It presents a most interesting study in psychology—though it cannot be touched upon here except in a passing way—that Ferguson, the rich merchant, the broad-minded citizen, the respected husband and affectionate father, should have been irresistibly attracted to Catherine Blok, the very humble-born and ignorant peasant. Yet so it was, and when Catherine left Riga, she was influenced thereto by Ferguson, and her object in going was to conceal, as far as could be concealed, the fact that the merchant prince and the peasant girl had met on a common ground; and as is invariably the result under such circumstances, and in such a case, the meeting was fraught with terrible consequences to both of them.
When Mrs. Blok and Catherine left Riga, they retired to Valdai, in the Valdai Hills, in the province of Novgorod, to the south of St. Petersburg. Valdai was a very quiet, out-of-the-way place. Here the mother and daughter took up their quarters in a stone-built house, and enjoyed comfort, convenience, and luxury, which must have been very novel to them. They knew no one, and were utterly unknown; nor did they seek to be known or to know. At regular intervals, about once a month, a man visited them. He was in the habit of going to St. Petersburg. There he posted to Valdai, a distance of nearly a hundred miles. He could have gone quite close to the place by train, but he preferred the round-about way for reasons of his own. He invariably arrived at Valdai at night, and when he left he always went away early in the morning.
This sort of thing went on for something like three years. Then the visits of the man ceased, but correspondence passed between him and Catherine, who was the mother of a son about two and a half years old. The man had looked after her and her offspring, but not as liberally as he might and ought to have done. At last differences arose between them. These differences were traceable to Mrs. Blok. She thought, probably not without some justification, that her daughter had not been treated well. In the end the man exacted from Catherine a document, which was signed by herself and counter-signed by her mother. In this document, which was very artfully drawn up, and was not, it is needless to say, Catherine’s composition, the man was represented as having been the victim of extortion and blackmailing, and the girl stated that it was impossible for her to fix the parentage of her son. It need hardly be said that the man who was in the habit of visiting Catherine at Valdai, and who took such extraordinary precautions to prevent his visits being known to anyone else, was Donald Ferguson, the merchant of Riga.
By means of the papers found in the packet which he took from Ferguson’s private box, aided and supplemented by many and patient inquiries, Danevitch was enabled to work out the foregoing pitiable little story. During the time he was so engaged—it extended over several weeks—there was an outcry against him. He was expected to do so much; and those who ought to have known better thought he was doing so little. Of course the general public did not know that he was engaged in the business at all, and, with the pig-headedness and stupidity peculiar to a mob, they railed against the authorities, saying it was shameful that so popular, upright, and true a man as Mr. Ferguson should be strangled to death in a place considered to be so well policed and watched as Riga; and yet all the vigilance and all the cleverness of the police were powerless alike to stay the crime and to bring the criminal to justice when the crime had been committed.
‘Our lives and property are not safe,’ exclaimed the rabble. ‘The police are supine; they are useless; they are in league with the knaves who prey upon honest citizens. If this is not so, how is it they have not brought Mr. Ferguson’s murderer to book?’
This was the tone adopted by a low Radical anti-Government paper, which styled itself the organ and the mouthpiece of the people. Although as a rule it was opposed to the moneyed and privileged classes, it was pleased in this instance—because it gave it a raison d’être for hurling abuse at the heads of the authorities—to place Mr. Ferguson upon a pinnacle of greatness, and to speak of him almost as if he were a martyred saint. The rulers in Russia are peculiarly sensitive to, and intolerant of, criticism, and the authorities in Riga, stung by the lashings of the local organ, lunged out, so to speak, and grabbed the first person they could lay their hands on. The Russian police have a habit of doing this when driven to desperation.
In the Riga case the arrests were made so indiscriminately and fatuously that the unfortunate suspects, after enduring much misery and indignity, were set at liberty with a growl that was not unlike a curse, and the local paper hurled more thunderbolts at the heads of the police, and showed a disposition to canonize the murdered man at the expense of the authorities. During all the time that this agitation was going on, Danevitch was working slowly but surely at his task of drawing aside the curtain and revealing the mystery. But those in authority above him, in spite of his record, considered that he was fumbling in the dark, and looking for clues in impossible places. But having learnt something about Mr. Ferguson’s skeleton from that packet of private papers, which was to be destroyed unopened in the event of Mr. Ferguson’s death, he proceeded on his own lines. It would not be easy to give a reason that would satisfy all minds why Mr. Ferguson kept those incriminating documents; but no doubt he thought that as long as he lived the confession—if it could be so called—which he had exacted from Catherine Blok would effectually protect him against any further claims she might be inclined to make against him; because he could confront her with that document, and say, ‘Look here, you acknowledge certain things. Here is your confession in black and white signed with your name. Therefore, if you don’t leave me alone I will charge you with blackmailing me.’
This, of course, was the weapon of a cunning and artful man which he used to menace and subdue the ignorant, the weak and wronged woman. He knew well enough in his own mind that he dare not make that document public; for though part of the girl’s statement might be believed, he would not come off scot-free, for would not people say, ‘If you had nothing to fear, why did you get that confession from her?’
The first step which Danevitch took after reading the contents of the sealed packet was to learn something of the Blok family; and to that end, in the character of an old vagrant man, he visited the mother and the daughter in their retreat at Valdai. It took him some time to gather the materials for the little family history already narrated. Necessarily, before he could do that, he had to worm himself into their confidence, and he would not have succeeded in doing that had he not laid a pretended claim to occult powers, which enabled him to read the past and divine the future. With such people as the Bloks this went a long way. They, in common with their class, had a fixed belief in charms, fortune-telling and spells.
When Danevitch saw the infant son of Catherine, he exclaimed: