CHAPTER XIV.LETTERS.
From St. Petersburg we went to Italy for the rest of the winter; and April found us again in Paris, at our old quarters, the Bellevue. As soon as we were settled, we looked up Sophie Scholaskie, whom we found up three long flights of stairs, in a very pretty little apartment, where she lived alone, with a woman to come morning and night to see to her rooms. She was a very handsome young woman, and so much like Ivan that I did not wonder he could pass for her so easily. She was delighted to see us, especially Katy, in whom she seemed to feel she had a particular right of ownership, and whom she scrutinized very closely all the time we were with her, and kissed at parting, saying, “For Ivan’s sake!”
She talked a great deal, but in a pleasant, ladylike way, asking many questions about her mother and Ivan. She had tried to keep him from going to St. Petersburg, she said, knowing how hot-headed he was when among his own friends. But nothing could deter him, and Siberiawas the result. He had been there some time. Indeed, she believed he had started on his northern journey the day we left the city. He had been treated with a good deal of kindness, thanks to Michel Seguin, who had used his influence all along the line. Did we know Michel?
The color in my face was a sufficient reply, and she went on: “Of course you do. I remember hearing of the American lady whom he would marry, if she were willing and it were not for his termagant old mother.”
“No!” I exclaimed. “M. Seguin neither wants me nor I him. We are friends; that’s all, and his mother need have no fear of me.”
Sophie laughed, and replied: “It would be good, pious work to live with her, I think. She is here now, at the Grand Hotel, with her maid, spending what she won at Monte Carlo. Perhaps you’d like to call upon her? This is her day.”
“Never!” I answered, quickly, with a vivid remembrance of her manner toward me the night I dined with her.
I had had enough of Madame Seguin, but did not express myself to Sophie, who spoke next of her grandmother, who lived in London.
“I think old ladies all get queer,” she said, “and grandma is the queerest of all, but I want you to call upon her. In fact, she expects you. She is half English, you know. Her mother was a Londoner, but her father was a Russian. She may amuse you.”
I was not in a very good mood to be amused, but I took Madame Reynaud’s address, and promised to call, if I had time, and the next day we left Paris. There was some misunderstanding with regard to our passage, which we had thought secured, and we were obliged to stay in London several days.
As time hung rather heavily upon our hands, I suggested one afternoon that we call on Madame Reynaud, and see what she was like. We found her in a fine apartment on Piccadilly, near Hyde Park, and attended by a butler, cook and maid. She was a little, wizened-up, old woman, painted and powdered, with many rings on her shriveled hands and large solitaires in her ears. She received us with a great deal of ceremony, and ordered tea at once. She had heard of us from her daughter and from Sophie, whom she supposed we had seen at her treadmill work, she said. Then began a tirade against Sophie for earning her own living, “teaching every kind of brat, when she might live with me, and be somethingbesides a breadwinner. I see a good deal of society, for there is blue blood in my veins, English as well as Russian, and I am as proud of the one as of the other.”
I thought I should greatly prefer Sophie’s life to one with that blue-blooded woman. She took up Ivan next, but not until she had nearly thrown Katy into hysterics by saying, in a very brusque way: “And this is the little girl Ivan fancied when masquerading as Sophie? And did you fancy him?”
“Madame,” Katy replied, with great dignity, “I liked your grandson, as Sophie, very much. I have never known him as Ivan.”
“Well put—well put!” and madame laughed, with a kind of cackle, which I detested.
“You’d better never know him as Ivan,” she continued. “I’ve warned him what he’d come to, and he has come to it. I have no patience with a nihilist, or anarchist, or striker of any kind. They deserve Siberia, or something worse, and I’m glad Ivan has his deserts at last—masquerading in petticoats! Yes, he has his deserts. It’s the Scholaskie blood, not mine—not the Rubenstein on the Russian side, nor the Burnells on the English. I’m proud of both. And my daughter is going to join her scapegrace son? Well, let her; her husbanddied there. He played the rôle of a beggar, and was caught; Ivan played the fine lady, and was caught—served ’em right—served ’em right! I would not turn my hand to save him. Have some more tea?”
