It did not occur to him to re-enter the bedroom;--afterwards he wondered why. Neither, however, did he think of going to bed. Numberless people were calling at the palace for information:--among them the Governor-General, who came in person. Ivan, however, saw no one; and by ten o'clock the house was wrapped in a vast silence. Piotr came to tell the heir that his old room was prepared; but Ivan still sat beside the fire, smoking, lost in vague conjectures. It was as well that he had not gone to bed. Precisely at midnight--the ghostly hour--the older doctor came quietly in to him.
"Your Excellency, I regret to inform you that your father, Prince Michael, passed from us five minutes ago."
At ten o'clock on the following morning Ivan, quiet, self-possessed, entirely himself again, came down to the small drawing-room for his morning tea. He knew that a mountain of work lay before him; though there were people enough to execute his orders. But the only command which the obsequious Piotr could extract from the young Prince was this:
"Till twelve o'clock I will neither speak to nor see a single person. At that hour have the whole household assembled in the state drawing-room." Only this bit of news could the excited valet of the dead Prince carry out to the kitchen; but the effect of his announcement was to send every servant, male and female, scudding across the court to their own building, to prepare themselves for the inspection of the new master.
Ivan, meantime, was occupying himself with the one matter which must be concealed from all the throng of executors, lawyers and officials of administration, by which he would presently be surrounded. During the night he had pondered on what was to be done concerning the affair of which his father had spoken at such length. And by now his course was chosen; his way looked clear; his mother, from on high, seemed smiling down on him in loving approval.
At half-past ten he stood alone in that sanctum which was to know its grim master no more. Behind him was a locked door; before him, the huge map, now entirely covered with the minute black figures that constituted the life-misery of many a respected malefactor;--that map which Grand-Dukes had prayed to look upon, and which, saving Piotr, and twice, in his boyhood, Ivan, no human eye but its creator's had ever seen.