscow. But this was a matter to be so much taken for granted
that it brought little additional pride. Ivan's imaginary father had
long been invested with greater honors than these. He would much have
preferred a satisfactory explanation of the one point which troubled
him mightily: which had filled many of his nights with unsuspected
grief, and disturbed his day-dreams while he puzzled, anxiously, over
known facts that had become too inconsistent with his beliefs for
comfort. That scene enacted in his mother's rooms, at supper, on the
evening after the ill-starred ball, when, at his mother's bidding, he
had left her, knowing that she wished to keep him from questions that
must not be asked, was neither the first such affair that he had seen,
nor yet the tenth. He had left the room with hands clinched and his
heart burning with anger: anger against--whom? what? The person who
brought the look he could not bear into his mother's eyes; the thing
that reopened those never-healed wounds he knew she bore within her. And
these wounds?--the suffering in her look?--Well, he knew, well enough,
of course, that they had all been made by his father! But the father of
such deeds was not the embodiment of romance that he had created out of
the stuff of dreams! There was, then, another; a reality: terrible,
perhaps, but also despicable, and full of things so mean, so low, that
he was hardly even to be hated? Already he could feel that hate was a
strong passion, not unflattering to its object. But--a man who
ill-treated women:--Incredible!

This was Ivan's immediate tangle. And, mercifully, tangle it remained
for many years. Only by degrees so gradual that they hardly hurt, did he
begin at last to draw away from the ideal, and accept, with whatever
reluctance, the real. At the very end, the struggle may have been sharp.
But this was simply because the idealized being himself seized and tore
away his last shred of illusion, and stood, bare-souled, before the son
who could only sit and gaze in horrified, horrible judgment.

       *       *       *       *       *

It happened in this wise.

Through the years of his son's infancy and boyhood Michael Gregoriev,
disregarding all thought of his child, saw practically nothing of the
boy. He had, in his heart, some faint satisfaction concerning Ivan's
sex, mingled with a fancy, gained after one accidental interview, that
nevertheless, considering his tastes and traits, Sophia's child should
have been a girl. Later, as Ivan began to emerge a little from utter
childishness, his father had resorted occasionally to his school-room to
search the little dweller there for certain longed-for signs of
temperament. Not finding them, he once more put his son away, this time
furiously raging that he should have been given a Blashkov heir.
Nevertheless, because Ivan was his all, and because the Prince, to his
own discomfiture, found himself constantly building careers for a
successor, there came again a day when his wild heart turned one last
time towards the boy, and, calculating his age, he was astonished to
find that his son had passed the first year of his teens.

That summer--the summer of 1854--Madame Gregoriev, Ivan, and Ludmillo
had spent at the Princess' favorite country-place, the tiny estate of
Maidonovo, near Klin. Here, in the spot where she had fewest memories of
the man whose name she bore, Sophia found that she could, for a few
weeks, rally from the weakness, the premonitory pain and its
accompanying dread which had lately found definite place in her life.
Here the summer skies were of Italian blue; the bells rang through air
liquidly golden, perfumed, rich with the murmur of insect life. And here
the three, mother, son, and their quiet companion, walked the
country-side, watching, first, the hurried sowing, fostering and reaping
of the brief-seasoned crops, and then the mad Russian festivals which
terminate the frightful summer labor. This year marked itself especially
in Ivan's mind; because it was the first in which he began to be haunted
by unremembered harmonies and melodies that throbbed again and again
across his brain till he would rush, in a frenzy, to the piano, and play
them swiftly away as one ridding himself of a torment. And it was at
this time rather a misery to him than a delight that, within a few
hours, they were always back again, driving him to continued pondering
over strange mysteries of tone.

It was the end of September before the little party returned to Moscow,
driven thither by premonitions of swift-approaching winter. A fortnight
more, and, on the seventh of the month, Ivan would enter his fifteenth
year. But it was three days before his birthday when the incident
occurred which prepared him for its unusual celebration. For while, at
dusk on the evening of the fourth day of the month, Ivan sat alone in
his music-room, he was approached by Piotr and silently conducted across
the building and into the presence of his father.

Michael received his son in his public office: a room which, to the boy,
appeared a fitting frame for the figure of the Prince, magnificent in
gold-embroidered uniform; booted, spurred, fiery-eyed and
fierce-mustached, but for all that showing a softened light in his face
as he perceived his son.

Piotr was promptly dismissed, and Ivan seated at the huge table whence
he could gaze at the burly figure opposite him as long as his eyes had
courage to look up. Nevertheless the pause was uncomfortable enough; and
the boy was glad when the silence ended.

"Ivan! you're now at the age at which I entered my first battle--as
drummer-boy--and had--Hm! my first love-affair. Are you in love?"

Ivan's velvet eyes lifted themselves slowly to the glittering orbs set
in the dark face. No word passed the young lips, but Michael read,
plainly enough, the wondering displeasure in the boyish face. Slightly
amused, he went on, relentlessly:

"This week, you're fourteen: a man, in short. Now, what have you done
that men can do?"

A fiery reply flew suddenly to the boy's lips; but there it stuck. He
could not speak to this man of his mother. Again he chose silence for
his answer.

"Nothing? You don't speak? Bah!" Michael brought his fist down upon the
table, till everything in the room danced. "Bah! It's a girl I've got! A
ninny. A milk-sop.--I thought so! Your lips--your cheeks--_you_--a
Gregoriev!" But the glittering eyes, striving to fathom those others,
were caught in a sudden quiet depth, wavered for an instant, and--were
lowered! Then Michael sat in a frown, elbows on the table, his chin on
his hand, thinking. Ivan, meantime, this little feat accomplished, sat
waiting, uneasily, for a decision or--a dismissal. He waited for some
time; but the end was worth it--perhaps. When his father spoke again,
his tone was serious:

"Well, I shall try you, after all. Here, on Thursday--your birthday,
mind! you shall meet life. I'll give you a supper, an early one, at ten
o'clock. Tell your mother about that from me. But Piotr will come to
dress you. I'll have no baby about. He'll bring the suit I command you
to wear; and--we'll see.

"Tell your mother, Ivan, that at last--on the seventh of this month, her
rule ends. The last Gregoriev becomes a man--or else--he leaves the
Gregoriev house! Do you hear? Prepare yourself, then, and--go!"

So, without another look, Michael caught his cloak and cap up from a
chair and strode from the room, leaving his son behind him. Presently,
however, Piotr came to lead away the dazed and bewildered boy.

Once more in his own room Ivan sat down, in a corner, to think. In the
beginning, he could only go over and over the recent scene. Considering
it, it seemed almost like some vivid dream, so unnatural had been his
father's conduct and manner of speech. And himself! How preposterously
he had behaved! Not a word, not a single sign of response or
comprehension could he remember having given. Certainly his father might
very well think him a--"milk-sop," was it, he had said?

For a day or two Ivan lived, in secret, through that scene. And after
forty-eight hours it dawned upon him that he was beginning to live in an
ever-increasing dread of that approaching supper-party, "at which he was
to become a Gregoriev!" Those over-sensitive, over-perceptive young
nerves of Ivan's had divined more of his father's mind than Michael
believed. And now a sure and certain instinct was warning the boy of
danger. Nevertheless--disobey the Prince's command? Ivan shivered. Not
appear, on his birthday evening, before the guests that would be--his?
Impossible! Well, something he had yet to do. There remained one command
of his father's which, up to this moment, he had felt reluctant to
follow. This was the message to his mother. Should he take it to her
now; or should he not?

Ivan had reached this point in his reverie of the late afternoon of
Tuesday, when the Princess came quietly into the room where he sat. With
an exclamation, he rose, and went to her; and presently they were seated
side by side upon a long divan, Ivan's warm young hand clasped tightly
in two that were dry and burning. The boy, relieved, gave a long, quiet
sigh; but it was Sophia who began to speak.

"Ivan, yesterday you saw your father?"

"Ah! You _know_, then, mother?"

"Know--what, my son?"

"What--what he said? About my saint's-day supper? Mother, I was to tell
you. He said, tell you that, on the seventh--that's the day--your rule
is over, and I become a Gregoriev. But, oh mother, it's not so, you
know!"

This last Ivan added with eager haste; for Sophia had given a low cry,
and her hands so tightened upon his that the grip hurt, rather. But
after he had spoken she waited a little, her head bent so that he could
not see her face in the twilight. When at last she lifted it to him it
was very white; but the lips did not tremble, the voice was steady. "He
is to give you a supper on this night? He told you so? Spoke about your
manhood--at fourteen?" she added, in a whisper, to herself.

"So he said, Madame. And I did not like it. My father is a very strange
man."

"Then, you do not _want_ this supper?" her gaze at him was intense, but
the dignity had fully returned to it.

To her secret consternation, however, Ivan hesitated.
"I--no--yes--Mother, ought I not to want it?"

For some seconds Sophia stared at him, trying to fathom the exact
purport of his question. Then her whole aspect changed. She took his two
hands and drew them to her breast, and kissed and bowed her head upon
them; and presently, though Ivan was clinging to her and demanding
explanation, she rose, hastily, and left the room.

Her going was impulsive. That which prompted it had come to her in a
sudden flash. Into Ivan's wistful question she had discerned some sense
of loyalty towards the other parent; and, in that instant, she was
ashamed. After all, he was Michael's own son. Must she, then, be sure
that he sought to do the boy harm? Nay, for once in her life she should
be brave again. First of all, she must try, as never before, to trust
the father of her son. Secondly, she must also trust that son. If Ivan
found himself, at the promised supper, in moral danger, he would
instinctively know it. Then, if he made no effort to escape, of what use
protection, or love, or fear, on her part, forevermore? No feminine
force could keep him from going, eventually, down the Gregoriev road.

With such reasoning did the woman try to control the secret, rising
terror that was on her. It would not be wholly downed; yet she succeeded
in keeping her own counsel during the next two days, and in that won a
victory greater than she knew. For the Princess never guessed that
during this time Michael waited in hourly, ironic expectation of some
sort of protest on her part. And neither master nor mistress suspected
that, on Wednesday evening, the serfs, kept informed by Piotr, Alexei,
and Másha of a little more than all, held solemn conclave in their own
house at the back of the inner court-yard. There Michael their lord was
duly cursed, their lady in the same way pitied; and, above all, they
discussed the possibility of giving the young master some sort of
protection at that impending festivity. The matter of open protest to
Prince Michael was actually brought up. For, alas! these simple folk
knew more than their lady of the usual details of their master's orgies;
and the thought of Ivan's participation in the simplest of them was as
horrifying to these slaves as to the gentle lady they served. But the
bold proposition came at last to nothing. For which of these lame dogs
was to beard the lion in his lair?

Wednesday and most of Thursday passed, for mother and son, in a
fluctuating succession of every mood known to their respective natures.
Finally, on the afternoon of his birthday, Ivan, furious at the
indignity, was forced into an hour or two of preparatory rest. But so
restless had been his recent nights that his very protests drifted
presently into sound unconsciousness, and he only awoke at candle-light,
to find Piotr bending over him, and his promised suit, gorgeous even
beyond expectation, lying at hand. And here Michael showed a touch of
his wonderful knowledge of human weakness; for that suit played havoc
with Ivan. There was courage to be found in the crimson cloth, interest
in the gold embroidery, ardent curiosity in the gleaming boots, an
almost swagger in the empty sword-belt. Truly, his Highness had
calculated well. By the appointed hour, Ivan was aflame. Once dressed,
he relinquished the idea of going to his mother for a parting kiss. He
felt, instead, that his "manhood" had already come upon him, and that
kisses were for children. Still, it was a relief to find that, had he
wished it, his half-promised visit would not have been feasible; for,
ere the last buckle was fastened, Sósha had come to escort his young
Prince, with due ceremony, in his first descent into the traditional
hell of his fathers.

