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This was a young girl, sixteen or seventeen years old, her head crowned by a coronal of heavy braids; her eyes, of a deep, purplish tint, rimmed with jet-black lashes, exact replicas of the Princess' own. Meeting those eyes, Ivan gave a sudden, comprehensive start. Then he said, a little confusedly: "My name is Gregoriev. I understand that the Princess Nikitenko sent for me some hours ago.
And by degrees his memoirs the continuation of a sporadic journal long kept up, which was, however, merely a mass of disconnected thoughts, flashes of perception, remarks on personal events, and endless reflections on the unrevealed Alpha and Omega of life began to be filled with other matter: chapter after chapter containing nothing but accounts of and speculations concerning two beings as far apart as the poles of the earth, and bearing no such similarity: the history and surmised character of Nathalie's beloved patroness, the Grand-Duchess Catharine, and those of the child of the wild romance of Alexandrine Nikitenko and Vittorio Lodi.
Only, apparently, Prince Gregoriev cared naught for their high consideration; and seemed to have taken a vow to darken only one doorway in the city beside his own: that hitherto lonely entrance to the apartment of Madame Nikitenko! As for Ivan, people might chatter and beckon as they would, his interest in them was gone.
There were Mademoiselle Cherneskovsky, with her long, skinny neck; and Alexandra Nikitenko, whose red face and fat figure could not possibly be forgotten in the good-nature of her disposition, any more than the immense wealth of the only daughter of the Shúlka-Mirskies could compensate for her thin, colorless hair, and pale, red-rimmed eyes with their invisible white lashes.
Rostov raised his saber, ready to strike, but at that instant the trooper Nikitenko, who was galloping ahead, shot away from him, and Rostov felt as in a dream that he continued to be carried forward with unnatural speed but yet stayed on the same spot. From behind him Bondarchuk, an hussar he knew, jolted against him and looked angrily at him. Bondarchuk's horse swerved and galloped past.
At the same time, since no brave fight can leave either man or woman as it found them, so, through the dreary years of her disgrace, Alexandrine Nikitenko, buoyed up by her unbreakable pride, had gathered from her blackened fields no small harvest of broad-mindedness, philosophy, and courage.
That evening, for next to the last time, a Florentine salon rang once more with the name of Alexandrine Alexiévna Nikitenko, widow of the Prince of the name who was the younger brother of the head of one of the most famous families in Russia. The story of the runaway and the dénouement which had brought two such well-known compatriots together, was in every one's mouth.
It was the prologue to a drama undreamed of as yet; the last act of which was to take place many years after the apparent end, now so near at hand. Upon the morning of March 15th, a soft and sunny day of the treacherous Italian spring, Ivan, presenting himself at the familiar door, was informed that Princess Nikitenko was indisposed, and begged him to excuse her till the morrow.
He sat, now, drearily playing fragments of various works, his brain teeming with memories: of his mother, in her sweetness and purity, bound for life to the brute force that had crushed her youth away in the first days of her married life; of Nathalie and her husband, the husband who had been the admirer of her own mother; of that shadowy Princess whose grave eyes he beheld overflowing with her secret woe, as they overlooked the vast and misty throng of mismated womanhood; lastly of the daughter of a woman who had rebelled against her lot; the nameless child of Alexandrine Nikitenko, who, filled as she was with the vivid life of her passionate heritage, was about to be shrouded away from the world she loved in the coif and robe of the cloistered nun.
Vittoria, with a low cry, fell upon her knees. Ivan, gone deathly white, stepped forward. "The Princess Nikitenko is dead?" he asked, dully. "In the odor of sanctity, my son." In one brief hour, the shattered illusion of these last weeks of Ivan's Italian existence had crumbled utterly away. As one walks in some unhappy dream, he endured the double ceremonies of funeral and burial.
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