A MIXED ASSEMBLY.
T was Sunday afternoon. The rather festive look of Petrovitch's room, in which he now sat alone, was not, however, due to any desire to specialise the day. He had simply made his home as cheerful as possible because he was about to entertain guests.
His table was spread with a snowy cloth, and with the preparations for a tea of a distinctly convivial character. There was jam, and more than one kind of cake; and the room was further brightened by bunches of chrysanthemums. Chairs were drawn round the fire in an inviting-looking circle. The least cheerful object in the room was the owner of it, who sat in his usual chair between the fire and the writing-table. He looked pale and weary, for the frosty weather had strongly renewed the pain in a wound in his breast—an old wound, and a wound that had just missed being a deadly one. Contrary to his usual custom, he was neither reading nor writing. The pipe he had been smoking had gone out, and his thoughts were far back in the past, among the memories which had re-awakened with that aching in his breast. His thoughts went further back than the date of that wound,—went back to the days before he had lost friends, home, and country. He saw again in fancy the brilliant gaiety of the winters in St Petersburg, he heard again the exquisite music of the concerts and the opera,—the balls where Majesty itself had deigned to be present, with anxious brow and uneasy, restless eyes. His memory dwelt longest on a certain torchlight fête on the Neva, when the ice had been a yard thick, and when the élite had been shut off from the common herd by walls made of blocks of solid ice, between which fir trees were planted; when coloured lamps and Chinese lanterns had thrown indescribable magic over the crowd of bright military uniforms and the exquisite toilettes of lovely women who had never in all their lives been troubled by any thought of what their dresses cost. And even at this distance he could not think without half a pang of a certain fair-faced girl, with golden hair, who, in her sapphire velvet and swansdown, had been the star of that fête to his boyish eyes. And she had been kind to him on this the last evening he had spent near her before his new faiths and duties had separated him from her for ever. That was the first loss his creed had cost him. He wondered what would be the last—life itself perhaps. Then he fell to thinking how these beliefs of his had grown up. How the reading of a certain book—an English book—had done for his mind what a successful operation for cataract does for one nearly blind—had shown him the facts of life, no longer half hidden in a mist of falsity, but in all their naked truth and ugliness. How for a time he had closed his eyes again and had tried hard to live on in the life of luxury, beauty, love, and (now he knew) selfishness which had been his by 'right of birth.' He remembered the night when, belated miles from his home, and overtaken by a snowstorm, he had sought refuge in a peasant's hut, how he had talked to his hosts, how one visit had led to many, and how what he had learned from these miserable serfs had forbidden him to forget or to set aside the teaching of the great author whose book had first set him thinking. He remembered that time, perhaps the happiest in his life, when he first began to write—when the ideas which had so long been seething in his brain had found literary expression. He remembered the joy with which he had corrected his first proof, the pride with which he read his first article in a magazine. So thoroughly back in the old time was he that he had stretched out his hand towards this very magazine, which stood bound on a bookshelf, when a heavy foot sounded on the stairs, and a moment after a knock at the door heralded the entrance of Mr Toomey, whom Petrovitch came forward to greet with an almost courtly welcome.
'But your wife,' he said; 'can she not come? I trust all is well with her?'
'All's well with her, and thanking you for the question; but all's not well with that young woman o' yours.'
'Of mine? I do not happen to possess a young woman, my good Toomey.'
'I suppose you and me and my Mary Jane possesses about equal shares of her, then, for I saved her from keeping company with the dead cats and dogs, and you sent her to our place, and now my missus is let in for looking arter her.'
'Come to the fire. I hope it's nothing serious.'
'I don't rightly know. My missus told me I should be better out of the way, and I sent the doctor in as I came by.'