MADAME FÉODOREFF
It may be said that it was not until after the ending of Joseph's weak
tragedy that Ivan passed into his third, and final, mental stage. As a
boy, he had known very intimately the inner buoyancy of youth, hope, and
faith in the joy of life. After the marriage of Nathalie, and his
subsequent precipitation, had come those wild rebellions of the soul,
the violent protestations, the young and petted cynicisms, that are the
inevitable accompaniment of the inevitable hour of disenchantment. This
phase, however great its length, must, nevertheless, resolve itself at
last into one of two others: the quiet complacency of a renewed but
gentler optimism; or a cynicism tried, real, deep-rooted, unhappy but
irresistible. Be this state a sign of weakness or of strength, it was
the one to which Ivan felt himself driven, willy-nilly, by all the force
of his experience. From that doubt of complete disillusion, that
confusion of thought and loss of all happy confidence which is one of
the results of the long-continued bread-struggle wherein disinterested
philosophy can have no part, Ivan had moved, by insensible stages, far
into the kingdom of the unredeemable pessimist.
To him, looking ruefully back along the years of his man-struggle, it
seemed as if each trial, each disappointment, had been built on a
variation of a single theme. Of the several friendships that had been
his, all, after running an uncertain course, had come to violent or
unhappy ends. And in the grave of each was buried a little and a little
more of his natural faith and optimism. And yet--not all! One
friendship, the first, had lapsed naturally, through separation. Indeed,
Ivan still sometimes heard from the companion of his first Petersburg
days--Vladimir de Windt. Had there, however, been no letters, he could
still always have followed his comrade's track; for de Windt--having
left the army many years since, to enter on a diplomatic career, had
been climbing, steadily, and was already, at thirty-five, on the
threshold of the Council chamber. Over this fact Ivan could unfeignedly
rejoice; for already Russia, high and low, was discussing the merits and
the probable future of this young man.
But of the others,--that group of men, the two women, who had sat at the
door of his soul's sanctuary--what of them? Nathalie, first: then
Zaremba, Anton Rubinstein, Laroche his comrade of the Conservatoire,
Ostrovsky his collaborator, Balakirev, Merelli, Joseph, finally,
Irina,--her soul still flaunting its rags before the gaze of the world,
while her brother and those student companions of her honest days and
Ivan's first success, labored in distant prison-mines, self-victims of
unsuccessful treason: what of these? Which one remained to him?--Ah!
there were two: old Nicholas, the unswerving, the devoted; and Kashkine,
who owed him nothing, who had given--was to give--so much! Why was it
that they counted so lightly in the scales against these others? Who can
say? who explain that perverseness of human nature which will not value
what it has, but must drop it by the way to stretch out unavailing hands
for the fleeting ungraspable? This, certainly, was what Ivan did; and
his face came in time so to show the bitterness of his heart, that
Joseph, rising stealthily from his unknown depth, dreaming of finding
help from his once benefactor, twice beheld the depth of Ivan's
habitual frown, and stole away without making appeal to the
heart-hungry man who now, year by year, labored alone in his desolate
palace.
The years of 1873, 1874, and 1875 passed slowly, bringing rich harvest
of Ivan's great gift to the music-world of Europe. Russia only would
have none of him; wherefore he, deeply resentful, held every individual
of his race at bay, until, at length, an incident, dreamed of long ago
but also long since despaired of, broke successfully into a solitude
that was becoming dangerous.
On Wednesday October 15th, in the last-named year, Ivan, book in hand,
sat idling over his _déjeuner_, when gray-headed Piotr entered,
quivering with excitement, to announce that a great lady waited in the
drawing-room and would not be denied a sight of His Excellency. So,
three minutes later, Ivan found himself face to face with the secret
lady of his heart.
"Nathalie!--Princess!"
"'Nathalie,' please, dear cousin.--Ivan, I am in great trouble, and I
have come to you for help."
"Help!--Trouble!" Ivan's low voice faltered. "Ah!--Can I make it right
for you?"
The woman before him shook her head, sadly. "No one can ever make it
right, Ivan."
"What is it, Nathalie?" In his secret mind, he was just murmuring her
name, over and over again, and blessing the woe that had brought her to
him.
