“I know,” I said huskily. “That’s just how I feel about Anne. She must be very like her mother!”
CHAPTER XXX
A BYGONE TRAGEDY
He sat so long silent after that outburst that I feared he might not be willing to tell me any more of what I was painfully eager to hear.
“Did she—the Countess Anna—die here, sir?” I asked at last.
He roused himself with a start.
“I beg your pardon; I had almost forgotten you were there,” he said apologetically. “Die here? No; better, far better for her if she had! Still, she was not happy here. The old people did not like her; did not try to like her; though I don’t know how they could have held out against her, for she did her best to conciliate them, to conform to their narrow ways,—except to the extent of coming to church with them. She was a devout Roman Catholic, and she explained to me once how the tenacity with which the Polish gentry held to their religious views was one more cause of offence against them in the eyes of the Russian bureaucracy and episcopacy. I don’t think Mrs. Pendennis—Anthony’s mother—ever forgave me for the view I took of this matter; she threatened to write to the bishop. She was a masterful old lady—and I believe she would have done it, too, if Anthony and his wife had remained in the neighborhood. But the friction became unbearable, and he took her away. I never saw her again; never again!
“They went to London for a time; and from there they both wrote to me. We corresponded frequently, and they invited me to go and stay with them, but I never went. Then—it was in the autumn of ’83—they returned to Russia, and the letters were less frequent. They were nearly always from Anna; Anthony was never a good correspondent! I do not know even now whether he wrote to his parents, or they to him.