She spoke to me, but I declined. She suggested that I should drive with her in the park, but I was anxious to get away from the dreadful old woman. As we were leaving, she put her hand on Katy’s shoulder, and said: “You are a bonnie little lassie, as the Scotch say, and, if Ivan were not such a fool, and you were not an American, I think it would do, and I should know where to leave my diamonds. I lie awake nights thinking about it. There is no one but Ivan’s wife and Sophie, and diamonds would be out of place on her, as a music teacher. They are worth having, eh?”
She touched the large pendants in her ears, and held up both her hands, on which seven rings were sparkling. Katy made no reply; she was as anxious to leave the house as I was, and we both breathed more freely when out in the open air in the bustle of Piccadilly.
A few days later we sailed for home, and, as my brother’s house in Washington was rented for the year, Jack and Katy came with me to Ridgefield, where Jack found ample scope for his talent in narrating to the boysof the place his adventures in Russia. Katy was very reticent. Something had come over her spirits, and for hours she would sit silent, with a look on her face as if her thoughts were far away. Once I spoke of Ivan, when there came a look of intense pain on her face, and she said: “Don’t, auntie. I can’t bear it. To think we are so happy here, and so free, and he is a prisoner in Siberia, doing I don’t know what—working in a chain gang, maybe.”
I disabused her mind of that idea, and a few days later there came to me a letter, worn and soiled, as if it had been long on the way and had passed through many hands. It was from Ivan, who was in Southern Siberia, and his mother was with him. He was happier, he wrote, than he had thought it possible for him to be as an exile and prisoner. He had met his fate, and it was not as bad as he had expected. Southern Siberia was not like the dreary north. He was a prisoner, it was true, and under surveillance, but he scarcely felt it, as he had nothing to conceal, and since his mother joined him he was tolerably content. He had heard of Jack’s daring defense and Katy’s earnest appeal for him, and thanked them for it.
Then he spoke of Katy particularly, saying:
“Under my woman’s dress a man’s heart was beating, and I was not insensible to the loveliness of your niece. She attracted me the moment I saw her in the train, and the attraction grew until I think I was as much in love with her as a man ever is with a pure, innocent girl, and my love was intensified from the fact that I had to conceal its nature. It was not Sophie who kissed her, but Ivan, the man who longed to take her in his arms, and who sees her now shrinking from me as if she half divined the truth. Did she, I wonder, and is there in her heart anything which responds to my love? I am a Russian, but I can live in America, and conform to American customs. I am a prisoner, but that does not count. There are many men here who stood higher in the social world than I did. Four years—the term for which I am banished—pass quickly, and, when I am free, I shall come to America, if Katy gives me the least encouragement to do so. She may not care to write to me, as other eyes than mine would see her letter, but tell her to write to mother a friendly letter, making no mention of what I have written. I shall take it as an answer in the affirmative, and nothing in Siberia can trouble me again. By the way, you have some old friends here—Ursula and her nephew, Carl, who, I imagine, is naturally a hard ticket. But he is doing his best as a farmer, and will be quite a respected citizen in time. Mother joins me in love to you all, and says tell you that old Drusais with us, and we are not very unhappy. She knows what I have written, and will look anxiously for Katy’s letter. God bless you all!
Ivan Scholaskie.
Ivan Scholaskie.
Ivan Scholaskie.
Ivan Scholaskie.
“I heard, from Sophie, that you called on my grandmother in London, and that she gave you her opinion of myself quite freely. She is a holy terror!”
This letter Katy read several times, but it was some days before I spoke of it to her, and asked if she intended writing to Madame Scholaskie. For some moments she made no reply, and when, at last, she did, her voice was very low and her face flushed, as if she were ashamed.
“To write to madame will be encouraging Ivan, and I don’t know as I ought to do that, I have such peculiar feelings with regard to him. I loved Sophie as I have never loved any other girl, and yet there was always something queer about it; and, when I knew she was Ivan, I recoiled from her for a while. I have never known Ivan as a man; never seen him in a man’s clothes. If I had, I should know better what to do. I must think.”
She took a week to think, and then one day surprised me with a letter she had written to Madame Scholaskie. It was very short, very commonplace, I thought, and hadin it no mention of Ivan, except at the last, when she wrote:
“Please remember us all to your son. We are glad he finds Siberia endurable.”