"For the present I am here, in Moscow; and my children are with me.--I
might have sent for you sooner, by note, Ivan. I _ought_, I suppose. But
I waited too long, and so came myself!" And she looked at him, her lips
smiling, her troubled eyes full of anxiety.
Even after all the years, Ivan read her well enough not to answer that
smile. Instead, he led her, scarcely protesting, into the dining-room;
despatched the amazed but delighted Piotr for fresh tea and something to
eat; and, when they were alone, sat for a moment lost in contemplation
of her, while she waited, wearily, for him to pick up the thread of
their talk.
Her appearance, charming to any other man, startled and momentarily
saddened Ivan. He marvelled, indeed, at the emotion roused in him by her
face: the face that he had pictured as forever changeless, but which, he
now perceived, time had dealt with more cruelly than with his own.
Madame Féodoreff was, indeed, a woman sufficiently beautiful,
sufficiently distinguished, to be looked at thrice in any assemblage.
Yet her every feature, the exquisite, pearly skin, most of all the once
sparkling, now deeply-seeing eyes, spoke of a long and difficult drama
of life.
These things passed through his mind as he gave his order and Piotr left
the room. For some moments more he was silent. Then, rousing himself,
almost unwillingly, from his contemplation, he spoke.
"You should be able to guess, Nathalie, how much your coming means: how
deeply it touches me. To think that you should still have
confidence!--How many years is it since the winter of your début?"
Though he asked it lightly, he saw the shiver that ran over the woman at
his side. "We must not count years," she said, softly. "Indeed, Ivan,
now that I am here, I find it hard to explain my idea in coming.--I am
alone in Moscow--virtually hiding. And I can tell you very little of my
reason.--Still, you can guess, at least, that my marriage--has
been--unsuccessful.--I have my children. I adore them; yet I have left
their father, and so injured them forever.--That is about all I can tell
you.--Up--"
"Princess, I beg of you!--"
"No, let me finish, Ivan! Up to the time of my mother's death, I never
wholly realized the truth of affairs.--She managed, somehow, to shield
me.--During her last years, Ivan, she regretted my marriage more than
any act of her life.--Indeed, I think it was the one thoroughly cruel
thing she ever did.--Since she went, I have been forced to understand:
to face black truth. And so, when the time came that even my babies were
beginning to ask me questions about--incidents--and--and persons who
frequented _my house_, I _had_ to come away. I know how the world
regards a runaway wife; yet I believe that I am not universally blamed.
I hope not. But, just now, it is impossible for me to face the world. I
have been alone for some weeks. I came to you to-day just for--just for
companionship, I suppose."
As she paused, Ivan leaned forward and impetuously took her delicately
gloved hand into his firm clasp. But the light that glowed in his eyes,
he wisely managed to conceal. "'Companionship,' Nathalie?--Let us give
it a better term: 'Friendship!' Surely that is permissible now, between
us. Believe me, anything that a man can do, I will do for you. You have
told me far more than I should have asked.--I can never take the place
of--of Madame Dravikine. But I can make you feel, perhaps, that the
world is not utterly lonely for you: that there is some one who is made
happier and better by your mere living presence."
Towards the end, his tone had become slightly uncertain; and Madame
Féodoreff, who was prepared for an emergency, and whose schooling in the
world had been thorough, hastily interposed. Moreover, as she began to
speak, old Piotr entered with an extemporaneous luncheon that did credit
to a purely bachelor establishment. As he set the things down before the
unexpected visitor, she, looking her host squarely in the eye, and with
a manner friendly but quite without sentiment, observed: "You understand
very nicely, Ivan! That, without knowing it, was precisely what I came
to say. Friendship!--It is something that has never yet entered my
life: very probably through my own fault."
Ivan's answer was a smile; for he had no special wish to take advantage
of this opening for banalities. While the Princess ate, therefore, he
played with his knife and fork, and they bandied the necessary phrases
of conventionality while the thoughts of both were busy with intimate
matters. Already Ivan, high-hearted, knew that the long-worshipped image
of the young Nathalie was gone, forever, from the chapel of his mind;
and that, already, in the empty niche, stood the shadow of another form:
one less fairy-like, less bewitching; but more suited to the reverence
of reason, and worthier of the homage he found himself still so ready to
outpour.
