As for Ivan, people might chatter and beckon as they would, his interest in them was gone. On the other hand, he had become completely absorbed in the personality of this other, once heart and centre of the gayest set in civilized society; now dwelling in the fastnesses of an isolation such as he himself, connoisseur of solitude, had not dreamed of. For in all existence there can be no such isolation as that of the woman cast out from among her kind, yet too much one of them to endure the companionship of others. At the same time, since no brave fight can leave either man or woman as it found them, so, through the dreary years of her disgrace, Alexandrine Nikitenko, buoyed up by her unbreakable pride, had gathered from her blackened fields no small harvest of broad-mindedness, philosophy, and courage. The Alexandrine of old, acknowledged priestess of frivolity, was not a tenth so well worth knowing as the faded, jaded woman, long since numbed to the pain of slights and insults, who had, through the long years, persistently made her dwelling-place in the city of her downfall. She was no saint: affected no martyr's pose: had never, since her departure from the convent within whose walls she left her babe, sought the consolation of religion. Child of the world, in a sense, she must always be; but she was also a woman, softened far more than she herself dreamed. Cynicism was the cloak of her defence; but Ivan, early in their acquaintance, unconsciously folded it back, and beheld the beautiful robe beneath. Thenceforward, throughout the last months of his stay in Italy, their friendship increased by leaps and bounds. The woman began to feel that at last the mysterious Arbiter of human fate had lifted His iron hand, and was looking upon her with forgiveness written in merciful eyes.
On the very day after his first dramatic meeting with the Princess, Ivan had written to Nathalie, in Petersburg, to gather, at first-hand, the details of the Russian part of the Nikitenko drama. Princess Féodoreff replied with her habitual promptness; but the story contained in her letter was rather disappointing. Apparently Florence knew as much as Petersburg. The deserted husband, who had climbed far up the ladder of diplomacy, was celebrated for his morose reticence about his personal affairs. Nathalie's words were almost an exact repetition of those of the little Contessa. Ivan was obliged to wait until, one day, he learned the whole story from the lips of its heroine herself, who told it to him unasked.
Early in their friendship, as soon, indeed, as she perceived that he ranged himself absolutely with her, Ivan learned how scrupulously honest Madame Nikitenko was. With manlike exactness she gave him to understand that friendship with him grown purely out of liking would be a godsend to her; but of kindness from compassion she would have none. Cut and gibe had little power to sting. Pity infuriated her. Gallantly she was fighting a disease which every day gained a little ground; and which she well knew to be mortal. But her very maid, the one person whom she deeply loved, dared no more to look at her with understanding of her pain, than she would have bared her back voluntarily to the knout. When, therefore, Ivan, adopting the Princess' own tone, told her frankly that she alone had power to keep away from him that ennui which must otherwise drive him out of Florence, she proceeded to tell him openly which subjects must thenceforth remain closed between them. Of these, the principal was her illness, which should, before Eastertide, free her forever from the eyes of the gaping world.
She had had her first hemorrhage in October, immediately after her return from Trouville, where she spent her summers. Christmas Day brought the second—a severe one, which was stopped barely in time. After that followed a long and peaceful interlude: weeks which Ivan afterwards looked back on with wonder; for the glamour of her personality, her magnetism, remained about that memory till the day of his death. His intercourse with her combined the best features of masculine comradeship and feminine Platonism before the mawkish stage is reached. She had the ability, so rare in men, to draw out the best that was in her companion. And Ivan would often find himself displaying qualities of eloquence and brilliancy of which he had never suspected the existence. But the woman never revealed to him their source. She herself was more than rewarded by the originality and the depth of the ideas which she merely taught him to express. For, though rhetoric may be cultivated, the most wonderful of tacticians cannot put individual ideas into the brains of a pupil.
Late February found the world, even down to Ivan's own servants, in a state of hot resentment against the Prince's desertion of his class. Ivan, however, cared not a whit. Daily he grew more absorbed: daily he found some newly admirable thing about her in whom he had reawakened the desire and the power to attract. True, their intercourse was purely intellectual. Yet Ivan had long ago perceived, even in the midst of wreck and disease, what this woman must have been in the heyday of her indiscretion; and he realized how helpless he should have been in her hands twenty years before. It is possible that, in time, the physical might have come to life in him. He might have forgotten the years, the emaciation, even the rouge and the careless efforts at concealing gray hairs with badly-put-on dye. All this, perhaps, in time. But, well or ill, fate had determined, long before, that this, her one true friendship, was to be but episodic. It was the prologue to a drama undreamed of as yet; the last act of which was to take place many years after the apparent end, now so near at hand.
Upon the morning of March 15th, a soft and sunny day of the treacherous Italian spring, Ivan, presenting himself at the familiar door, was informed that Princess Nikitenko was indisposed, and begged him to excuse her till the morrow. Thus the wording of the message, which produced no more effect than a little disappointment. Ivan loitered about the streets for an hour, and then suddenly decided to go up to Fiesole and spend his day upon the pleasant height that overlooks the "smokeless city" and the valley of the winding Arno. As he rode up, and up, through the sunshine, past fields just touched with the first, faint, exquisite green, a slow intoxication began to tingle through his veins; and lo! the creative instinct came trembling through him once again.
From that moment, time ceased. The hours passed dreamwise. And, at the falling of the day, when the blood-splashed glory of the western sky was balanced in the east by the soft radiance of the low-swinging moon, his latest inspiration swelled towards its culmination. Long and long he sat alone on the little terrace before the gray, stone church, his mind wandering through space to the accompaniment of wondrous harmonies, himself oblivious of time and men.
It was after one o'clock when at last he reached his apartment and entered the antechamber where, to his astonishment, stood Piotr, anxiety written on his wrinkled face. As the door shut behind Ivan, and he stepped into the light of the hanging lantern, Piotr started forward, crying:
"Excellency!—At last!"
"Who else could it have been?—What are you waiting for?"