A week before, had Drexel seen definite prospect of the revolutionists’ success, he would have leaped at this as a wonderful business opportunity. But it was quite another influence that now determined his reply. Freeman had been in conference with Sonya and her friends; he was going to be in further conference with them; to enter into this plan, even if he chose not to carry it out, would mean that somehow he would again come into contact with Sonya.
“I would consider it,” he answered.
“Would you meet with a duly authorized committee to talk it over?”
“Yes.” He thought of the conference he had witnessed four nights since, and he wondered if he would come before the same group. “Meet where?” he asked.
“I am supposed not to give the address, and I would rather not.”
“As you like,” Drexel returned stiffly. “But either I know where I am going, or I do not go.”
“Oh, very well;” and Freeman gave the address of the house in Three Saints’ Court. He rose. “This of course has been only a preliminary talk. I shall see you again in the course of two or three days. Good-night.”
Drexel, preoccupied with this new chance of his finding again the girl he loved, returned to the Howards’ apartment, and found them prepared to start to the ball at Prince Valenko’s. In his present mood he shrank from that brilliant show. He preferred to remain at home, kept company by thoughts of a beautiful, spirited young woman in the coarse, shapeless clothing of a factory girl. He tried to beg off; but Alice would not hear of losing a convenient cavalier whom she might have need of—and his uncle demanded, if he did not go, with whom was he to talk, with nobody around him except people that spoke only French and this fizz and pin-wheel business that they called Russian? So Drexel could do nothing but consent and follow to the carriage.
They drove past the Winter Palace, empty of royalty, for the Czar, in fear of those he ruled, dared not trust his person there—past huge grand-ducal palaces—and presently they entered a great mansion that looked forth upon the ice-bound Neva. Drexel was well accustomed to the luxury of the rich Russian nobility, but even he, with his double reason for being dull to impressions, could but note that he had been in no house so rich as this. And he recognized that, save for the Czar and his immediate family, there were none prouder and higher in all the empire than these haughty men whose breasts were a blaze of orders and these haughty women who seemed to walk amid a moving fire of jewels. And of them all, he well knew, none had lineage older, nobler, than Princess Valenko.
Drexel did not see the princess upon his entry, for interest in the famed beauty, long absent abroad, was high, and she had been swept aside into one of the drawing-rooms by an admiring group and was there the prisoner of her guests. Drexel ascended to the brilliant ball-room. A little later, while he was standing with his uncle and Prince Berloff, General Valenko, recognizing Berloff, paused a moment beside them. The military governor was straight, gray-haired, gray-bearded, a splendid figure of a soldier-statesman at sixty-five, his bearing and every feature marked with that pride which unbends only to equals, with strength, decision, dominance. There was also that in his face and bearing which suggested that his character was fibred with pitiless severity—with that despotic severity which becomes a mere matter of course after a lifetime of service to the most autocratic and cruel of Christian governments.