An hour had passed. Ivan, Sergius, and four guards were sitting silently in the antechamber to Prince Michael's inner room. They alone were left; for, Stassov first, then Lemsky, had been led away into that dreaded chamber, and had not returned. Of what passed at their examinations, Ivan could only guess. But his imagination being now on fire, he felt that the crossing of that threshold would be little less awful than that of a doomed heretic into the torture-chamber of the Spanish Inquisition. Of the memories, realizations, and foreboding of those sixty minutes, it is difficult to speak, clearly. From the stunned calm of the first moment of shock, Ivan had drifted gradually into a fever of acutest feeling. To him, now, his situation assumed monstrous and distorted proportions; for he expected no jot or tittle of favor from the father who had cast him so completely out of his life. Moreover, back of all the melodrama of the present, lay a black shadow of haunting memory: memory of the house in which he sat; of his impressionable, childish days within it; of Nathalie; of Ludmillo; finally, above all, her image enveloped in a shining aura of passionate appreciation, his mother: of the sorrow of her tender life; and the poignant bitterness of her death. It was to this tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest of his tone poems; the "Saturnalia of the Red Death," taken from Poe's wild tale.
At length, while he sat drearily working his numbed fingers, Piotr entered for the third time and summoned Sergius, away into the inner room. Before he went, Irina's brother turned his face to his companion and looked at him; and in that look Ivan read all that the student had tried to express in it: his remorse, his anguish, his sorrow for the treachery that had ruined his friend. It was strange how, by that look, the hearts of both were lightened.
Ivan waited long alone, under the curious eyes of the guard who saw in him a type very different from that of the usual "political." Even these men, uneducated as they were, believed, in their hearts, that there was a mistake somewhere about this fellow. And yet, as for his chances of release with the great Chief within there—bah! They were not worth the price of a rusty nail.
In the end it was with an air dogged, half-sullen, half-resentful, that Ivan, concealing his face by keeping his head bent down, followed his father's old servitor along the short passage to the closed door of Prince Michael's cabinet. Immediately there came a word of command from within. The door was opened, and Ivan was pushed into the room.
It contained only one man, seated at a great work-table covered with orderly piles of documents. At first sight, the years seemed to have passed over Michael's head leaving him untouched; but, as Ivan stepped into the light of a low-hanging lamp, his father gave a sudden start, a hoarse gasp, and then fell back into his chair again—an old man. Ivan, though he had been gripping himself for the ordeal, felt himself turn slowly white, closed his eyes for an instant, and reopened them to meet the diamond-bright glare of his father's look. At that, moved by a combination of emotional strain, physical exhaustion, and nervous tension, he suddenly began to laugh. It was his father who brought him back to himself again: his father, who sat slowly rubbing one hand across his brows, and muttering, as one in a daze:
"Toi!—Toi, Ivan!—Dieu! Dieu!"
Words, tone, appearance, moved the son intensely; for never before had man beheld Michael Gregoriev show such stress of emotion. Never had any hour so clearly revealed the ravages of mad living and secret unhappiness.
True, the fierce eyes could flash as of old; the voice would presently once more ring harsh and servant and equal alike would cringe before him; for still he held half Moscow in the iron grip of his terrible omniscience. But Ivan noted the color of his hair—that dead white that is not the snow of years but the ashen colorlessness borne of continuous nervous strain. And there was the unexpected stoop of the powerful shoulders, the occasional unavoidable trembling of the hands, and in his face, which repeated the livid tone of the hair, were graven lines, many and deep, born of the repressed disappointment and increasing loneliness that had insensibly humanized the harsh visage. To the eyes of the son, looking on his father for the first time in years, there lay on face and figure, everywhere, the marks of that dread instrument which no member of the Third Section can put away or destroy: the evidences of relentless experience.
Eye to eye they faced each other, father and son. One minute passed.—Two.—Three. Never before had Ivan felt himself a thing of evil. But under those terrible eyes, that had searched hearts as others searched printed texts for interlinear meanings, he began to feel himself drawn into the wild waters between a Scylla of shame and a Charybdis of terror. Alas! Would this man believe his wretched tale of the trickery of others; of wanton, stubborn stupidity on the part of himself?
The first, hot wave of mortification had not passed when Prince Michael suddenly straightened, and lifted his head. His two hands were fast clinched; but their trembling was still plainly visible. He seemed, for an instant, about to break into one of his old torrents of abuse; but suddenly, with an effort, he restrained himself, paused, and then said, slowly: