I was not in a very good mood to be amused, but I took Madame Reynaud’s address, and promised to call, if I had time, and the next day we left Paris. There was some misunderstanding with regard to our passage, which we had thought secured, and we were obliged to stay in London several days.
As time hung rather heavily upon our hands, I suggested one afternoon that we call on Madame Reynaud, and see what she was like. We found her in a fine apartment on Piccadilly, near Hyde Park, and attended by a butler, cook and maid. She was a little, wizened-up, old woman, painted and powdered, with many rings on her shriveled hands and large solitaires in her ears. She received us with a great deal of ceremony, and ordered tea at once. She had heard of us from her daughter and from Sophie, whom she supposed we had seen at her treadmill work, she said. Then began a tirade against Sophie for earning her own living, “teaching every kind of brat, when she might live with me, and be something besides a breadwinner. I see a good deal of society, for there is blue blood in my veins, English as well as Russian, and I am as proud of the one as of the other.”
I thought I should greatly prefer Sophie’s life to one with that blue-blooded woman. She took up Ivan next, but not until she had nearly thrown Katy into hysterics by saying, in a very brusque way: “And this is the little girl Ivan fancied when masquerading as Sophie? And did you fancy him?”
“Madame,” Katy replied, with great dignity, “I liked your grandson, as Sophie, very much. I have never known him as Ivan.”
“Well put—well put!” and madame laughed, with a kind of cackle, which I detested.
“You’d better never know him as Ivan,” she continued. “I’ve warned him what he’d come to, and he has come to it. I have no patience with a nihilist, or anarchist, or striker of any kind. They deserve Siberia, or something worse, and I’m glad Ivan has his deserts at last—masquerading in petticoats! Yes, he has his deserts. It’s the Scholaskie blood, not mine—not the Rubenstein on the Russian side, nor the Burnells on the English. I’m proud of both. And my daughter is going to join her scapegrace son? Well, let her; her husband died there. He played the rôle of a beggar, and was caught; Ivan played the fine lady, and was caught—served ’em right—served ’em right! I would not turn my hand to save him. Have some more tea?”
She spoke to me, but I declined. She suggested that I should drive with her in the park, but I was anxious to get away from the dreadful old woman. As we were leaving, she put her hand on Katy’s shoulder, and said: “You are a bonnie little lassie, as the Scotch say, and, if Ivan were not such a fool, and you were not an American, I think it would do, and I should know where to leave my diamonds. I lie awake nights thinking about it. There is no one but Ivan’s wife and Sophie, and diamonds would be out of place on her, as a music teacher. They are worth having, eh?”
She touched the large pendants in her ears, and held up both her hands, on which seven rings were sparkling. Katy made no reply; she was as anxious to leave the house as I was, and we both breathed more freely when out in the open air in the bustle of Piccadilly.
A few days later we sailed for home, and, as my brother’s house in Washington was rented for the year, Jack and Katy came with me to Ridgefield, where Jack found ample scope for his talent in narrating to the boys of the place his adventures in Russia. Katy was very reticent. Something had come over her spirits, and for hours she would sit silent, with a look on her face as if her thoughts were far away. Once I spoke of Ivan, when there came a look of intense pain on her face, and she said: “Don’t, auntie. I can’t bear it. To think we are so happy here, and so free, and he is a prisoner in Siberia, doing I don’t know what—working in a chain gang, maybe.”
I disabused her mind of that idea, and a few days later there came to me a letter, worn and soiled, as if it had been long on the way and had passed through many hands. It was from Ivan, who was in Southern Siberia, and his mother was with him. He was happier, he wrote, than he had thought it possible for him to be as an exile and prisoner. He had met his fate, and it was not as bad as he had expected. Southern Siberia was not like the dreary north. He was a prisoner, it was true, and under surveillance, but he scarcely felt it, as he had nothing to conceal, and since his mother joined him he was tolerably content. He had heard of Jack’s daring defense and Katy’s earnest appeal for him, and thanked them for it.