Indeed that first visit, self-restrained, brief, uneventful as it was,
proved more momentous to both man and woman than either, beforehand,
would have dreamed possible. Their early passion for each other both
believed to lie buried deep beneath the weight of years of separation
and difference of occupation and environment. Vanity! The first hour of
real reunion showed them both that the old feeling had been far from
dead: was, in truth, sleeping so lightly that a touch must rouse it
again. Four hours after Nathalie's departure, Ivan found himself at the
piano, pouring out his heart in such a burden of passionate melody as
had rarely rushed from him, even in his moments of inspiration. And the
long hours of the sleepless night served absolutely to loosen the
fetters of his self-repression; for in the growing glory of the dawn, he
watched also the glorious resurrection of the one great love of his
life. Again, after many years, she lived in him: in every thought and
hope and dream; not now as a child, potent, through ignorance, to wound
him past endurance; but as a woman, beautiful through time and sorrow,
magnificent in the wreck of her woman's life. Still he knew well that
if love was to be his, it must remain for a long time under the guise of
friendship. What he did not acknowledge to himself, was the fact that
all the world was to share something of this great and painful joy. He
was still ruthless in the service of his single god. And this love, like
every other factor of his life, must serve as food for his genius. It
was Nathalie who had unconsciously turned him, protesting, to his work.
It was to be through her also that he reached the height of his career:
his perfection of maturity. For she was the inspiration of the "Tosca
Symphony."
If Ivan had suddenly risen from the depths to the heights, the cause of
his change was also to know powerful emotion on his behalf. In the days
of her far-away youth, Nathalie Dravikine's affection for her cousin had
been as strong as any her school-girl nature was capable of. But when,
after her hurried and loveless marriage, she was forced into, a
revulsion of exquisite misery to a breadth of pain and repression that
forced her naturally light nature into incredible development, the
comparatively petty grief of Ivan's loss was forgotten. News of his
disgrace reached her months after the fact, and but a few weeks before
the birth of her first child,--now long since dead. And in her then
morbid and unnatural condition, she had peevishly brushed all thought of
her cousin aside, accounting his unhappiness as small beside her own.
Many years later, when the long period of her bitter schooling had
moulded her into something far finer than her youth had promised; when,
also, she had brought the art of concealment to its height of
perfection; the memory of her lost cousin's gallant and loyal devotion
recurred to her, together with the surmise that she had been the cause
of his dismissal from the army, and the still more amazing fact that he
was now beginning to be recognized as an incalculable power in the world
of music. An interview with Vladimir de Windt confirmed her first
belief; a symphony concert at the Conservatoire hall, fixed the second.
And then, suddenly, she discovered that the man who had sought ruin
because of her loss, and who had risen, pedestalled, from that ruin to
another and a greater personality, had won a place in her heart from
which he was not to be driven.
For many years, now, his spoken name had never failed to stir her
secretly. Though, in the ordinary sense of the word, she was hardly
musical, her emotional nature had been too fully developed for her not
to recognize the power that breathed through Ivan's tempestuous or
fairy-like compositions. She began to make his work her peculiar study;
and never a phrase of it but touched her deeply, strangely; in spite of
which, _mondaine_ that she must always be, it was not till she heard
that he had inherited the title and wealth of his father, that she began
sentimentally to exalt her undefined feeling for him.
Certainly, had it not been for his present social status, Nathalie
Féodoreff, even in the desolation that had followed the tragic climax of
her years of married martyrdom, would never have sought that first
meeting with her cousin. Yet she was not to be judged upon that fact
alone. She was a devoted mother. She had been a faithful wife to a man
who had lowered his manhood to a level beneath that of the very beasts.
She had borne with him through degradation, insult, once or twice
physical violence; and this not only because Russian orthodoxy gives no
quarter to a rebellious wife, whatever the provocation. But when that
time arrived when her duty to her children and her duty to her wretched
husband could no longer be compatible; when the two little girls
remaining to her out of five children, began to question the
relationship between their governess and their father, Nathalie
hesitated no longer. Seizing upon one of her husband's frequent
absences, she completely dissolved her establishment, told the furious,
vile-tongued Frenchwoman quite calmly that her services were no longer
necessary; and, that evening, with her children, two servants, and her
personal effects, disappeared, absolutely, beyond the ken of Prince or
police.
