There is a certain maxim, unpleasant as it is prevalent, indulged in with great frequency by a certain class of stoical sophists, to the effect that there are many sorrows in life more difficult to bear than that separation from our nearest brought by death. But those men—and especially the women—who have experienced sorrow of both varieties, do not use that proverb.
In his after life Ivan Gregoriev was called upon to bear many burdens of grief; but none of them ever caused him to waver in the assurance that the death of his mother had brought him the bitterest suffering he could be called upon to endure. Before this time—for many recent weeks—he had believed himself cognizant of most forms of unhappiness. So, in a blind, insensate fashion, he was. But the night on which his mother left him opened his eyes to that land of grief where consolation waits on time; it shook from him the last vestige of morbidity; and, lastly, it brought him, too, in generous measure, perception of those beauties of thought and action to be gained by one who accepts his loss unselfishly, in a true and humble spirit.
During the three days that passed before the funeral, Ivan, his brain dulled and heavy with a kind of morbid despair, haunted the room where his mother lay, surrounded with candles the lights of which illumined and intensified the smile of transfiguration still remaining on her peaceful face. To the boy, waiting and watching dumbly, it seemed intolerable that the stillness of that sacred room should be disturbed by the exits and entrances of strangers. In the beginning, he resented even the arrival from her Petersburg convent of his cousin Nathalie; and for the many members of the Blashkov family, distant relatives or mere acquaintances, who throughout her life had left Sophia to bitter loneliness, and came now to stare upon her empty frame, the son felt a hatred too fierce to be expressed in words. They, however, neither knew nor would have cared to learn how the boy heard their every word concerning him and his with wrath unspeakable, and shuddered with misery at their heartless insolence. Nevertheless, the wretchedness hidden under his set, strained mask, was divined by his aunt. Thus, she, for the time much softened by her grief, and feeling also a good deal of curiosity concerning the inner nature of this youth of the haunted eyes, presently sought, by every art of tact and seeming understanding, to open his heart to tears. The fact that she at length succeeded, must be put down to her lasting credit; it having been a deed directly opposed to the traits of her rather cold nature.
Upon the evening after the funeral Madame Dravikine, intensely wearied by the long walk to and from the cemetery, was lying on her couch, eyes closed, her head aching slightly. Nevertheless, when there came a timid knock upon her door, she answered with a summons to enter, and Ivan, responding, went to her impetuously, yielded his hands to her clasp, and allowed himself to be drawn to his knees, at her side, there to listen to gentle words about his mother's love for him, and her ambitions for his future, till she had pierced through the armor of his reserve, and he burst into a storm of sobs the violence of which at first frightened her.
It was the one possible means of relief, however; and Madame Dravikine, wise in her generation, let him weep his bitter revolt away. This lasted nearly an hour, and both were exhausted by the time the tears had ceased, and only an occasional, spasmodic sob gave evidence of the storm that had passed. It was at this juncture—Ivan upon the floor, half sitting, half kneeling, Caroline's arms clasping him close—that the door of the room opened again, quietly, and Nathalie appeared. At sight of the two she halted, uncertainly. But her mother, gently releasing the embarrassed boy, bade her come in; nor when, an instant later, he made the move, would she permit Ivan to go. It was, perhaps, unfair to her that this kindly act of hers should have borne, for all three of them, consequences so momentous, and, to the Countess, so unwelcome. Yet it was certainly this evening which saw the beginning of the single real passion of Ivan's life. Thereafter, in that little gallery of mental portraits carried by each of us in his intimate heart, the beloved form of his dead mother was given a companion picture: that of a girl's face, warm and living, upon which he often gazed with an ardor, a devotion, a longing, rather unboyishly sincere.
