The Genius

by Margaret Horton Potter

"Then I'll see it for you. Look here: this offer is going to help you up the ladder. It will prepare the way for your new place in the world:—the one you want to gain for yourself, which is far better than anything inherited. You've more promise in you than any of these other lumbering creatures—even Serov himself. And now—you refuse your great chance because you'll be living in a city where your father is!—Bah, Ivan! I never thought you a school-girl before!—Must it be Laroche, then?"

"By Heavens—no!" The words leaped from him involuntarily; but Ivan let them stay.

Two minutes afterwards the pipe was once more going, placidly; and by the time the room was hazy with smoke, Nicholas had explained the details of his plan, and had departed, leaving Ivan alone, dizzy with the prospects of his new life. Within a fortnight, he could turn his back on Petersburg, the hated city.—Small time now for the long-delayed placing of his symphony: for the completion of the concert overture and the tone-poem already forming in his active brain! Better to wait, and take his chances in the musical world of Moscow.—His work! His profession!—Did this unexpected offer leave him free enough to develop the future of his dreams? Ah well! No use pondering that. The affair was settled; and circumstance must take care of the rest. Destiny is probably foreordained. What reason, then, in struggling over and doubting one's actions? Meantime, a new theme was taking possession of his mind. Moscow, and the idea of seeing it again, had brought old memories down on him; and he wondered if he might not gratify his sudden longing, and let his father know at least that he was alive, and well? The second wish was graver; touching his hidden self more nearly. Could he, should he—would it be humbling his pride too much, if he went to see his aunt—who had just returned to town for the winter?—Would she let him come to say good-bye to her, give him some faint echo of the by-gone friendliness?—Time certainly had drawn the poison from Ivan's wound, since he could debate this question, which, after all, was only the cloak to another: that of the possibility of learning how his cousin fared. For of her, the young Princess, he had learned practically nothing since the time of her hasty marriage in a distant land. That she spent her life in and around Petersburg, he was aware. But he had never once seen her in the city; and had never been sure of her immediate whereabouts. That her place in his heart had never been usurped, nor her image grown dim with the passing years, was all he realized to-day.

Ivan's inheritance from his mother was a temperament sensitive to the point of morbidness. This unhappy characteristic had been fostered only during his early years. But he had not attempted to change it till the period of his disgrace plainly offered a choice between a resolute stifling of his pain or downright madness. Being the son of his father, he made the practical selection. And he saw now that the years of his independent poverty had done much towards the development of common-sense, and the extinction of that hypersensibility which had so marred his otherwise fine nature. Moreover, just the regular, daily routine of work, and the friendly rivalry with his fellow-students, had imbued him with the manly courage with which he faced the world. Yet not one of us can permanently alter his temperament; and, to the end of his life, Ivan was destined to suffer periodic torments from shyness, natural reticence, and a never-dying sense of shame at the memory of that unjust disgrace which by this time many interpreted rightly, and many others had completely forgotten.

For some years, in fact since his boyhood, Ivan's mental attitude towards his father had been as to a black shadow which had lain across the whole of his mother's existence and the greater part of his own. When his change of feeling began, or how, he did not know. Possibly it was as far back as the trial and conviction, through his father's indictment and evidence, of Brodsky, his own bitterest enemy. Certainly its development had certainly been unconscious. And to-day Ivan was himself surprised at his secret feeling of tenderness towards Prince Michael, as for one aged and broken with grief. After the absolute silence of four years, he found it almost a pleasure to write the lonely man, telling him of his little success, his sudden change of residence, something of his ambitions for the future; but not a word of his long struggle with poverty, and the lonely austerity of his life. In the letter he enclosed an address—that of Rubinstein's Moscow apartment; where, even should it not be his own abode, communications at least would always reach him. And if his excellency would but send some word, however brief, Ivan would gladly come to see him—not as a son, necessarily, but as one to whom Prince Gregoriev's welfare could not but be a matter of supreme interest and concern.

