"78 Kerzonskaia, St. Petersburg,"Tuesday, January 9th, 11P.M."Dear Cousin:—Since our last talk together in far-away Moscow, the consciousness of you and of your question have been always with me. To-night I have been sitting here, alone in my boudoir, for two hours, trying, desperately, tothink. I have wished to give myself fair opportunity for finding out my real mind; but, miserable thing that I am! the realIwill not respond."Ivan, my husband has been buried a week and a day! True, for years my tie to him was bondage. I have, to-night, a far tenderer feeling for you than I can remember ever having feltfor him. Yet, in spite of this, I cannot bid you hope. I am widowed; and the first numbness of the unexpected shock has not left me yet. I can say to you truly, cousin, that I love you: that the comradeship we have known is something which I shall try to continue while we both live: though we are far beyond our twenties now, Ivan. But more than this, more than pure friendship, seems to me impossible. Marriage—even though it be with the love of my girlhood—is still half-terrible to me. I think that certain memories of my existence with Alexis can never be wiped away."Am I cruel, dear Ivan? Oh, I so wantnotto be! But, indeed, I think I am not yet wholly myself. So I bid you remember that I have suffered very cruelly from the 'love' of a man; and I pray you, for that reason, to try to forgive me when I tell you that friendship is all I can ever want now: that as a friend I shall write you; and as a friendyoumust know,"Your affectionate, sorrowful,"Nathalie D. F."
"78 Kerzonskaia, St. Petersburg,"Tuesday, January 9th, 11P.M.
"Dear Cousin:—Since our last talk together in far-away Moscow, the consciousness of you and of your question have been always with me. To-night I have been sitting here, alone in my boudoir, for two hours, trying, desperately, tothink. I have wished to give myself fair opportunity for finding out my real mind; but, miserable thing that I am! the realIwill not respond.
"Ivan, my husband has been buried a week and a day! True, for years my tie to him was bondage. I have, to-night, a far tenderer feeling for you than I can remember ever having feltfor him. Yet, in spite of this, I cannot bid you hope. I am widowed; and the first numbness of the unexpected shock has not left me yet. I can say to you truly, cousin, that I love you: that the comradeship we have known is something which I shall try to continue while we both live: though we are far beyond our twenties now, Ivan. But more than this, more than pure friendship, seems to me impossible. Marriage—even though it be with the love of my girlhood—is still half-terrible to me. I think that certain memories of my existence with Alexis can never be wiped away.
"Am I cruel, dear Ivan? Oh, I so wantnotto be! But, indeed, I think I am not yet wholly myself. So I bid you remember that I have suffered very cruelly from the 'love' of a man; and I pray you, for that reason, to try to forgive me when I tell you that friendship is all I can ever want now: that as a friend I shall write you; and as a friendyoumust know,
"Your affectionate, sorrowful,"Nathalie D. F."
There are men, perhaps, who would have read hope into this letter and have clung to it, willy-nilly. Ivan was not of these. Self-deception was never a vice of his; and, from this hour, the soul of Nathalie Féodoreff stood revealed to him more clearly than to herself.
Once through the letter he sat motionless, the black-bordered sheet crushed tightly in his right hand. He had forgotten the paper on which her words to him were traced. Perhaps he had forgotten the words themselves. But the throbbing of his heart continued: the veins in his temples still stood out, like purple whip-cords. It was late in the night before there appeared, in the dark room, the vision of his mother's angel-face gazing at him, her clear eyes filled with mingled love and understanding; and midnight had long struck before that which he instinctively expected was finally given: when, like a diapason, crashing,fortissimo, through the dark, rolled the magnificent, despairing chords of the final theme of the great "Tosca Symphony"—themotif, the epitome, of his own, dark life.
CHAPTER XXITOSCA REGNANT
During the weeks immediately succeeding this last repulse, Ivan suffered as he had suffered in the early days of Nathalie's marriage. It was not easy for him to comprehend why Madame Féodoreff's letter should affect him so bitterly. He made all the familiar efforts: tried every resource known to him of old. They failed. Not only had his tranquillity departed; not only had his work been turned from joy to drudgery; not only was the pleasant savor of his quiet existence gone; nay: physically, mentally, he felt himself sick, and in want. His brain played him false. His sleep deserted him. His carefully guarded existence turned upon him, mocking.
Ivan at last began fully to realize what the past three months had done: how, in them, all the old love-bitterness, all the accumulated loneliness and hardship of his solitary years, piled together, had been transmuted into a mighty hope, the destruction of which swept away his carefully-reared edifice of artificial content. Out of all the women in the world, he had wanted, had asked for, in all his life, none but Nathalie. But her he had needed, terribly; and she was gone: gone out of his yearning heart, and arms, and soul—for good!
It was now a long time since he had begun his reign in the house of his fathers: that dreary house of evil name in which pure women had been overcome as by some poison, some miasma of foul living, and, generationafter generation, had died there, down to his mother's day. This, for more than two centuries had been the tradition of that grewsome palace, till it was famed throughout the city for the sinister line of men who had dwelt therein, and had finally died out with the last Prince. Ivan, when he took up his residence there so suddenly, had put behind him his memories of the old-wife's tales, and his own boyhood experience. This, as he progressed farther and farther along the road of power, had become easier daily until—a woman stepped in, and the power of Prince Ivan faded and died. In the early days of his disappointment, he was beset by all the ghosts of his fathers. Himself once more a prey to that black Tosca that is the heritage of every thinking Russian, he yielded without resistance to thoughts and memories as morbid and as dreary as those on which his mother, years ago, had fed her dread disease. So, after a few midwinter weeks of brooding, lassitude, and sleepless fasting, his personal servants, there being no friend at hand to replace them, ventured to remonstrate with their master. Piotr was now as much his devoted slave as was old Sósha, who had recently retired from active duty to the kitchen-corner, where his reminiscences and his pipe-smoke together flavored that cheery room. Sósha had no hesitation in taking Piotr's lead, and begging the master either to bring home company to amuse him, or to change his abode to some more fashionable quarter of the city, whither all his dependants would happily follow him.
To these simple appeals Ivan listened, certainly; but, bound down by that cruel lassitude which is the direst symptom of chronic melancholy, he refused every suggestion, and left his servants to return to their quarters, dismally shaking their gray heads over his mental state.
So through the winter. But the flowing of spring-tide rouses the dullest to contemplate some possiblechange of routine. And when that blessed season once more breathed upon White Russia, Ivan woke to the memory of old desire. From his mother, who, as a girl, had run wild over the huge Blashkov estates, Ivan inherited that intense love of nature without which an artist must be always maimed. This year, especially, he found himself daily dreaming of the perfumed nights and sweet-aired days of the country of his boyhood: his mother's favorite resort, at Klin, whither she had been wont to convey him in May, and whence she departed, tearfully, under heavy pressure, in October; though twice in her life she had managed to spend the greater part of the winter there, in the white wilderness hateful to her lord. "Maidonovo" was a moderate-sized house, set in the midst of twenty acres of land situated a half-mile from the extremity of the village of Klin. A year after his wife's death Michael Gregoriev had sold the place, which he had always detested. Of it Ivan now dreamed, incessantly; till, late in April, he entered into negotiations that were presently to electrify his household and that part of Moscow's population with whom he figured as something of a personage.
It was the twenty-eighth of the month when Piotr, after a two-hour closeting with his master, flew to his fellows with astounding news.