Certainly the picture thus enshrined was one not unworthy of strong admiration. For even at fourteen Nathalie Dravikine was very beautiful, in a delicate, flower-like way. Her complexion was clear and pale, the blood which ran beneath it showing only under the stress of some emotion, when it would suffuse her whole face with waves of exquisite color. Her delicate head bore a weight, almost too great, of fine, blue-black hair, just now hanging in a heavy plait to her knees. Her eyes, large and velvety as Ivan's own, were, however, of a shade indescribable, chameleon-like: one day varying between beryl and aqua-marine, anon of a light hazel, and finally, in moments of excitement, grief, or joy, of a deep, baffling black. Hitherto, Ivan had been undecided about their color; but to-night, as he saw them run their gamut from light to that tender dark, he felt a strange, quivering half-fear, half-joy, stirring his heart; and in one moment it had become impossible for him to look her in the eyes again and retain any sort of composure. Moreover, as he sat, red-eyed and conscious, in a chair between aunt and cousin, it seemed to him as if some one were pouring a cool balm over the burning wound within him: as if, already, his mother's strange promise were finding fulfilment, and she herself, or her fair spirit, stood at his side, her gentle hand upon his shoulder, a smile of the old, loving companionship in her deep eyes. He did not know whether it were minutes or hours before, with a long sigh, he rose, kissed his aunt, drew back with flaming face from Nathalie's tentative advance, but finally, with throbbing heart, just touched her cheek in the usual place, and then ran off, glad of the darkness in the passage outside. Unlike the traditional young lover, however, he was not destined to spend the dark hours in waking dreams of his love. Nay, the pretty child did him better service. That night, for the first time in ninety-six weary hours, he slept, soundly and dreamlessly, till Alexei came to call him, when he rose with a feeling of great strangeness, of irrevocable change, upon him, as he faced a final joyless day.
There was no help for it. He must return, that afternoon, to the Corps; where now there would be no weekly breaks in his monotony of unhappiness. So much he learned in a brief, uncomfortable interview with his father, immediately after breakfast. And when he was dismissed, he understood that it was Prince Michael's farewell to him for an indefinite period: a fact which troubled him very little in itself, however; the less so since, when he reached his room again, he found in his hand an envelope containing a princely sum of pocket-money—which was to last him through the spring. Wearily and drearily, however, the boy, with the aid of his serf, packed the few garments he had brought with him, and then went off to hang about the closed door of his aunt's suite of rooms, in which, also packing, was Nathalie: that strange, new Nathalie, born for him fifteen hours before.
He had reached a great depth of unhappiness when suddenly, about noon-time, the gate to fairy-land opened and he was admitted by Celestine, who had been sent, indeed, to seek him. In a few, whirling moments, he found himself eating an early déjeuner à la fourchette with his aunt and cousin, after which he drove with them to the Petersburg station, and there, upon the noisy, crowded platform, reached his empyrean.
Madame Dravikine and her maid were in the carriage reserved for them, arranging their bags and rugs. But Nathalie had remained—ah, was it not of her own choice?—outside, for three minutes longer. Their few words were as simple and as awkward as inexperience could make them; but they were afterwards gone over, a hundred times, at least, by Ivan, who, at each repetition, became more impressed by the brilliance, the wit, the savoir-faire, the repose of Mademoiselle Nathalie's brief and stumbling formalities. Then—then Madame Dravikine was calling her daughter. A whistle blew. The second bell rang loudly. Officials jangled hastily down the platform; and Ivan, his heart throbbing in his throat, suddenly caught his cousin's slender figure in his arms, held her for one endless instant, found her lips with his own, and found himself, five minutes later, gazing blindly down an empty track, while the footman at his side stared at him in stupid wonderment. So, coloring with shame, joyously angry, broken by the long prospect of ensuing grief and longing—not for one being loved and lost, but for two—he entered the carriage which was to carry him across Moscow, from heaven to hell: from the Petersburg station to the stone buildings of the Corps des Cadets, where, in the ensuing weeks, Ivan Gregoriev, already an adept in enduring the various forms of school-boy misery, was about to begin upon a lesson before which more than one grown man would have visibly shrunk; and under which Ivan himself, before it was finished, had become appalled at his own capacity for suffering.