likewise, were such as had never
been seen upon a Blashkov. They were white and hard, but pliable as
rubber, their fingers extraordinarily long. In fact, they were hands for
which any musician, teacher or virtuoso, would, had such commodities
been marketable, have bought at any price. And this fact had early been
recognized by Ivan's tutor, and by him eagerly seized upon and used.

Monsieur Ludmillo was hardly the typical lazy, effeminate, creature
whose only interests in life were holidays and the society of such
ladies as would receive him. On the contrary he was conscientious,
retiring to a point of absolute self-effacement, and able to forget
himself only in his one great passion: music. He was a Pole of the
Chopinesque type: and it was in spite of himself that he gave his pupil,
besides the regular studies, a very thorough grounding in the classical
masters, taught him something of the spirit of Schumann and Schubert,
and even permitted in Ivan's repertoire such bits of Glinka and Serov as
were to be managed by the boyish hands. Happily, Ludmillo had not lived
enough in the fashionable world for him to endure the vapid floridities
of the late Italian school; but there rose in him a secret delight when
he heard his charge, left to himself, return again and again to the wild
and haunting melodies of little Russia, Lithuania, and, above and beyond
all, of rebellious, crushed, poetic Poland.

The instrument on which Ivan gained his first understanding of the art
that he was to make his own, was one that had come into the palace upon
the marriage of his mother. In the days before the complete stifling of
her talents, Sophia had been wont often to dissipate the misery of her
earlier disillusions in music. But there arrived a time when grief
became too deep for such sentimental balm; and then the piano's painted
cover had been closed, as she believed, for good, and the instrument, at
her orders, carried away to the unused room where, years afterwards,
Ludmillo discovered it and put it into some sort of order. Madame
Gregoriev's assent to his timid request to have it moved to Ivan's rooms
had been indifferently granted. But later, when, in the candle-lit dusk,
Ivan and his tutor drew instinctively together before the instrument,
they were more and more often joined by another figure, silently
stealing, who would listen to the half-forgotten melodies of other
years that were, for her, ghost-haunted, till further endurance b