And in this incognito lay the power of the Chancellerie; for it might be the very individual to whom you spoke so confidingly; the friend, man or woman, on whose fidelity you relied implicitly, the young girl with the innocent face, the youth with the bold free carriage, the elderly courtier with venerable grey locks, or the dame d'honneur of highest repute, who was the secret agent and in the secret pay of the Chancellerie, and who, at a given signal, would deliver you up to its iron laws, its fearless judgments, and cruel sentence.
On this particular evening the outer salon was well filled with guests, whose gay voices and subdued rippling laughter mingled with the strains of the Household band, and bespoke some hearts at least among the number as free from carking care. French was the language spoken, for Petersburg outvies even gay Lutetia itself in its undeviating worship of all things Parisian.
Within an embrasure of one of the heavily-draped windows, the curtains of which had been pulled somewhat hastily apart, sat a youthful couple, who would in any assembly have stood boldly forth as being more beautiful and distinguished than is the usual type of humanity. Of these, one was a young man, the other a woman scarcely entering her second decade, but with so much of imperious grandeur and haughty pride of race about her that to call her by the less dignified title of girl or maiden would seem an impertinence.
The young man was of more than ordinary proportions, tall and broad-shouldered, with a look of the innocence of childhood still clinging to the soft curves of his fair Northern face, that was revealed in his joyous azure-blue eyes, and reflected in the crisp golden curls which, despite the rigid cropping according to the last Paris mode, lay in tiny rings all over his round and well-shaped head. A close observer would perhaps have noted that his throat, though full and well developed, owned a straight and clean back line, denoting a lack of amative passion, and that the head and forehead were most developed where the phrenologists tell us to look for cruelty and perseverance. His hands were remarkably white, and kept in scrupulous order, even to the finely-rounded filbert nails that shone with the reflected sheen of a polissoire and poudre des ongles. This was his only bit of cox-combry, however, and for the rest, it may be said, he had a hearty laugh, a merry jest, and a cheerful word for every one, and, while boasting more friends than any young patrician in Petersburg, yet admitted no one to a closer intimacy than that accorded by outward cordiality of manner.
This was Ivor Tolskoi. We have seen him before, in the inner sanctum of the Chancellerie, when Vladimir Mellikoff accepted his mission; and Ivor cursed the fate that trembling in the balance, fell in the favour of the older and more experienced man, and thus shut him out from winning his first spurs in the service of his master.
Ivor Tolskoi was, in many ways, an enfant gâté of his world. He was an orphan, and very rich; a ward of the Tsar's, owning large estates in the wild Ural province, which he seldom visited, and serfs whose numbers he had never counted, who were free in name only, and whose sole use in the world was so to labour for him that his revenues year by year never failed, and never grew less. He owned no title, and he would have scorned the acceptance of any mere bauble of to-day's creation; he would have told you, with a toss of his golden head and a ringing laugh, that the Tolskois were lords of the soil and of human souls long centuries before Peter came to the Imperial throne, and raised his nation from out their barbaric indolence; and that while the imperious Tsar was learning ship-building at Deptford, his ancestor of that period was riding at large over his vast properties, hunting the wild boar and the wolf, the ermine and marten, across his own territory, whose boundaries not even he could define. It would ill become him, then, the last scion of his grand old race, to accept a tawdry title in place of his own simple name, Ivor Tolskoi, which each eldest son had born in succession for generation after generation, and before which the peasants upon his wide western property turned pale and trembled.
His companion was his equal in feminine beauty, and there were many circumstances in the life of each strangely similar, which served to draw them closer together, and more intimately than is usually the case in a country and a Court where etiquette governs rather than affinity.
The face of the young woman who leant back negligently against the pile of velvet cushions Ivor had placed for her, was strangely beautiful, with the weird, almost unholy beauty of an enchantress of old; such beauty as Faustine wore, or Cleopatra, or Messalina, which enslaves the senses at once, without leaving any loophole for calm reason. She too was tall and grand of build, though slight, as became her three-and-twenty years; her shoulders bore the curves of the Milo Venus; her neck and bosom fell in the round charming lines of maidenhood; her head rose proudly from the short classic pillar of her throat, and was carried with an almost royal grace; the sweep from chin to ear was perfect in its fine symmetry; the low arched forehead bespoke more than ordinary intelligence; beneath it her eyes, set wide apart and wearing a look of innocent fearlessness, were of the deepest shade of violet, to which the black lashes and pencilled brows gave the piquancy of unexpectedness, for her hair, which was rolled high in heavy masses and fastened with a jewelled arrow, was brown in colour, shot through with a thousand lights of golden auburn; her complexion was pale but warm, and the small perfectly modelled bow of her mouth was tinged with vivid crimson, adding the perfecting note to her ideal countenance.
In manner she was cold, proud, repellent, though beneath the outward ice ran a fire of passion that once let loose would sweep away all barriers of conventionality, and stop at nothing to accomplish its desires.
Like Ivor, she was an orphan, and like him untitled, but there ran within her veins a strain of the great Catherine's blood, transmuted to her from an ancestor who could boast of Imperial favours, and of this bar sinister in the past Olga—for she it was—was prouder than of any patent of a lesser nobility. It may be that, generations intervening notwithstanding, this last fair representative of her race possessed some traits and characteristics of her Imperial ancestress, for like her, she was both strong and weak, impetuous and calculating, passionate and mercenary, forgiving and tyrannical; and was indeed a pure specimen of the Russian type, in which are so strongly and so dispassionately blended the master passions of cruelty and remorse.