“This morning. I had a letter from Vronsky forwarded by the publishers.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” cried Olivia. “I had an idea you weren’t quite yourself.”
“I didn’t want to worry you without due reason,” he explained, “and I was upset. It was like a message from the dead. For, not having heard of him all this time, I concluded he had perished, like so many others, at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Anyhow, there he was alive in a little hotel in Bloomsbury. Of course, I had to go and rout him out.”
“Naturally,” said Olivia.
“Well, I found him. He had managed to escape, with the usual difficulties, and was now about to search Europe for his family.”
“What a terrible quest,” said Olivia, with a shudder.
“Yes. It’s awful, isn’t it?” replied Triona in a voice of deep feeling—already half beginning himself to believe in the genuineness of his story—“I spent a heart-rending day with him. He had expected to find his family in England.”
“But you wrote to him——”
“Of course. But how many letters to Russia reach their destination? Their letters, too, have miscarried or been seized. He hadn’t had news of them since they left Petrograd.”
Carried away by the tragedy of this Wandering Jew hunt for a lost family, Olivia forgot the reason for its recital. She questioned, Triona responded, his picturesque invention in excited working. He etched in details. Vronsky’s declension from the ruddy, plethoric gentleman, with good-humoured Tartar face, to the gaunt, hollow-eyed grey-beard, with skinny fingers on which the nails grew long. The gentle charm of the lost Madame Vronsky and the beauty of her two young daughters, Vera and Sonia. The faithful moujik who had accompanied them on their way and reported that they had sailed on the Olger Danske from Copenhagen for London. He related their visit to Lloyds, where they had learned that no such ship was known. Certainly at the time of the supposed voyage it had put into no British port. Vronsky was half mad. No wonder.