In Moscow she took a small apartment, in a quiet quarter of the city;
and there, masking her unhappiness behind an habitual languor, strove
heroically to readjust herself to life. Finally, as the result of a
momentary, rebellious impulse, the period of her friendship with Ivan
began. Neither of the two had been quite prepared for the after-effects
of their first quiet and commonplace meeting. Nevertheless when, on the
following Sunday, Ivan's card was brought to her in her little _salon_,
he was not refused. His cousin greeted him placidly, and he made speedy
friends with the two quaint children whom he found with her, and who
served thenceforward to keep the facts of her existence always in
evidence; but who could not, unfortunately, prevent the existence of
secret emotions, either in their mother or in the beloved new "uncle"
who proved such a mine of sweetmeats and toys.
After Ivan's first call, Nathalie found herself grappling with the
question as to whether he must be absolutely dismissed, or merely held
at arm's-length. Into this discussion pride entered so largely that she
presently determined to do neither thing; but to conceal her own
impotence beneath an armor of cousinliness. Thenceforth Ivan found
himself, at first to his delight, later to his baffled chagrin, treated
with an informal friendliness, a guileless intimacy, that perfectly
answered its designer's purpose, though the helpless recipient chafed,
rebelled, stayed away, suffered agonies of jealous rage, and finally,
one blustery day, presented himself again in the _Gagarinesky_, wrapped
in a manner impenetrably suave and bland. He had read her at last; and
was satisfied. Thus, their companionship entered upon its best period.
Intellectually it was perfect. Sentimentally, though decorum was never
transgressed, there came for each certain minutes of unavoidable
revelation that were eminently satisfactory to the other. And in time
their intimacy reached a point where Ivan began actually to confide
musically in her:--a woman!
The twilight hours which he spent at the piano in her _salon_, while she
listened dreamily to his interpretations or improvisation, were the
finest they knew; and wrought a beautiful pediment for their temple to
Amicitia. The difference in their natures served for each as a
stimulant. To Ivan, her sympathetic comments, frequent praise, rare
criticism, lacked absolutely nothing. Nathalie early perceived that she
was beholding a genius at work: a giant engaged upon labor too
stupendous for irreverent contemplation. And from him and his music she
gained the medicine her bruised heart and broken nerves most needed. For
Ivan, in the growth of his great love for her, unconsciously brewed an
elixir of power from which each drank, daily. So, by unavoidable
degrees, both were led unconsciously into a land from which few can
emerge still solitary. Yet that was what the gods eventually decreed for
this hapless twain.
The semi-religious festival of Christmas passed; and New Year's, the
real holiday of Europe, had arrived. Ivan, who had spent a week and sums
incredible, over gifts for the small Sophia and Katrisha, determined
also, at the last moment, on his present for Nathalie, and then passed
New Year's eve alone in his own palace, in sleepless cogitation.
Long before this time he realized that all the passion of his youth had
been renewed and increased a hundredfold: that he loved the Princess
Féodoreff as he had never loved Nathalie Dravikine. He was ready, nay,
mad, to lay himself at her feet. He dreamed, by day and by night, of the
only feasible release for her: civil divorce; to be followed, as
speedily as might be, by a marriage of the same type with him. Alexis
Féodoreff, he was convinced, would readily consent to this release; and
would offer no opposition to her plea. So far, all was easy enough. But
Nathalie: what of her? Had _she_ considered the subject? How devoutly
orthodox was she? Had she divined his heart? Was her kindness directed
towards this possible end? Finally, dared he speak, on the morrow, when
so excellent an opening would be made by his gift to her: a diamond
heart containing one priceless ruby in its centre?--Should he, by
daring, win to heaven? or should he be considered a libertine, and so
thrust back to the dull purgatory whence he had so lately risen to her?
Better risk nothing than lose all!--Whereby it may be seen that Ivan's
blood had cooled a little in the past fifteen years.
