"No, everyone is dead. His mother worshipped him, but she died when he was scarcely eighteen, and his father before that. His mother is his adored memory. In all the mad scenes which he and his companions, I am afraid, have enacted in the Fontonka house, there is one set of rooms no one has dared to enter—her rooms—and he keeps flowers there, and an ever-burning lamp. There is a strange touch of sentiment and melancholy in Gritzko, and of religion too. Sometimes I think he is unhappy, and then he goes off to his castle in the Caucasus or to Milasláv, and no one sees him for weeks. Last year we hoped he would marry a charming Polish girl—he quite paid her attention for several nights; but he said she laughed one day when he felt sad, and answered seriously when he was gay, and made crunching noises with her teeth when she ate biscuits!—and her mother was fat and she might grow so too! And for these serious reasons he could not face her at breakfast for the rest of his life! Thus that came to an end. No one has any influence upon him. I have given up trying. One must accept him as he is, or leave him alone—he will go his own way."
Tamara had ceased fighting with herself about the interest she took in conversations relating to the Prince. She could not restrain her desire to hear of him, but she explained it now by telling herself he was a rather lurid and unusual foreign character, which must naturally be an interesting study for a stranger.
"It was an escape for the girl at least, perhaps," she said, when the
Princess paused.
"Of that I am not sure; he is so tender to children and animals, and his soul is full of generosity and poetry—and justice too. Poor Gritzko," and the Princess sighed.
Then Tamara remembered their conversation during their night ride from the Sphinx, and she felt again the humiliating certainty of how commonplace he must have found her.
Presently the Princess took her to see the house. Every room filled with relics of the grand owners who had gone before. There were portraits of Peter the Great, and the splendid Catherine, in almost every room.
"An Empress so much misjudged in your country, Tamara," her godmother said. "She had the soul and the necessities of a man, but she was truly great."
Tamara gazed up at the proud débonnaire face, and she thought how at home they would think of the most unconventional part of her character, to the obliteration of all other aspects, and each moment she was realizing how ridiculous and narrow was the view from the standpoint from which she had been made to look at life.
For luncheon quite a number of guests arrived, the Princess, she found afterward, was hardly ever alone.
"I don't care to go out, Tamara, as a rule, to déjeuner," she said, "but I love my house to be filled with young people and mirth."