I thought it very cold, but it was a letter, and would answer Ivan’s question. For three days it lay upon the library table, directed and stamped, and then one morning I missed it as I came to breakfast after the postman’s call, and Katy said to me: “I have committed myself. The letter has gone, but may never reach its destination.”
Weeks passed, and months, and no answer came to Katy’s letter. Her face wore a look of disappointment, but she never mentioned Russia voluntarily. Jack, on the contrary, was never tired of airing his exploits, and telling of Ivan’s arrest in a woman’s clothes, and what he said to the gendarme in Ivan’s defense; and, when these topics failed, Chance was a fertile theme. Unknown to any of us, he wrote to M. Seguin, and received an answer, written, I think, as much for my benefit as for Jack’s. There was a long account of Chance and his doings, which pleased Jack.
“You will, of course, show this letter to your aunt,”Michel wrote, “and tell her she is not forgotten, and that I have only to mention her name to Chance, telling him to find her, when he springs up, racing all over the house, and, if the door is open, rushing into the street, in his mad search for her; and, when he fails, he comes back and puts his head in my lap, with a sorry, human look in his eyes, as if asking where she is, and why she does not come. I ask that, too, sometimes. I am very lonely now, as mother is in Monte Carlo, with Zaidee, who is growing to be a tall girl, quite unlike the frowzy head to whom your aunt gave her hat. That hat is still in existence, hanging in Zaidee’s room, in place of anicon, I verily believe. The girl says she does not believe inicons. She believes in the religion of the United States, and when I asked her which one, telling her there were many creeds and isms there, she promptly answered: ‘Miss Harding’s religion, of course.’
“She was a little, wizened-up old woman, painted and powdered.”
“She was a little, wizened-up old woman, painted and powdered.”
“She was a little, wizened-up old woman, painted and powdered.”
“I have heard of Ivan—that he is doing well and feeling well. His sister has been to St. Petersburg to dispose of the furniture of the house. Some of it she sold, some was rented with the house, and some she stored, in case her mother should return, which is doubtful, as she is very feeble. Tell your aunt that I bought the square table at which she was playing cards when I came looking for Ivan. I hardly know why I bought it, when our house is full of tables, but I did, and it has a place in what I call my den. Tell her, too, that I am writing on Nicol Patoff’s desk, and that I know no more of him now than when she was here. Your sister was a beautiful little girl. Give her my love, if she cares to take it from an old man like me. And give it to your auntie, too. I always think of her as a girl, she looks so young. Tell her that the olddroskyman, who, the winter she was here, was keeping his bones warm in his mud hut on the plains, has come back, with a new establishment and new horse, and loudly laments that he did not have the pleasure of driving little madame. He thinks he lost a great deal—not so much in kopecks as in honor. He took Zaidee out one day, rather against his will, as he remembered the touzle-haired girl who had your aunt’s hat, and hardly thought it fit that she should ride in his newdrosky, even if she is transformed into a fine-looking girl, with a tongue in her head, he said, and a devil in her eyes! He nearly upset her, he drove so fast, and she was glad to escape with whole bones. Zaidee is what you call acase—a rank nihilist at heart, I believe, but she covers it so well that mother does not suspect. If she did, she would not tolerate the girl a moment. She is death on anarchy of any kind.”
There was more in the same strain, and Jack did not think much of the letter as a whole. It was more for me, he said, than for himself, and I’d better answer it. But I didn’t, and time went on, and Russia seemed to mefar in the past, and as something I should never see again, when, in the summer two years after our winter’s experience, I was there again, the companion, or guest, of a lady who took me with her because I could speak the difficult language. There was no Sophie Scholaskie with us this time—no M. Seguin at the frontier. Instead, there were plenty of officials, rather brusque and rough, as they examined our baggage and passports and scrutinized me curiously, as if they had seen me before, and wondered why I was there so often. I wondered, too, before the long, dreary journey came to an end, and St. Petersburg, with its gilded dome and spires and palaces, loomed into sight. Then I began to feel at home, for I knew nearly every foot of the great city, and I recognized some of the officials whom I had seen before. The hotel did not suit my friend, who wished for a more quiet place, and, after a few inquiries, we found it by a strange chance in the very house where the Scholaskies had lived, and where M. Seguin had come searching for Ivan.