Throughout the night he fluctuated; and morning found him still in
haggard doubt, hardly lessened when, at a most informal hour, he
presented himself at the house in the _Gagarinesky_, where, from the
_concierge_, he gained the first hint of trouble. The old woman informed
him that, in the night, a message had arrived for madame up-stairs.
Madame's maid had finally taken it in; and Yekaterina learned, at the
delivery of the morning milk, that the news had been very serious; and
that madame must shortly leave Moscow.--Whereupon the beginning of
lamentations and curiosities--and Ivan out of earshot, flying up the two
flights of stairs which led to the lady of his desire.
Ivan Veliki had sounded the first stroke of the tenth hour when Prince
Gregoriev knocked upon his cousin's door; and the tenth vibration had
not yet died upon the air when he paused in the doorway of the
drawing-room.
Nathalie sat in the jut of the room, her back to the row of windows. The
heavy coronal of dark braids was piled above her white face with all its
usual, exquisite care. The transparent delicacy of her complexion was
accentuated by her gown, which was of black, unrelieved save by a little
line of white at the throat. In her lap lay two or three envelopes, an
open telegram, and some legal-looking, red-sealed papers.
Ivan gazed at the picture she made without speaking: his heart trembling
in his throat. In a moment or two, however, she lifted her eyes to his,
and, without rising, motioned him to come closer. He went, at once,
lifted her cold hand and kissed it, his holiday greetings long since
forgotten. After a moment's gaze into her set face, he said, gently:
"You are in trouble, Nathalie _mia_?"
"Yes, Ivan.--No, Ivan!--I do not know. I cannot think at all,
yet.--Alexei Alexandrovitch is dead," she replied, rapidly, and without
expression.
At the last words, Ivan felt himself struck as by an inward blow. He
started, violently, and echoed: "Dead!--Alexis dead!--Then, Nathalie,
you--"
"I am widowed."
"You are free!"
Their words were uttered almost simultaneously. Then followed a silence,
pregnant, surcharged; on Ivan's part almost unpermissible. The Princess
Féodoreff lifted one hand to her brow and let it fall again. Ivan turned
and began rapidly to pace the room. The thing was so utterly unexpected,
so entirely the one event that he had felt could never come about, that
he was as one dumb. The woman, watching him, dulled though her mind was
by the shock, divined, instinctively, something of his state of thought.
Woman though she was, however, she was unprepared for his first action,
which, as it were, threw a search-light upon the sole idea into which
the confusion eventually resolved itself.
Ceasing his walk he went swiftly to her, took her two hands, drew them
protectively to his breast, and said, huskily: "You are in great
trouble, Nathalie.--You are unhappy.--Is it--tell me!--is it grief for
_him_?"
Before the clearness of his look, her own went down. A faint color crept
into her cheeks. For one moment she hesitated; but finally rose to his
own height of honesty.
"No, Ivan, I cannot grieve for the man who deliberately wrecked my
youth, debased my thoughts, lowered me for years in my own eyes.--Do you
expect it?--It seems to me that, just now, I am feeling nothing. But I
know already that I am _going_ to suffer.--I shall suffer remorse! I,
who have been so proud of my long forbearance, shall suffer for these
last weeks as if I had left him years ago, without provocation!--He is
dead; and I was not with him at the end.--He died in his bed.--They tell
me it was his heart. He had had trouble with it before, and they had
warned him against dissipation; for he was an old man.--But he heeded no
one.--And he asked for me, at the end, and I was not there!--_That_ is
what I shall suffer for. After all those long years of enduring, I left
him to die alone.--Alone: my husband!"
"Nathalie!"
The Princess started at the note of agony in Ivan's voice.
"Nathalie! You are not to suffer for that brute:--that brute who drove
you here--drove you to me!" Still retaining the two hands, which she had
not tried to make him relinquish, he suddenly sank upon one knee before
her, so bringing his head nearly on a level with her own. Then,
oblivious of all things else, he began to pour out his heart to her:
"Nathalie, that first time, years ago, that you came to Moscow--the
time of my mother's death, I forgot my heart-break over her, in you.
