Shall I never be able to forget? Shall I never succeed in drawing the veil? Tuberoses and—
Phew! Where did that whiff of chloroform come from? Is it my imagination playing me tricks, or is that man at my side a surgeon, fresh from some murderous horrible operation? They are all alike, those doctors, licensed to butcher.
Tuberoses and chloroform! Chloroform and tuberoses! Faugh! they go well together. The grim spectre breathes the one and wears the other.
I suppose it is remorse. How horrible remorse is! Bearing you down, gripping you by the throat and strangling you until your brain whirls, your senses are dulled, and you see all over again the scenes you desire most to forget.
It is a couple of years since, yet how fearfully vivid it all is!
That pallid face, whiter than the white pillow; the closed eyes, the ashen-brown hair!
By Heaven! I see it all before me even now. A hideous reality. The dénouement of a terrible drama in our struggle for freedom.
Mine was a delicate mission. My readers will probably remember that about two years ago a new Russian literary and social star appeared in the London firmament, in the person of Madame Vera Kovalski. Her sudden appearance in English society, and her ostentatious parade of wealth aroused our suspicions that she was an agent of the Russian Government, a surmise which was quickly confirmed, for one morning we saw in certain London daily newspapers a long letter signed by her in defence of Russian bureaucracy, and eulogising the humane Tzar for his paternal interest in the millions who called him “father.”
From that day she was the object of vigilant watchfulness. Communications with the various Circles in Russia elicited nothing regarding her past, until one day the Executive received a letter from the Kiev centre, informing us that the woman who called herself Kovalski was the young wife of Colonel Paul Krivenko, chief of police of that town. Her husband, with his grey-coated myrmidons, had for a long time past endeavoured to stamp out the revolutionary movement among the students at the University, but although dozens of innocent persons had been arrested and sent without trial to Verkhni Udinsk and Yakoutsk, he had, up to the present, been unable to discover any members of the Circle proper.