The Genius. Margaret Horton Potter
common to all men. While, then, the words "Premier of Russia" still echoed through his head, there rose upon his inner ear a sudden note of melody, vagrant, sweet and melancholy as the songs of the Steppes. Known song it was not, however; but something unique, as were all the airs that came to him unbidden. Under its influence it was natural that his face should change, and soften. But Michael, imagining that rapt expression to be the result of his own words, was well satisfied; and he sent the boy from him so preoccupied with his uncomprehended gift, that the immediate prospect of the new life faded, for the moment, into the dim land of the unimportant Real.
This brief ecstasy of unsought happiness could not last, however. During the ensuing days Ivan was obliged to banish dreams, and yield himself to preparations for that change which, though it should have brought something of eager anticipation to his boy's mind, was really invested with an unreasonable dread: dread rooted no less in a presentiment of his own than in the expression of his mother's face, the morning redness of her eyes, the uncontrollable quiver of her lip. Sophia, indeed, had received a blow that she was not to recover from. But the full misery of her immediate future she could, fortunately, not as yet surmise.
The farewell between Ivan and his quiet tutor was somewhat pathetic. The prospects of the Pole were, in their way, far drearier than those of his pupil. He was an intensely shy man; and yet the thought of leaving the home which had come so perfectly to suit his sensitive temperament, was to him more calamitous than the prospect of finding and fitting himself into another place. On the last morning, master and pupil spoke but little. Ivan sat drearily strumming out one of the nocturnes of that young countryman of Ludmillo's, lately dead but already hailed immortal by a select few, Monsieur Chopin; and the heart-break in its strange harmonies seemed to express all that neither of them dared attempt to say. Fortunately, the strain did not last long. It was barely ten o'clock when Casimir, having imprinted a kiss upon the hand of his Princess, and actually left another on Ivan's scarlet cheek, was driven, with his modest box, away from the familiar portal into the unfriendly realms beyond. With him slipped away the first large piece of Ivan's child-world. And the rest of it was not to be long in following.
Of the final clinging of Sophia to her child, the child of her martyrdom, the man-child who must be relinquished now to the world that called to him, who shall write? Torn mother-love stares not out from paper pages, in the cold black and white of print. Poor Princess! She was strong in neither mind nor body. Trained to a fashionable young ladyhood of delicacy, vapors and graceful fainting-fits, there had been little in her married life to build up fortitude and the courage to endure unwelcome griefs. From day to day her little store of bravery had been drawn upon, extravagantly. For in Sophia, fear bred no angry pride, but rather a flat despair. And it had come to a point at last where even the hauteur of her class would no longer suffice to cover the humiliations of her daily life. Now that the final climax had come, it found her quite denuded of all force, all strength, all hope. Her one raison d'être was to be removed, her single prop drawn from her. Therefore she fell, quietly, with scarcely a word of protest, only an instant of tottering. This the metaphor. To speak plainly, so complete was her desolation that, outwardly, she betrayed nothing. Ivan was drawn to wonder at it; but he left her, perhaps, with the less anxiety, being too inexperienced in the ways of grief to worry as a woman might have done over this attitude towards their parting. Nevertheless, the memory of their last evening together lay graven so ineffaceably upon Ivan's heart, that he recalled it clearly, in its every incident, during the last hour of his life.
It was a Sunday—the evening of the day of Ludmillo's departure. Ivan had been summoned to his mother's room, where he found her sitting, rather wearily, he thought, before a table on which steamed a brightly polished samovar, surrounded by the dishes of a tempting meal, devised by Másha to suit the respective tastes of her lady and the young Prince. Darkness had fallen an hour before, and the room, with its quaint old furniture, tapestry-hung walls, and old oaken floor strewn with Bokhara rugs, was lighted by three swinging-lamps that cast red reflections upon the polished wood of wainscot and floor. Mother and son sat side by side at the table, and, while they ate, made little attempt at conversation. Instinctively, each was waiting for the other to speak.
