Once through the letter he sat motionless, the black-bordered sheet crushed tightly in his right hand. He had forgotten the paper on which her words to him were traced. Perhaps he had forgotten the words themselves. But the throbbing of his heart continued: the veins in his temples still stood out, like purple whip-cords. It was late in the night before there appeared, in the dark room, the vision of his mother's angel-face gazing at him, her clear eyes filled with mingled love and understanding; and midnight had long struck before that which he instinctively expected was finally given: when, like a diapason, crashing, fortissimo, through the dark, rolled the magnificent, despairing chords of the final theme of the great "Tosca Symphony"—the motif, the epitome, of his own, dark life.
CHAPTER XXI
TOSCA REGNANT
During the weeks immediately succeeding this last repulse, Ivan suffered as he had suffered in the early days of Nathalie's marriage. It was not easy for him to comprehend why Madame Féodoreff's letter should affect him so bitterly. He made all the familiar efforts: tried every resource known to him of old. They failed. Not only had his tranquillity departed; not only had his work been turned from joy to drudgery; not only was the pleasant savor of his quiet existence gone; nay: physically, mentally, he felt himself sick, and in want. His brain played him false. His sleep deserted him. His carefully guarded existence turned upon him, mocking.
Ivan at last began fully to realize what the past three months had done: how, in them, all the old love-bitterness, all the accumulated loneliness and hardship of his solitary years, piled together, had been transmuted into a mighty hope, the destruction of which swept away his carefully-reared edifice of artificial content. Out of all the women in the world, he had wanted, had asked for, in all his life, none but Nathalie. But her he had needed, terribly; and she was gone: gone out of his yearning heart, and arms, and soul—for good!
It was now a long time since he had begun his reign in the house of his fathers: that dreary house of evil name in which pure women had been overcome as by some poison, some miasma of foul living, and, generation after generation, had died there, down to his mother's day. This, for more than two centuries had been the tradition of that grewsome palace, till it was famed throughout the city for the sinister line of men who had dwelt therein, and had finally died out with the last Prince. Ivan, when he took up his residence there so suddenly, had put behind him his memories of the old-wife's tales, and his own boyhood experience. This, as he progressed farther and farther along the road of power, had become easier daily until—a woman stepped in, and the power of Prince Ivan faded and died. In the early days of his disappointment, he was beset by all the ghosts of his fathers. Himself once more a prey to that black Tosca that is the heritage of every thinking Russian, he yielded without resistance to thoughts and memories as morbid and as dreary as those on which his mother, years ago, had fed her dread disease. So, after a few midwinter weeks of brooding, lassitude, and sleepless fasting, his personal servants, there being no friend at hand to replace them, ventured to remonstrate with their master. Piotr was now as much his devoted slave as was old Sósha, who had recently retired from active duty to the kitchen-corner, where his reminiscences and his pipe-smoke together flavored that cheery room. Sósha had no hesitation in taking Piotr's lead, and begging the master either to bring home company to amuse him, or to change his abode to some more fashionable quarter of the city, whither all his dependants would happily follow him.
To these simple appeals Ivan listened, certainly; but, bound down by that cruel lassitude which is the direst symptom of chronic melancholy, he refused every suggestion, and left his servants to return to their quarters, dismally shaking their gray heads over his mental state.
So through the winter. But the flowing of spring-tide rouses the dullest to contemplate some possible change of routine. And when that blessed season once more breathed upon White Russia, Ivan woke to the memory of old desire. From his mother, who, as a girl, had run wild over the huge Blashkov estates, Ivan inherited that intense love of nature without which an artist must be always maimed. This year, especially, he found himself daily dreaming of the perfumed nights and sweet-aired days of the country of his boyhood: his mother's favorite resort, at Klin, whither she had been wont to convey him in May, and whence she departed, tearfully, under heavy pressure, in October; though twice in her life she had managed to spend the greater part of the winter there, in the white wilderness hateful to her lord. "Maidonovo" was a moderate-sized house, set in the midst of twenty acres of land situated a half-mile from the extremity of the village of Klin. A year after his wife's death Michael Gregoriev had sold the place, which he had always detested. Of it Ivan now dreamed, incessantly; till, late in April, he entered into negotiations that were presently to electrify his household and that part of Moscow's population with whom he figured as something of a personage.