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I shall take good care, however, that she never again endangers her reputation by receiving any sort of attention from you, in any place, at home or abroad. You will do well not to offer it, Ivan Mikhailovitch; for I cannot have my daughter's name linked with that of a Gregoriev!" With which brutal thrust this great lady turned coolly away, leaving Ivan, stuttering with rage, behind her.
When at last Prince Gregoriev was ushered into the royal presence, the voice of the master of ceremonies shook as he announced the name; and, while he closed the door that shut this madman from his sight, he longed and yet dreaded to hear his Majesty's first words.
In his memoirs the admirable Constantine has left a picture of Gregoriev as he was at this period in his forty-eighth year: "A figure lean, not very tall, giving the dual impression of wiry fortitude, and a delicacy that was rather spiritual than physical, Gregoriev's body formed a marked contrast to his face at sight of which, on the day of his return, I confess to having been shocked, so changed had it become since my last view of it.
He had been in his place barely ten minutes when the great doors opened to the first guests; and, during the hour that followed, they were scarcely shut. The opera was over. Fashionable Moscow, accustomed to live at night, swathed itself in furs, and, grumbling at the unwonted distance, had spun across the city, in open sleighs, to the distant Gregoriev palace.
For eighteen years, then, the Gregoriev palace had stood in its isolation, echoing only to the revelry that money can always obtain. For eighteen years its master, buying what the world had to sell, had been secretly planning to obtain what was not for sale: had faced, unmoved, an isolation which, to a nature less strong, would have been unbearable. Now, at last, he was about to win.
That was the one possible hope. Even so it was a pity, a very great pity, that the gnädige Frau had waited so long. By now, every day almost every hour diminished the chance of recovery. After this explanation, made by the German doctor and entirely corroborated by his Russian colleague, there was a silence. Prince Gregoriev sat bent over the table.
Make things ready; and come to me for the necessary money. Great God! How hideous the world can be!" The issue of the Moscow Journal for March 26, 1887, announced the return of Prince Ivan Gregoriev to Russia after a thirty-month absence abroad; adding that he was in Moscow for a few days only, before proceeding to his country-place of Maidonovo, near Klin.
But he was, nevertheless, the evil genius of the company, flattering the women, taunting the men, to continually increasing libations. Meantime, on the second floor of the palace, not far away from that dining-room beneath, a very different meal was in progress. Princess Gregoriev, her sister, and Ivan, her boy, sat together at a small, round table, waited on by women.
Before the last curtain descended, Ivan had been forced upon the stage beside his companion, to respond to the frantic plaudits of the men and women who, a few years before, had turned from Ivan Gregoriev as from one accursed.
De Windt began, at once, with a flood of eager, anxious questions; but, when they were a few hundred feet away from the mess-tent, Gregoriev turned to him, saying, in a low tone: "Wait a little, Vladimir. The thing has more in it than you suspect thank God! You will be able to guess all that I can't explain; but you must wait, before I tell you anything, till I've read this!"
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