It was as they were finally alighting from the vehicle that Ivan's companion, Stassov, managed at last to speak, in a whisper so rapid and so low that Ivan barely caught it:
"We get our trial now. This examination will be all we'll have.--Be careful."
Then, for the first time, Ivan's heart sank, terribly. Another instant, and it was in his throat. Their destination had not been the palace of the Governor; but that of the chief of the Moscow Third Section. Ivan was entering his boyhood home!
An hour had passed. Ivan, Sergius, and four guards were sitting silently in the antechamber to Prince Michael's inner room. They alone were left; for, Stassov first, then Lemsky, had been led away into that dreaded chamber, and had not returned. Of what passed at their examinations, Ivan could only guess. But his imagination being now on fire, he felt that the crossing of that threshold would be little less awful than that of a doomed heretic into the torture-chamber of the Spanish Inquisition. Of the memories, realizations, and foreboding of those sixty minutes, it is difficult to speak, clearly. From the stunned calm of the first moment of shock, Ivan had drifted gradually into a fever of acutest feeling. To him, now, his situation assumed monstrous and distorted proportions; for he expected no jot or tittle of favor from the father who had cast him so completely out of his life. Moreover, back of all the melodrama of the present, lay a black shadow of haunting memory: memory of the house in which he sat; of his impressionable, childish days within it; of Nathalie; of Ludmillo; finally, above all, her image enveloped in a shining aura of passionate appreciation, his mother: of the sorrow of her tender life; and the poignant bitterness of her death. It was to this tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:--the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest of his tone poems; the "Saturnalia of the Red Death," taken from Poe's wild tale.