The Grand Duke and Eva Sorel had come late. The dinner was over, and the general conversation had ceased. The couples whispered. The Duke, sitting between Lady Elmster and the Princess Trubetzkoi, had fallen asleep. However animated the company, this would happen from time to time; every one knew it, and had become accustomed to it.
Though he slept, his pose remained erect and careful. From time to time his lids twitched; the furrow on his forehead deepened so that it seemed black; his colourless beard was like a fern on the bark of a tree. One might have suspected that he feigned sleep in order to listen; but there was a slackness in his features that showed the uncontrolled muscles of sleep, and lent his face the appearance of a lemur. On his excessively long, lean hand, which rested on the cloth, and, like his lids, twitched at times, gleamed a solitaire diamond, the size of a hazelnut.
A restlessness had stolen over the company. When the rifles outside began to rattle again, the young Countess Finkenrode arose and turned frightened glances toward the door. Szilaghin approached her, and calmed her with a smile. An officer of the guards entered, and whispered a report to Tutchkoff.
Eva and Wiguniewski sat a little aside, in front of a tall mirror that reflected a pallid image of them and of a part of the room.
Wiguniewski said to her: “Unhappily the report is vouched for. No one thought of such a thing.”
“I was told he was in Petrograd,” Eva answered. “In a German newspaper, moreover, I read a report that he was arrested in Moscow. And where are your proofs? To condemn Ivan Becker on hearsay is almost as terrible as the crime of which he is accused.”
Wiguniewski took a letter from his pocket, looked about him carefully, unfolded it, and said: “From Nice he wrote this to a friend of his who is also my friend. I am afraid it puts an end to all doubt.” Painfully, and with many hesitations, he translated the Russian words into French. “I am no longer what I was. Your suppositions are not groundless, and the rumours have not lied. Announce and confirm it to all who have set their hopes on me and given me their trust on definite conditions. A terrible time lies behind me. I could not go farther on my old and chosen path. You have been deceived in me, even as a phantom has misled me. In a case like mine it requires greater courage and strength to confess sincerely, and to wound those who had put their faith and trust in me, than to mount the scaffold and give up one’s life. Gladly would I have suffered death for the ideas to which all my thoughts and feelings have been devoted hitherto. All of you know that. For I had already sacrificed to them my possessions, my peace, my youth, my liberty. But now when I have come to recognize these ideas as destructive errors, I must not serve them for another hour. I fear neither your accusations nor your contempt. I follow my inner light and the God that is within. There are three truths that have guided me in that searching of my soul which led to my conversion: It is a sin to resist; it is a sin to persuade others to resistance; it is a sin to shed the blood of man. I know all that threatens me; I know the isolation that will be mine. I am prepared for all persecutions. Do what you must, even as I do what I must.”
After a long silence Eva said: “That is he. That is his voice; that is the bell whose chime none can resist. I believe him and I believe in him.” She threw a sombre glance at the face of that sleeper beside the radiant board.
Wiguniewski crushed the letter, and thrust forward his chin with a bitter gesture. “His three truths,” he replied, “will be as effective against our cause as three army divisions of Cossacks. They will suffice to fill the dungeons on both sides of the Urals, to unman our youth, to bury our hopes. Each one is a whip that will smite unto the earth an hundred thousand awakened spirits. Crime? It is worse; it is the tragedy of all this land. Three truths!” He laughed through his compressed teeth. “Three truths, and a blood-bath I will begin that will make those of Bethlehem and St. Bartholomew seem jests. You may look at me. I do not weep; I laugh. Why should I weep? I shall go home, summon the popes, and give them this rag; and let them made amulets of it to distribute among those who wait for salvation. Perhaps that will suffice them.”
Eva’s face grew hard. An evil fascination still drew her eyes toward that sleeper’s face. Upon the edges of her lips hovered a morbid smile; the skin of her cheek glimmered like an opal. “Why should he not follow the command of his soul?” she asked, and for a moment turned her diademed brow toward the prince. “Is it not better that a man should express and embody himself completely than that many hundreds of thousands be helped in the dreary mediocrity of their rigid lives? He has said it in his own beautiful way: ‘I follow the inner light and the God that is within.’ How many can do that? How many dare? And now I understand something he once said”—more penetratingly she looked into that sleeper’s face—“‘one must bow down before that!’ So that was in his mind. Strange ploughs are passing over this earth of yours, prince. In its lacerated body there streams a darkness into which one would like to plunge in order to be born again. A primitive breath is there, and chaos; there the elements thunder and the most terrible dream becomes reality, an epic reality of immemorial ages. Of such life I once had no perception, except in some great marble in which a nameless woe had become rigid and eternal. I feel as though I were looking back on this scene from the height of centuries to come or from a star, and as though everything were vision.” All this she said in a trembling voice and with an impassioned melancholy.