The great Gregoriev palace was, in less than a month, to pass out of the hands of the last of the family, and into the possession of the government, by whom it was to be turned over to the Department of Police. Moreover—and Piotr's emphasis on the word brought a sharp stillness in place of the rising buzz of comment—instead of a place in Moscow, Monsieur le Prince had bought his mother's former country-house at Klin, whither he intended to remove immediately, there to pass at least the summer, retaining as many of his present household as cared to remain with him. (Here a smile, at the ideaof any of the twenty's leaving the service of a bachelor, a lover of solitude and simplicity, who would sooner have struck himself than one of his servants!)—Finally, the whole change was to be completed in two or three days; and a week, at the outside, would see the new existence well begun.—Whereupon Piotr, all his news given, descended from his imaginary rostrum, as eager as his fellows to have a voice in the impending discussion.
It is no very rare thing for the Russian May-day to wear an aspect of January. But May snow is, at least, a transient thing; and there are years when the first day of the gentle month is such as no country would repudiate. Nature did honor to her disciple; for the world was a glory of young green and gold, as Ivan, bowed with memories, made his progress out of the present, along the white, country road to the house of the long ago.
Winter had ended ten days before; and Russia, with that marvellous rapidity with which she accomplishes all change, had already risen from snow-sheet and mud-bed, and stood negligéed in a robe of gauzy-green, all flower-sprigged and sun-flecked. Three days more, and the fruit trees, for which Klin is famous, would be bowers of pink and white. And behind the flying droschky, there actually arose a fine, white film of dust! House doors stood open to the milky air; and Staroste and lonely Village Priest alike were at work in their respective gardens.
Ivan, now emerged from his black, winter mood, was tremulous with emotion; and, as his vehicle left the village behind, his eyes ranged over the broad country-side, reading, as in a familiar book, each old, beloved character printed on the open page of the landscape seen last during the summer he had spent here alone, after his mother's death.
When Ivan alighted at his own gate, Sósha stood there to welcome him and take upon himself the customary haggle with the driver. Nor did the old man, noting his master's face, so much as address a word to him whose expression he read with the sagacity of one trained to the task. Hence Ivan, his heart overflowing, went at his own, lingering gait towards that open doorway wherein, it seemed, Sophia's slender form must presently appear.
He entered the house alone, turning at once into the little morning-room, where he looked vaguely about for his mother's tambour-frame which was not in its place beside the window. Hither, an instant later, came Piotr, announcing, respectfully:
"The large room above has been prepared for your Excellency. The trunks are all unpacked.—At what hour shall I serve the tea—and where?"
Ivan started, looked about him dazedly, and realized that he had not eaten since early morning, though the hour was now past four. Then he said, rather wearily: "Tea here, Piotr, in an hour. After that I will see you and Sósha. Meantime, let me be left absolutely alone. I want to go over the whole house. See that I meet no one."
"Your Excellency is obeyed." And Piotr had bowed and was gone.
Ivan flung hat, gloves and stick upon the table, and then looked slowly round once more.—Twenty-one years since his mother had gazed on these familiar walls?—Impossible! Two decades of other lives intervening between him and the summer in which sad-eyed Sophia had secretly watched the coming of her hideous Octopus of disease? Nay! He would not let that thought endure. But every trace of intrusion must be put away: if, indeed, it had left a trace. At least the belongings of his mother, now removed, must come back. He shoulddwell here with her beside him, in his heart, always!—But certainly this room, save for the tambour and scattered wools, was quite unchanged: roughly-tinted buff walls, polished floor, with its delicately faded Persian rug, heavy chairs and sofa, ay, the very spindle-legged table near the bay, were all here, forming the old ensemble. It was almost incredible.—But Ivan had discounted the penetration of those servants who, in the long ago, had loved their lady as now they loved her son.
With a heart violently throbbing, a throat painfully knotted under the strain of associations long cherished in the inner sanctum of his memory, Ivan passed slowly through the long, cold drawing-room towards the staircase at its farthest end, and so, slowly, upward. As of old, the slippery stairs were uncarpeted; and his heart jumped anew as his eyes met the thing they sought: a small, round knot-hole, in a corner of the seventh step, which had been filled in with a piece of wood rather darker than the rest, and which, as a boy, he had been possessed to cut out with his knife, only to be inevitably caught at and punished after each attempt.
At the head of the stairs still stood the great, oaken chest, the bottom drawer of which had been dedicated to the use of his most precious toys. That was empty, now. He must not break the spell by opening it. So, with a smile that was an inaudible sigh, he passed on to his mother's bedroom: that room in which, on a New Year's night now thirty-eight years gone by, a lonely wife had prayed God for the boon of motherhood.
The very shrine before which Sophia had knelt, bracket, ikon, and brass candlestick, still hung on the far wall, beside the bed. Ivan's eyes paused at it, and he was seized by the impulse to speak to his mother from that spot. Repressing himself, however, he sat down beside a table on which he leaned an elbow, supportinghis head upon his hand. Presently his eyes drooped shut. The unwonted sweetness of the air, the long, twining sun-shadows of late afternoon, the intense, country stillness, all of them helped the oppression of memory, till gradually he began to feel himself enwrapped in a shimmering, elusive mist of half-real dreams.
He perceived that the windows were fast-shut, double-paned, their cracks stuffed with the customary winter moss. Still the raving wind came through: a freezing breath. Daylight was gone. In its place—was this some pale moonbeam straying through the uncurtained window, to mingle its ghostly light with the flaring yellow flame of the guttering candle?—And that figure that crouched, dumbly, on the floor, beneath the protective ikon? Who was she?—And who the other two who now resolved themselves out of the creeping mist and glided towards the sleeping woman?—a tall and radiant personage, leading by the hand a little child?—It seemed not strange:—neither new nor amazing. Ivan knew the gentle lady who had prayed: knew also the Majestic One who brought the answer to that piteous prayer. But the child—the shadow-shape whose tiny hand was clasped in that of the Divine Woman?—Ah,that—
Ivan shuddered, started, and, by a violent effort, flung off the clinging vision. Old Sósha, standing in the doorway, was saying, in his gentle, plaintive voice:
"The tea, your Excellency!—It is as you commanded.—You have journeyed far and waited long!"
"Waited!—I commanded tea in an hour. It can't be five."
"Pardon, your Excellency, the bells have rung six."
Ivan sprang to his feet with an exclamation. Then, suddenly, he swayed, caught himself, by means of the table, and sank back in his chair with a suppressedgroan. The old servitor ran forward, fear in his face; but Ivan, smiling at him, waved him away:
"It is quite well with me, Sósha.—Go bring the samovar up here:—here, to my mother's room."
So, with less thought of Nathalie in his heart than he had known for many a long day, Ivan began his life at Klin: an existence which, barring one restless interval of travelling, was to continue till the end of material things came for him. He was not yet old in years. The experiences that had been given him were scarcely of a theatrical kind. Those which had gone deepest, and upon which his soul had fed itself, had been scarce visible to the world, could not have been surmised by his closest friends. His scars were the scars of temperament: the result of an abnormal capacity for feeling. The vividness of his imagination heightened petty trials to a semblance of wanton cruelty. Impersonal matters he unconsciously made his own. Echoes of the greatWeldschmerz, coming to him from the void, vibrated their way through his nature till they emerged again, imprisoned in harmonies of his creating.
This summer, for example, the first that he spent at Klin, brought him scarce one outward incident worthy of note; yet it was to him a time overflowing with events—of mind, and memory. To an outsider or amondaine, the Maidonovo routine would have seemed monotonous to a verge of imbecility. Ivan, ghost-haunted, found each minute of each day pregnant with its own suggestion: saw his life as a tapestry, the design of which was woven upon a background of surpassing natural beauty—the climax and gradualdecrescendoof the year. He had emerged from that long period of semi-idleness in which he had been able to do no more than refine a mass of half-finished work; and was now feeling a fresh joy in a renewed and strong-flowing power; anexcitement in the evolving of new ideas. September found ready for the printer five new works; the first of them and the biggest, his "Fifth Symphony," theandanteof which must remain forever unrivalled, while the work as a whole can only be surpassed by its successor in the same form, Ivan's last and greatest creation: the "Tosca Symphony." Beside this he had written the "D-minor Violin Concerto" for Brodsky; the "Liturgy of Joseph of Arimathea," for four voices with organ accompaniment; half a dozen of the melodious songs that were his special delight: and, lastly, the little, one-act opera "Iris," for which he had written both libretto and score, and which created a furore on its performance in Petersburg, the winter after his death.
