"Oh well, then—it'll be easy! You must carry the girl off!"
Ivan gave a violent start; and, for one instant, the cruel mask dropped from his face, leaving an expression wonderfully different. Then all the gray bitterness closed in again. "That would be quite impossible.—Why man, consider! She herself refused me!"
"Nothing of the sort! This morning she was herself. To-night, she was repeating to you her mother's thoughts. They coerced her.—Be a man, my boy; and I'll help you! You two love each other; and you've got to marry. Do you think you owe her nothing?"
"Vladimir—Vladimir—you want to be kind to me. But you don't understand. You didn't hear—how that woman—insulted my race; my blood; yes—even her own sister, my mother!—You can't ask me to overlook that—even—for—Nathalie!"
And Ivan's deep groan touched the heart of the man that heard it.
Nevertheless, de Windt had been struck by the sudden thought he had as suddenly expressed. Marriage with her daughter, would certainly be as sure a thrust as could be given to the proud woman who had so causelessly hurt her nephew. After a time the friend pressed this view upon his companion, till Ivan, in spite of himself, joined in the working out of a strange idea: an idea of the seventeenth, rather than the nineteenth, century; but possible, feasible, for all that. So, in the end, young Gregoriev sought his bed that night not in black depression, but with his brain once more on fire with hope:—hope of an incredibly swift fulfilment of his lately despaired-of heart's desire.
This sudden frame of mind lasted for three days. And during that length of time Ivan went cheerfully about his daily tasks, meantime, in company with de Windt, working out the details of their secret plan. It was in pursuit of one of these that, on the afternoon of the fourth day, Ivan stood once again on the door-step of the Dravikine house.
Even in his nervousness Ivan noticed, as he waited, the unusual fact that the shades of the drawing-room were all pulled down. And it seemed to him, too, that there was about the house an air of unwonted desolation, which, as the minutes passed, certainly became intensified in his mind. Once more he sounded the huge knocker; and yet again: this time so vigorously that the door shook. His sense of calamity had grown till it was a presentiment. Yet his heart rose as, after a long five minutes, there came the sounds of fumbling key and grating lock; and then the door swung open before him, and he stood facing—not the trimly liveried butler, but the gaunt and stooping figure of Ekaterina, the old serf, garbed in a soiled working-dress.
"Madame Dravikine—does she receive to-day?"
"Saints behold us, Lieutenant, she may, for all I know! She and my little Natusha—who cried without ceasing for three days and three nights—went away this morning, with all their luggage, to the foreign land by the sea: to Germany, where it's warm, and where they will stay, my lady said, till summer comes again, and they can all go to Tsarskoë.—Saints!—You are sick too, young sir!"