“But suffering and prison could not frighten him! In Zurich, before he went to Moscow, he had been trained for a doctor. And seeing how powerless the protest of the students had been, he determined to go among the people. So he made himself a medical missionary to the poorest, the most oppressed, the most miserable; and wherever he was called to carry a cure for disease, he carried, too, a word of hope, of courage, of protest, a cry for freedom!
“Late one night, in a terrible snowstorm,” she went on, “just twenty years ago, a peasant brought to our door a note, unsigned for the sake of safety, it seemed, telling father that an escaped political prisoner was dying of exposure and starvation in a hut on a deserted farm ten miles from the town. My father hurried to his horse and set out, with food and fagots, and by morning, through the cold and deep snow, he reached the place.
“There he found a man apparently freezing to death, and fed and warmed him,” said the girl; “and when the fellow was able to tell his pitiful tale, father boldly encouraged him, told him of the organization of protest he was forming, and asked him to join. Little by little father told him all he had done and all his plans. At nightfall father said farewell and turned to the door, where he found himself facing a spy, who held a pistol at his head. In the fight that followed, father was able only to wound the other upon the chest with the blunt knife they had used to cut their food, before the spy called a second confederate down from the loft, and father was overcome.
“On the information of these police spies, without trial of any sort—father’s friends could discover only that the name of his betrayer was Valerian Urth—father was sentenced to solitary confinement in an underground cell for life. And my mother—because she sent food and fagots to a supposed convict—was exiled to Siberia! Ten years ago, her sister, who took me, received word that she died on the convict island of Sakhalin; but my father”—she gasped for breath—“lived, at least!”
She stopped as suddenly as she had begun. Trant, who had stooped to watch his records more closely when the name of the police spy was mentioned, still kept his gaze steadfastly upon his instruments. Suddenly he motioned to the girl to complete her narrative.
“Some years ago.” she said, “when I was eighteen, I left my mother’s sister and went back to my father’s friends, such of them as were still free,” she continued. “Many who had worked with him for the organization had been caught or betrayed. But others and more had come in their places; and they had work for me. I might move about with less suspicion than a man. So I helped prepare for the strikes which at last so terrified the czar that on the thirtieth of October he issued his manifesto to free those in prison. I had helped to free my father with the rest. I took him to Hungary and left him with friends while I came here. Now, do you not understand why I am going back?” She turned in pitiful appeal to young Edwards. “It is because there is work again in Russia for me to do.”
She checked herself again and turned to Trant to see if he would force her still to proceed. But he was facing intently, as if fascinated, the strange hammering man and his two stranger companions; yet he was not watching their faces or their figures at all. His eyes followed the little pencil points which, before each of the three, continually traced their lines of record. Then he took quickly from his pocket a folded paper, yellow with age, worn, creased, and pierced with pin marks. In the sight of all he unfolded it swiftly upon the table before the three, refolded it, and put it back into his pocket. And though at sight of it no face changed among the three, even Trant’s clients could see how one line now suddenly grew flat, with low elevations, irregular and far apart, as the pencil point seemed almost to stop its motion over the smoked paper of the man in the middle, Meyan.
“That is all,” said Trant, in a tone of assured triumph, as he unstrapped the sphygmographs from their wrists. “You can speak now, Mr. Edwards.”
“Eva!” cried Winton Edwards, in wild appeal. “You are not married to this man?”
“Married? No!” the girl exclaimed in horror. “Until last Thursday, when he came to the office, I never saw him. But he has come to call me for the cause which must be to me higher and holier than love. I must leave my love for the cause of Russia. I must go and nurse our soldiers on the battlefield. I have been promised a full pardon if I will do so.”