The months that produced this large amount of work were spent in a depth of solitude such as only Ivan would have dared to undergo. Nathalie's letters, which grew more frequent as the days went by, and to which he faithfully replied; two visits from Kashkine, one from Mily Balakirev, and half a dozen from Nicholas, who was to be daunted by no amount of taciturnity, were the only incidents of the period. Balakirev, indeed, had brought with him a young protégé, one Rimsky-Korsakow, (since heard from,) to worship at the shrine of Russia's Gregoriev; whereupon that hero, highly disgusted, behaved so boorishly that the chagrined Balakirev refused Nicholas' next plea, and would not go again. Ivan's one, regular recreation were his long, solitary walks through the country-side, disturbed only by the clamorings of children, whom he had spoiled with kopecks, and whose chatterings interrupted his thoughts no more than did the voices of squirrels and birds—from which latter, indeed, he got many an idea.
These five-mile walks, with four hours in the morning and two in the evening at the piano, an hour or so spent in skimming over some of the scores in his vast musicallibrary, considerable reading, especially at meal-times, of Russian, French and English novelists and the German philosophers, whom he approached worshipfully, formed the occupations of his quiet life during many years. And, as the first months passed, he began to realize that his painfully acquired philosophy of living was demonstrating its practicability in the many volumes of his daily journal.
No artist, nor, indeed, any scholar or original thinker of temperament, can progress far in his chosen work without acquiring a certain philosophic attitude of his own that makes for religion; though it be no more than the result of orderly habits of thought: its premise gleaned merely from a continual subconscious synthesis of the sum of personal existence. The type of the synthesis matters no more than the form of its result: mockery and atheism of Schopenhauer or von Hartmann; poetic illogicalities of Hegel; dizzy flights of Schelling; materialism of Locke; idealism of Berkeley; magnificent transcendentalism of the imperial Kant;—they become one at last. Truth is one and indivisible; therefore it is the sincerity of thought, not its fashion, that matters. True, Ivan Gregoriev, musician by necessity, philosopher by instinct only, left in the end little record of his answer to the riddle. But this was rather well than ill. For, from the very beginning, Ivan's "glimpse behind the veil" was distorted, clouded, smirched, by an unconquerable cynicism: a personal resentment and rebellion against the God who stood forth as the acknowledged creator of the miserably unhappy race of men. The eternal question:—if God be only Omnipotent Good, why the existence of evil?—he asked in ever-growing bitterness, till so-called altruism became to him a mockery; and he took a painful delight in twisting his wisdom into the most fantastic forms, which he also made the sport and butt of formal logic;knowing always, in his own heart, the evil that was wrought in him by those bitter reflections that formed the refuge of his idle hours. Ah! Had Nathalie but cared!
September was gone ere Ivan wrote the dedications of his five newly-finished works. And then, thinking of the men so remembered, he realized that they all happened, for the moment, to be in Moscow. Thereupon he suddenly decided to invite them to Maidonovo for forty-eight hours, and, during that time, to hold a manuscript festival, in which his and their unpublished works should be played each by its composer, and criticised by the listeners.
An invitation from Ivan was not now a thing to be refused. Therefore the evening of October 10th found six men assembled round the samovar in the transformed living-room of Ivan's home. For the time, the host had thrown off his habitual air of grave reserve, and, responding to the friendly and congenial atmosphere around him, expanded to a gayety, a magnetic boyishness, that fascinated as much as it amazed the four who knew him as no others could; and sent Avélallement, a wealthy German dilettante, whose acquaintance with the famous Russian consisted of a long correspondence and a fanatical admiration of his work, back to his native Hamburg determined on bringing Ivan to Germany, in order that the most sentimental, hospitable and musical race in the world might come to know, as he did, the great-hearted Russian, whose only possible fault was that he had not been born on the other side of the frontier.
That evening, and the day that followed, were more delightful than Ivan had dared hope. Surrounded by those who were big enough to understand him, (and, though he did not realize this, he was now generally recognized as too great a genius to be longer victimizedby jealousy) he himself shone out with a kind of radiant optimism quite foreign to his general humor. The new works were gone over, and praise, with thanks for the dedications, given with a sincerity that was unmistakable. Finally, hispièce de résistance, the symphony, was played again and yet again; first by one musician and then by another, the rest hanging upon each note and chord and progression with the delighted appreciation of men who understood that they were hearing a masterpiece which was to be reverenced by generations to come, and which was to bring honor to all Russian music. By the second evening Rubinstein, his kindly face beaming with pleasure, was arranging the program of an extra concert in his Vienna series to be devoted entirely to Ivan's works. Ivan promised him the symphony for its first performance there; and Brodsky agreed at once to play the newconcerto, the study of which he intended to begin, from the manuscript, on the following Monday.
It was perhaps the sharp and painful contrast of the incident that closed this holiday, which made it afterwards shine so brightly in Ivan's memory: a memory to which, in later days, he was to turn again and again, as to the happiest hours of his professional life. His success might not have been really very great.—And yet, the pressure of Kashkine's hand upon his shoulder; the friendly light in Rubinstein's faded eyes, the painful hand-clasp of muscular Balakirev—surely these things showed that the old cabal against him had at last come to a natural end? Moreover the attitude of open admiration adopted both by Brodsky and Avélallement, both of whom lived entirely abroad, plainly betrayed the esteem in which he was held in other lands. Yes; for one hour—perhaps the only one of his life—Ivan felt to the full the exaltation of success, of applause, of the intimate knowledge that, however great hispraises, they were no more than his work deserved. He was a successful artist: his feet on one of the last steps of that great, golden stairway, around the foot of which thronged such struggling crowds; the serene heights of which were so little trod.—Ay, it had been given him, his bright day! How could he complain when, at eleven o'clock on the second night, old Sósha entered the room and handed a telegram to his master?
Brodsky and Balakirev were in the middle of a haunting melody of the Steppes, arranged by Mily himself, when the sharp exclamation of Ivan brought a quick silence, and turned every eye towards him:
"I have a message here, my friends.—It is bad news.—I—I must—" he passed his hand across his brow, and thought for a moment: "I must get to Moscow to-night, somehow.—A friend—a man, is dying there, in the Cherémétiev Hospital.—You understand? You forgive me?—It is urgent I should reach him before the end."
There was the natural chorus of sympathy, regrets, assurances of understanding. Only Brodsky betrayed a touch of the curiosity which all felt; for, even to those who knew him best, Ivan's life and connections had always had about them a suggestion of mystery which made his every affair an object of unwonted interest to those who knew him. But to none—not even to Nicholas—did Ivan disclose the identity of the man, or the exact nature of the agitation that spoke of hidden grief.
He made his preparations quietly; bade good-bye to the friends who, though they were to sleep at Maidonovo, would be gone before he could return; and, taking the bag prepared for him by Sósha, hurried out to the sleigh that awaited him. Seventy minutes after the arrival of the message, the Petersburg mail thundered into Klin on its way to Moscow. Ivan, solitary midnight passenger,was put on board, together with the mail-bags and registered express.
