My fair travelling companion was a murderess!
We arrived in the Siberian city of Irkutsk one afternoon in December, and took tea at the post-house. Before we had finished our meal Mariána, who, though very pale, looked undeniably beautiful in a dress richly trimmed with otter, suddenly disappeared.
“Has any one seen the lady who arrived with me?” I asked presently of the men who were warming themselves around the stove.
“Yes,” replied a man who had just entered, and was shaking the snow from his sheepskin. “I saw her entering the Governor’s Palace.” Then he added, with a wink, “His Excellency has an eye for feminine beauty—he has.”
I waited for no more. Struggling into my shuba, I crammed my cap on my head and hurried to the Palace, only a few hundred yards away. Of the sentry at the gate I learned that a lady had called upon his Excellency, and been admitted. After a short conversation with a flunkey, the man pocketed one hundred roubles as a bribe, and I was conducted through the great handsomely-furnished residence of the representative of the Tzar, and shown into a small anteroom, shut off from another apartment by heavy plush curtains.
As I entered I heard voices in the adjoining room.
“So you have come, my little one,” a man’s gruff voice exclaimed.
“Yes—at last,” was the reply. The words were Mariána’s.
Peeping through the curtains I found I could observe all that went on in the luxuriant gaudy apartment. Before the glowing fire a tall, elderly man, in the white uniform of the Imperial Guard, with his breast covered with orders, was standing; and near him Mariána, pale, erect and queenly.
“I have come, General Korolénko, to free myself from the hateful toils you cast about me three years ago, when you were Chief of the Third Section of Police in Petersburg,” she said, regarding him steadily. “I was a Nihilist, and you, taking advantage of my youth and inexperience, gave me a choice of alternatives. You ordered me to the mines, and then gave me a chance of regaining my liberty and of saving my brother’s honour by becoming one of your contemptible spies. I agreed. For three years I have been your puppet. I have acted my ignominious, dishonourable part in Petersburg society, and been the means of sending dozens of unoffending persons to their terrible doom—to rot in the dungeons under the Neva, or toil in the dark silver mines of the Trans-Baikal—while you, the ex-Chief of Secret Police, live here in luxury and pose before your Imperial Master as the great detector of conspiracies!”