"Meeting the doctor on my way out, I inquired whether he thought it was worth while to suggest that the mother should come, or could he last so long. The doctor seemed unable to decide, saying he might live a week or he might die that day.
"Hurrying home, I despatched the promised letter, and for days awaited the answer. Each day I telephoned to the prison for news of the dying man, and each time I received the same reply, 'He is alive, but very weak.' And this for five days.
"On the sixth day, when I came home in the afternoon, my servant met me with the information that a very old woman, poorly dressed, in bast shoes and a wallet on her back, had been there asking for her son Paul.
"Rostchin's mother, upon the receipt of my letter, had determined to come in person to pardon her son. As the journey cost five roubles twenty copecks, she sold all her possessions, pledging even her felt shoes, thus being forced to travel in bast shoes, in spite of the intense cold. It was her first visit to a large town; she was bewildered by all she saw; but her mother's love helped her to surmount all obstacles.
"The next morning, very early, I went to her. In her anxiety to get to her son, she came to the tram with one golosh only over her bast shoe; the other she had forgotten. It was not until we were on the way that I broke the sad tidings to her that the hospital to which we were going was the hospital of a prison. 'Oh! Paul, Paul, my beloved son. My darling! How did you get to prison?' she sobbed. 'He was a warrant officer, and now he is in prison.'
"To me it was most touching that she did not once reproach him. She only pitied him without end. She warmly thanked me that I had not mentioned in my letter that he was in prison.
"'Oh, God! Oh, Holy Virgin Mary! Let me find him alive; let me but hear one word from him; let him look on me only one moment,' prayed the old woman.
"We found, on our arrival at the prison, that Rostchin yet lived, but to give an adequate description of the meeting between mother and son I feel is beyond me.
"When I led the poor woman into the room where Rostchin lay, and showed her the bed on which he was stretched, she staggered, and would have fallen had I not supported her. But her eyes fell on the picture of a saint, and, making the sign of the Cross, she approached the bedside of her son. He was so weak that he could not even turn his head, but tears rolled down his cheeks, and the poor mother, bending over him, gazed so earnestly into his eyes that her tears fell and flowed with his.