During the two-hour ride through the roaring blackness, Ivan did not sleep, and scarcely moved. His mind was occupied in going over and over two scenes of the days before his succession: one, the afternoon on which a certain starving youth, fed and warmed by him, had told the story of his struggle for an artistic education; the other, his final interview, two years later, with that same youth, soiled, then, in mind and body; sodden with vice; mentally rotten with the knowledge thereof: the fair god of his ideal dragged from its altar and sold, with all the rest of his great heritage, for less than a mess of pottage.—Again, as he neared the city, these memories were augmented by an anticipation: the imagined picture of the third and last interview he was destined to have with the tragic boy. Ivan was to get his last glimpse into that soul to-night. He was going to one who, dying, had called to him from the depths: Joseph Kashkarin, the Pole.
Dawn had not yet risen. Moscow, wind-swept, dripping with wild bursts of rain, its desolation augmented by the mournful shrieking of wind through the narrow streets, was shrouded in the intense darkness of the last hour of the night, when Ivan at last dismounted from his droschky at the door of the great hospital given to the city by Count Cherémétiev. He found no difficulty in entering; for there is no moment of the day or night when some wretched soul may not find a refuge there.
At the same time, the "Prince" Gregoriev, together with a piece of gold, did serve to cut many yards from the red tape that impedes all progress in Russia. A brief explanation, two minutes' wait, the appearance of a young man garbed in spotless white, a walk uptwo flights of stairs and along a chilly corridor, and Ivan found himself at last halting before a closed door. Here the nurse turned to him saying, softly:
"We were obliged to remove him from the ward at noon to-day. We prefer not to allow deaths in the general rooms if we can avoid it.—Then too, early this evening, the man was suddenly paid for."
"Paid for!—By whom?"
"A lady. We do not know the name. She refused to give it, and did not ask to see the patient; but she left a considerable sum for him."
"Why did you not send for me sooner?"
"He never mentioned your Excellency's name till this afternoon. And of course we did not dream that you—you knew him. He has been conscious only at intervals since the hemorrhage yesterday; and he is also under the influence of opiates."
"He is dying of—what?"
"Galloping consumption; and—" The man hesitated.
"What?"
"Well, it is a complicated case. We think there must have been a touch ofdelirium tremensjust before he was brought in—a week ago. Alcohol, you see, is the best thing we know for consumption. If the case hadn't been aggravated by privation—hunger, exposure, want,—we might possibly have saved him, at least for the time. But I assure your Excellency that everything has been done—"
"You think it absolutely impossible to save himnow—if no expense is spared? I give youcarte-blanche—"
"The man is dying, Prince Gregoriev. Only a miracle could help him now."
There was a moment's silence before Ivan said, very softly: "Let us go in."
The room was small, rather bare, but clean and well-warmed by the huge stove built into the wall, withhalf of it extending into the room beyond. A second nurse was sitting in a chair beside a small table which held medicines and the night-lamp. This man rose as his successor entered, and, at the door, a word or two was spoken between them. Ivan caught the phrase: "No change." Then he halted beside the iron bed and stood looking down on the motionless form of Joseph.
Joseph!—Joseph Kashkarin, this bearded, hollow-eyed, gray-lipped man, with the spots of scarlet flaming from his projecting cheekbones, and throwing the death-hue of the rest of the face into still more dreadful prominence? Joseph's, that clawlike hand, with the broken, stained and shapeless nails, which once had wielded a brush that created the laughing face of Irina Petrovna—the woman who had brought him down to death? A great shudder seized upon Ivan; and, for an instant, he was forced to turn away. Then the nurse brought him a chair; and he removed his coat and hat and seated himself beside the cot, his face resolutely straightened into an expressionless gravity. As he watched, the nurse administered a hypodermic of strychnia, and then bathed the burning face and hands with cool water. The task completed, the man turned to Ivan, saying, nonchalantly:
"The stimulant may pull him up, sir, for fifteen minutes, if you wish to speak to him. But he's failing. He'll hardly linger to see the sun."
In spite of himself Ivan betrayed something of the thrill that shot through him at these words. Till now he had scarcely realized that he was actually to watch a man start upon that dread passage which leads—none knoweth whither. He sat wrapped in solemn thought until, presently, the form beneath the blankets stirred, and Joseph began to cough:—a cough that shook and racked his emaciated frame as if it would tear flesh from bone. The nurse hurried to his side. But it wasfive minutes before the fit had ceased and the sick man, raised high upon his pillows, regained his breath and the strength to open his glittering eyes, which fell at once upon Ivan. For a moment they stared, dazedly. Then a distorted smile softened the line of the pallid lips:
"You!—Then they did send—and youcame! I'm not dreaming?" He spoke in a whisper, as if to himself; but the words were distinct.
"No, Joseph, I am here.—Joseph, why did you wait?—Why did you not come to me, years ago?—I hunted so long! I never dreamed of leaving you longer than for that one night. I have prayed that—" He broke off, suddenly, remembering that excitement might bring on the cough again. And indeed Joseph's eyes were already closed once more.
Ivan waited, patiently, one, two, five minutes. Then the whisper came again: "That is a long time ago. But I remember why I didn't go to you: why I concealed myself. It was because I was ashamed.—We all wish to hide our dirty souls from every one—even from God, I suppose. Well,youhad been really good to me; and you were my ideal: the ideal of my best self, and of my art. How could I go to you, when you must see the depths I had got to."
"But you are letting me see you now, and there is nothing dreadful in it," put in Ivan, gently.
"Ah, now IknowI am dying. You cannot despise a man who is facing eternity."
"I should not have despised you then, if—you had cared.—You see, Joseph, after all, we're brothers. Your God is also mine. We both wanted to serve Him in the same fashion; for all the arts are kin. And I knew how great your talent was: how fine would be the expression of the best in you."
"Ah! That is it!" Joseph sat forward, eagerly, and his faint voice wavered. "'The expression of thebest,'—that, Ivan Mikhailovitch, is what you tried to give me the chance for: what you always have done yourself. You were moving steadily upward. I was always plunging farther down.—And it was my wilful choice. I think I know the truth now. My service of God was never freely given. It was not the best I could do: the finest work I was capable of, just for the sake of the work, and the high thoughts it brought, to me and to others. There were more sordid motives. I wanted—first, fame: adulation from people; secondly, no, perhaps most of all,money. For of that I had never had enough for common necessities in all my life. So, even if there had been no—woman" (that word almost inaudibly,) "I should not have done what you believed I could do.
"Art!—the great sun-goddess, that shines afar! She it is that gives us the gift: the chance to work. But she knows all our hearts; and she judges our deeds honestly. That which she accepts of us, she lays at the feet of the Most High.—Is it well?—Thou art Abel. Thine offering of the lamb is more pleasing than the first-fruits of the harvest. On me,—Cain, God frowns, and the devil grins.—He is grinning through the wine. I hear his laugh amid the clink of the coin.—He is in red; and I flaunt my mistress in his colors. Then we dance: first for sheer delight, with the music. Then the whips come down on our shoulders, and we go on.—Faster!—Higher!—Leap and prance, and watch the grin expand.—Ah-h-h-h!—Are the shadows there deep enough, rich enough, do you think? And are the lips too much a 'thread of scarlet'?—Oh the opalline lights in that cloud!—How to blend such colors on a palette?—Nature? She is mocking, too.
"But oh, Irina, I see it now, at last! The dawn—the dawn is here. The night is gone. I have dreamed, I suppose: ugly dreams.—But they, too, are done with.—Look,my beloved, it is morning! The first sunbeam shines there—and is reflected in your dear eyes!" And, lifting his thin body, arms wide-stretched, eyes a-glitter, Joseph made his last reach up, after the great sun-shaft he had sought so long:—reached, and so, with a faint, far cry of satisfaction, had it, and was gone.
