At the station were waiting four two-seated sleighs, each with three splendid blacks hitched abreast. It fell out that Drexel, the countess, Sonya and Berloff got into one sleigh, Sonya and Berloff in the front seat. As they flashed over the flat white country, tucked away in frozen sleep, Drexel involuntarily compared these two women, the one he did not love and felt sure he could have, and the one he did love and knew he could not have—both beautiful, both clever, both so different from what they seemed to the world—both involved in the dangerous underground struggle against the Czar.
He could but notice with what ease Sonya talked with Berloff, that powerful antagonist with whom she was in deadly duel. He studied Berloff anew in the light of her startling revelation, and he saw anew the power, the resourcefulness, the relentless cunning behind that pale, refined face. In a struggle of wits against wits, he was an adversary that only the cleverest could hope to hold his own against. Moreover, he did not fight alone. Fighting with him, and for him, was his own army of near a hundred thousand spies, and besides these was the million of the standing army, and all the vast civil machinery of the State. Drexel drew a long breath.
The prince’s mansion sat in a great park of snow-drooped evergreens. It was a big, box-like, sprawling pile, as are most of the older country seats of the Russian nobility, but the plainness of its exterior prepared a surprise for him who entered for the first time. The furnishings were rich and quiet in their tone; the walls of the main rooms were hung with paintings, studies, etchings, chiefly works from the hands of the big Frenchmen of the nineteenth century; and everywhere were exquisite little bronzes, the best private collection in Russia. Berloff, so said his friends, could have been an eminent artist himself, had birth not destined him to greater things.
Drexel’s eyes were ever covertly watching Sonya—thrilled with the sense that he alone of all here knew the double part she played. Sonya at once became the dominant figure of the party. She did not seek attention, rather she seemed to disdain it; but, nevertheless, it focussed upon her, and with a magnificent indifference she accepted it as her due.
In the evening, when they were all in the music room, the countess surprised one of Drexel’s surreptitious glances at Sonya. “You seem to think with the rest of the men, that there is only one woman present, the princess,” she whispered.
“I had heard so much of her that I was curious,” Drexel returned.
“Allow the elderly widow to tell you that attention paid the princess is attention wasted. She will smile on nothing less than royal blood. Since we left Petersburg she has given you one casual glance and two casual words. Are my statistics correct?”
“They agree with my own.”
Her voice sank to a bare whisper. “And of course you know she has no sympathy with our movement to gain freedom. She believes in the divine rights of the high-born—that they are superior and should rule and have the earth, and that the many should be their footstool.”
He saw it was her wish to draw him into some retired corner and continue the conversation of the train; but this was not permitted her, for just then the debonair young lieutenant of the Czar’s Guards who had been tripping airily among the perfumed heights of tenor arias from the Italian opera, left the piano, and there arose a demand that she should sing. In rebuke to these sweet soulless intricacies, so it seemed to Drexel, she sang several of the folk songs of little Russia—simple, plaintive airs that were the voice of the people’s heart speaking its joys and woes and aspirations—and sang them in a rich and soft contralto charged with feeling.