Ivan was too little of his own blood, a youth too habitually and
instinctively pure-minded, to comprehend, in the first glance, that
supper scene, and gain therefrom life-long disillusionment. For him,
even after he had left it, there remained in some sort a glamour over it
all--the softening veil of lights and laughter, the gleam of plate and
the perfume of flowers, which successfully hid the blackest ugliness.
The first fresh frost was still upon his glass; and through it the
golden wine was beautiful as it could not be for those about him, who
saw, as it were, through tepid crystal, a flat and nauseous vintage
hardly to be borne even for the faint quickening of the blood still to
be obtained from it. But with Ivan it was as his mother had hoped. She
still sheathed him as in a coat of mail; yet that night the sword of
disaster glanced off it as by a miracle only.

Was this man indeed a father who could find place for his boy at such a
table, beside the woman who awaited him? who could command the boy in
one breath to drain his glass, and Piotr in the next to refill it?

Within twenty minutes Ivan's head was light with the delicious poison of
that exquisite wine. So transparently white grew his skin, so huge and
velvety his black eyes, so serious his finely chiselled mouth, that even
Celestine and Cerisette began to feel, somewhere beneath that hardened
outer shell of "temperament," a disregarded organ filled with a
long-forgotten, aching sensation that was not to be encouraged.
Regarding the quiet boy whose gold embroidery glittered so bravely in
the light, they grew painfully silent; and in that silence secretly
reproached the man who put them to such abominable usage. Indeed,
Gregoriev himself, always quick to take the temperature of a company,
was presently amazed at the tone beginning to prevail over this one. The
screaming laughter had been modified; the unquestionable conversations
stilled. But the wine, for these very reasons, was flowing faster, as
each member of that company sought to deaden those strangely roused
sensations which most of them had believed forever dead for them.
Gregoriev perceived how many eyes remained fixed reflectively on the
white face of the young Prince, in whose eyes was beginning to dawn a
look of comprehension. And they saw with fear the gleam of mockery that
was glowing in Michael's orbs. The host, indeed, had planned, but found
no time in which to execute, a new and daring _coup_, before his son had
sprung to his feet, lifted his brimming glass in a hand grown tremulous,
and dashed it violently at the nearest wall, where it shivered into
splinters, its contents falling, in one heavy, golden mass, upon the
rug. Then, mouth set, head erect, he turned from the company and walked
steadily out of the room. But, the door once closed behind him, once out
of range of his father's mocking eyes, he began to run, madly, through
the narrow corridor, into the central hall and up the staircase, whence
he presently precipitated himself into the bedroom of his mother, who
was sitting in a lounging-chair before a blazing fire.

At the unexpected appearance, Sophia rose with a cry. Only the angels
could have read all the anguish which that utterance bore from her--all
the pent-up misery of a woman tortured during the last hours beyond
every power of endurance. High God had heard her at last. Her son had
returned to her, unconstrained, of his own will, up from that depth,
from that nether hell, to the sounds of which she had been listening for
a long hour. But now her boy was clasped within her arms, his suddenly
burning cheek pressed to hers, his wine-tainted breath, mingling with
her half-restrained sobs as she cried over him only half coherently:

"Ivan--little one--son of my heart--you came back to me!"

"Oh, little mother! Little mother! Keep me safe--from _him_!"




CHAPTER IV

THE CORPS OF CADETS


In the old, feudal days of quick-spilled blood and easy death, there was
a certain fateful, epoch-making cry which had power to carry dread or
terror through the high ranks of the official world, while it brought to
others exultant hopes of desires and ambitions at last to be fulfilled.
It was a cry of life and of death, of the ending of one rule, the
beginning of another, consisting of two phrases from which nations took
their being; which were cried aloud by men in robes of mingled black and
white and punctuated by the breaking of a black, the flourishing of a
white, wand. It is the cry with which history ends and begins: "Le Roi
est mort! Vive le Roi!"

Now Russia, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was almost Europe
in the sixteenth. It was on February 18, 1855, that the reign of the
Iron Czar actually came to an end. But the news of his death was made
public in Moscow only two days later. For forty-eight hours the sudden
closing of that rule, which had been as sombre, as turbulent, as
tyrannical as that of any Borgia or Medici, was concealed from the
nation. But the morning of the twenty-first found the petty-official
world, risen early from sleepless unrest, pushing aside its early tea to
re-read the unexpected bulletin from the Hermitage.

High and low, from the Minister of the Interior to the humblest customs
inspector, waited, trembling, for the readjustment. But Michael
Petrovitch Gregoriev, who, it might have been thought, had good cause
for apprehension, came down from his bedroom at the usual hour, shut
himself into his sanctum, sat down to stare thoughtfully at a certain
portion of his hieroglyphic map, and then, with a deep, relieving sigh,
fared vigorously forth to the day's officialdom.

And it soon appeared that Monsieur Gregoriev's confidence was justified.
More yet, special favor was shown him. He passed his summer in a long
and important journey through Southern Russia, travelling especially
through battle-scarred Crimea, and, returning with his report to Moscow,
found awaiting him that for which he had vainly intrigued for years.
Thus his wife was hastily summoned from her retirement at Baden-Baden,
where she had been joyously living with Ivan and her sister; and she
returned, drearily, to Moscow, to receive a blow she had never thought
to dread.

It was again the evening of October seventh when Ivan, called from the
quiet festivity he was enjoying with his mother and Ludmillo, followed
Piotr unwillingly into the presence of his father, who awaited him in
his official room. Left alone at the closed door, Ivan entered, slowly,
and was motioned to a seat opposite his father at the paper-piled table.

For a moment or two Michael regarded him thoughtfully. Then all at once
he cried out: "_You_ my son! God! What a baby it is!"

Ivan's face flamed and his lips twitched; but, in the end, he held his
tongue. After all, did it matter what this man said?

Michael, watching him, and in some measure reading his thought, let his
face soften again. "Well, it may be better that way. Listen,
Mikhailovitch! I have done for you what has been done for no Gregoriev
before. You are to be pushed up the ladder. You're to be deostracized.
In the end, you'll find that Petersburg will receive you. They must; for
at last I've obtained your commission in the Cadet Corps: something
that none of our race has ever had. I tried, of course, for the Pages,
but that they wouldn't give. Nevertheless, you'll come out an ensign of
the line, and I can buy your lieutenancy in a guard regiment within the
month. You understand?"

Michael paused, and fixed his keen eyes on the boy who was now on his
feet, motionless, his brows knitted. He was a little bewildered by the
unexpectedness of the thing. Yet he did understand--tumultuously, what
that great news meant.

"When do I leave here?" he asked, presently, in a voice that was strange
to him.

"In one week--to the day. There are preparations to be made. You go like
the Prince you are. Christ! If _I_ had had the chance!"

This last, muttered exclamation, Ivan scarcely heard. He was still
staring down at the table, trying to readjust himself, to resolve his
thoughts into either joy, or--more difficult--regret. The silence seemed
longer than it was. Then Ivan looked up, silently asking permission to
go. But he found his father's unholy eyes fixed on him, and
instinctively he shrank backward, trying to cover his naked soul from
that piercing vision.

"Wait! I've not finished yet. I want you to see just what I'm giving
you. I want you to understand the start you're getting. Do you realize
that, unless you make an unholy fool of yourself, within four years all
Petersburg will be open to you? At twenty you will penetrate to those
places to which I--_I_, with all the--experience, and the intimate
knowledge I've got, shall never be admitted. I can buy commissions for
you in any regiment. But in the end I don't intend you for the army. Oh,
if I could have started you in the Pages Corps! Still, your advance is
certain. And this is my first, middle, and last advice to you: walk
instantly to the very centre of the first high intrigue that presents
itself--everywhere. You'll find them even at the Corps--in your first
year. For in Russia, Ivan, a full comprehension of that great game means
power. Understand, the utterance of such a sentiment would mean Siberia.
But this young Alexander is simply a puppy. He's to be influenced by a
footman--by a serf! See that you reach him, then. Study him: learn him:
absorb him. Then find your own methods and stick to them; stopping at
absolutely nothing they may carry you to. It's the stopping, sooner or
later, that is the universal mistake: the mistake I've never made--else
I should have been in the gutter yet. You begin, Ivan, where I end. I
see no limit for you. Petersburg will hold more than one empty
portfolio. But you must not look below the highest. Take the Interior
for yourself. To-night, Ivan, I, your father, make you Premier of
Russia. Am I so careless of my son?"

Once more Michael's gloomy, flashing eyes were fastened upon Ivan's
uplifted face; nor was he wholly dissatisfied at the unquestionable
interest he perceived in the boy's expression. Ivan, indeed, felt
petrified at the vista opened up before him. It seemed as if his
father's words were burning themselves into his brain. And yet, even as
he waited, quietly, for the dismissal that soon came, these ambitions of
his father's for him were succeeded by something all his own: a thing as
yet only half understood, and held secret in his heart out of dread of
hearing it mocked or of finding it something common to all men. While,
then, the words "Premier of Russia" still echoed through his head, there
rose upon his inner ear a sudden note of melody, vagrant, sweet and
melancholy as the songs of the Steppes. Known song it was not, however;
but something unique, as were all the airs that came to him unbidden.
Under its influence it was natural that his face should change, and
soften. But Michael, imagining that rapt expression to be the result of
his own words, was well satisfied; and he sent the boy from him so
preoccupied with his uncomprehended gift, that the immediate prospect of
the new life faded, for the moment, into the dim land of the unimportant
Real.

This brief ecstasy of unsought happiness could not last, however. During
the ensuing days Ivan was obliged to banish dreams, and yield himself to
preparations for that change which, though it should have brought
something of eager anticipation to his boy's mind, was really invested
with an unreasonable dread: dread rooted no less in a presentiment of
his own than in the expression of his mother's face, the morning redness
of her eyes, the uncontrollable quiver of her lip. Sophia, indeed, had
received a blow that she was not to recover from. But the full misery of
her immediate future she could, fortunately, not as yet surmise.

The farewell between Ivan and his quiet tutor was somewhat pathetic. The
prospects of the Pole were, in their way, far drearier than those of his
pupil. He was an intensely shy man; and yet the thought of leaving the
home which had come so perfectly to suit his sensitive temperament, was
to him more calamitous than the prospect of finding and fitting himself
into another place. On the last morning, master and pupil spoke but
little. Ivan sat drearily strumming out one of the nocturnes of that
young countryman of Ludmillo's, lately dead but already hailed immortal
by a select few, Monsieur Chopin; and the heart-break in its strange
harmonies seemed to express all that neither of them dared attempt to
say. Fortunately, the strain did not last long. It was barely ten
o'clock when Casimir, having imprinted a kiss upon the hand of his
Princess, and actually left another on Ivan's scarlet cheek, was driven,
with his modest box, away from the familiar portal into the unfriendly
realms beyond. With him slipped away the first large piece of Ivan's
child-world. And the rest of it was not to be long in following.

Of the final clinging of Sophia to her child, the child of her
martyrdom, the man-child who must be relinquished now to the world that
called to him, who shall write? Torn mother-love stares not out from
paper pages, in the cold black and white of print. Poor Princess! She
was strong in neither mind nor body. Trained to a fashionable young
ladyhood of delicacy, vapors and graceful fainting-fits, there had been
little in her married life to build up fortitude and the courage to
endure unwelcome griefs. From day to day her little store of bravery had
been drawn upon, extravagantly. For in Sophia, fear bred no angry pride,
but rather a flat despair. And it had come to a point at last where even
the hauteur of her class would no longer suffice to cover the
humiliations of her daily life. Now that the final climax had come, it
found her quite denuded of all force, all strength, all hope. Her one
_raison d'être_ was to be removed, her single prop drawn from her.
Therefore she fell, quietly, with scarcely a word of protest, only an
instant of tottering. This the metaphor. To speak plainly, so complete
was her desolation that, outwardly, she betrayed nothing. Ivan was drawn
to wonder at it; but he left her, perhaps, with the less anxiety, being
too inexperienced in the ways of grief to worry as a woman might have
done over this attitude towards their parting. Nevertheless, the memory
of their last evening together lay graven so ineffaceably upon Ivan's
heart, that he recalled it clearly, in its every incident, during the
last hour of his life.