Ivan, feeling his way to the window, opened the curtains and looked out through blurred eyes upon the holy city. The dying man had, indeed, beheld the day. Yet no sunlight glittered upon the Kremlin domes; only the velvet blackness of the dark hour had melted, and given place to a twilight of sullen gray. Then, through the mind of Ivan, exhausted by the emotions of a sleepless day and night, there shot a pang—not of sorrow, but of deep, irresistibleenvy, for the man who had passed away, out of the Russian autumn, into the glory of the everlasting sun-land.
CHAPTER XXIITHE LION
Before Ivan left the hospital that morning, he had made all arrangements and provided a generous check for Joseph's funeral. Then, utterly exhausted, he drove to a quiet hotel, sent a telegram bidding Piotr join him with necessary clothes, and finally retired. He remained in the city for four days:—until the interment was over. During that time there occurred two incidents of which he never afterwards was heard to speak, but of which the remembrance never left him; for they eventually proved to be the end of his long and dramatic acquaintance with Irina Petrovna Lihnoff.
For all the unspeakable heartlessness of her later career, this many-sided woman showed deep emotion over the tragic end of the man whose youth and career she had ruined. Ivan recognized the fact that, even had he not appeared, Joseph would have received every attention, every aid, while he lived; every honor after his death. And her first visit to Ivan was to beg that he would allow her to reimburse him, at least for the funeral just ended. Ivan's refusal was unalterable. Nor was his feeling of repugnance towards her softened, either by this incident, or by her later well-acted but over-theatrical appeal to his pity, his former affection for her, for the possible restoration of his consideration, even though entire forgiveness for the irrevocable past should be impossible. Ivan unfortunately read her too well. Did he do her an injustice when he said to himself,bitterly, that Prince Gregoriev was worth an attempt which would not have been wasted on Ivan the composer?
It was noon on the fourteenth day of the month when Ivan re-entered the lonely house at Klin, whence he was practically not to emerge for five long years.
In the years between the October of 1879 and that of 1884, he performed the hardest labor of his career. His life was one of Spartan simplicity; nor, though about him Russia fainted beneath the terrible blows of nihilist knouts, did he once lift his head to catch so much as an echo of the furore. Unlike the majority of his fellow-countrymen, he took little interest in the tempestuous history of the period. Still, the event of March 13, 1881, did affect him powerfully enough to produce the most beautiful of all requiem masses: one worthy of the martyrdom it commemorated. For the Liberator met the base reward of his long and arduous struggle to help his people as nobly as had his great American predecessor, who, sixteen years before, had also fallen by a traitor's hand. Yet it is said that none who had known him doubted, as they laid the shattered form of Alexander down, for the last time, on the iron cot of his soldier's room in the great Winter Palace, that the sigh of the dying Czar was no confession of pain, but rather one of relief at this swift solution of his unsolvable problem.
It was two years before the third of that royal name dared don his heavy crown; and when that was done, it was Loris Melikov who became Czar. But, though the secret societies might shriek and rave of the necessary doom of the double tyrant to be downed, the people themselves had tired a little of the everlasting howls of bomb-thrower and assassin; and quieter years succeeded those of Russia's greatest shame.
Ivan, from his hermitage, took some part in the coronationfestival; for from his hand came the Triumphal March, and the great "Victory" overture, played in the Kremlin Square by an orchestra of one hundred and seventy pieces, augmented by bells and cannon.
This was, however, one of the works that Ivan never heard. At the time of its first performance he refused the invitation to conduct it, and did not so much as think of going to Moscow to hear it played. He was in a very different mood from one of triumph; for there had come upon him the bitter grief of Nicholas Rubinstein's death. For two years the old man had faded, visibly. During the summer of 1881, he had spent much time at Maidonovo, where he helped Ivan with the final polishing of his last opera, the famous "Boris Telekin." That autumn, all the old circle conspired together to keep him in the country, where Ivan longed to tend him as a son. But the old man, dominant to the last, insisted on returning to town and resuming his work at the Conservatoire. In the February of 1883 he actually went to Paris, to help Anton and Davidoff prepare for their great festival there. The journey, however, fulfilled Kashkine's bitter prophecy. Nicholas died in the French capital on the evening of March 11th; and Ivan, struck to the heart, crept yet closer into the solitude and isolation of Klin, where, for three months, he yielded himself to Tosca and opium, till a second catastrophe in the Russian musical world was averted only by Kashkine, who routed out his friend and forcibly insisted on beginning rehearsals for "Boris Telekin"; which opera saw itspremièrein November; and became the sensation of the season.
This one was the last of Gregoriev's operas. He had already expended too much time on a form unsuited to his talent; and when "Boris" left his hands perfected, he completely lost interest in it, and began at once to devote himself to his unnumbered symphony, the"Æneid"; one of the greatest of musical epics, and well worthy of the poem whence it had risen. The fruit of the winter of 1883 and 1884, included also the too-popular "Nathalie" dances, (where, for once, Ivan over-melodized); the "Cinderella" ballet; and his symphonic poem "Dream of Italy." These completed, he sank into a state of torpor from which nothing seemed to rouse him. Overwork had shorn him alike of vitality and of the imagination which had become as the breath of life to him. And the brief tone-poem "Hypatia," forced after a fortnight's visit in October from Madame Féodoreff and her daughters, is the driest, most hopelessly academic, of his works.
Nathalie's departure, however, seemed to break the spell of his dreariness. During the following six weeks he was frequently seen in Moscow and seemed to cling to the companionship of Kashkine; who, in a measure, began to replace Rubinstein with him. In December came Avélallement, acknowledged envoy from the five greatest German orchestras, begging Monsieur Gregoriev to consent to a tour of the orchestra cities of Germany, where he should conduct programs of his own works. To the amazement of the Moscow circle, Ivan received this proposition with something like enthusiasm. Before Christmas he bade good-bye to Russia for an indefinite period; for, the German tour over, he was determined to spend a summer in Switzerland, and follow the autumn down into that Italy of his dreams which he had never seen.
"I have spent too many years in this gray land, Constantine. I am beginning to feel the grayness. My whole soul is yearning for the sun.—I have grown narrow, and stern, and stiff, mentally and bodily. I must expand: must seek out men once more: and countries and peoples that are not ours.—I long for the contrasts of Africa, of Egypt; of the burning desert, withskies of fiery blue.—I bid good-bye to Russia. Time shall lead me whither it will!"
Kashkine, gazing at him thoughtfully, felt a sudden chill of doubt creep into his heart. The time for his biography was drawing near.
In mid-December, "Prince" Gregoriev, (the title being the finest of advertisements,) escorted by Monsieur Avélallement, and attended by a stately retinue of servants, arrived in Hamburg, where his tour began. His amazement at the ovations constantly given him, was naïve; for it seemed that Ivan was never to realize the extent of his reputation. But fanatical adulation, following in the streets, constant cranings of the neck from the populace every time he appeared in public, presently began to make him miserable. He was finding fame rather an unwieldy burden. Indeed, he had begun seriously to regret his contract, when he learned that, on a certain evening, both Edvard Grieg and Johannes Brahms, who had travelled from their respective Norway and Austria to meet him, were to sup with him and his host after occupying a box at the last of his Hamburg concerts.
That supper-party gave a bad quarter of an hour to Madame Avélallement, the hostess: a woman of supreme tact, but whom three great artists bade fair to overwhelm. As they seated themselves at table Brahms, who had been in a brown study, suddenly proffered the company an extemporaneous criticism of Ivan's music, which he tore into miscroscopic bits, and flung upon the winds of sarcasm; after which he perorated elaborately upon his own power and the perfect academic accuracy of his style.
