“No, no!” I exclaimed, my hand placed tenderly upon the poor girl’s shoulder. “Banish such thoughts. You may be released yet. I am here, striving towards that end.”
But she only shook her head again very mournfully. Nobody is released from Siberia.
As we stood together, my heavy coat wrapped about her in order to protect her a little from the piercing blast, she told me how, under the fatigue and exposure of the journey, her mother had fallen so ill that she one day dropped exhausted by the roadside. One Cossack officer, finding her unconscious, suggested that she should be left there to die, as fully half a dozen other delicate women had been left. But another officer of the convoy, a trifle more humane, had her placed in a tarantass, and by that means she had travelled as far as Tulunovsk. But the officer in charge there had compelled her to again walk, and over that last thousand miles of snow she had dragged wearily until, ill and worn out, she had arrived in Yakutsk.
From the moment of her arrival she had scarcely spoken. So weak was she, that she could only lie upon the bare wooden bench, and was ever begging to be allowed to die. And only that morning had she peacefully passed away. I had arrived twelve hours too late!
She had carried her secret to her grave!
I heard the terrible story from the girl’s lips in silence. My long weary journey had been all in vain.
From the beginning to the end of poor Madame’s illness no medical man had seen her. From what she had suffered no one knew, and certainly nobody cared a jot. She was, in the eyes of the law, a “dangerous political” who had died on the journey to the distant settlement to which she had been banished. And how many others, alas! had succumbed to the rigours of that awful journey!
I walked with Luba back to the Governor’s bureau, and in obedience to my demand he gave me a room—a bare place with a brick stove, before which the poor sad-eyed girl sat with me.
I saw that the death of her mother had utterly crushed her spirit. Transferred from the gaiety and luxury of Petersburg, her pretty home and her merry circle of friends, away to that wilderness of snow, with brutal Cossacks as guards—men who beat exhausted women with whips as one lashes a dog—her brain was at last becoming affected. At certain moments she seemed very curious in her manner. Her deep blue eyes had an unusual intense expression in them—a look which I certainly did not like. That keen glittering glance was, I knew, precursory to madness.
Though unkempt and ragged, wearing an old pair of men’s high boots and a dirty red handkerchief tied about her head, her beauty was still remarkable. Her pretty mouth was perhaps harder, and it tightened at the corners as she related the tragic story of their arrest and their subsequent journey. Yet her eyes were splendid, and her cheeks were still dimpled they had been when I had so often sat at tea with her in her mother’s great salon in Petersburg, a room decorated in white, with rose-du-Barri furniture.