It was a Sunday--the evening of the day of Ludmillo's departure. Ivan
had been summoned to his mother's room, where he found her sitting,
rather wearily, he thought, before a table on which steamed a brightly
polished samovar, surrounded by the dishes of a tempting meal, devised
by Másha to suit the respective tastes of her lady and the young Prince.
Darkness had fallen an hour before, and the room, with its quaint old
furniture, tapestry-hung walls, and old oaken floor strewn with Bokhara
rugs, was lighted by three swinging-lamps that cast red reflections upon
the polished wood of wainscot and floor. Mother and son sat side by side
at the table, and, while they ate, made little attempt at conversation.
Instinctively, each was waiting for the other to speak.

But the inevitable talk, at thought of which Sophia's heart fluttered
till her breath was all but gone, was not allowed a natural beginning.
After a time there came from below the first of a crescendo of
sounds--that noise of muffled voices, long since familiar to the room.
As the sound increased, and the laughter began to be punctuated by
clangs of shivering glass, the woman and the boy drew closer together,
and began a hasty conversation, each trying to draw the attention of the
other away from that which occupied them both irresistibly. It was long
before there arrived any diminution in the unholy racket. But at last,
by some fortunate caprice, the party evidently decided to leave the
house for some place of public amusement; so that, at last, the great
palace was wrapped in its wonted, daytime stillness. And in the first
minutes of this, Ivan, as if he read his mother's thoughts, grew silent,
and turned to her expectantly.

His hope was fulfilled. That night, acting impulsively upon a
half-considered plan, Sophia, for the first and last time in her life,
laid bare her heart before her son. The boy listened in a silence that
grew by degrees from reverent interest to pity, from pity to horror,
from horror to absolute fury, till, thinking of the Gregoriev blood that
ran in his veins, he longed to tear from his breast the heart which had
been made to beat by the man below--that father whom he now saw in the
full light of truth. It was in that hour that Ivan put away from him
forever all childish things. His mother's story, so direfully heightened
by reason of all which she left to the intuition and imagination of her
listener, suddenly brought him to an understanding of true womanhood
that is the portion of very few experienced men. It seemed as if his
existence had been enveloped in all that was foul, and wicked, and
heart-breakingly pathetic in the world. And afterwards he realized that
in that evening was sown in him a seed which was to bear bitter fruit:
the seed of the Russian Tosca, that _Herzeleide_, which has stamped
every one of the company of illustrious Slavs with an indelible print of
melancholy.

Sophia probably did not realize Ivan's capacity for feeling or for pity.
Yet she had a purpose in the telling of her story. Ivan, a Gregoriev,
must be given the opportunity of knowing how a woman's soul can be
killed within her. Then, should he follow the footsteps of his race, his
sin would be upon his own head. Nevertheless, she used little art in her
tale, and she drew therefrom neither moral nor homily. Of what use
either of these? What remonstrance was there that could hold a true
Gregoriev from the pursuits of his maturity? At the same time, if Ivan
was what she believed him to be, he could read the moral as he ran. She
spoke from a bursting heart, and only in small degree relieved herself
by speaking. Nor did she mention their approaching parting; for
reference to this subject was beyond her. Ivan must divine what he could
of her feeling, or he must believe her callous in her great despair.

Meantime the boy had yielded one slender hand to his mother's clasp; the
other was tightly clinched. He sat bolt upright, his burning eyes fixed
sternly on the wall before him, his face pallid save for the two round
spots of flaming red that burned high upon his cheekbones. His heart was
throbbing irregularly. And in his brain, amid the chaos of broken
ideals, crumbled idols, and all the jumbled facts of his new
understanding of misery and of evil:--amid all his strange and vibrant
emotions, there thundered gigantically a series of magnificent minor
chords forming a motive over-poweringly climatic. It was the same theme
of "hope abandoned," which, nearly forty years later, was to open the
last movement of his greatest work: that "Tosca Symphony" which has
moved the whole world to wondering tears. Many times during the
succeeding years it left his memory, and he would try vainly to recall
it. But circumstances always rose to bring it again to his mind; till,
at last, recurrent pain had fixed it there forever: that world-theme,
which had its birth on this first Sunday of his sixteenth year.

It was eleven o'clock when Madame Gregoriev, worn out and trembling with
feeling, finally ended her narrative. It was midnight before she and
Ivan kissed good-night. During that whole hour, neither one of them
uttered a word. Ivan had sunk to the floor at his mother's feet, his
head in her lap, his burning hands clasped in her icy ones, his throat
contracting ever and again with the dry, gasping sob of extreme emotion.
Sophia, on the contrary, sat above him, her head lifted, her pale face
calm, her tearless eyes gazing off into some far country of her own. Yet
before their minds lay the same picture--that of a woman's woe: a petty
thing, the commonest of all affairs in the man-ruled world, yet hardly a
thing to be discussed. Some reverence, or understanding, must be granted
it by the dullest mind. So, as the distant voice of Moscow's great bell
boomed its twelve strokes, Ivan rose, slowly, as one still in his dream;
went for a moment into the mother-clasp; and then, still without
speaking, turned to pass, for the last night, down the corridor leading
to the distant wing in which were his own rooms.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was on a Monday--beginning of the working week--the morning of
October fourteenth in the year 1855, that Ivan went out into the world.
His flight was not far: merely to the other end of Moscow; but it led
into a life that he had been unable to imagine in the smallest detail.
Once there, it took him less than a week to perceive that, while his
vague hopes of companionship were scarcely to be realized, he was to
drink to its dregs his preconceived cup of unhappiness.

The four great _Corps des Cadets_, created in the mid-reign of the Iron
Czar, had been devised especially for the preparation of youthful
Russian nobility for their respective places in the military, possibly
the official, world. As it presently turned out, these great schools
were destined to become hot-beds of tyranny, intrigue, rivalry,
caste-feeling, and snobbery in their worst forms. Hence, considering the
certain future of each cadet, the Corps afforded an even more adequate
preparation for bureaucratic methods than their creator had had reason
to expect. In the Moscow institution every inmate, from its head,
Colonel Becker, to the youngest boy of the fourth class, was subject to
a government of favoritism, bribery, deceit, and the pettiest meanness,
in which was no room whatever for advancement along the lines of
conscientious work, honesty, or honor. Here prestige of birth, or
aptitude for intrigue, carried all before them; for this was, indeed,
the period of the worst mismanagement these schools were to know. In
later years the Liberator found time to look to them. At present--in the
Moscow Corps, Sitsky, "Cock" of the school, a vicious dunce of twenty,
would never be called upon to yield his position to Kashkarev, a
brilliant scholar and a thoroughly scrupulous boy of eighteen, who was
generally despised because his grandfather had been a Pole.

In this gathering, where all were in some degree noble, the distinctions
drawn by the boys themselves between lineage and wealth, political
prestige and the quiet conservatism of lofty birth, were so arbitrary,
so contradictory, so innately Russian, that the very masters, who, from
Becker down, were German, did not pretend to understand the system, but
blindly followed the lead of the scholars and their truculent head. And,
to those who have had any experience at such hands, it is bitterly plain
that of all merciless cruelty of civilized lands, that of boys under
twenty-five is the most remorseless.

It is, then, not difficult to understand that, from the first days, Ivan
was in a situation undreamed-of even by his father. In the immediate
beginning Becker, awed by his knowledge of the enormous power wielded by
Prince Michael, would have treated Michael's son with some sort of
consideration. He was soon shown his mistake. The boys he was supposed
to teach had none of them, as yet, ever come under the eye of the
mysterious, hardly-credited "Third Section." Upon the day following
Ivan's arrival, therefore, there was held, in the dormitory inhabited by
the upper ten of the dreaded "first class," a solemn conclave, headed by
the lords of the school: Sitsky, Sabléf, Osínin, Pryanishikoff, and
Blashkov--this last actually a second cousin of Ivan. The decision
resulting from the debate, held when the lower school was at drill, was
spread abroad without delay by certain methods known only to the boys.
By nightfall every cadet knew that young Gregoriev's status had been
fixed; and henceforth none would dream of disputing it till the boy in
question had passed his second year. By the third day the masters had
read and accepted the decree, quietly assigning the new boy to his
destined oblivion. For Ivan was a Gregoriev, son of a trans-Moskva
house, and had never even seen the Equerries' Quarter! grandson,
moreover, of a creature who had _worked_. Worse yet, he was the son of
what was really no more than a police officer. (For, though officialdom
meant much in their ranks, the police was beyond the pale of their
bigoted respect.) Thus it is easy to recognize Ivan's natural place, and
why he must henceforth regard himself honored if a member of the upper
school so much as addressed to him a command. This much the week
decided. But it was Sunday night before active persecution began.

Boys' schools, be they in what country they may, are as much alike as
boy nature is alike and unalterable the world over, from age to age.
Only the details differ. At Rugby, new boys undergo blanket-tossing. In
France there is a custom less vigorous though physically more painful.
In the Moscow _Corps des Cadets_, in the fifties, matters were as much
more savage as Russian civilization was, at that day, lower than that of
England. In the Kishinaia, then, the popular form of hazing is--or
was--the "circus"; and the pretty game was ordinarily arranged for
several victims. But Ivan was accorded a distinction, inasmuch as the
boys of his form positively refused to soil themselves by contact with a
rank outsider; and the upper school could not but condone its inferiors
in their aristocratic aloofness. Having, then, but one victim for the
evening's sport, it was thought fitting that some unusual climax should
be invented for the furtherance of the school ideals. And this touch was
finally invented by a youth who had just finished a certain forbidden
book relating to some unspeakable customs of the Orient.

Ivan's Sunday evening shall know no record here. He bore it, lived
through it--even infuriated his tormentors by his insistent refusals to
cry out or beg for mercy: choosing, instead, meanly to faint just before
the crucial moment. But though it was a week before he crept shakily
from his bed again, there was no inquiry in the school as to the cause
of his peculiar illness. Only in secret was some notice taken of the
affair; which had really gone beyond ordinary bounds. Colonel Becker
gave Ivan more than one hour of serious consideration; for to him Ivan's
father was more than a name. And, in the end, the boy was granted what
his mother had hitherto vainly asked: leave to spend thirty-six hours,
weekly--from Saturday night to Monday morning--at home, in his mother's
company. It was a wise decision, and it served a double purpose; for not
only did it remove a sure victim from the band of savages that held
possession of the school through every weekly holiday, but it gave one
miserable boy just enough respite from his wretchedness to stifle the
revelations which time and suffering would otherwise have surely
brought. Even so, at first, Becker trembled lest the terrible Chief
should be made aware of his son's treatment at that noted school. But
weeks passed and no complaint was made. And thus came Ivan's first step
towards favor. For Becker could not but be thankful for the boy's brave
silence; nor thereafter did he always try to hide that gratitude from
the unhappiest of his pupils.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such was the beginning of Ivan's school life. It had taken just seven
days to teach him that the curse of his parentage must still be his
heavy burden. He had done infinitely more than was generally required to
prove a boy's worthiness for acceptance by his fellows. Not a boy in the
school but had watched his clothes cut to ribbons before them, under the
knout. Not a boy but surmised the hideous state of his bruised body. And
yet, not a boy in the school offered the slightest sign of friendliness,
even of recognition. Loneliness he had known--was, indeed, to know
again--but never thereafter the loneliness that he endured in this
crowded school.

