Lucy Harding

by Mary Jane Holmes

I was too angry to answer, and I felt that my face was as red as my hair. The women began at once to ask questions concerning the robbery, but the gendarme did not deign to answer them. They were cattle, as he had designated them, and, as just then there came a whistle which he understood, with a scowl at the women and children and a look I did not like at myself, he walked away in pursuit of some poor wretch—Carl, perhaps, I thought, as I sat down again upon the doorstep, faint and tired from my recent encounter.

Only the woman on whose doorstep and on whose apron I was sitting was willing to talk. She seemed superior to her neighbors, with a look upon her face as if nothing mattered to her now. In reply to my questions, she said that Paul Strigoff, the gendarme who had just left us, was one of the hardest and cruelest of the lot, and he was more a German than a Russian. Carl had been in prison, and nearly killed with the knout, but he had his good parts, and would share his last crust or kopecks with a friend.

“He is”—and she hesitated a moment; then began, in tolerably fair English; and, when I looked at her in surprise, she explained that she had once lived in England for a year, and learned the language. “I was not always what I am now,” she said. “It is a great fall from the Court Quay to this place, but I have made the descent, and was so bruised and stunned that life holds nothing for me now—nothing—and what goes on around me rather amuses me. I have been a suspect—arrested as such, and put in prison. Oh, the horror and shame of it, and I as innocent as you! My husband is in Siberia—sent there rightfully, I suppose, according to the laws of this land. I have no children, thank God, but”—and red spots began to come out on her thin face—“it is not known to many here—but Carl is my nephew. A good boy once as ever the sun shone on. But they arrested him for something he never heard of, and nearly killed him with the knout to make him confess what he knew nothing of. When satisfied that they could get nothing from him, they let him go, and he crept to me in the night, with his poor back all gashed and bleeding, and every particle of manhood crushed out of him. There is nothing like the knout administered wrongfully to take the pride from a man and make him a fiend. Carl is pretty bad now, and does not care. I am sorry he attacked you, and wonder that he did. He must have had too much vodka. You should not have come here, and the sooner you go, the better. Your friend is greatly upset.”

She looked at Mary, who was very white and very busy trying to keep herself from the children who were pressing round her, and who had been joined by other children from some quarter. Among them I recognized my hat, which I had discarded on the first day of my arrival. The same girl I had then seen with it on was wearing it, and had twisted a piece of faded blue tarleton around it in place of the ribbon and flower, which, I suppose, some other child was wearing. At sight of it, I laughed. The world seemed so small, with many wires converging to the same point, and just now to this neighborhood, where I knew I ought not to be. But I must ask the woman a question before I left, and, turning to her, I said: “Do you know Michel Seguin?”

“Only as a terror to the nihilists and thieves. I’ve never spoken to him,” she said. “I hear that, although he is quick to catch ’em, he is kind after they are caught. Very different from Paul Strigoff, who has come up from the scum of Moscow, and feels his importance as a gendarme, while Michel Seguin is a gentleman, and comes of a good family.”

“Do you know where he lives?” I asked her next, and she replied: “Yes; on the Nevsky. He has money, and his mother is a lady.”

“And did you ever know or hear of the Patoff family, who first owned the house? There was a Nicol Patoff, a young man. Did you ever hear of him?”

“Patoff?” she replied. “No, I don’t know them. They must have left before I came to St. Petersburg. The Seguins lived there then.”

“Thanks!” I said; “and now I really must go. Come, Mary.”

I stooped to help her up, and, before I got her to her feet and away from the woman, who was again offering her vodka, I was conscious that some new impulse had been given to the crowd, which had pressed disagreeably near to me as I bent over Mary. The children began to scatter, and in the distance I saw my hat, worn hindside before, and bobbing up and down on the frowsy head of the peasant girl. The women, too, began to move off toward their own homes, while Chance started up, and, with a joyous bark, ran swiftly up the street, where a tall gendarme was coming toward us with rapid strides and swinging a little cane, which I had heard could, on occasion, make itself felt.