Once more the old woman stretched out to him her wasted hand. “Good-night, Mr. Drexel. Do not despair because we have given you nothing to do. Before we are through you may have more than you desire!”
He followed Sonya down into the street, and still he saw that withered and blanched old figure in the chair. All the time that he had sat watching her, he had wondered who she was and what had been her history; and now as he and Sonya, holding to each other, went careening through the frenzied wind, he asked her. The White One, said Sonya, was the daughter of a scientist famous during the third quarter of the last century, and herself had been a learned and skilled physician. She had become fired with the inspiration for freedom that crept into Russia in the sixties, while she was in the first flush of young womanhood, and ever since had given heart and mind to the cause of liberty. Thirty-five years she had spent in prison or Siberian exile. Her last sentence had been to fifteen years of hard labour in the Siberian mines. Here toil, exposure, the bitter cold, the prison food, the vile living conditions, a flogging she had been given, had at length broken her once strong body. Two years before she had been sent back on a stretcher as a “safe” and negligible person—sent back to die. But her thirty-five years of harsh captivity that had shattered her body, had only strengthened her spirit. She had returned to the struggle of right against might with even greater devotion and intensity.
But she had to be careful, so very careful! Her life hung but by a thread. Besides her paralysis, which bound her prisoner to chair and bed, she had heart trouble, and Dr. Razoff had said that any unusual exertion, any high excitement, would be her end.
By the time Sonya had concluded they were back again in Three Saints’ Court. As they entered the outer of the upstairs rooms a man rose from the table where he had been reading by the light of a single candle. It was Freeman, the terrorist.
“I was told some of you would be back, so I waited,” he said. “I have an idea——”
He recognized Drexel and broke off in surprise. “Why it was to talk about you that I came here! To plan for bringing you here in a day or two, as I had promised. This is better than I had expected! How does it happen you are here?”
Drexel remembered that Freeman was not one of the few in the secret of Sonya’s identity—so he dared not reveal the part she had played.
“I learned a secret from Prince Berloff’s papers,” he answered easily. “I had to flee; you had told me of this place; I came here.”
“It must have been a valuable discovery.” His eyes suddenly flashed. “Not the whereabouts of Borodin?” he said.
Drexel glanced at Sonya. He had gained the information for her; it was for her to decide with whom it should be shared.