CHAPTER IIMICHAEL
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 connectedwith 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 sideof 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, hisconcentration 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 humanbeing. 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 acoupthat 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 withinthe 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 thesame 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: whohad 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 havesome 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 hadplayed 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 thehors d'œuvresand 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 haddrunk. 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—tothat?"
With a low exclamation, Caroline went forward and fell upon her knees beside her sister, asking for pardon between her shaking sobs.
CHAPTER IIITHE 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 possiblefrom 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 otheryears 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 betweenPeter the Greatand theArabian 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 unknowncompanions: 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 explanationof 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 boyhoodMichael 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 andagain 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 beenhis 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! Youknow, 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, andI 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 notwantthis 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 atouch 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 daringcoup, 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 intothe 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—fromhim!"