"I hardly know how to begin," he said. "Perhaps it had better be with my father and mother, because it was the tragedy of their lives that shaped mine." He was silent for a moment, as if thinking. Then he drew a long breath, as a man does when he is ready to take a plunge into deep water.
"My mother was a Russian. Her people were noble, but that didn't keep them from going to Siberia. She was brought to America by a man and woman who'd been servants in her family. She was very young, only fifteen. Her name was Michaela. I'm named after her—Michael. The three had only money enough to be allowed to land as immigrants, and to get out west—though her people had been rich." He paused a moment for a sigh.
"She and the servants—they passed as her father and mother—found work in Chicago. My father was a lawyer there. He was an Englishman, you know—I've told you that before—but he thought his profession was overstocked at home, so he tried his luck on the other side. The old Russian chap was hurt in the factory where he worked, and that's the way my father—whose name was Robert Donaldson—got to know my mother. There was a question of compensation, and my father conducted the case. He won it.
"And he won a wife, too. She was nineteen when I was born. Father was getting on, but they were poor and had a hard time to make ends meet. They worshipped each other and worshipped me. You can think whether I adored them!
"Mother was the most beautiful creature you ever saw. Everyone looked at her. I used to notice that when I was a wee chap, walking with my hand in hers. When I was ten and going to school my father had a bad illness—rheumatic fever. We got hard up while he was sick; and then came a letter for mother from Russia. Some distant relations in Moscow had had her traced by detectives. It seemed there was quite a lot of money which ought to come to her, and if she would go to Russia and prove who she was she could get it.
"If father'd been well and making enough for us all he'd never have let her go, but he was weak and anxious about the future, so she took things into her own hands and went, without waiting for yes or no, or anything except to find a woman who'd look after father and me while she was gone. Well, she never came back. Can you guess what became of her?" he asked, huskily.
"She died?" Annesley asked, forgetting in her interest, which grew with the story, to wonder what the history of Knight's childhood and his parents' troubles had to do with the Malindore diamond.
"She died before my father could find her; but not for a long time. God—what a time of agony for her! Things happened I can't tell you about. We heard nothing, after a letter from the ship and a cable from Moscow with two words—'Well. Love.'
"For a while father waited and tried not to be too anxious; but after a time he telegraphed, and then again and again. No answer. He went nearly mad. Before he was well enough to travel he borrowed money and started for Russia to look for her. I stayed in Chicago—and kept on going to school. The friends who took care of me made me do that ... or thought so.
"But when I could, I played truant. I was in a restless state. I remember how I felt as if it were yesterday. Nothing seemed real, except my father and mother. I thought about them all the time. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't study. I couldn't bear to sit at a desk. I picked up some queer pals in those months—or they picked me up. I suppose that was the beginning of the end.