When he had reached his final period, the silence was awe-inspiring. Avélallement, his wife, even Grieg, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Ivan's work, sat dumbwith apprehension, quite oblivious of the fact that Ivan, appreciating the solemnity of the occasion, was silent only because he was struggling with hardly repressible laughter. He had diminished this to a smile, however, before he helped himself bountifully to wiener-schnitzel, and remarked, with an air of anxious deference:
"It is a privilege to have heard your views, Herr Professor. In my youth I, too, was a worshipper of the mathematical cult. I should doubtless have compressed myself into that mould had it been possible. But alas! My stubborn inner self would not permit.—After all, each to his own. To me, imagination: the great, melancholy harmonies of the infinite Steppes. To you, your counterpoint, your fugue, the infallible, unquestionable sequence of one-two-three. Let us not quarrel, then, over the inevitable."
Brahms frowned. But alas! for the moment, his mouth was full. And Madame Avélallement, breathing a prayer of thanks and relief to Ivan, had seized her instant and turned the conversation to safer paths. Some hours later the two masters parted, in perfect amicability. But it is to be noted that they never met again.
The dour criticism of the rigid classicist was almost the only adverse word spoken of Ivan throughout his triumphal tour. To be sure, it was frequently said that his conducting was by no means equal to his composing: but that was a truth which could have hurt only had it been turned round. Ivan laughed many a time over his unconquerable terror of daïs and baton; and had not the orchestras he conducted been perfectly drilled in his programs before his coming, he might more than once have come to grief. But it was noticeable that wherever Ivan came into personal contact with the journalists, no praise was afterwards too high for him. For the magnetism of his personality had increasedwith the years; and, added to the absence of any conceit in his manner, it made him an object of adulation that drove him into frequent fits of contrary taciturnity.
However, the long years of loneliness and unremitting labor proved an excellent foundation for this little period of relaxation. Also, as his tour continued, he was kept in a constant state of surprise at the number of celebrated musicians who came from flattering distances to hear his concerts and shake his hand. Grieg and Brahms were the vanguard of a distinguished throng: men representing every school, and of every type of ability; from the veteran Carl Goldmark, idol of his following, to a very young man, by name Richard Strauss, concerning whose immature but highly individual compositions, Herr Brahms had already worked himself into many a classical fury in the pages of his favorite musical journal; though more than one great artist—among them Ivan,—believed that wondrous messages were to come from the pen of this youth who already dallied, in such magnificent unconcern, with certain awe-inspiring transgressions of classical laws, augmented and diminished to a breathless degree!
It was nearing March, and the German tour was verging on its close, when Kashkine came from Petersburg, at Ivan's earnest request, to make one of the party invited, by Frau Cosima, to spend a week at the home of Wagner in Bayreuth. It was with a little reluctance that Gregoriev entered this sanctum of the great magician's world. None who knew intimately Ivan's work and that of the creator of the music-drama, could easily comprehend the lack of sympathy between these two men whose music was of so much the same type. Perhaps the similarity rose from very different sources. Certainly the effects produced, however much alike in power and in distinction, had originated in minds bearingso little resemblance to each other, that neither could see himself reflected in his contemporary. Indeed, as Wagner adored, and yearned to imitate, Beethoven, his diametrical opposite, so Ivan, tempestuous iconoclast, pored, year after year, over Mozart, deeply deploring his inability to imitate the simple, wearisome, weakly-flowing syrup of obviousness, which constitutes the secret of that master's popularity. So the two great men, each of whom must be reverenced by all the members of the other's following, found in each other, through the insistence of human nature, ficklest of contrary jades, none of the greatness but all of the faults.
Happily, however, there proved to be no reason for Ivan's hesitancy over the invitation of Wagner's remarkable wife. His visit, of which many hours were spent in the opera-house, where rehearsals for the summer's festival were going busily forward, proved far too interesting to require any polite pretence. Ivan took his leave of the widow, (who has done so much to augment the fame of her husband), with expressions of sincere regard and regret, adding, involuntarily, his satisfaction that this stay was to form his final impression of musical Germany.—For, three days later, Monsieur Gregoriev and his suite arrived in Paris: home of a very different musical cult.
Here a new group—one no less distinguished than that of their German brethren,—awaited the Russian star. Aged Gounod, Messrs. Saint-Saëns, Massenet, and Bizet, with Bemberg, Vidal and Duparc the song-writers, together with a little group of the younger school, d'Indy, Charpentier and their set, were gathered together to prepare a festival for Prince Gregoriev, showering on him attentions of every kind; and laboring tirelessly to convince him of their admiration and their "sympathetic appreciation." No blunt comment or criticismhere! All was smoothly, exquisitely polished: urbanely, beautifully French. But within a week or two Kashkine noted that Ivan was turning inward again towards himself and his habitual solitude. And he knew that presently these complacent fellows would be sticking themselves on the spikes of a chestnut-burr of moroseness,brusquerie, and blunt refusals to have anything to do with music and musicians.
What to do? As the days went on and his fears were fulfilled, Kashkine brought himself a dozen times to the verge of remonstrance, of pleading, of explanation; but, each time he opened his lips to speak on that subject, his courage failed, and he retreated hurriedly to safer topics. It was odd that this gentle-natured man, so easily assailable in general, should prove so unapproachable on the subject of personal expediency. Even Kashkine, already Ivan's Boswell, a man unselfishly eager that his friend should leave behind him a trail of golden admiration, dared not make the suggestion that it were better to move on, merely because he so dreaded the inevitable quiet glance and the direct, unequivocal: "Why?"
Happily, however, Constantine's secret anxiety was soon ended. One afternoon, as the two friends sat together in thesalonof Ivan's suite, the Prince called Piotr to him, ordered him to arrange a farewell dinner for his friends on the following evening, and to be ready to leave, on the succeeding morning, for Nice, where they would spend the carnival: Lent falling very late this year.
The events of the ensuing months contain no musical history of any note. Italy, still arrogant over her florid successes of the fifties, had nothing but ridicule for the robust northern style which, to the ears accustomed to simple melody, accompanied by the tum-ti-tum of guitar-notes, that lightest dessert of the musical feast,was as the howling of demons drowning the songs of an angel-choir. Ivan, progressing slowly southward towards the Eternal City, found his name everywhere unknown; so that he was obliged to depend for comfortable rooms and ready service solely on his title. In Rome, to be sure, the score of "Boris Teleken" was to be seen in a window or two, side by side with those of "Lohengrin" or "Tannhäuser." And there the society of which Leoncavallo was president, gave him a dinner, at which the conversation turned principally on the beauties of the Italian climate and the glories of her historic past.
These things did not, however, wound that professional vanity of which Ivan possessed so infinitesimal an amount. Never was man more thoroughly inoculated byamor Italiæthan Gregoriev. During the first weeks of his stay in Rome, guide-books and histories of the city were never out of his hands; and he took up his pen only to write the promised weekly letter to his cousin. Nor, as the spring advanced, and the tides of the Roman populace, driven before the hot blast of the sirocco, began to roll towards Frascati and the hills, would Ivan follow them. On the contrary, he seemed to glory in the increasing heat of the unclouded sun; and, when he had sent from him, one by one, every member of his party save Piotr and Piotr's son, young Ivan, he began to prepare for a more reckless journey, southward. While his anxious but obedient retinue proceeded to Florence to prepare for him a winter abode, this madman, attended by a courier and his two servants, whom neither expostulation nor threat could drive from his side, set out for Naples, en route—horror incredibilis, for Sicily!
