And, turning his horse, the Czar rode back to his tent with bowed head. They who saw him return hardly recognized his white face. The generals of division had great work to disentangle their troops and get them into position again. A murmuring arose among the men, as though a battle had been lost.
The Czar, not even awaiting the march past of the regiments, who were wont to defile past him with pipe and drum, left the whole command to the Grand Duke, and, throwing himself into his troika, drove back to the Winter Palace.
There he hastened to his study. On it were spread important, weighty documents, containing epoch-making decisions for people and nations, only awaiting his signature. The Czar's eyes rested sadly upon them, reading in them, not what was written upon them in ordinary characters, but the Palimpsest with which fate ever crosses the carefully thought-out plans of mankind.
Then, seizing all the documents—painstaking labors of many a night—he made them into a roll, and, throwing them on to the fire, watched them, a prey to the flames. They were all to have been Sophie Narishkin's dowry.
Soon they were a heap of ashes.
Then, sitting down, he wrote a letter. It contained but two words—"Come back."
The envelope was addressed to Araktseieff.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE RENDEZVOUS
There is something marvellous in the summer nights of the extreme North. Foreigners find it harder to accustom themselves to them than they do to the long winter nights with their cruel severity. The evening glow lasts till midnight, and then begins the dawn. It seems endless until the first stars appear in the still, clear sky, and under them the brilliant planets Venus and Jupiter, burning in the firmament like diamonds on the surface of a golden lake. The pale moon describes its short orbit, a superfluous luminary; and on the Feast of Masinka the half-hour of actual night is impatiently awaited, in order to let off fireworks on the forty islands of the Neva. (For by daylight it is no use to send up rockets!) Street lamps are not lit in St. Petersburg at all during this month. Nor in the apartments of Korynthia's villa are lights needed on the evening of this 20th of June. The sky diffuses light enough until 11 P.M., and a little twilight will not seriously disturb those of whom we are about to speak.
Korynthia, in some agitation, has strayed—who can tell how often in the course of that evening?—on to her veranda, and let her eyes rove over the surface of the mighty river below. It, too, is golden in the evening light, and, like the Russian pictures of saints, on a golden ground is reflected in its sheen the capital, with its rows of palaces, the dome and columns of St. Isaac's, the florid architecture of the Exchange, the bridge of Holy Trinity, the scattered islands from amid whose wooded heights the varied forms and shapes of country-houses peep, with roofs red, blue, green, gilded, and pagoda-like. And among the islands are darting boats, gondolas, canoes, of every kind and description. Some rowed by twelve boatmen, others by a solitary dreamer; the one flashing along at lightning speed, the other letting himself drift on with the stream. The song of the boatmen is in the air.