Even then I loved you, utterly. You were the angel of all my wretched
cadet days. Then, years later, when I came to know you a little, my love
became the passion of a young man, and it finally swept me into a gulf
of desolation. But no wrong could really come through you; and what then
seemed ruin, showed itself, in the end, the opportunity of my life. It
drove me to what I could not have done alone. Through you I found my
work.
"That is long ago, Nathalie; and I am not a young man now. But in all my
life there has been only one woman.--That fact came to me forcibly in
that first hour of your first visit to me here: the beginning of our
thrice-blessed companionship.
"That beautiful dream is ended, now. No doubt, for a time, you must
leave this place. But it is insulting neither you nor the dishonored
dead whose wife you have not been for years, to tell you what you know:
that you carry away with you my soul!--Nathalie, Princess of all my
life, will you not set forth leaving behind you the promise to come
back?--You shall wait as long as you will: two years, if it must be. I
have endured far longer than that, and without hope.--Only let there be
between us the dear knowledge that, in time, you are to accept for a
husband the man whose life shall thenceforward be at your least
command!"
His speech had been too rapid for interruption; and yet both voice and
manner were quiet and restrained. His every word was spoken with the
simplicity of unconscious ardor. And only from his eyes, which burned
her, and the almost painful clasping of her hands, could the Princess
surmise his emotion.
Perhaps, had it been feasible, she would have stopped his speech. But,
somehow, he had compelled a hearing. And nothing he had said either
shocked or repelled her. Yet she was enough affected by the death of the
man who had done her every despite, but who had, nevertheless, taught
her the mystery of life and given her her children, to be distressed at
this proposal in the first hours of her widowhood.
Gently she put Ivan from her, and rose, moving towards the window,
before which she stood, gazing down into the white street, while Ivan
waited, trembling with emotion. When she turned to him again, she had
replaced the chains upon her feelings.
"This afternoon I am leaving for Petersburg," she said. "I must carry
your words away with me.--My impulse is to reject, instantly, every
suggestion of such a thing.--But your companionship in these last weeks
has meant for me more than I can tell you now; and, in my empty home in
Petersburg, I shall carefully consider the honor you have done me.--Yes,
dear Ivan, it is an honor from any man; and from you a very great one.
The woman whom you married would be fortunate, I know. But--I can only
promise to write you, soon. Believe me, you shall not wait longer than I
can help. This is fair, I think.
"And now, I can give you no more time to-day.--No, you can do nothing,
thank you. Léonie for me, old Kasha for the children--they do
everything.--We leave the Petersburg station at five. Come then, if you
will, to say good-bye to the little girls. Our au revoir must be here."
"Au revoir!" echoed Ivan, his voice gleaming.
Madame Féodoreff smiled, rather sadly. "Ah, Ivan, whatever my answer to
you, tell me that I shall have your friendship still! It is the most
precious thing that is left me, excepting my children. I cannot afford
to lose you as my friend.--Promise!" and she held out her hand.
He took it, quietly. "I promise, dear lady of my life."
"Then, again--au revoir!"
"But soon.--_Soon!_"
He was gone; but, though she yielded to her impulse and ran to the
window to look after him, he walked away without once turning his head.
* * * * *
That night, when he returned alone to his empty house, after bidding his
world good-bye at the Petersburg station, he perceived at once that the
Moscow around him was but a wilderness, and his great palace a prison.
Thenceforward he was to exist only in the consciousness of waiting: his
faith in her promise that she would torture him not a moment longer than
she must. But, as the days passed, logic, calm, even reason, forsook
him, till no lover of twenty-one was ever in sorer plight than he. Truly
Nathalie herself could hardly have guessed the depths to which she had
plunged this quiet and self-centred man. She had, nevertheless, the
consideration to keep her word. It was but eleven days after her
departure, nine after the funeral of her husband, before Ivan found
himself shut alone into that room where she had first greeted him,
holding her answer in his visibly trembling hands.--A moment.--A long
sigh.--It was open.
"78 KERZONSKAIA, ST. PETERSBURG,
"_Tuesday, January 9th_, 11 P.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, to _think_. I have wished to give
myself fair opportunity for finding out my real mind; but,
miserable thing that I am! the real _I_ will 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 felt for 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 want _not_ to 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 friend _you_ must 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"--the
_motif_, the epitome, of his own, dark life.