During July and August Kashkine, staying, in a condition of enraged resignation, in Berne, daily awaited a telegram announcing Ivan's mortal illness or death.Instead, however, he merely received frequent epistles from the subject of his fears, written in increasing ecstasy; till finally, in the first week of September, came the climax. In a note dated from Heaven (a place called, by the vulgar, Taormina), there came, at the end of the exclamation points, one or two rational sentences of information. It seemed that, upon the completion of his "Sicilian Fantasia," Ivan intended returning, by degrees, to the north, reaching Florence about November 1st. But he did not forget to add that it would be a voluntary plunge from the skies to purgatory.—For well indeed was Sicily named the "Smile of God!" And as for Russia—Moscow—Petersburg—well! popular mistake had incredibly conceived the infernal regions hot instead of cold; for who on the beautiful earth could ever be unhappy while the sun, visible presentment of the Deity, moved unobstructed through the turquoise vault of Italy?—Italy!—melody embodied: harmony made visible: Mozart paraphrased: Kingdom into which all artists must seek entrance; fairy-land come true!
Kashkine read his letter with relief, with resentment, finally, with laughter. But Ivan's earnest invitation to him to spend the winter in Florence could not be accepted. He had already been absent far too long. Russia claimed him. And thus, when, at last, in the first days of the melancholy month, Ivan arrived at the gray capital of Tuscany where he was to make his temporary home, no friendly faces save those of his servants were at hand to welcome him.
Probably no city in all the world possesses so powerful an attraction for so many people of so many nations as does this grim stronghold of Medici and Borgia. Its society, like that of most Italian cities, is largely cosmopolitan. Its different "colonies" intermingle, however, with the greatest friendliness; and among these "Prince" Gregoriev was effusively received. It wasless than a month before he was given to understand that, though a fine dilettantism in any of the arts is a charming fad, a professional career for a Prince with a fortune like his was not to be seriously considered for one moment. To the surprise even of Piotr, this attitude amused rather than angered Ivan; and, his summer's work polished and sent away, he smiled in his sleeve and urbanely donned his new garb, determined to play the part assigned him tillennuishould tear away domino and mask.
By the time he arrived the "season" was already in a vigorous infancy. Daily, in the late afternoon, the Cascine became an international mêlée of magnificent equipages and Parisian toilettes. Then, the drive over, those Florentine leaders who owned palaces, and their foreign imitators who contented themselves with a "Mezzanine," seated themselves at well-provided tea-tables and entertained a regularly flowing throng of tea-drinking, scandal-mongering women, accompanied by a circle of men of some interest and distinction. In the evening, Florence did still more. By this time, thesalonswere suffocating and airless. Yet there were few nights in the week when, somewhere, the sober reception was not heightened to a ball, sometimes impromptu, more often formally prearranged. Morning found the indefatigable leisure world scattered through one or another of the great galleries, where, before the masterpieces of a by-gone Italy, they recounted all the questionable incidents of the preceding day. And never a woman but could tell the length of time that Countess X—— had remained in the conservatory; or the variety of rouge used by that preposterous Mademoiselle C——, whose mother should really adopt spectacles.
For a matter of four or five weeks Ivan, still living in the glamour of this land of the death-in-life, permitted himself to float, passively, round and round the fashionablewhirlpool. It was a wonder he endured so long; for, from, the first, he was lionized unbearably, and was soon taken up by the very cream of Florentine society: (a little clique really difficult for foreigners to penetrate); till behold! the old Principessa, head of the lofty house of Contarini, reached a stage of liking and familiarity where she did not hesitate to tap her Prince on the arm with her fan, commanding his escort during her formal progress through her sparsely furnished but highly exclusivesalons.
Signs of awakening were, however, plainly visible in Ivan's manner before the day of the accident which revolutionized his winter.
Gregoriev, like every other visitor to the city, had observed, and frequently stared at, a certain person who constantly haunted the best of the galleries and resorts—Pitti, Uffizi, Academia, the shop of Vecellio on Lung' Arno, and, finally, the Cascine. She was a woman of rather odd aspect, somewhere near middle age, who was always followed by a maid, but otherwise went alone, unspoken to. Despite her complete isolation, she was unquestionably a person of breeding, probably also, considering the appointments of her carriage, of wealth. More than once it had been on Ivan's tongue to ask about her; but the question was still unspoken when she was thrown forcibly upon his recognition. It was early upon a December afternoon; and Ivan was walking alone on the deserted driveway, his mind engrossed with a recalcitrant theme, when he was broke in upon by the sudden noise of pounding hoofs, rattling wheels, then, after three or four breathless seconds, a scream, interrupted by the thud of a falling horse, the snapping of a shaft, and the plunging of the second animal, who halted, trembling, a few yards away.
But half aware of what he did, Ivan rushed to the horse, caught him by the bridle and held him fast,while the coachmen, and a workman or two who had come up, busied themselves over the fallen beast, which, though bruised and bleeding, had broken no bones, and was declared able to finish the journey back to the apartment of "madame."
A few seconds later Ivan found himself standing bare-headed in the presence of the lonely woman of his imagination, who, herself pale, evidently shaken, and coughing violently, was, nevertheless, between her gasps, vigorously remonstrating with her terrified and hysterical maid. Astonished at the force demonstrated by one whom he now perceived to be seriously ill, Ivan accepted an eagerly proffered seat opposite the women, and accompanied them back, across the river, into the city.
The drive was memorable. On its termination Ivan, fascinated by certain observations, accepted further hospitality, and sat for half an hour over a samovar in a beautifully furnished littlesalon; finally saying au revoir not only with his lips but with his mind.
That evening, for next to the last time, a Florentinesalonrang once more with the name of Alexandrine Alexiévna Nikitenko, widow of the Prince of the name who was the younger brother of the head of one of the most famous families in Russia. The story of the runaway and the dénouement which had brought two such well-known compatriots together, was in every one's mouth. Ivan was besieged with questions, to which his replies were so unsatisfactory that a general appeal was made to the authority of the Principessa Contarini. To her Ivan gave a brief account of the event, and then himself became an eager interlocutor. His first triple question also ended, for some time, his remarks. And when he had been fully answered, his mind was too full for further utterance.
"Who is this Princess Nikitenko? Why is she in Florence? And why is she not here to-night?"
A storm of comment, ejaculation, exclamations of wonder! Ivan closed his ears; and opened them again only for the young Contessa Contarini, who, at a nod from her mother-in-law, undertook enlightenment. Then—one half-hour in the dim-lit corner of an inner boudoir,—and Ivan found himself at lastau courantof the great scandal of 1869, which, wonderful to relate, was still, after nearly eighteen years, almost as interesting as ever: the persistent presence of its heroine almost as astonishing as in the first days of her ostracism.
It was in the autumn of the year 1867, when the reign of the Liberator was in the fulness of its fame, that a certain scandalintimebegan, in St. Petersburg, to divide interest with the still engrossing topic of the freed serfs. Every one in society took sides, for or against, in the quarrel and separation of the young Prince and Princess Nikitenko: both of whom had been, since their marriage, high in the graces of the Grand-Ducal circle, and leaders of the fastest set in the capital. When the trouble between them became noticeable, gossip ran fast and furious; partly for the reason that no human being seemed to understand just where the cause of the difficulty lay. Whispered mention of the Grand-Duke Constantine, madcap-libertine, hero of a thousand escapades, tended in no way to lessen the interest, though of evidence there seemed none. The climax proved to be a fitting one, however; for, early in March, the Princess, with two maids, a valet, her entire wardrobe, and all save the hereditary jewels, disappeared from the ken of humankind.
Six weeks later she was heard from in Florence, where she remained in seclusion during the summer, but in the autumn opened asalonwhich, in point of brilliance, elegance, and distinction, eclipsed every other in the Tuscan capital.