Of what Ivan bore during his first year in that harsh preparation for
his after life, it would be useless to write. The day's routine was long
and hard: its hours from early morning till nine at night; its subjects
the usual studies, with military drill, tactics, and history. Moreover,
at the end of the ordered day there was frequently guard-duty at the
door of the first form's secret club, which used pretended fear of
discovery as a means of keeping some younger boy awake till he should
fall asleep on his feet, and be carried into the club-room for the
punishment always inflicted for this military crime of "sleeping on
duty." This year the fourth form had one more cause of gratitude for the
existence of Ivan; for he was chosen for this vigil three nights to any
other boy's one. The consequence of this was that, between October and
April, he was in the hospital four times, always owing to an increase in
the low fever induced by physical and mental exhaustion. Through the
winter, Becker had made a few feeble attempts at protection, all of
which proved abortive. But finally, in the early spring, noting Ivan's
look of frailty, and fearing a breakdown that must be brought to the
notice of Prince Michael, he took the case in hand vigorously, and
procured for the boy at least unbroken sleep at night, though he could
force no other consideration from the scornful young brutes towards
their physically broken, mentally-raging victim.

It was, for Ivan, an added irony of Fate that, during this long period
of physical strain, the severest he was ever to know, his one hitherto
unfailing refuge should be denied him. And the trial culminated in a
shock as unexpected as it then seemed unendurable.

For many weeks the boy, while sedulously concealing the facts of his
school life, had nevertheless wondered that, during his Sundays with
her, his mother divined none of his unhappiness. But he himself failed
to perceive the burden which that same mother, hitherto as near to him
as he to her, was herself bearing. How should he guess that she was at
last obliged to concentrate her every faculty upon herself in order to
keep from him any betrayal of her condition? Ivan had, certainly, more
than once remarked the haggard pallor of her face; or caught her in an
involuntary movement of pain. There were nights at school when he
thought long and anxiously of her. Yet he was thoroughly unprepared
when, on the morning of the third of April, he received from her a
brief, strained, unnatural note, containing the astounding information
that she was starting at once, with his aunt, for the Riviera, where she
might remain for some weeks.

He had the day to ponder over this news: reserving the greater pain of
it for the night: when, happily, he should be unmolested. But he never
came to this; for, at the end of the evening study-period, he was called
from the assembly-hall by no less a person than Colonel Becker himself,
at the door of whose dreaded room stood Piotr, white-faced and red-eyed.
At his appearance Ivan halted for one, heart-stilling instant. Then he
muttered, in a hoarse, dry voice:

"My mother!--She is dead?"

Piotr slowly shook his head, replying: "Not yet.--They have sent for
you."




CHAPTER V

DEATH JOY


During that long winter when the mental eyes of Ivan were first opening
to the meaning of life and the individual struggles of each to find his
place in a world apparently unassailable, Ivan's mother, Princess
Sophia, slowly, in great anguish of body, was learning a last lesson of
the master by whom she had never been spared. Through that dark period,
though mother and son met weekly, their intercourse, hitherto so full,
so unreserved, became inevitably hesitant and broken. Each was bearing a
burden which neither was willing to reveal to the other. Ivan,
concealing from the tender woman every sign of his persecution at the
hands of his companions in the Corps, felt himself constantly
tongue-tied before her. And though ordinarily the mother-sense would
speedily have penetrated that awkward reserve, Sophia, herself all
unaccustomed to deceit, was so fully occupied in hiding every sign of
her own secret, that Ivan's reticence appeared to her only the
reflection of her own. It was as natural, then, as it was unfortunate,
that these visits, looked forward to by each of them as bright oases in
an otherwise treeless desert, should also have brought with them their
quota of discomfort and vain regret. Throughout each week, woman and boy
alike hungered for each other. Yet on Sunday night both usually parted
with hearts overflowing with secret remorse at the thought that there
was actual relief in the knowledge that the day was over. Moreover, as
the weeks passed, the Sunday evenings together became shorter and more
short. Madame Gregoriev, smiling through the agony that yet found place
in every line of her face, would confess to fatigue and would resign
herself to the hands of the maid whose duties were daily becoming more
those of a nurse, leaving Ivan to the care of the serfs, who, by their
unfeigned delight in his appearance, generally sent him away from their
quarters about midnight in a very cheerful mood. Later, however, through
the dark hours that followed, Ivan's thoughts instinctively reverted to
his mother, and the strange expression in her face would take a
significance filling his heart with a pain which the morrow's light
could not banish.

Months slid by. The Russian New Year came and went. And now, when Ivan
reached home on Saturday evening, his mother frequently greeted him from
her bed; and on Sunday would sit up only for an hour or two, in her
_chaise-longue_, before the open fire always kept burning in her
up-stairs sitting-room, her frail form clad in the loosest of negligées.
Still, to all the boy's sad and anxious queries, the reply would be:
"Just fatigue, and perhaps a little cold. In a few weeks, you shall see
me quite strong again. Smile for me, Ivan!" And Ivan seemed to accept
the words. But weekly he went back to his work with something added to
the weight now constantly dragging at his heart.

Had Ivan guessed half the truth, however: could he have had one glimpse
of his mother's reason for her constant "fatigue," he would have learned
that the vague disquiet he was bearing was a feather-weight in
comparison to the helpless misery of watching and comprehending the slow
spread and increase of the most pitiless, direfully cruel, of all
diseases.

It had been in the very first week of Ivan's life in the Corps that
Sophia Ivanovna returned, in a kind of numb haze, from the house of the
doctor she had gone to for examination. She stood alone in her own room,
trying to comprehend the fulness of that which had come upon her. All
alone she had made her discovery; and alone had gone to have it
verified. But, in spite of everything, realization was difficult: the
realization that, turn whither she would, there was upon her--upon that
poor, tortured breast, the relentless clutch of death. Struggle as she
might, through the ensuing months--the few, few ensuing months, that
clutch must grow tighter and more cruelly tight, until--the end. During
the years since her marriage Madame Gregoriev had, more than once,
wished--nay, prayed for death. But a hopeless desire and the inevitable
reality are generally two widely different things. And the clearest
possible proof of the poignancy of the mental suffering of her past life
lay in the fact that, fully understanding her position, it was a matter
of only a few hours before she could accept, with some show of
tranquillity, this last incident of, this fitting climax to, her long
tragedy.

From the first, she kept her knowledge to herself. The doctor who had
examined her had not been requested to take up the case; and as yet, she
asked help of none. It was weeks before old Másha, coming, one
afternoon, into the Princess' rooms with tea, found her mistress on her
knees before the ikon, passionately demanding strength for continued
silence. The old woman, struck suddenly dumb with intuition, waited only
till the dread name had come from Sophia's lips, and then burst into a
wild wailing--that long-drawn cry for the dead, characteristic of the
Russian peasant. The Princess demanded, implored, finally threatened her
old servitor, till the promise of secrecy had been obtained; but she
guessed that Másha had not given it till she had assured herself that
the disease could not be concealed much longer.

Hitherto, in that bleak and lonely household, there had been little
comfort for the woman who knew no hour, no second, free from pain. But
Másha, like many country-bred women, was skilled in the decoction of
those herbs and simples that seem, at times, more efficacious than more
scientific medicines. Moreover, the old woman was passionately devoted
to the mistress whom she had tended as a child, and nursed through every
illness of girlhood. Thenceforth Sophia was the recipient of the
tenderest care; and the old serf, experimenting, found more than one
preparation which, for a time at least, seemed to draw some of the fiery
agony from the poor, disfigured breast.

As the winter passed, however, and March drew towards its close, the
Princess, wasted almost to a shadow, left her bed no more. Thus at last
her husband awoke to the fact that her illness was no mere "woman's
nonsense." Their first brief interview terminated when, in response to
his direct questions, Sophia simply drew the covering from her breast
and let him look upon the hideous source of her pain. The man bent over
her, stared for a moment, shuddered, and, turning on his heel, left the
room without a word. Early upon the morning of the following day, that
of March thirty-first, to Sophia's amazed displeasure, the two most
eminent physicians in Moscow met at her bedside. At the conclusion of
their examination they were ushered below, to the Prince's cabinet,
where they gave Michael their decision as to the necessary course of
action. There must be an immediate operation. That was the one possible
hope. Even so--it was a pity, a very _great_ pity, that the _gnädige
Frau_ had waited so long. By now, every day--almost every
hour--diminished the chance of recovery.

After this explanation, made by the German doctor and entirely
corroborated by his Russian colleague, there was a silence. Prince
Gregoriev sat bent over the table. A grayish tinge, absolutely foreign
to it, had overspread his face. His eyes were flaming. His teeth gnawed
savagely at the ends of his mustache. The two physicians waited,
considerately, till the lowered head was raised, the eyes lifted:

"There is--no other way? She--she has got to submit to the knife?"

"Gewiss! Nor can we promise--recovery--even so. Without it--two weeks--a
month, perhaps!" he shrugged, helplessly. "You understand, it is
medullary: the most rapid, the most malignant variety of all. It is not
a case that promises credit to us. Therefore, if the Herr Graf would
wish to try another physician, I should be glad that it were so. I would
resign the case willingly; for this disease gives little satisfaction to
us who love our work."

"At the same time," broke in Monsieur Petchkoff, the Russian doctor,
with some asperity, "we must remind our client, Herr Weimann, that
operations to-day do not mean what they did before the recent great
discovery of anæsthetics. I have been using chloroform now for more than
three years; and in every case where the heart permits, it has
obliterated entirely the pain of incision. You understand that the
patient may go to sleep in her bed and awaken there again, a few hours
later, without the slightest knowledge that she has ever been removed
from it. Consider that, your Highness!"

Gregoriev leaped to his feet. "Is it possible? I never believed those
tales. Do you corroborate this statement?" he added, turning to Weimann,
who sat approvingly nodding his head.

At the question he merely raised his shaggy brows, replying: "Without
doubt, Herr Graf. Anæsthesia is now used in every enlightened country in
the world. The Herr Doctor has exaggerated its benefits in no
particular."

Gregoriev sank into his place again with a groan of relief. "Operate,
then! Operate at once--to-day, if there be time!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Prince Michael's desire, which was, in fact, that of his wife also,
since the thing must be gone through, was impractical, owing to the fact
that considerable preparatory work was still necessary. On the first day
of the new month, Weimann made an examination of her heart, which
resulted less satisfactorily than he had hoped. Not until evening did he
finally announce his decision that the administration of chloroform
might be made without undue danger. And after this there were still to
be made those preparations necessary for an operation in the palace:
Michael absolutely refusing his wife's request that she be taken to the
Royal Hospital. Nor was it till the evening of that day--the second of
April--that the unhappy lady wrote Ivan her scarcely deceptive letter:
an act repellent to her, but insisted upon by Michael, who persisted in
maintaining his belief in her ultimate recovery. With what an agony of
yearning to see her boy, to bid him good-bye, the poor soul hung upon
each painfully scrawled word, only those who have lain under the chill
of death can know. From the first she had no hope, and but little
desire, of leaving the dread table alive. Yet she was loath to give
expression to the doubt that might still be hailed by her husband with
his old, scornful mockery.

It was the first time, perhaps, that she had misjudged Michael on the
side of inhumanity. Scorn for her was gone from him now; and so changed
was he that his very servants could not read him. Was it remorse, or
actually some long-latent affection, reawakened under the shadow of
impending loss, that had brought the haggard lines about his mouth, and
dulled the fires of those terrible eyes? Sophia herself asked that
question of the darkness, as she lay the long night through, watching
for what she dreamed of as her last dawn.

