“I have followed you here,” I said, opening my capacious fur coat and throwing it around the poor shivering girl. “I only arrived to-night. Where is your mother? I must see her at once.”
She was silent. In the darkness I saw that her white face was downcast.
I felt her sobbing as I held her, weak and tearful, in my arms. She seemed, poor girl, too overcome at meeting me to be able to speak. She tried to articulate some words, but they became choked by stifled sobs.
“Your mother has been very ill, I hear, Luba,” I said. “Is she better?”
But the girl only drew a long sigh and slowly shook her head.
“I—I can’t tell you—Mr Trewinnard!” she managed to exclaim. “It is all too terrible—horrible! My poor mother! Poor darling! She—she died this morning!”
“Dead!” I gasped. My heart sank within me. The iron entered my soul.
“Yes. Alas!” responded the unfortunate girl. “And I am left alone—all alone in this awful place! Ah! Mr Trewinnard, you do not know—you can never dream how much we have suffered since we left Petersburg. I would have preferred death a thousand times to this. And my poor mother. She is dead—at last she now has peace. The Cossacks cannot beat her with their whips any more.”
“Where did she die?” I asked blankly.
“In here—in this prison, upon the bench beside where I slept. Ah!” she cried, “I feel now as though I shall go mad. I lived only for her take—to wait upon her and try to alleviate her sufferings. Now that she has been taken from me I have no other object for which to live in this dreary waste of ice and snow. In a week I shall be sent on to Parotovsk with the others. But I hope before reaching there that God will be merciful and allow me to die.”