His idea was to continue on the ocean the life he had led on land, selecting, however, only its most interesting phases. For that reason he decided to take Sergueff along. The teacher seemed melancholy, as though the comforts and the liberal sums of money which the Prince bestowed on him weighed on his conscience like remorse. He had something more urgent to do in the world than voyage idly hither and thither in a luxurious boat. He disappeared one day, to return to Russia, as though the gallows had a fascination for him. Or was it that he preferred, in case of better luck than that, to travel once again around the world, but in his own manner?
The Colonel, as the aide de camp of the Prince, felt obliged to embark. He had never yet left "his boy's" side! But, oh, he was not blessed with sea legs, and, much less, with a sea stomach! He was a hero of the mountains! They were obliged to send him back to Paris from a port in Brazil.
The voyage of the Gaviota lasted for five years. In the second year Michael Fedor thought his career as a navigator was about to be interrupted. The war between Russia and Japan had just broken out and he cabled from a Pacific port, asking for his former place in the Guard. The reply was a long time in coming. The Czar was still angry with him and kept him in exile.
"So much the better!" Michael finally said to himself in a voice choked with anger. He guessed what was going to happen; what was to be the final fate of those brave Russians of the sharp sabers, when they came to face the astute little yellow men who had silently gone on appropriating the most scientific occidental arts of killing.
His adventures in the various ports, his relations with women of every race and color, were sufficient to fill his life.
"I am studying geography," he wrote Don Marcos, after inquiring about his mother's health. "I am studying the geography of love."
It was not long before he was obliged to interrupt his cruise to return to the Princess. The physicians had ordered her away from the Paris palace, with its gloomy decorations so stimulating to her obsessions. They were sending her to the Riviera to drink sunlight and open air.
And poor Maria Stuart, absolutely incognito, went from one large hotel to another, occupying entire floors with her retinue of much beaten Russian servants and much adored soothsayers and witch doctors. She was the despair of the hotel keepers, who were always glad to see her depart, though she alone paid more than all the other guests put together.
Her son found her looking like a specter in her flowing mourning garb. She was weaker and thinner, and her eyes had taken on an alarming, fixed stare, which gave one the creeps. Her complexion had lost its former whiteness, gradually growing darker as though burned by an inner fire. For the moment her sole preoccupation was the construction of a palace on the Blue Coast. On French territory, in sight of Monte Carlo, she had bought a small promontory, a spur of land and rocks jutting out into the sea, a ridge covered with century-old olive trees and gnarled pines. She was kept busy quarreling with a stubborn old couple, an aged peasant and his wife, who were refusing to sell her the extreme point of the headland. She had already spent many thousands of francs on the plans of the future palace. Architects, painters, and landscape gardeners were constantly working for her, making studies of the historic past, in the endeavor to view of the Mediterranean an enormous Scottish castle express her imaginings. Her idea was to erect in full as Scotch as could possibly be imagined; in short, according to the Princess, it was to be "a novel of Walter Scott, done in stone."
Michael was frightened. The sumptuous dungeon in Paris was to be repeated in the face of that luminous sea, in one of the most smiling landscapes of the earth. Behind his mother's back he talked with all the men who were working on the future Villa Sirena, the "Villa of the Sirens." The Princess had selected this name, in the conviction that on moonlight nights the daughters of the briny deep would come and visit her, singing on the reefs beneath her window. That was the least they could do for her!