The hour of the operation was fixed for one o'clock on the afternoon of
April third. By dawn of that day the whole household was astir,
gravitating, for the first time in many a year, wholly about the bedroom
of the mistress of the house. Madame Gregoriev, lying motionless in the
half-light of her room during the morning hours, preceding the impending
ordeal, was filled with a sense of unreality, of wonder at the stir that
was suddenly being created about her. For years she had been accustomed
to a life of systematic neglect. For months she had borne her bodily
torment silently and without hope of aid. Now, in one day, as it seemed,
she had become the centre of a new world. There were two professional
nurses to anticipate her every want, while old Másha, hitherto her one
attendant, cowered snuffling in a dark corner of the room. At her
bedside her husband, his black eyes dulled with trouble, sat side by
side with Vassily, the brother, whose manner had never before so
softened in addressing her. And his voice grew husky as he persisted in
the assurances of perfect recovery that he could not himself believe.
Lastly, and best of all, Caroline was coming: was, indeed, already on
her rapid way. All things had been done for her comfort; yet none of
them weighed for a moment in the balance with her one, great, unvoiced
desire: the desire to see and talk to her boy before she yielded herself
to that mysterious unconsciousness from which she had not the smallest
hope of emerging. But she was now wholly under Michael's sway. She
realized that he was acting for Ivan's peace of mind: that in so acting
he had himself some hope of her recovery. And, remembering his new
consideration for her, she could not bring herself to dispute him. When,
at the hour named, the surgeons and their assistants entered her room,
she received the kisses of husband and brother upon an unwrinkled brow;
and, as she lifted her head towards the sweet-smelling sponge, there was
a faint smile upon her lips, a gleam of relief in her tired eyes.

Vassily Blashkov and his black brother-in-law waited together at
Sophia's bedside till her unconsciousness was complete; and then both
stood, reverently, while the limp body was carried from the room. For
the first time in their lives these two utterly selfish men looked into
each other's eyes with but one comprehensive thought, which was all for
another. Each man was suddenly white with unwonted feeling; for there
was something in the pose of that helpless form which brought home, with
a poignant stab, a sudden realization of her neglected life.

Still acting upon common impulse the two presently descended, side by
side, to Michael's official room, where, on the table, Piotr had placed
a bottle of sherry, some glasses, and a plate of biscuits. Before these
the two seated themselves; and, as the first glow of the wine began to
course through them, they fell into a low-voiced conversation; for it
was a period of strain so great that any possibility of forgetfulness
was grasped, eagerly. Of Sophia, however, neither could speak; and their
thoughts fell naturally upon that which was dearest to her: Ivan: the
nephew to whom the uncle was almost a complete stranger. And it was to
this man whom for years he had hated so roundly, that Michael revealed,
for the only time in his life, his feeling for the boy whom he had so
tardily and slightly acknowledged.

"You--haven't told him, I understand?" Blashkov began, in a low tone.

"Not yet. If--if she comes out--he may see her. The anxiety will be less
for him.--She--she's his whole life, here."

"And he hers, I imagine?"

"It's true.--I--I haven't counted with either of them.--I never tried."

This was all. The long, almost unbearable pause that followed was broken
by a commonplace remark, and the conversation kept in that vein by
mutual consent. For, when the inner life is throbbing fast and strong,
intimate expression becomes impossible. And above these two men,
chatting about the trivial things of their existence, hung a black
shadow of dread: a strain of waiting which, minute by minute, grew more
tense.

An hour had passed, and the ears of both were strained for the faintest
sound in the corridor, when there came an unhoped-for break. Less than
forty-eight hours after the first news had reached her in Petersburg,
Caroline Dravikine entered the Gregoriev house in Moscow. Piotr, his
face alight with relief, showed her into the room where brother and
brother-in-law sat together. There she flung off her wraps, commanded
tea, and exerted all her power towards distracting the thoughts of those
two men who showed not half her courage in the face of a calamity which
could touch neither of them as it must touch her, who had kept the one
greatly unselfish affection of her life for the sister now lying at the
point of death above her.

A second hour slipped round, and the momentary relief of Caroline's
arrival passed. The darkening room had grown silent again, and the sense
of oppression was becoming unendurable to the three of them, when one of
the nurses slipped into the room to say:

"The Princess Gregoriev is in her bed. You can see her if you wish."

A woman's whisper broke the twilight: "Thank God!--Thank God!--She is
conscious? She is safe?"

"She cannot be conscious for some hours yet, Madame.--The operation has
been a terribly difficult one. Her Ladyship's condition is critical."

Silence. Then a faint groan from Michael's chair.

There followed six hours of waiting, watching, hoping, despairing. The
deadened consciousness trembled on the edge of the great void; and
neither doctor, nurse, nor relative left the still room in which the
soul still delayed. Now and again, after the administration of some
stimulant, one of the three, Michael, Vassily, or Caroline would whisper
a question, hoping always for an answer suggestive of hope. But the
reply was always the same:

"We cannot tell.--Wait."

It was nine o'clock at night before the body stirred naturally for the
first time, and a long, fluttering sigh broke from the pallid lips. From
Caroline came a faint cry of joy; and then Sophia's great eyes opened,
languidly, and her look was turned upon her sister.

"Mother!" she whispered, smiling.

"No, Sophie!--No!"

But Weimann was at her elbow. "Do not contradict!" he murmured. Then he
turned to Michael.

"You have a son?" he said, quietly.

"Yes!--You mean--" Michael's face had not held this look before.

"He should be here," said the doctor, steadily. "I think she will know
you all--yet."

Prince Gregoriev bowed his head upon his breast, and stole from the
room. Ten minutes later Piotr was speeding across Moscow in his master's
brougham, towards the _Corps des Cadets_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of that long drive homeward across the city, Ivan's only memory was of a
long blur of pain that culminated, as they halted at the portals, in a
sudden burst of realization. His eyes, tear-shrouded as they were,
sought the well-known window on the second floor from which his mother's
face had so often greeted him or smiled down a farewell for one more
week.--Yes, the window was alight! Then--then she was still--Great God!
How did human senses bear such grief as was swelling through him now?

Within the gloomily lighted hall Ivan found himself, quite unexpectedly,
face to face with his father, who was apparently awaiting him. Until
this moment Ivan had forgotten the very existence of Prince Michael; but
now he was startled at the drawn and haggard face that presented itself
in the lamp-light, as his father seized him by the arm, and, whispering
a few words of the explanation that brought Ivan's heart into his
throat, drew him swiftly up-stairs, to the threshold of her room, and
there turned, leaving him alone.

Five minutes before the priest, his last rites accomplished, had passed
out of the doorway on which the boy now halted, straining his eyes into
the room beyond. He saw a bed surrounded by silent figures; and only
then became conscious of the meaning of the sound that had filled his
ears since his coming: the high, long-drawn, wailing of Sophia's piteous
struggle for breath. Immediately over her hung Weimann and one of the
nurses, just finishing an injection of strychnine. At the foot of the
bed sat Madame Dravikine, white, silent, dry-eyed. Across the room,
before the largest of the three ikons, knelt Sonya and old Másha,
praying, silently. And upon them all, even the deathlike figure on the
bed, was an air of listening, of waiting, of expectancy, which was
presently relieved by the apparition of the tall, lean, boyish figure,
who wavered for one moment, and then came hurriedly forward.

Ivan was scarcely conscious of his movements. His limbs were trembling,
his hands were icy cold and damp with sweat, his tightened throat seemed
as if it must break the drawn muscles in its straining. But his great
black eyes shone tearless as he walked straight to the bed and stood
gazing down upon the quivering face upturned to him. Then, after a
moment of preparation, the dreadful breathing ceased, and a faint,
shaking voice replaced it:

"Ivan! Dearest! You have come!"

Taking his mother's transparent hands with a movement of infinite
gentleness into his own, Ivan dropped upon his knees by the bedside, his
two eyes still fixed longingly, hungrily, upon the beloved face. For an
instant he was conscious that others in the room were stealing away, and
presently, save for one nurse, he was alone with her who, sixteen years
before, had brought him into the world.

In the silence that surrounded him Ivan felt his very soul pierced by a
medley of unknown emotions, chief of which was the sense that he stood
alone and helpless before a separation that he could not bear. And
presently that dread was voiced for him, in the strange, weak, tender
tones of his mother's voice:

"I must leave you soon now, Ivan."

At last a sob tore its way through his rigid throat, and his answer was
given in a passionate whisper: "No, mother! No!"

"Dear, my body is going. You could not wish to keep me always. And I am
so glad, Ivan! So glad! My own mother has been here, at my side, all
day. So, then, I shall come and comfort you--at least at the first,
while it is most sad for you."

"'At first!' Do you think I can stop wanting you, grieving for
you--ever?"

She could smile, that dying one, in her great wisdom, at this passionate
repudiation of the balm of time. To her, it appeared, the secrets of the
dead had been already revealed. "You are still very young, dear boy.
None of us of the world can escape this pain of parting. 'Death is the
last enemy that shall be overcome.' The time is not long, Ivan, before
you will take on man's full estate. Shall you remember then what I, your
mother, have suffered--through a man?--through your father, Ivan?"

His expression turned to one of surprise. Never had she spoken, even
indirectly, on this subject to him before. But he answered at once:
"Yes, mother. I know. I shall remember."

"Ah, yes--keep that remembrance--all of it! You will be a man of power,
of influence. When you marry a good woman, Ivan, then think of me most
of all. You have in you Gregoriev blood, and all Gregorievs have been
like your father. You must change that, break that tradition. Will you
remember? Will you--pro--"

The speech had been a long one, and, syllable by syllable, her voice had
been growing weaker. Now, with a word half uttered, she settled back,
gasping violently, her eyes half shut. Ivan started to his feet; but
already the nurse was by the bed, forcing cognac and water down the
Princess' throat. Ivan stood still, tightly clasping one of those chilly
hands. He was waiting anxiously for her to speak again; for to him their
talk was not finished. His mother, however, seemed to think differently.
Her hand tightened upon his, but she had the air of one satisfied,
content with all things. The boy, watching her, understood that she
desired nothing more.

Presently the others stole softly in again, and Sophia drew her sister,
by a look, to the bed, beside Ivan, and made one more effort of speech:

"Katrisha--remember--Ivan. He is--mine. When he--goes--to
Petersburg--care for him--for--my sake!"

"Ah, yes, Moussia! Yes! Ivan shall be cared for--well!" murmured
Caroline, brokenly.

Sophia, her dim eyes resting on them both, smiled.

In the midst of this came an interruption. The smile vanished, and a
gleam of dread crossed the face of the Princess, who had started forward
a little, and seemed to listen. Indeed, there was the sound of a muffled
tread approaching the door. Another instant, and Michael, entering, went
to the bedside, and stood looking down upon his wife. White and strange
was his face, and Madame Dravikine perceived that his hands were
trembling. She saw also, however, how Sophia drew away from him, how the
labor of her breathing was increased. Every one in the room started when
the dying woman's right hand was raised from the sheet and pointed at
the dark and powerful figure bending near.

"You--who have ruined my life--go! Let me die--at last--in peace!" she
said, all the silent torture of her wifehood sounding through the
wavering, feeble voice.

Michael Gregoriev, with a violent start, drew back. He passed his hand
once across his face; then, straightening suddenly, and without another
look at the figure on the bed, he turned and strode from the room,
leaving the door open.

Behind him, silence fell again. Sophia's breathing and the faint mutter
of old Másha's prayers mingled with the wailing of the wind as it rushed
round the corner of the house, and the pelt of freezing rain on the
windows. In the half-lighted room no one either moved or spoke. Minutes
passed. Half an hour. Ivan, standing on his feet, grew desperately
nervous and weary. Madame Dravikine, seated in a corner, leaned back in
her chair and let her heavy eyelids fall.

Presently, out of the night, came the voice of Ivan Veliki, from the
distant Kremlin, booming the eleventh hour. As the last stroke trembled
through the room and echoed into silence, Sophia Gregoriev lifted
herself suddenly to a sitting posture. Her eyes widened, joyously, upon
some distant scene, and a cry of ecstatic wonder broke from her lips.
Then, in a breath, the divine light faded. The lips fell apart. It was
her son who caught her as she fell.

