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.
§3
I was strongly impressed by stories of the rebels and I their fate, and by the horror which reigned in Moscow. These events revealed to me a new world, which became more and more the centre of my whole inner life; I don’t know how it came to pass; but, though I understood very dimly what it was all about, I felt that the side that possessed the cannons and held the upper hand was not my side. The execution of Pestel[[29]] and his companions finally awakened me from the dreams of childhood.
[29]. One of the Decembrists.
Though political ideas occupied my mind day and night, my notions on the subject were not very enlightened: indeed they were so wide of the mark that I believed one of the objects of the Petersburg insurrection to consist in placing Constantine on the throne as a constitutional monarch.
It will easily be understood that solitude was a greater burden to me than ever: I needed someone, in order to impart to him my thoughts and ideals, to verify them, and to hear them confirmed. Proud of my own “disaffection,” I was unwilling either to conceal it or to speak of it to people in general.
My choice fell first on Iván Protopópov, my Russian tutor.
This man was full of that respectable indefinite liberalism, which, though it often disappears with the first grey hair, marriage, and professional success, does nevertheless raise a man’s character. He was touched by what I said, and embraced me on leaving the house. “Heaven grant,” he said, “that those feelings of your youth may ripen and grow strong!” His sympathy was a great comfort to me. After this time he began to bring me manuscript copies, in very small writing and very much frayed, of Púshkin’s poems—Ode to Freedom, The Dagger, and of Ryléev’s Thoughts. These I used to copy out in secret; and now I print them as openly as I please!