But the inevitable talk, at thought of which Sophia's heart fluttered till her breath was all but gone, was not allowed a natural beginning. After a time there came from below the first of a crescendo of sounds—that noise of muffled voices, long since familiar to the room. As the sound increased, and the laughter began to be punctuated by clangs of shivering glass, the woman and the boy drew closer together, and began a hasty conversation, each trying to draw the attention of the other away from that which occupied them both irresistibly. It was long before there arrived any diminution in the unholy racket. But at last, by some fortunate caprice, the party evidently decided to leave the house for some place of public amusement; so that, at last, the great palace was wrapped in its wonted, daytime stillness. And in the first minutes of this, Ivan, as if he read his mother's thoughts, grew silent, and turned to her expectantly.
His hope was fulfilled. That night, acting impulsively upon a half-considered plan, Sophia, for the first and last time in her life, laid bare her heart before her son. The boy listened in a silence that grew by degrees from reverent interest to pity, from pity to horror, from horror to absolute fury, till, thinking of the Gregoriev blood that ran in his veins, he longed to tear from his breast the heart which had been made to beat by the man below—that father whom he now saw in the full light of truth. It was in that hour that Ivan put away from him forever all childish things. His mother's story, so direfully heightened by reason of all which she left to the intuition and imagination of her listener, suddenly brought him to an understanding of true womanhood that is the portion of very few experienced men. It seemed as if his existence had been enveloped in all that was foul, and wicked, and heart-breakingly pathetic in the world. And afterwards he realized that in that evening was sown in him a seed which was to bear bitter fruit: the seed of the Russian Tosca, that Herzeleide, which has stamped every one of the company of illustrious Slavs with an indelible print of melancholy.
Sophia probably did not realize Ivan's capacity for feeling or for pity. Yet she had a purpose in the telling of her story. Ivan, a Gregoriev, must be given the opportunity of knowing how a woman's soul can be killed within her. Then, should he follow the footsteps of his race, his sin would be upon his own head. Nevertheless, she used little art in her tale, and she drew therefrom neither moral nor homily. Of what use either of these? What remonstrance was there that could hold a true Gregoriev from the pursuits of his maturity? At the same time, if Ivan was what she believed him to be, he could read the moral as he ran. She spoke from a bursting heart, and only in small degree relieved herself by speaking. Nor did she mention their approaching parting; for reference to this subject was beyond her. Ivan must divine what he could of her feeling, or he must believe her callous in her great despair.
Meantime the boy had yielded one slender hand to his mother's clasp; the other was tightly clinched. He sat bolt upright, his burning eyes fixed sternly on the wall before him, his face pallid save for the two round spots of flaming red that burned high upon his cheekbones. His heart was throbbing irregularly. And in his brain, amid the chaos of broken ideals, crumbled idols, and all the jumbled facts of his new understanding of misery and of evil:—amid all his strange and vibrant emotions, there thundered gigantically a series of magnificent minor chords forming a motive over-poweringly climatic. It was the same theme of "hope abandoned," which, nearly forty years later, was to open the last movement of his greatest work: that "Tosca Symphony" which has moved the whole world to wondering tears. Many times during the succeeding years it left his memory, and he would try vainly to recall it. But circumstances always rose to bring it again to his mind; till, at last, recurrent pain had fixed it there forever: that world-theme, which had its birth on this first Sunday of his sixteenth year.
It was eleven o'clock when Madame Gregoriev, worn out and trembling with feeling, finally ended her narrative. It was midnight before she and Ivan kissed good-night. During that whole hour, neither one of them uttered a word. Ivan had sunk to the floor at his mother's feet, his head in her lap, his burning hands clasped in her icy ones, his throat contracting ever and again with the dry, gasping sob of extreme emotion. Sophia, on the contrary, sat above him, her head lifted, her pale face calm, her tearless eyes gazing off into some far country of her own. Yet before their minds lay the same picture—that