When we entered his sitting-room on the upper floor I was astonished to find it bright and comfortably furnished. One would never have expected such a clean, cosy room in a house of that character, situate as it was in one of the lowest quarters of the metropolis. Crimson damask curtains hung from a neat gilt cornice; in the centre of the room was a round table, upon which tea was laid, and seated at the window, reclining in a cane rocking-chair, was a pretty fair-haired girl of about sixteen reading a novel.
Rising as we entered, she glanced shyly at me.
“Elyòna, I’ve brought a friend, one of our compatriots, whose name, however, I have not the pleasure of knowing.”
“Ivan Lipatkin,” I replied, uttering the first name that crossed my mind. I considered it politic to conceal my identity until I knew more about him.
His daughter smiled, shook hands, and welcomed me.
“You are more comfortable here than in Algachi,” I said, glancing around.
“Yes,” he replied. “Although I am blind and helpless, I am not exactly destitute.”
We took tea together, and were quite a merry trio. Elyòna Karelin was charming, and her father’s conversation was that of an educated and cultured man.
After I had given him a fictitious account of myself, he told me his story. He was a lapidary in Petersburg, and had been thrice arrested and confined in one of the bomb-proof casemates of the Prison of Petropaulovsk, because it was alleged that his freedom was “prejudicial to public order.” On the last occasion of his arrest he was condemned to hard labour for life, and sent across Siberia to the dreaded mining district beyond Irkutsk. His daughter went into voluntary exile with him, and they remained at Algachi four years. At length, aided by a Cossack officer who took compassion on the decrepit old man and his devoted child, Karelin succeeded in escaping. He then became a brodyag, or escaped convict who wanders about the country subsisting upon what he can beg or steal, but always travelling towards the west. In this way he managed to walk nearly a thousand miles towards the Ourals, when by good chance he fell in with a train of freight sleighs going to Nijni Novgorod fair. One of the drivers had fallen ill and died, therefore he disguised himself in the dead man’s clothes and took his place, having first, however, succeeded, with the help of some of the other men, in filing away his leg-irons. His clothes with the yellow diamond upon them he buried in a snowdrift, and with the dead man’s passport was allowed to pass safely back to Europe, after an absence of nearly five years.
Soon after his arrival, however, he was stricken down by fever, and lost his eyesight. In Kazan he was joined by Elyòna, who had followed him. Afterwards they came to England.