At first Madame de Talmont seemed embarrassed, and a faint pink flush lent unwonted colour to her pale cheek. But Ivan’s detailed description of his interview with Henri at Vilna arrested and held her with its absorbing interest.
“M. de Pojarsky,” she said, uttering the name with a little hesitation, perhaps even reluctance, “if you have a mother living, I pray God to send some one to comfort her, as you have comforted me.”
“Ah, madame,” returned Ivan, “I have never known my mother; she died in my earliest infancy. I am tempted to envy M. de Talmont,” he added with a smile.
Madame de Talmont looked at him with quickened interest. “May I ask,” she said rather quickly, “does your father live? It is sad if one so young as you appear to be, stands alone in the world.”
Ivan sighed. “I am alone in the world,” he said. “But the strange thing is, that I cannot tell whether my father is living or dead.”
“How is that?” pursued Madame de Talmont eagerly. But Clémence interposed, from a kindly desire to spare the young Russian a painful recital. “We can guess,” she said—“we have heard, even in France, of exiles in Siberia. We have pitied their sufferings.”
Ivan’s white face flushed. “No one is sent to Siberia now” he said eagerly, “who would not in any other country than ours be far more severely punished. It was the Czarina who exiled my father,” he continued with some excitement—“not my Czar.”
“Do not think me unkind or discourteous,” Madame de Talmont said gently, “if I venture to inquire what was the offence laid to his charge. I have a reason.”
“I can answer without pain or reluctance,” said Ivan. “My father’s disgrace and banishment, and my mother’s death, which quickly followed, took place in my infancy; and the kind but simple people who cared for me and brought me up could tell me very little. But from that little I have gathered that my father, being in Paris at the outbreak of the Revolution, became involved in the crimes of the Jacobins, rather from youthful thoughtlessness than from any deliberate evil intention.”
“Ah!” said Madame de Talmont.