Eva had not listened very attentively. The hymns to Russia, intoned by wayfaring literary men and observers, began seriously to bore her. She made a faintly wry mouth. “Yes,” she said, “it’s a world all its own,” and held out her lovely hands toward the warmth of the fire.
It seemed to Ermelang that she had never, in the old days, let some one to whom she was talking thus drift out of the circle of her mind. He felt that his words had had no friendly reception. He became diffident and silent. Guardedly he observed her with his inner eye, which was truly austere. He saw the change of which she had spoken, and recorded the image as she had demanded.
The oval of her face had acquired a line hardened as by the will. Nothing was left of goodness in it, little of serenity. An almost harsh determination was about her mouth. There were losses, too. Shadows lay on her temples and under her lids. Her body still betrayed her lordship over it, precisely in its flowing ease, its expansion and repose, such as one sees in wildcats. Ermelang had heard that she toiled unceasingly, spending six to seven hours a day in practice, as in the years of her apprenticeship. The result was evident in the satiation with rhythm and grace which her limbs and joints showed and her perfect control of them.
Yet nothing gracious, nothing of freedom came from her. Ermelang thought of the rumours that accused her of an unquenchable lust after power, of dangerous political plotting, fatal conspiracies, and a definite influence upon certain secret treaties that threatened to disquiet the nations, and of not being guiltless of journalistic campaigns that in their blended brutality and subtlety menaced the peace of Europe. It had seemed as though great coal deposits in the depth of the earth were on fire; but the men above still lived and breathed without suspicion.
Those who distrusted her declared her to be a secret agent of Germany, yet she enjoyed the friendship of French and British diplomatists. Her defenders asserted that she was used without her knowledge to cover the plans and guile of the Grand Duke Cyril. Those who believed in her wholly declared that she really crossed his plans and only feigned to be his tool. The nobility disliked her; the court feared her; the common people, goaded by priests and sectaries, saw in her the embodied misfortune of their country. At a rebellion in Ivanova she had been publicly proclaimed a witch, and her name had been pronounced accursed with solemn rites. Not later than the day before, a deputation of peasants from Mohilev, whom he had met in the fish market, had told him that they had seen the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo, and in their complaints concerning the famine in their province had, in their stubborn superstition, pointed out the wicked splendour of the foreign dancer’s life. It had become proverbial among them. The Tsar, they said, had been unable to give an answer, and had gazed at the floor.
All these things were incontrovertible parts of her life and fate. He looked upon her lovely hands, rosy in the glow of the flames, and felt a dread for her.
“Is it true,” he asked, with a shy smile, “that you entered the forbidden fortress thrice in succession?”
“It is true. Has it been taken amiss?”
“It has certainly aroused amazement. No stranger has ever before crossed that threshold, nor any Russian unless he entered as a prisoner. No one seems able to fathom your impulse. Many suppose that you merely wanted to see Dmitri Sheltov, who fired at the Grand Duke. Tell me your motive; I should like to have a reply to the gossips.”