The young Pole made no trouble about accepting this help from his sudden friends. Nevertheless, his gratitude was well-expressed and patently sincere. Nicholas Rubinstein alone, felt some secret, uncorroborated doubts about the character of the boy; but he was too doubtful of his perceptions not to abuse even his own alter ego for a pessimistic cynic. And when, within the month, he received from the protégé a small portrait of himself, in which the likeness was so striking that it excused every fault of execution, he tried hard to take Joseph to his genial heart as, years ago, he had taken Ivan, on sight.
Every member of the group who had helped him received similar testimony of the stranger's gratitude. But of them all only the picture of Ivan, a pastel, in which the face alone was thrown out by the light of a red lamp, and the rest of the figure, seated at a piano, remained deep in shadow, was in any way remarkable for its execution. This, however, impressionistic though it is, remains to this day the one thoroughly characteristic portrait of Gregoriev; albeit in later life he sat for, and at the request of, three great artists. This little picture, however, being recognized as something remarkable, went into the salon in the following October, and received the first medal for pastels—completely overtopping the more elaborate oil which had also been accepted, and which got a mention.—Truly, the Pole's second start in life bade fair to be as sensationally successful as his first had been unhappy.
Joseph once settled and happily at work, Ivan went back to his own routine again in excellent spirits. Now and then he saw the young man, who regarded him, as Ivan could not but know, as his benefactor, his self-constituted guardian and adviser. Ivan was himself a man of so much individuality and independence that he failed to understand Joseph as one of those who cannot live without leaning, if not for help, at least for constant encouragement, on some one else. Ivan had, indeed, perceived that a little vein of weakness ran side by side with the peculiar spirituality of the Pole. But so beyond his own nature was this combination, that it never entered his head to watch and guard the young fellow as he might have done had he understood. Perhaps, in this way, Joseph's gift might have been saved to the world. But fate grants much help to no man; and when Ivan's eyes were opened, it was already too late. This did not come about, however, until, in the spring of the year 1871, something had happened to change Gregoriev's mode of life almost as completely as he had altered that of the waif thrown up at his door out of the troubled sea of the Akheskaia.
It was now twelve years since the youth Ivan, graduated from his four penitential years of military schooling, had taken his first long flight from Moscow, northward, into the joyous unknown: twelve years since he had put behind him all that half-comprehended blackness of evil and grim unhappiness that had weighted his boyhood with vague premonitions of coming disaster. Indeed, had he been told, at the hour of his going, that he should never again know a month of life in the same house with his father, he would have been possessed by a secret joy. Not so, however, Prince Michael. Nothing in all his merciless life had hurt this man of shadows like the defection of his son. Nor did the rolling years soften the sting of loss. Rather, as, little by little, the mantle of loneliness was drawn closer and closer about him, muffling him at last even from contact with the companions of his relaxation and license, the hardness and the bitterness in him increased, till something of it was surmised even by the jackals that served him. Still, of the processes of that strange nature, no one in the world knew much. His high position, held against all rivals by power of fear, naturally brought him into contact with officialdom, from Czar down to police-sergeant. But from every man he got the same species of servility, fawning or inimical, born of guilty knowledge of Michael's hieroglyphic map and his relentless use of it. And this attitude of the world, encouraged though it was by its recipient, bred in him no desire for intimacy with any of his kind, but only a half-indifferent, lazily calculating, contempt.
There had been a time when certain of his private occupations—interviews with personages of wealth or influence, cryptic conversations, resulting always, however defiant the beginning, in the same grovelling pleas and promises—had amused and interested the cynic most mightily: been the cream of his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere wanton freak, in unconditional release.—Preposterous indeed that the only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning to seem the only ones bearable to remember!
His wife, a woman for whom he had had a certain tolerant affection, but no respect, he had probably not greatly mourned. Of friendship with his equals, he knew nothing. So, of sheer necessity, all the personal interest of his last years had been centered in the career of his banished son.—And ah! How he had suffered through that son! No other blow devised by man or God could have touched him save just the disgrace and downfall of Ivan in Petersburg. During the months immediately following the court-martial, the palace in Konnaia Square had been the abode of a fiend incarnate. Servants slunk from room to room in terror of their very lives; and the Governor-General, an Imperial Highness, had looked forward with dire dread to his occasional necessary visits to the chief of the Third Section. This lasted throughout the summer. Then, in the autumn, had come sudden opportunity for vengeance, of a sort, on Ivan's persecutor, Colonel Brodsky, whose disgrace and exile were achieved with marvellous swiftness, and who died, fifteen years later, in the horrible mines of Kara. Not until midwinter, however, did Prince Michael's agents receive orders to locate, watch, and make report on the condition of his son. It took some weeks before Ivan, half-starved, badly clothed, living like a day-laborer, was discovered in his garret on Vassily Island. Help was not proffered. But never again did Michael lose sight of the young man.
In the succeeding years, the Prince watched the growing career of his son with a mingled passion of anger, pride, humiliation, relief, and a mighty, uncontrollable eagerness. As, slowly, wearily, beset with every difficulty, Ivan climbed, round by round, the ladder of his chosen profession, his father noted his progress far more accurately than he himself. And when at last Michael was forced to realize that the younger Gregoriev had come to a distinction almost as marked as, and infinitely more respected than, his own, the grim-souled Prince felt himself torn by an almost unbearable emotion, half delight, half remorseful pain. For, all unconsciously, the musician stood a living reproach to the father whose ambition had found no better road to celebrity than that of trickery, dishonesty, blackmail,—all-unscrupulousness; while the boy, by personal sacrifice and hard and honorable labor, had reached the same end many years earlier.
A pity, perhaps, that his father's inmost heart should have gone forever unfathomed by Ivan. But deep down in the son's nature lay the sting of Michael's desertion in the hour of his great need. That strange interview held between them on the night of the students' capture, had done no more to soften the relationship between them than had the money sent to Ivan on one or two occasions when it had not been greatly needed. As to the interview, indeed, it was only Ivan who came out unscathed; for the ring of Ivan's laugh—that cruel laugh which Michael had understood far better than Ivan himself—sounded for many a month in the official's ears; and for a time he denied himself his greatest, but unacknowledged, delight. For three months he kept away from the opera on Ivan's nights, thereby suffering incredibly.
Many another incident showing the possibility of reconciliation between the two might be recounted; but none brought result; and, in fact, till the very end, a mocking fate kept the two apart.