Just what Ivan's intention had been when, in his hour of madness, he committed this irreparable and terrible mistake, no one, least of all himself, could have said. Despair had driven him, for the moment, out of his senses. He cared nothing whatever for himself or his reputation, little for that of the woman he would have dragged down with him. In his mind he had some dreary hope that Nathalie, the weak and faithless, would learn of his wretched action and be hurt by it—a little as he had been hurt by her.
Before the reckless twain had arrived at their all too public destination, however, Ivan was in a fever of misery and shame. Well enough to laugh and say that the thing he proposed to do was so common as scarce to cause notice in the gay watering-place, always a rendezvous for the high half-world. But Ivan was, even now, by no means of this kind: the military members of the Yacht club, to whom such escapades were afterwards proudly exploited among their friends. All night long, as he sat upright in his place in the reserved carriage, sleepless, watching the young woman who was reclining opposite him trustfully unconscious, Ivan was aware of his mother's reproachful presence: and heard again the voice that had rung so dreadfully in his boyish ears: "Remember, Ivan, what I have suffered, through a man! Will you remember?—Will you break the Gregoriev tradition towards women?"
Once again Sophia, gentle woman, did her work. Irina Petrovna opened her eyes, next day, upon a different man.
Whether the girl were astonished, or pleased, or disappointed, by the strangeness of her situation during the fortnight in Baden, Ivan could not tell. He was perfectly well aware that it would be of no use to explain their true position to any one he knew. Mockery at his faith in their credulity at so preposterous a statement, would have been his only reward. But it was none the less true that, so long as Irina remained with him, she was treated with the punctilious courtesy that he should have used towards her had she been what they pretended her to be: his sister. He had taken three rooms—two bedrooms and a little salon—at the hotel. And the very waiters winked, solemnly, outside the salon door, as they served early coffee and, later, an elaborate déjeuner, to the two within. But Ivan could meet any eye calmly. And if Irina marvelled, she said nothing. Only, from this time forth, Ivan occupied, in her secret soul, a niche of his own, far above that of any other man. In later years, many candles burned before her shrine; and it served to keep within her heart one spot inviolate. The thoughts, the prayers, expended here without sense of conscious virtue, perhaps served her unexpectedly in the end, when before her, hopeless one, a golden gate swung slowly open, and she entered that land where the wretched deeds of her later life could blacken her thoughts no more.—At the time, certainly, she might have been impatient at the formality of her companion's manner, his unfailing deference to her faintest wish. And yet she was conscious that the days spent in this gay resort were happy: happier than any she had ever known. And even Ivan, in the great anxiety of his soul, found that a conscience unexpectedly clear can bring a species of content less fleeting than any causeless light-heartedness. He was giving little thought to others' thought of him. But Petersburg was dull just now; and his behavior had been a godsend to the salons.—Good Heavens—how they were using his name—and hers!
On the morning of April 30th, Petersburg was still a sea of mud: the atmosphere still thick with rain. Spring was opening slowly. But the ice had gone out of the Neva. Boats plied along the canals. And all the world was packing away its furs. The day was intensely dreary. But the heart of Vladimir de Windt, who was lounging idly about his desolate apartment, was drearier still. How he missed that foolish Ivan, still lost in the great unknown! How he railed at him, in secret, the while he bravely defended him, single-handed, against the world; till the day when he learned Ivan's prospect of utter calamity and took the knowledge home with him to bear in solitude. It was a week, now, since the day of his own interview with Brodsky. By this time the whole city knew all!—Gregoriev's heart-history had been dragged gayly through the mud of Petersburg society; and at last the curious world might write finis upon a completed story—in which the lady was now safely married to another; the man disgraced and degraded.—But the cause of this disgrace, and its injustice, only de Windt knew or cared to know.
Even he could not guess, however, how Brodsky had discovered the identity of Ivan's companion. But de Windt had borne the brunt of the Colonel's rage when he learned it; and de Windt had endeavored to obtain some sort of softening of the sentence pronounced upon the unhappy boy.—It was vain. And even Vladimir, as he lay once more going over the rapid events of the past weeks, never dreamed, in his heart, that Ivan was not guilty in a certain way. Men must judge one another by their own standards. De Windt had never thought Ivan effeminate—a milk-sop; but, had he been made to believe the truth, it is probable that one or the other of these epithets would then have expressed his opinion of his friend.
The first charge made by Brodsky against his Lieutenant was that of overstaying his leave—already for the length of seven days, and still no prospect of return. The second charge, a far more serious one, was that of conduct unbecoming an officer of the guard: conduct which, though it might be laid to the door of almost any unmarried officer in the service, nobody had ever before dreamed of forcing home for judgment. But at last, it seemed, there was a man willing and ready, for the sake of an old spite, to risk shattering his own glass house to splinters for the sake of a revenge. Brodsky was determined, immediately upon Ivan's return, to summon him to a court-martial; and, since he was not a man to keep silence with regard to his plans, the tale, with its piquant references to Brodsky's private malice, was in everybody's mouth, and was found spicy enough to sting the palate of the most jaded scandal-monger in the army—in comparison with which that of a woman of fifty years' residence in India, is not to be compared. But by the end of April even this affair had been served up often enough to have grown slightly stale; and Petersburg was now on the qui vive for a dénouement.
It came, that dénouement—well-timed: just when the clubs were full to the brim, the barracks crowded, the city overflowing with ennuyée men and women who were preparing for their summer flight. But the first scene of the last act was not watched by the outer world.