The Genius | Page 3

"Mother!"
Then, immediately, darkness had fallen. The visitors from afar were
gone. Sophia lay upon the bare floor beneath the ikon, fast asleep.
In a few moments the door from the hall opened hastily, and a woman's
voice whispered in frightened haste:
"My lady! Khazyaceka! His Excellency Prince Michael is coming
up-stairs! He is almost here!"
CHAPTER I

THE CZAR'S BALL
After the night of what she came gradually to call the Holy Dream, the
years passed more swiftly, with less of inward tumult, for Sophia
Ivanovna Gregoriev. It was now the close of the year 1851; and the
reign of the Iron Czar was wavering towards its dark end. Meantime the
son of the chief of the secret section in Moscow was eleven years and
three months old: a straight-limbed, quiet child, the son of his mother.
And all Sophia's recent life, that life which had entwined itself wholly
about the promised babe, was mingled the inexplicable strangeness of
her dream-memory. To her, New Year's night had become a sacred
time; and she loved to keep a vigil through it in her own, lonely way.
This year, however, it was to be marked in a different manner. For
Michael Gregoriev had planned that, on the first night of 1852, he, and
perforce his wife, should make a final effort to obtain that social
recognition which had never been the accompaniment of his political
advancement.
At this time--as, indeed, to-day, there stood, in the south-central part of
trans-Moskva Moscow, only two private buildings of any note. One of
these was the low-spreading palace of the Governor; the other that of
Prince Michael Petrovitch Gregoriev. The first had stood in its gardens
for a century and a half. The other was nearly fifty years older. The
dwelling of the Gregorievs was at some distance from its stately
neighbor, however; for it stood on the southeast corner of the Konnaia
Square, approachable by carriage only through the Serpoukhovskaia.
Its surroundings were of the humblest sort; for it was a long way south
of the Merchants' quarter, and so far from the sacred precincts of the
Kremlin that the voice of Ivan Veliki had melted into an echo ere it
reached the Gregoriev gateway.
It is certain that neither age nor environment made this old place less
grewsomely interesting: this ancient dwelling of a family whose
unsavory annals were lost in the gloom of Tátar rule. The Gregorievs
were closely bound to the gloomy stone pile; and would dwell there, in
all probability, as long as their line continued. Michael, the present
Prince, was loyal to his house. Yet its situation was one of the greatest

of crosses to this man, who had known and cast away many a heavier
burden during his career. Remote as he was from the fashionable
districts, there was neither man nor woman in the city, from the
proudest house in the Equerries' quarter to the outskirts of the Novaia
Andronovka, but knew and shuddered, agreeably, at the Gregoriev
reputation.
It was not strange, then, that the affair of New Year's night had become
the sensation of the season. For on this night Prince Gregoriev had
vowed a triumph over the massed society of the Mother City. He
intended to accomplish now what his wedding with a daughter of one
of the oldest and most honored families had failed to do: what no use of
his unscrupulous power could force, what all Moscow society, for once
banded unanimously together, had sworn he should never
accomplish--enter their ranks, the ranks of the old nobility of the
Empire.
By New Year's morning, however, the numbers were admitting, bitterly,
their defeat. Once more Gregoriev was about to achieve the impossible.
Eighteen years before, Moscow society had defeated him, superbly. At
the time of his marriage to a daughter of the Blashkovs, the question of
his admission into the "court circle" had been violently agitated. But at
that time even his prospective father-in-law had not had the hardihood
to suggest an informal presentation of this man to his Majesty. Nay, it
was the bride, pale, pretty, sensitive Sophia, who, when it was seen that
she had no slightest influence over her dread husband, had been, not,
perhaps, without a sigh, dropped from their acquaintance by her former
associates: nay, by her very family, all save one sister, a girl younger
than herself.
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. His amazing intrigue had