§2
In the ancient family of the Ivashevs a French girl was living as a governess. The only son of the house wished to marry her. All his relations were driven wild by the idea; there was a great commotion, tears, and entreaties. They succeeded in inducing the girl to leave Petersburg and the young man to delay his intention for a season. Young Ivashev was one of the most active conspirators, and was condemned to penal servitude for life. For this was a form of mésalliance from which his relations did not protect him. As soon as the terrible news reached the young girl in Paris, she started for Petersburg, and asked permission to travel to the Government of Irkutsk, in order to join her future husband. Benkendorf tried to deter her from this criminal purpose; when he failed, he reported the case to Nicholas. The Tsar ordered that the position of women who had remained faithful to their exiled husbands should be explained to her. “I don’t keep her back,” he added; “but she ought to realise that if wives, who have accompanied their husbands out of loyalty, deserve some indulgence, she has no claim whatever to such treatment, when she intends to marry one whom she knows to be a criminal.”
In Siberia nothing was known of this permission. When she had found her way there, the poor girl was forced to wait while a correspondence went on with Petersburg. She lived in a miserable settlement peopled with released criminals of all kinds, unable to get any news of her lover or to inform him of her whereabouts.
By degrees she made acquaintances among her strange companions. One of these was a highwayman who was now employed in the prison, and she told him all her story. Next day he brought her a note from Ivashev; and soon he offered to carry messages between them. All day he worked in the prison; at nightfall he got a scrap of writing from Ivashev and started off, undeterred by weariness or stormy weather, and returned to his daily work before dawn.
At last permission came for their marriage. A few years later, penal servitude was commuted to penal settlement, and their condition was improved to some extent. But their strength was exhausted, and the wife was the first to sink under the burden of all she had undergone. She faded away, as a flower from southern climes was bound to fade in the snows of Siberia. Ivashev could not survive her long: just a year later he too died. But he had ceased to live before his death: his letters (which impressed even the inquisitors who read them) were evidence not only of intense sorrow, but of a distracted brain; they were full of a gloomy poetry and a crazy piety; after her death he never really lived, and the process of his death was slow and solemn.
This history does not end with their deaths. Ivashev’s father, after his son’s exile, transferred his property to an illegitimate son, begging him not to forget his unfortunate brother but to do what he could. The young pair were survived by two children, two nameless infants, with a future prospect of the roughest labour in Siberia—without friends, without rights, without parents. Ivashev’s brother got permission to adopt the children. A few years later he ventured on another request: he used influence, that their father’s name might be restored to them, and this also was granted.