The young Princess was a woman of remarkableeducation, and tremendous gifts.—So much was always admitted.—Her beauty was a moot point: herchic, never! She threw herself eagerly into the study of those arts which have made modern Italy what it is; and she rapidly gathered about her the most talented young men in that part of the country. In the January of 1869 this company was signally augmented by the arrival of one Vittorio Lodi, a young Roman tenor; over whose voice—one of those natural organs found only in that land of the sun—Florence speedily went mad.
Up to the middle of the ensuing February, the prestige of the Nikitenko steadily increased in brilliance. Then, suddenly, as it were in a night, the shadows began to gather round her. Whence the first rumor rose, none ever knew. But it ran round thesalons, down the Cascine, through the town, like a circle of fire. Immediately the watch was set: and immediately the reports began to come in.
Yes, unquestionably it was true. The Princess and Lodi were constantly together. In the morning he was unfailingly to be found in her boudoir, practising, perhaps, his rôle or his songs for the evening. In the afternoon he had a place in her victoria, and they paid their calls together, or he sat beside her at her own tea-table. Every evening that he was free Lodi spent in hersalon. And on those evenings when he sang, people found Madame Nikitenko "not at home till twelve."
Soon, inevitably, the world began to draw a little away from the woman, while it courted the man. Immediately, to the general indignation, she withdrew herself, positively, from the world; and Vittorio refused most of his invitations. Then, as the season drooped and died, and spring swept up from the south, the beautiful Alexandrine became invisible to every eye but that of the devoted tenor.
Thenceforth it is a stupid tale. "For her sins," theRussian lady made a long retreat in a neighboring convent; whence she did not emerge until November was sweeping the leaves down the Cascine, and the world was once more at home. When she returned to the city of her former triumph, it was to find every door shut against her, every face averted as she passed. As for the Lodi, he was now in Milan, at La Scala, at a phenomenal salary.
That, behold, was eighteen years ago! Still, inexplicably, Alexandrine returned, winter after winter, to the city of her loneliness. There continued to be stories of regular visits to the convent outside the walls, where, in the odor of sanctity, was growing up a little girl with Nikitenko eyes of purple-blue, and the darkest of waving, Italian hair. None had ever heard of any attempt either at divorce or at reconciliation on the part of the husband, now a man high in the councils of the Reactionary party. Nor was scandal ever again able to couple any name with that of the solitary woman, upon whom a change had been gradually creeping. Many had heard her cough, and perceived the nature of it. A few charitable souls would have relaxed towards her now, had she herself permitted it; but her door remained obstinately closed against all women and every man save her compatriot, Ivan. He, without apparent effort, broke in at once upon her solitude. So, indeed, had the young Contessa prophesied, in sprightly conclusion. Then, yawning behind her fan, she laughed, and commanded the sombre-eyed Russian to take her back to the dining-room and her own circle of adorers.
Ivan himself finished the evening properly. But, as he walked out into the night chill, his heart and brain alike were overflowing with interest, with pity, nay, with a kind of fellow-feeling, for this woman whose bravery was of the greatest known to humanity. Even to-night he had looked into the hearts of women of her own formerclass; and he shuddered at their conscienceless inconsistency. For the moment, probably, he forgot the sage maxim concerning "safety in numbers." The woman who yields herself to a single great passion and will neither hide it nor cap it with another, is surely lost in the world of to-day—or yesterday!
Two weeks. Two little weeks; and the new intrigue of Alexandrine Alexiévna Nikitenko, now in her forty-first year, was the great subject of the Florentine world. For, at the dusty wheels of her battered chariot, she dragged a new captive.—And such an one!—Their lion:thelion!—The nobleman of the hour, and a genius to boot!—Incredible.—Nauseating. Finally, resignation; and covert murmurs about green bay-trees. All doors, of course, were still open to Prince Gregoriev. He should have every opportunity for repentance. Only, apparently, Prince Gregoriev cared naught for their high consideration; and seemed to have taken a vow to darken only one doorway in the city beside his own: that hitherto lonely entrance to the apartment of Madame Nikitenko!
As for Ivan, people might chatter and beckon as they would, his interest in them was gone. On the other hand, he had become completely absorbed in the personality of this other, once heart and centre of the gayest set in civilized society; now dwelling in the fastnesses of an isolation such as he himself, connoisseur of solitude, had not dreamed of. For in all existence there can be no such isolation as that of the woman cast out from among her kind, yet too much one of them to endure the companionship of others. At the same time, since no brave fight can leave either man or woman as it found them, so, through the dreary years of her disgrace, Alexandrine Nikitenko, buoyed up by her unbreakable pride, had gathered from her blackened fields no smallharvest of broad-mindedness, philosophy, and courage. The Alexandrine of old, acknowledged priestess of frivolity, was not a tenth so well worth knowing as the faded, jaded woman, long since numbed to the pain of slights and insults, who had, through the long years, persistently made her dwelling-place in the city of her downfall. She was no saint: affected no martyr's pose: had never, since her departure from the convent within whose walls she left her babe, sought the consolation of religion. Child of the world, in a sense, she must always be; but she was also a woman, softened far more than she herself dreamed. Cynicism was the cloak of her defence; but Ivan, early in their acquaintance, unconsciously folded it back, and beheld the beautiful robe beneath. Thenceforward, throughout the last months of his stay in Italy, their friendship increased by leaps and bounds. The woman began to feel that at last the mysterious Arbiter of human fate had lifted His iron hand, and was looking upon her with forgiveness written in merciful eyes.
On the very day after his first dramatic meeting with the Princess, Ivan had written to Nathalie, in Petersburg, to gather, at first-hand, the details of the Russian part of the Nikitenko drama. Princess Féodoreff replied with her habitual promptness; but the story contained in her letter was rather disappointing. Apparently Florence knew as much as Petersburg. The deserted husband, who had climbed far up the ladder of diplomacy, was celebrated for his morose reticence about his personal affairs. Nathalie's words were almost an exact repetition of those of the little Contessa. Ivan was obliged to wait until, one day, he learned the whole story from the lips of its heroine herself, who told it to him unasked.
Early in their friendship, as soon, indeed, as she perceived that he ranged himself absolutely with her, Ivanlearned how scrupulously honest Madame Nikitenko was. With manlike exactness she gave him to understand that friendship with him grown purely out of liking would be a godsend to her; but of kindness from compassion she would have none. Cut and gibe had little power to sting. Pity infuriated her. Gallantly she was fighting a disease which every day gained a little ground; and which she well knew to be mortal. But her very maid, the one person whom she deeply loved, dared no more to look at her with understanding of her pain, than she would have bared her back voluntarily to the knout. When, therefore, Ivan, adopting the Princess' own tone, told her frankly that she alone had power to keep away from him thatennuiwhich must otherwise drive him out of Florence, she proceeded to tell him openly which subjects must thenceforth remain closed between them. Of these, the principal was her illness, which should, before Eastertide, free her forever from the eyes of the gaping world.
She had had her first hemorrhage in October, immediately after her return from Trouville, where she spent her summers. Christmas Day brought the second—a severe one, which was stopped barely in time. After that followed a long and peaceful interlude: weeks which Ivan afterwards looked back on with wonder; for the glamour of her personality, her magnetism, remained about that memory till the day of his death. His intercourse with her combined the best features of masculine comradeship and feminine Platonism before the mawkish stage is reached. She had the ability, so rare in men, to draw out the best that was in her companion. And Ivan would often find himself displaying qualities of eloquence and brilliancy of which he had never suspected the existence. But the woman never revealed to him their source. She herself was more than rewarded by the originality and the depth of the ideaswhich she merely taught him to express. For, though rhetoric may be cultivated, the most wonderful of tacticians cannot put individual ideas into the brains of a pupil.