“I am lost!” she said despairingly. “I have been mad to keep those letters. And yet, how could I destroy them, when they were as life itself to me! My God! have I been too late, after all? Is he already in the hands of those cursed, bloodthirsty devils? Holy Mother of God! save me from going mad!”
My own bewilderment and alarm were momentarily increasing, but I used my best endeavors to soothe the distracted woman at my side.
“For pity’s sake!” I implored, “be calm. To lose your self-control may help to bring about the very disaster you fear. And think of Feo. She will still claim your attention, whatever may be the demands upon your fortitude.”
“My darling Feo! God help her, if anything befalls me, for those ravening wolves, my enemies, will have scant mercy upon the child of a suspect. Dora, can I trust you? Dare I put my secrets in your keeping?”
“God helping me, I will do all I can for you.”
“I believe you. Now listen.”
Madame Kominski spoke in a low voice, but with a painful concentration of purpose and a nervous clasping and unclasping of her hands which could only be the result of extreme agitation and dread.
“Listen,” she said once more. “I belong to a family which has given many martyrs to the cause of freedom, and from my earliest youth I was taught to hate that merciless Juggernaut, the Russian autocracy, with all its vile ramifications of pillage and murder. Pah! Curse it! What does government do for us? It revels in luxury and splendors drained from the life-blood of millions of groaning victims. It grinds the people into nothingness as remorselessly as the millstones crush the wheat with which they are fed. But the day will come when even that mighty thing of evil will be numbered among the curses of the past, and when wealth and happiness are no longer all absorbed by the thin crust of society, while all beneath it is one mass of rotten, seething corruption and misery. They talk of hell! What hell could display sufferings equal to those which have been endured by my people? What hell could be big enough to hold all the accursed wretches who have for ages helped to trample out the lives and souls of a vast nation?”
“Madame! madame!” I whispered, in renewed alarm. “Think how dreadful it will be if you are overheard!”
“Why, yes,” she said, sinking her voice again. “I believe I must be mad! And is it not enough to drive one mad, to see the downfall of all one’s hopes; the failure of all one’s plans; the utter hopelessness of trying to rescue even one unit among all these millions from the remorseless fate which an iron autocracy metes out for it? Where are now all my struggles? Lost! Wasted! Gone! Crashed by the foul harpies who bloat themselves on the miseries of others!