Yet death held something still in store. Minutes later, as Ivan lifted
himself heavily from his kneeling-place beside the bed, and gazed,
through tear-filmed eyes, upon the face of his dead, there broke from
him a little cry, a cry of joy. In its passage to freedom his mother's
soul had stamped her visage with its state. From that face the lines of
many years of anguish, mental and physical, had fallen away, leaving the
flesh as smooth and fair as that of a girl. The eyes were lightly
closed; and, most beautiful of all, her lips had slowly spread into a
smile of such transfigured radiance as sent a thrill of intense and
wistful longing through the hearts of those that looked on her.

The tragedy of Sophia Gregoriev was at an end; and none seeing her could
doubt that she had found in the Unknown Land ample reason and
compensation for her life on earth.




CHAPTER VI

NATHALIE


There is a certain maxim, unpleasant as it is prevalent, indulged in
with great frequency by a certain class of stoical sophists, to the
effect that there are many sorrows in life more difficult to bear than
that separation from our nearest brought by death. But those men--and
especially the women--who have experienced sorrow of both varieties, do
not use that proverb.

In his after life Ivan Gregoriev was called upon to bear many burdens of
grief; but none of them ever caused him to waver in the assurance that
the death of his mother had brought him the bitterest suffering he could
be called upon to endure. Before this time--for many recent weeks--he
had believed himself cognizant of most forms of unhappiness. So, in a
blind, insensate fashion, he was. But the night on which his mother left
him opened his eyes to that land of grief where consolation waits on
time; it shook from him the last vestige of morbidity; and, lastly, it
brought him, too, in generous measure, perception of those beauties of
thought and action to be gained by one who accepts his loss unselfishly,
in a true and humble spirit.

During the three days that passed before the funeral, Ivan, his brain
dulled and heavy with a kind of morbid despair, haunted the room where
his mother lay, surrounded with candles the lights of which illumined
and intensified the smile of transfiguration still remaining on her
peaceful face. To the boy, waiting and watching dumbly, it seemed
intolerable that the stillness of that sacred room should be disturbed
by the exits and entrances of strangers. In the beginning, he resented
even the arrival from her Petersburg convent of his cousin Nathalie; and
for the many members of the Blashkov family, distant relatives or mere
acquaintances, who throughout her life had left Sophia to bitter
loneliness, and came now to stare upon her empty frame, the son felt a
hatred too fierce to be expressed in words. They, however, neither knew
nor would have cared to learn how the boy heard their every word
concerning him and his with wrath unspeakable, and shuddered with misery
at their heartless insolence. Nevertheless, the wretchedness hidden
under his set, strained mask, was divined by his aunt. Thus, she, for
the time much softened by her grief, and feeling also a good deal of
curiosity concerning the inner nature of this youth of the haunted eyes,
presently sought, by every art of tact and seeming understanding, to
open his heart to tears. The fact that she at length succeeded, must be
put down to her lasting credit; it having been a deed directly opposed
to the traits of her rather cold nature.

Upon the evening after the funeral Madame Dravikine, intensely wearied
by the long walk to and from the cemetery, was lying on her couch, eyes
closed, her head aching slightly. Nevertheless, when there came a timid
knock upon her door, she answered with a summons to enter, and Ivan,
responding, went to her impetuously, yielded his hands to her clasp, and
allowed himself to be drawn to his knees, at her side, there to listen
to gentle words about his mother's love for him, and her ambitions for
his future, till she had pierced through the armor of his reserve, and
he burst into a storm of sobs the violence of which at first frightened
her.

It was the one possible means of relief, however; and Madame Dravikine,
wise in her generation, let him weep his bitter revolt away. This lasted
nearly an hour, and both were exhausted by the time the tears had
ceased, and only an occasional, spasmodic sob gave evidence of the storm
that had passed. It was at this juncture--Ivan upon the floor, half
sitting, half kneeling, Caroline's arms clasping him close--that the
door of the room opened again, quietly, and Nathalie appeared. At sight
of the two she halted, uncertainly. But her mother, gently releasing the
embarrassed boy, bade her come in; nor when, an instant later, he made
the move, would she permit Ivan to go. It was, perhaps, unfair to her
that this kindly act of hers should have borne, for all three of them,
consequences so momentous, and, to the Countess, so unwelcome. Yet it
was certainly this evening which saw the beginning of the single real
passion of Ivan's life. Thereafter, in that little gallery of mental
portraits carried by each of us in his intimate heart, the beloved form
of his dead mother was given a companion picture: that of a girl's face,
warm and living, upon which he often gazed with an ardor, a devotion, a
longing, rather unboyishly sincere.

Certainly the picture thus enshrined was one not unworthy of strong
admiration. For even at fourteen Nathalie Dravikine was very beautiful,
in a delicate, flower-like way. Her complexion was clear and pale, the
blood which ran beneath it showing only under the stress of some
emotion, when it would suffuse her whole face with waves of exquisite
color. Her delicate head bore a weight, almost too great, of fine,
blue-black hair, just now hanging in a heavy plait to her knees. Her
eyes, large and velvety as Ivan's own, were, however, of a shade
indescribable, chameleon-like: one day varying between beryl and
aqua-marine, anon of a light hazel, and finally, in moments of
excitement, grief, or joy, of a deep, baffling black. Hitherto, Ivan had
been undecided about their color; but to-night, as he saw them run
their gamut from light to that tender dark, he felt a strange, quivering
half-fear, half-joy, stirring his heart; and in one moment it had become
impossible for him to look her in the eyes again and retain any sort of
composure. Moreover, as he sat, red-eyed and conscious, in a chair
between aunt and cousin, it seemed to him as if some one were pouring a
cool balm over the burning wound within him: as if, already, his
mother's strange promise were finding fulfilment, and she herself, or
her fair spirit, stood at his side, her gentle hand upon his shoulder, a
smile of the old, loving companionship in her deep eyes. He did not know
whether it were minutes or hours before, with a long sigh, he rose,
kissed his aunt, drew back with flaming face from Nathalie's tentative
advance, but finally, with throbbing heart, just touched her cheek in
the usual place, and then ran off, glad of the darkness in the passage
outside. Unlike the traditional young lover, however, he was not
destined to spend the dark hours in waking dreams of his love. Nay, the
pretty child did him better service. That night, for the first time in
ninety-six weary hours, he slept, soundly and dreamlessly, till Alexei
came to call him, when he rose with a feeling of great strangeness, of
irrevocable change, upon him, as he faced a final joyless day.

There was no help for it. He must return, that afternoon, to the Corps;
where now there would be no weekly breaks in his monotony of
unhappiness. So much he learned in a brief, uncomfortable interview with
his father, immediately after breakfast. And when he was dismissed, he
understood that it was Prince Michael's farewell to him for an
indefinite period: a fact which troubled him very little in itself,
however; the less so since, when he reached his room again, he found in
his hand an envelope containing a princely sum of pocket-money--which
was to last him through the spring. Wearily and drearily, however, the
boy, with the aid of his serf, packed the few garments he had brought
with him, and then went off to hang about the closed door of his aunt's
suite of rooms, in which, also packing, was Nathalie: that strange, new
Nathalie, born for him fifteen hours before.

He had reached a great depth of unhappiness when suddenly, about
noon-time, the gate to fairy-land opened and he was admitted by
Celestine, who had been sent, indeed, to seek him. In a few, whirling
moments, he found himself eating an early _déjeuner à la fourchette_
with his aunt and cousin, after which he drove with them to the
Petersburg station, and there, upon the noisy, crowded platform, reached
his empyrean.

Madame Dravikine and her maid were in the carriage reserved for them,
arranging their bags and rugs. But Nathalie had remained--ah, was it not
of her own choice?--outside, for three minutes longer. Their few words
were as simple and as awkward as inexperience could make them; but they
were afterwards gone over, a hundred times, at least, by Ivan, who, at
each repetition, became more impressed by the brilliance, the wit, the
_savoir-faire_, the repose of Mademoiselle Nathalie's brief and
stumbling formalities. Then--then Madame Dravikine was calling her
daughter. A whistle blew. The second bell rang loudly. Officials jangled
hastily down the platform; and Ivan, his heart throbbing in his throat,
suddenly caught his cousin's slender figure in his arms, held her for
one endless instant, found her lips with his own, and found himself,
five minutes later, gazing blindly down an empty track, while the
footman at his side stared at him in stupid wonderment. So, coloring
with shame, joyously angry, broken by the long prospect of ensuing grief
and longing--not for one being loved and lost, but for two--he entered
the carriage which was to carry him across Moscow, from heaven to hell:
from the Petersburg station to the stone buildings of the _Corps des
Cadets_, where, in the ensuing weeks, Ivan Gregoriev, already an adept
in enduring the various forms of school-boy misery, was about to begin
upon a lesson before which more than one grown man would have visibly
shrunk; and under which Ivan himself, before it was finished, had become
appalled at his own capacity for suffering.

       *       *       *       *       *

During every age of humanity, in every state and stage of human
civilization, there have been certain great-souled beings who, for the
sake of a totally inadequate reward, have delivered themselves over,
bound and helpless, into the hands of a task-master severe, relentless,
all-demanding, but wise and just beyond every other teacher of mankind.
The greater number of these daring persons have, in the end,
accomplished their schooling, done their tasks, and reached their goal;
because, once in the toils, they must needs go forward, or die. A very
few of these toilers, Hindoos ascending towards Arahatship, Christians
aspiring to certain heaven by way of certain martyrdom, have been given
beforehand an exact estimate of the price they were to pay. But all
others, the vast majority of those demanding of nature her divinest
gifts, have mortgaged themselves blindly for an amount, and at a rate of
interest, unknown, undreamed of. Of these, Ivan was one. At the age of
sixteen he first felt his power, made his demand. Consciously or
unconsciously--probably both--he cried to Fate: "Behold me! I hold a
message for mankind! The Spirit of Music will deign to make use of me as
her instrument. I am summoned to the world-service. Give me, then, that
which shall make me great enough to bring this gift of mine to its
highest issue, that my mistress may find her priest worthy of acclaim
and of advancement!"

This is a cry that Fate is bound to answer, for it is the cry of
assurance. Hearing his words, the Great One stood before the boy and
considered him thoughtfully. It may be that he was given secret warning
of the meaning of his demand. This it is not for us to know. But,
knowing or unknowing, he repeated his cry, and was answered. There and
then, with this mysterious, perverse wisdom, his task-master began his
training, blinding the eyes of the pupil to all save the few immediate
steps along the steep road that lay before, permitting him to advance
only step by step, under her guidance. Ivan yielded himself as clay to
those powerful hands; but the clay was pure, and, because of its youth,
more pliable than are those who know themselves only in later years. And
now, had he wished it, his master would not have let him go.

Poor Ivan! My poor hero! How was he lashed through that long spring, and
the summer that he spent alone at ghost-haunted Klin, where every corner
of house and garden spoke to him of his mother. How pitilessly was he
dragged through depths of grief and solitude and hopeless longing; till
he stumbled, half fainting, deep in the slough of despair! Hopeless and
heart-sick, forgetting, and, he believed, forgotten by, every living
joy, he fought his battle of temperament hand to hand, imagining every
contest lost. Nothing of his past, his present or his future, was clear
before him. He was as one crying in the wilderness; and no echo of an
answer caught his ear. So numb was he from emotional experience by the
summer's end, that, in the second week of September, he returned to
Moscow for his second winter in the Corps, with hardly more than a dull
and throbbing sense of dread.

The cold weather set in early that year. October and November passed in
a whirl of powdery snow and winds that cut through the heaviest furs. As
the time of Christmas fasts and feasts drew on, Ivan began to long for
what he believed would not be granted him--the spending of his holiday
week in comparative freedom at home. He was, however, too proud to beg
such permission; and not one word from Prince Michael did he receive. It
was, then, not till the very hour that his companions were gayly rushing
off to their various conveyances of departure, that Ivan, standing
ruefully in the snow-filled court-yard, perceived Piotr tramping through
the outer gate, looking about him, undecided as to the right entrance.

