CHAPTER XIV.
AN IKON OATH.
Ivan Liustig was not like any one else. His friends of the Petersburg Circle were conscious of some lack of foundation beneath the graceful superstructure of his character. But they did not array themselves, as his critics, against him. They smiled at him, but they loved him.
Since he had escaped with me after the wrecking of the Tzar’s train near Borki, he had returned to Russia, whither I had also gone with Bounakoff upon a secret quest.
When, in Petersburg, I heard of him as investigating psychical phenomena as encoiled in psychology, it seemed another versatile phase at which again to smile. For Ivan, who was an enthusiastic medical student, was sure to have, here, as elsewhere, some exceptional experiences; was sure to pour out the recital of the same in due time to his chosen associates with a fulness of picturesque detail that shed a new light on all the question involved. But when it appeared that it was not psychical research in the abstract, but a feminine psychist in the concrete that held Ivan in thrall, there was an altered feeling inducing a graver view.
“I hope all this we hear is an airy joke,” I said to him one day after a meeting of the Circle. He honoured me, as his elder, with some deference in his friendship; and the quality of the latter sentiment had been exceptionally warm between us since our journey together in the Imperial train.
He looked at me steadily with his handsome blue eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“You must know well enough. They say that you are spending all your leisure with some shady female, who, at one and the same time, expounds spirits, magnetic psychology, and exploits the pockets of the credulous.”
To my surprise he turned very pale.
“Were you not one of my best friends, Anton, I’d knock you down for that.”