"One Sunday evening, just before he went away with Mr. Vronsky. He asked me to meet him, and I went to the old arbor while you were at evening service. He was unhappy and lonely, craving for love. He had been good to me, and I was sorry for him. And when he asked me to promise to be his wife when I grew up, I promised, because it seemed a little thing to do for him. I was happy with you, and he was all alone——" Her voice broke.
At last Denzil spoke. "Then it was really he whom the old gardener saw, as he told us. Rona, the man who saved you is not called David Smith at all. He is my younger brother, Felix Vanston."
The shock of these words brought the girl to her feet with a spring. "Your brother? Your brother?" she cried, incoherently. "Oh, no, for his brother was hard and merciless, and you—you are always so good and generous! That can't be true—it simply can't!"
The Squire, too, rose. "Let me tell you something of our early life," he said, with urgency. "You have told me the truth—the truth which I ought to have heard when first you came to us. If I had known—but I do my brother justice. He did not wish me to know that it was he until he had had a chance to show that he meant to try and do better. He has done better. He has apparently put in two years of good, steady work, and conquered a position for himself. But his discreditable past still drags at his heels. What did he tell you of his past, if I may ask the question?"
She answered, softly and low, "He told me that he had been in prison. But he said he was very sorry. He was misled, enticed, by bad men, who were too clever for him. He was young, and his head was full of great ideas."
"Let us walk along, away from the others," said Denzil, "and I will try and tell you something about Felix's mother."
CHAPTER XVI
HAPPENINGS IN A STRANGE LAND
—I ventured to remind her,
I suppose with a voice of less steadiness
Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me,
—Something to the effect that I was in readiness
Whenever God should please she needed me.
—ROBERT BROWNING.
To the English imagination, Siberia is mainly a land of cold and darkness, through which gangs of despairing convicts are driven with the lashings of governmental whips.