That night Ivan slept beneath his father's roof for the first time in
nine months; and in the gray of early morning there came to him an idea
of radiant promise. The pocket-money sent him in September--five hundred
rubles, the existence of which his companions had fortunately never
surmised, remained almost untouched. Ivan was extravagant only in the
purchase of music-paper and harmony-books, which are not matters of
great cost. Why, then, should he not drive to-day to the Tverskaia, and
there select Christmas presents for those few to whom it would be a
delight to give? The custom, not at that day so prevalent in Russia as
now, was still by no means unusual. And though Piotr and Alexei and old
Másha, besides, as a matter of duty, his father, were the names on
Ivan's written list, they were all of them meaningless compared with
that one gift for her for whom no gift in the world could be
sufficiently fine or costly.

Through that whole morning he dragged the sleigh and patient Alexei up
and down the Tverskaia, while, the other presents long since selected,
he went from shop to shop, dismayed anew at every place by the price
asked for those gems which alone seemed fitting for the object of his
gift. Still, in the end, he was comparatively satisfied; nor was his
choice one likely to displease any feminine soul the world over. For
the little, pearl-studded bracelet that lay in a blue-velvet case in the
breast-pocket of Ivan's coat was, considering the boy's inexperience, in
astonishingly appropriate taste; and well calculated to recall him to
the mind of the girl of whom he had dreamed through nine long months.

The remainder of the day belonged to the gods; for Ivan managed to
devote more than two hours in the penning of a moderately long, rather
stiff little letter addressed to his cousin Nathalie, at the Catherine
Institute for the Daughters of Nobility, in Petersburg. Moreover, this
done, there was still the bracelet to be wrapped, tied and stamped.
Then, after his return from the nearest official registry, there
remained the dear delight of dusk-dreams, which, to-day, concerned the
probable reception of his gift, the reading of his letter, and, climax
of climaxes, the probability of an acknowledgment!

Ivan's holiday week passed slowly, and there came no word from
Petersburg. On each of the last three mornings he rose tremulous with
hope; on each of the nights retired praying for a speedy morrow. But
instead of any joy, these days brought him only unexpected trials. His
father, it seemed, had suddenly become much interested in his son's
straight, strong presence, and took opportunity to keep him, for long
periods every day, in his company, discussing with him the details of
his life at the Corps, and the possibilities of the future. Each
conference brought only strengthened conviction of his father's
insistence upon a military-diplomatic career for him, and of the
futility of the slightest hope of leading that musician's life for which
he had been created. To-day, the least suggestion of his secret desires
might bring upon him a storm which would, then and there, forever
annihilate them. At this day his own, spiritual guide had become a thing
of little importance, in Ivan's mind, compared with the relentless
strength which his father could exhibit at an instant's warning. And,
because he had not yet learned that supreme faith in destiny to which he
afterwards did attain, Ivan carried this curious trouble with him
through many a long day, nor cast it wholly off till the world had
changed for him.

On the day after New Year's Ivan returned drearily to the Corps, where,
after a week of aimless dejection, that institute, following its
invariable custom, brought him an unlooked-for blow. It was in the form
of a small packet, bearing the Petersburg mark, which, on opening, he
found to contain a little pearl-studded bracelet, and a note that ran as
follows:

     "MY DEAR IVAN MIKHAILOVITCH,--The mother-superior of the Catherine
     Institute has forwarded to me a gift and a note designed by you for
     your cousin Nathalie.

     "I very much regret that you should have made such a mistake as to
     think that little girls either receive jewelry from any persons
     other than their parents, or, indeed, at my daughter's age, receive
     it at all. Nor do the pupils of the Institute accept communications
     from any persons but those whose names are upon a list prepared by
     the parents of the inmate.

     "Wishing you the compliments of the season, and health under the
     blessing of your patron saint, accept, my dear nephew, the
     considerations of my sincere regard.

                                  "CAROLINE IVANOVNA DRAVIKINE."

Ivan read this short missive till he had it by rote. At each repetition
it struck him as more cutting, more cruel, more unjust. His aunt had
certainly intended a rebuke; but she hardly realized either the
over-sensitiveness of Ivan's nature or the extent of his boyish feeling
for his cousin, whom he concluded to be responsible, by some
unfathomable pique, for his humiliating discomfiture.

As a matter of actual fact, Nathalie had never received either letter or
gift. She, like Ivan, had left her school during Christmas week to spend
the festival with her father and mother. It was not till two days after
the departure of Mademoiselle Dravikine from the institute that the
packet and the letter from Moscow had been placed in the hands of the
mother-superior. That worthy woman, examining the list of her pupil's
correspondents, found upon it but one person from Moscow--Madame la
Princesse Gregoriev, lately deceased, whose name she now took the
opportunity of erasing from the authorized list. This done, it remained
for her to ponder upon the subsequent conclusion of this very unusual
incident. Undoubtedly something must be done, if not with the letter at
least with the packet, which, even to her unworldly eyes, had about it a
suggestion of gold and gems that could not but bring a flutter of
interest to a heart which, long as it had been consecrated to unworldly
things, was still of the eternal feminine. It was not till the good,
stupid soul had resorted to earnest prayer, that she hit upon the
inspiration of casting all responsibility upon the capable shoulders of
her pupil's mamma, the worshipful Countess Dravikine.

This august lady, though it did not occur to her to seek council with
the Most High, found adequate means of disposing of the undesirable
gift. It was a matter of considerable satisfaction to her that Nathalie
had not been made cognizant of the little affair. Yet the watchful
mother would have been not a little amazed could she have read the
depths of her demure daughter's mind, and found there a vague but
unquestionable disappointment at having in so many months received
neither word nor message from her Moscow cousin. It was odd that Madame
Dravikine should not have realized, by this time, that her daughter was
the child of her own heart: and, since her childhood, Caroline Ivanovna
had certainly never failed to recognize the least of her own conquests.
Was it possible that the woman now high in the favor of a second reign,
should have a dunce for a daughter? Yet the mother would probably have
felt something other than satisfaction had she suspected how keenly
Mademoiselle Nathalie had studied her tact and her tactics. It might be
flattery of the sincerest order; but it must, nevertheless, prove rather
too trying for comfort.

It had been in the August of the year 1843 that the court journal of
Petersburg announced, at the head of its budget from Tsarskoë-Selo, at
which fashionable resort the Dravikines were wont to spend part of each
summer, the birth of a daughter to the popular and fascinating Countess,
Caroline Ivanovna. Within the month there began to pour in upon that
lady a flood of congratulations which, upon the occasions of the first
calls, were astutely turned to tactful condolences, it being at length
understood that, while the Count was satisfied with the sex of his
child, the Countess daily vibrated between rage and tears that she
should not have given her house an heir. And since it was unquestionably
madame who ruled the family, young Mademoiselle Nathalie, despite her
remarkable eyes, her curling black hair and her rose-leaf skin, came to
spend her babyhood in the care of the Dravikine serfs; until at the age
of six she talked like a kitchen-maid, and had the manners of a
stable-boy--or a Grand-Duke.

Now, in the autumn of 1849, Count Dravikine, whose promotions came about
as regularly as his wife's allowance was paid, had just been created
Assistant Minister of Public Works; and the dignity thereby superinduced
in him was in exact proportion to the height of his upward step. Upon a
November afternoon, then, as his Excellency was returning from the
Council, he came suddenly upon his daughter, standing in the court-yard
of his house, bare-headed, arms akimbo, feet spread apart in the
attitude of a jockey, her white bonnet thrown upon the muddy flags
before her, her shrill voice raised to a scream, as she pelted her
helpless nurse with a string of oaths that would have done credit to his
Iron Majesty, all for presuming to interrupt her game within doors in
order to take her for the prescribed daily walk in the gardens of the
Tauride.

Count Dravikine, his eyes narrowing with anger, approached the furious
child, lifted her, now kicking frantically, in two powerful arms,
carried her straight to his wife's boudoir, and flung her before her
mother. Then, in a voice that Caroline had heard only twice before, he
expressed his opinion of the up-bringing of his child, finishing with
certain forceful suggestions of change for the future.

Countess Caroline listened without a word; but when her husband left
her, he was well aware that his orders would be obeyed to the letter.
The Countess, indeed, respected her partner and had continued to obey
his rare commands simply because she was aware of the existence of that
very voice and manner. And from that hour the education of her tomboy
became with her a matter of considerably greater moment than the
planning of the winter's campaign, or the choice of a costume for the
first court ball of the season.

It followed that Mademoiselle Nathalie passed through two extremely
trying years. At the end of them, however, she was a child transformed.
No one now could possibly mistake her for a boy. She could read and
write, spell fairly, had some knowledge of arithmetic and the
conjugation of _Amo_: and, finally, her knowledge of intricate profanity
had materially lessened. Nowadays, when she was left alone in her rage,
her most forceful expressions seemed to be "_Dieu de Dieu de Dieu!_" or
"_Sapr-r-risti!_" of her mild little tutor or her more vigorous French
maid.

In spite of this conventional training, Nathalie, whose temperament
contained a strong dash of masculinity, was quite eleven years old
before she began to turn her vivid imagination to dreams of distant
débutantism or still remoter officers, who, in the most brilliant of
uniforms, should appear at miraculous moments in her career, bringing
shame and jealousy to armies of ill-mannered rivals. After the first
three months in the Catherine Institute, this style of amusement also
changed, and she was overcome by a religious mania which, being
encouraged on every hand, might possibly have become really dangerous.
It was by finally emerging from it unscathed, and having, at the age of
thirteen years and six months, resolved herself into an agreeably normal
young person whose quiet manners covered a swift and keenly feminine
brain, that Nathalie Dravikine proved herself worthy of her mother's
steel.

This, indeed, Countess Caroline came herself to perceive. After their
long winter's separation, during those few days together in the
sorrowing house of Gregoriev, during the April of 1857, mother and
daughter came closer together than ever before. Madame Dravikine was
softened by grief; and the consolation she found in her daughter's
presence was as great as it was unexpected. Nathalie's tenderness and
gentleness were certainly traits of the Dravikines, rather than of the
Blashkov family. But Caroline, absorbed in memories of her beloved
sister, failed either to analyze these, or to pay much heed to the two
or three brief scenes between her girl and Ivan, which should have been
summarily checked in their infancy. As it was, Mademoiselle Nathalie
gained some relief from gloom and loneliness in the open admiration of
her cousin; and, after the first day of novelty, found herself taking a
quivering delight in this, her first affair.

The little climax of it all, that five minutes on the platform of the
Petersburg station, which ended in a most uncousinly kiss, flamed
scarcely less hot in the memory of the maiden than in that of Ivan.
Nathalie carried back with her into the gray Petersburg Institute such a
host of flagrant dreams as kept a dozen chums about her through the long
twilights of as many afternoons. For the damsel was an erratic priestess
of Eros; and, at this dream-age, she and her comrades gave to the
technique of forthcoming flirtation a patient analysis that promised
adequate devastation among the courtier army awaiting their acknowledged
young-ladyhood.

Thus comes it that we take a final glance through two childish
prison-houses, in far-separate Russian cities, wherein a youth and a
maiden lie nightly dreaming the same dreams: one of them a spirit
already bonded to the service of mind under the whip of circumstance:
destined to storm rocky heights, from which hard-won eminences he shall
command great views of sweeping plains and far-off mountain ranges; the
other a pretty chrysalis on the eve of her change into a butterfly of
butterflies; who is, nevertheless, to attempt flights overhigh and
overfar for her frail wings; venturing to unfriendly lands whence she
must return with frayed and tired pinions and a bruised and bleeding
little soul. And their two destinies, so divergent, are yet fated, ever
and again, in the swift swinging round their orbits, to approach, touch,
and bound away again in opposite directions, strive though they may to
maintain for a while some parallel course.

