Rubinstein stopped perfectly still, and maintained a quivering silence till the speech was concluded. But his two hands were clinched, so that the nails turned suddenly blue. Zaremba, seeing this, was about to make an explanation in a very different key, when Anton, in the harsh raucousness that serves one who is restraining violent profanity, almost whispered: "You will have the goodness, then, Monsieur Zaremba, either to send me, in the morning, reparation to the amount of—or stay! shall we, after all, publish those little letters from your friend the Lady of the Dyna—"
"Good God! Anton! Surely, surely I'm too useful to you!—Surely you understood my little joke, did you not?—Bah! This whiffet of a Gregoriev! Why, if his stuff contains anything of any value whatever, he has stolen it all from what he has seen of your unpublished works!—I—I—"
Rubinstein burst into a peal of laughter; and yet, well as he understood all that this bald flattery stood for, it pleased him:—pleased him, coming from a man whom, years before, in a fit of unwonted generosity, he had saved from usury and blackmail: from one of those Jews who, then as now, infested Petersburg and terrorized men of standing from the very imperial family down. Anton had bought Zaremba's wretched debt, and the half-dozen innocent love-letters from a young girl who afterwards became an active Nihilist. And yet Anton Rubinstein, genius, jovial winer and diner, victim of the devils of envy and jealousy, had actually stooped, more than once, to threaten blackmail to the man whom he knew, in his heart, to have been guilty of nothing more than a week's unfortunate gambling, and an early attachment to a girl who had not returned his affection in kind!
Once more, as usual, the pianist won his point; but it took two hours before he would allow Zaremba, his remnant of a conscience once more deadened by the combined forces of Rubinstein's magnetism, covert threats, and golden wine, to leave.
The result of their talk bore immediate fruit. Late in the afternoon of the 11th, Ivan Gregoriev sat once more at his bedroom table, and very slowly, with white face and hands that shook, drew from his coat-pocket the letter which he had received at the post-office half an hour before, but had been unable to open on the way. Now, after a moment's fumbling, he cut the envelope, took out the effeminate sheet of note-paper, and began to read. Second by second his face changed. The letter was not long; yet before he reached the signature his face had twice flushed scarlet, and twice gone deadly pale.
It was a half-hour before his door was opened, after a dozen unanswered knocks, and the room invaded by Nicholas Rubinstein. He beheld his favorite thrown forward across a table, from which an overturned inkstand dripped its contents, unnoticed, to the floor. The new-comer never paused for this; for his eyes had fallen on the letter, crushed in one of Ivan's out-stretched hands; and then he gazed upon the body which he perceived to quiver, from time to time, with half-conscious, reminiscent sobs.