“I had had no news from Russia for some months, when Mr. Pendennis died suddenly; he had been ailing for a long time, but the end came quite unexpectedly. Anthony was telegraphed for and came as quickly as possible. I saw very little of him during his stay, a few days only, during which he had to get through a great amount of business; but I learned that his wife was in a delicate state of health, and he was desperately anxious about her. I fear he got very little sympathy from his mother, whose aversion for her daughter-in-law had increased, if that were possible, during their separation. Poor woman! Her rancour brought its own punishment! She and her son parted in anger, never to meet again. She only heard from him once,—about a month after he left, to return to Russia; and then he wrote briefly, brutally in a way, though I know he was half mad at the time.
“‘My wife is dead, though not in childbirth. If I had been with her, I could have saved her,’ he wrote. ‘You wished her dead, and now your wish is granted; but I also am dead to you. I shall never return to England; I shall never bring my child home to the house where her mother was an alien.’
“He has kept his word, as you know. He did not write to me at all; and it was years before I heard what had happened during his absence, and on his return. When he reached the frontier he was arrested and detained in prison for several days. Then, on consideration of the fact that he was a British subject—”
“That doesn’t weigh for much in Russia to-day,” I interpolated.
“It did then. He was informed that his wife had been arrested as an accomplice in a Nihilist plot; that she had been condemned to transportation to Siberia, but had died before the sentence could be executed. Also that her infant, born a few days before her arrest, had been deported, with its nurse, and was probably awaiting him at Konigsberg. Finally he himself was conducted to the frontier again, and expelled from ‘Holy Russia.’ The one bit of comfort was the child, whom he found safe and sound under the care of the nurse, a German who had taken refuge with her kinsfolk in Konigsberg, and who confirmed the terrible story.
“I heard all this about ten years ago,” Treherne continued, “when by the purest chance I met Pendennis in Switzerland. I was weather-bound by a premature snowstorm for a couple of days, and among my fellow sufferers at the little hostelry were Anthony and his daughter.”
“Anne herself! What was she like?” I asked eagerly.
“A beautiful girl,—the image of her dead mother,” he answered slowly. “Or what her mother must have been at that age. She was then about—let me see—twelve or thirteen, but she seemed older; not what we call a precocious child, but womanly beyond her years, and devoted to her father, as he to her. I took him to task; tried to persuade him to come back to England,—to his own home,—if only for his daughter’s sake. But he would not listen to me.
“‘Anne shall be brought up as a citizeness of the world,’ he declared. ‘She shall never be subjected to the limitations of life in England.’