Kinder, most surely, just to leave them there: well-guarded children,
walled securely away from the black, bleak world; oblivious of all
things save the white innocency of their dreams of first, most fragile,
high-romantic love.




CHAPTER VII

SPRING AND THE ROSE


The summer of 1860 found Ivan Gregoriev at the end of an experience so
long, so difficult, so seemingly unendurable, that, up to the last few
months of its continuance, he had never indulged in any anticipations of
its conclusion. Like all things, however, his four years' battle came
finally to an end. One, two, three, four: despair, unhappiness,
resignation, and, lastly, some sort of authority as the recognized
leader in his work, at least, of the grandiloquent first form: so passed
the years of his cadetship, till, in the June of 1860, he graduated,
honorably, and went off to spend the summer at Klin in his own fashion,
giving very little thought to that impending commission which was once
again to reorder his existence. Many were the pleasures possible to him
now in that quiet spot. Some part of gilded Moscow--the very best of the
clubs, would have opened to him had he displayed any passion for
baccarat, or the kindred games indulged by the vast majority of his
class. Cared he naught for these, there was yet another, phase of
mannish existence to which he might agreeably be introduced. But when
aspiring sycophants, members of the great mass of impecunious people of
"family," found that this eccentric son of Prince Michael failed to
appreciate the charms of a single member of the opera ballet (now
indulging in the delights of their summer vacation, and expending part
of their savings of fifteen rubles a week upon champagne suppers or
coaching-parties to the various fashionable suburbs), they left him
disgustedly to his own devices: which consisted in pouring over the
orchestro-harmonical works of Monsieur Berlioz; and evolving strange
progressions upon his new Érard.

Meantime, behold Prince Michael, alone in his sanctum, diligently
studying the hieroglyphics on his map--of which the last corner, under
the heading of "Alexander II.," was gradually filling--and otherwise
working most zealously towards a new end. Nor was zeal unnecessary; for
it took him four months to make a certain lofty nobleman see the
unavoidable consequences of the translation and publication of a certain
portion of that map. It was October before a peremptory telegram brought
Ivan, with all his paraphernalia (consisting principally of much-worn
musical scores and a considerable pile of crude manuscript-music), back
to Konnaia Square. That night the young man slept once more in his boy's
room in the west wing; and nine o'clock next morning found him, for the
first time in his life, in his father's innermost cabinet, facing the
powerful form and the difficult eyes of Prince Michael.

The interview was a long one, but contained little repetition, and made
good use of every minute of its three hours. Ivan's whole problematical
future was laid before him, clearly and in detail, as it had been
constructed, during years of consideration, in his father's brain. It
was the one plan of Michael Gregoriev's life which was destined to prove
an absolute waste of energy. Still, there were to be two years of it
literally fulfilled, wherefore we touch upon its preliminaries.
Moreover, as Prince Michael spoke plainly, so we; though Ivan expended
little amazement on the revelation, and appreciated remarkably little of
the powerful influence that had been already brought to bear on his
unimportant behalf. Michael himself was keenly aware that, even in the
face of his map, he dared attempt nothing more till he had accumulated
at least another twenty-four months of--um--ah--inner official history.
But, for the present, he was satisfied with his accomplishment. Ivan, as
graduate of one of the Corps, had been entitled to an ensignship in a
line regiment. Influence, however, obtained for him a first lieutenancy
in the Mounted Grenadiers--the finest regiment of the imperial guard in
Petersburg, and the Emperor's favorite; whose uniforms, moreover, were
calculated to capture the faith and fancy of any damsel, not of blood
royal, in the whole Empire. Last, and, from Michael's point of view,
most important of all, such a position would give Ivan at once the
_entré_ into the best clubs, and, with them, the "smartest" society of
Petersburg.

Using these facts as a preface, Prince Gregoriev proceeded to
sketch out, to his silent auditor, the lines of an ideal (!)
social-politico-military career, untrammelled, at last, by the
traditional ostracism of his race. For his commission would do much for
him; and Madame Dravikine was practically pledged to provide some sort
of reputation for her nephew, being not unaware that the celebrated map
of her brother-in-law contained more than one item of interest centering
about her own most sacred name and title.

Through the period of explanation Ivan sat motionless, eyes down, brows
knit, apparently attentive to his father's words. At the end, when the
Prince had handed him his commission and half a dozen introductory
letters, he bowed to his father, but uttered not one word of thanks or
of understanding:--he--Sophia's son, though he had just received the
gift of such a career as three-fourths of the young men in the country
would have gone on their knees to obtain! Michael was half disposed to
be pleased at the fellow's insolence. But he did not have the fineness
of intuition to dream that his son, watching him closely through
half-shut lids, had felt his blood pounding so furiously through his
pulses that he dared not permit his lips to open for the fraction of a
second lest he should fling some expression of his deep disgust, his
anger--nay, his _hatred_--into his father's face, follow it with his
commission, crushed into a ball, and rush forth from that ghost-haunted
house, never to re-enter it again. Instead of this theatrical
performance, then, Ivan chose silence and inaction. And finally, with
bursting brain, he escaped to his own room, where he found
Piotr--ostensibly waiting with tea.

But, unfortunately for Piotr, the young master was as uncommunicative as
the old; and the door to the inner sanctum had, throughout this
interview, been shut and bolted. Thus mere speculation was all that
found tongue in the serf's quarters that night.

For many hours that afternoon--in fact, till darkness fell--Ivan sat
over the samovar, drank glass after glass of tea, rolled cigarette after
cigarette, and found himself at last still staring at a blank
horizon-line, upon which not one picture consented to appear. Yet,
reason with himself as he would, he knew that the heart within him was
surging with joy. He was going out into the great world of Petersburg,
his own master at last. He was going into the world of light, of gayety,
of wealth; of the army, the court, of--of Nathalie Dravikine! Ay, it was
true! That little love--that first, foolish love--lived in him still,
having survived all the changes of his past changing years. Was it then
to die, now, when his passion was about to be fired afresh by the
presence of its living object?

Pondering thus, Ivan inhaled his cigarette-smoke, and felt the fine
thrills of a subtle intoxication creeping along his nerves till, at
length, his thoughts took a new turn. Standing, as he did, upon a
threshold, looking through an open doorway out upon active life, he
considered those things which he should force from the world for
himself; and first of these, in his desire, was that knowledge which
results only from experience. Kept all his life in the shadows of an
unscalable wall of officialism, there had, nevertheless, reached his
ears the first inarticulate rumors of that great movement of the youth
of Russia towards enlightenment, towards education, towards individual
understanding--a movement unique in the annals of the educational
history of the world. From this period for many years all the youth of
that tremendous Empire--every boy, every _girl_, from the highest to the
lowest, was to rise up, alone, uninfluenced, demanding of age and
guardianship the right to go forth into the world to work, to study--to
learn, in fine, how a great country might in the future be developed.
For a long time, even at Klin, within the walls of the Corps, Ivan had
heard tales almost incredible in their strangeness of bitterness and
rupture among the finest families between father and son, mother and
daughter:--the members of the old regime against the self-constituted
advocates of the new. Nor did a few months put an end to this
incomprehensible movement. Sonya Kovalevsky, in the company of her
chivalrously nominal young husband, had left her parental estate and was
at work in Heidelberg, perfecting that mathematical genius that was to
make her known throughout the scientific world. Following her brilliant
example, went a small army of young, upright and earnest women and
girls, by whom half the universities in Europe were presently invaded,
by no means, as was soon learned, to the detriment of the collegiate
standing, either in ethics or in learning. And as college after college
opened its doors to these young seekers after truth, bigoted Russia
stood aghast at the incalculable prospect of the future.

More knowledge of these facts, and information of and experience in half
a hundred other matters, did Petersburg promise its new lieutenant; and
the more he thought of it all, the more eager did he become to embark at
once upon this new existence. Nor was the time of his departure far
away. He was just a month past his twentieth birthday when, upon a
bitter October morning, he was admitted once more to his father's
sanctum, this time to say good-bye. During the brief interview, Michael
exhibited a touch of feeling, perceiving which Ivan felt a brief pang
that he could not match it. But when a roll of twenty-five hundred
rubles was placed in his hands as the allowance for his first six
months, the young man's gratitude was sincere enough and deep enough to
satisfy the father, who knew more than his son of the expenses entailed
by a life in one of the crack regiments of the guard, and who informed
Ivan a little sarcastically that his lieutenant's pay ought not to do
more than keep him properly gloved and shod.

By the time he emerged from that celebrated closet, with his commission,
his passport, and three letters of recommendation, together with his
money, in his uniform pockets, Ivan found that his hand-luggage had
already been carried out and placed in the sleigh that was to carry him
on the first brief stage of his journey into the great world. And, as he
left the palace and entered the square, his officer's swagger was just a
trifle overdone. For he had shot up, as it were, in a night: he was
twenty and a personage at last!

The journey northward across the snowy flats was all a delight to the
traveller. Those odd little first trains that ran over the famous "ruler
line" between the two Russian capitals, were still sources of wonder and
delight to the peasants of the scattered villages now beginning to
spring up along the railway; and each stopping-point found the train
surrounded by a throng of fur-clad individuals, many of whom had
travelled some versts to see the train: perhaps accompanying a friend
who was to travel a short distance therein; perhaps to get a load of
merchandise or freight destined for a distant town; or, perhaps, just
for the sake of seeing the engine, the cars, and the crowd that would
assemble about them. Many of these last were country priests, idle on
weekdays, desolate enough in their unique isolation, glad to seek any
sort of distraction for its own sake, and even more eager than their
peasant inferiors for the distinction of a single word of greeting or
command from one of the lords of passage. Ivan was pleased to alight
frequently; get a brief walk in the sharp air; address a word or two to
some adoring native; and scatter a handful of kopecks among the
occasional children of the station-masters. But these paltry happenings
were all forgotten, and his heart full to bursting, when at last, on the
evening of the second day, there gleamed, far ahead through the dusk,
the red lights of St. Petersburg.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first week of a young man's independence: his entrance into the
exalted rank of high-born bachelorhood--can it ever again be brought up
out of the past a distinct, coherent memory? Hardly. For Ivan and the
capital spun together in the wildest of dances, during the first days of
their meeting. Ivan's mind whirled in a chaos of regimental
introductions and instruction, wearying hunts for suitable bachelor
quarters, long afternoon hours filled with the pungent smell of tanbark
and the careerings of a horse with whom he never came to be on terms of
absolute equality; evenings spent in the glamour of strange restaurants,
the discussion of French _entrées_, and the contemplation of
much-dressed denizens of the high and the half worlds; and, finally,
retirement in a room at the Hôtel Bellevue, where a young lieutenant
with only two thousand rubles in his pocket was not a person of any
special importance.

This haze of memory terminated, finally, and objects appeared in a
clearer atmosphere, when young Gregoriev became half-owner of a charming
apartment in the irreproachable _Bashkov Peréolouk_, ten minutes' walk
from his barracks, in partnership with a fellow-officer, one Vladimir de
Windt, destined to become his friend of friends. And shortly after this
momentous step, Ivan took another, by presenting his card in the
_Serghievskaia, numéro 843_, where his aunt, Madame Dravikine,
vouchsafed him ten minutes of her much-besought time, it being the
afternoon of one of her receptions. In her small, but admirably arranged
drawing-rooms, were gathered the cream of a certain set of Petersburg
society, now met for the first time this season, and making the rooms
echo with their particular variety of scandalous, intensely personal
news acquired during a long summer, and apparently having been held back
for exploitation at this special hour. Unintelligible as it proved to
Ivan's unsophisticated ears, he listened with awe to the sound of royal,
and other lofty and sacred names bandied a

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