The writer of this missive spent time and pains upon its composition; and succeeded in expressing himself with clearness and considerable delicacy, though making very evident the fact that he neither desired nor would accept the slightest pecuniary assistance from one who had so furiously disowned and deserted him in his hour of sore need.

It may have been this final implication, or, more probably, the one other unfortunate suggestion in the letter, relating to the importance to the writer of Michael's welfare—(interpreted health)—which the father angrily deduced as a desire for his death and the hope of speedy inheritance, which once more undid Ivan with the desolate, stubborn, remorsefully remorseless old man, to whom, in his secret soul, the boy was still the apple of his eye, the greatest and final disappointment of his harsh life. Certainly Ivan waited in vain for the requested message. But before this disappointment came, he had passed through another anxiously waited experience. For, on the same day that he posted the letter to Moscow, he took his courage into his hands and went, for the first time since the February of nearly five years ago, to the house in the Serghievskaia, where a brisk young footman informed him suavely that Madame la Comtesse received.

It was forty minutes later when Ivan emerged from the house, his brain whirling in as great a tumult of emotions as were the hearts of two women whom he left behind him. Yet the idea of emotion on his aunt's part would never have occurred to him; and of the other, he knew nothing. Countess Caroline was past mistress in the worldling's art of subtle, refined, undiscoverable patronage, snobbery, indifference—insult if you will. With apparently exactly the same quiet voice and manner, she could warm the soul of a Royal Duchess with the delightfulest flattery; while, in the intervals between phrases, she would shrivel an undesirable caller into a state of quivering apology for the presumption of invading the house of so lofty a personage as Madame Dravikine.

Thus, when her nephew presented himself before her, Countess Caroline's heart gave a great throb of welcome and of pity; but her impassive face grew only a little colder, and, though in the first seconds of looking into the eyes of Sophia's son, hearing the familiar, inherited tricks of her sister's speech, she was betrayed into the suggestion of a genuine frankness, she soon bethought herself of an imminent danger which both were in; and she instantly set herself to drive him from the house at the earliest moment. For the Countess had been momentarily expecting her daughter, who was to come to tea this afternoon; and for many reasons she dared not permit those two to meet again. Therefore poor Ivan found himself treated to a succession of monosyllables so chilling that there rose up in him, first, a great wave of bitter disappointment and grief; and then a hot anger that held him immovable in his seat, in the face of a now open attack of rudeness such as few women and no man had ever before endured from this experienced mondaine. At last, seeing that, while he gained nothing, he was probably losing much by his persistence, he rose, restrained, by an effort, any expression of the fury that his aunt read plainly in his eyes, and left her. Nor did he ever know that during the last fifteen minutes of his stay Nathalie,—Nathalie, her dear face lined with grief and care, her beautiful eyes faded and dull from long bodily pain and the mental anguish that has passed the bounds of tears,—Nathalie, big with child for the third successive autumn of her wretched married life—had sat not twelve feet from him, overhead, in her mother's boudoir. For there she had retreated, on learning that madame was entertaining a young man who was not an habitué of the house, and whose name had not been given for announcement.

Still Ivan's visit had not been wholly fruitless. He had elicited what he had chiefly wished to learn. Unconsciously, because the subject was the present burden of her nights and days, Caroline had betrayed the fact of her daughter's unhappiness. Yet she would have maintained, and truly, that she had not permitted three sentences to pass her lips on the subject of the Princess Féodoreff. But the acuteness of the mondaine pales before that of the lover. Caroline knew nothing of what Ivan took away with him; nor dreamed that, from this hour, Nathalie's load became the secret burden of another. But perhaps in that brief hour, when her bitter tongue had so belied the crushed emotion of her heart, Madame Dravikine regretted, not for the first time, her cruel rejection of the young man who, it was plain to see, had retained his fidelity to her unhappy child through all his years of separation from her and ignorance concerning her married life.