“You are anxious, of course, to meet that friend of your brother?” I asked.
Miss Haldin put the letter into her pocket. Her eyes looked beyond my shoulder at the door of her mother’s room.
“Not here,” she murmured. “Not for the first time, at least.”
After a moment of silence I said goodbye, but Miss Haldin followed me into the anteroom, closing the door behind us carefully.
“I suppose you guess where I mean to go tomorrow?”
“You have made up your mind to call on Madame de S⸺.”
“Yes. I am going to the Château Borel. I must.”
“What do you expect to hear there?” I asked, in a low voice.
I wondered if she were not deluding herself with some impossible hope. It was not that, however.
“Only think—such a friend. The only man mentioned in his letters. He would have something to give me, if nothing more than a few poor words. It may be something said and thought in those last days. Would you want me to turn my back on what is left of my poor brother—a friend?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “I quite understand your pious curiosity.”
“—Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences,” she murmured to herself. “There are! There are! Well, let me question one of them about the loved dead.”
“How do you know, though, that you will meet him there? Is he staying in the Château as a guest—do you suppose?”
“I can’t really tell,” she confessed. “He brought a written introduction from Father Zosim—who, it seems, is a friend of Madame de S⸺ too. She can’t be such a worthless woman after all.”
“There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Father Zosim himself,” I observed.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Calumny is a weapon of our government too. It’s well known. Oh yes! It is a fact that Father Zosim had the protection of the Governor-General of a certain province. We talked on the subject with my brother two years ago, I remember. But his work was good. And now he is proscribed. What better proof can one require. But no matter what that priest was or is. All that cannot affect my brother’s friend. If I don’t meet him there I shall ask these people for his address. And, of course, mother must see him too, later on. There is no guessing what he may have to tell us. It would be a mercy if mamma could be soothed. You know what she imagines. Some explanation perhaps may be found, or—or even made up, perhaps. It would be no sin.”
“Certainly,” I said, “it would be no sin. It may be a mistake, though.”
“I want her only to recover some of her old spirit. While she is like this I cannot think of anything calmly.”
“Do you mean to invent some sort of pious fraud for your mother’s sake?” I asked.
“Why fraud? Such a friend is sure to know something of my brother in these last days. He could tell us. … There is something in the facts which will not let me rest. I am certain he meant to join us abroad—that he had some plans—some great patriotic action in view; not only for himself, but for both of us. I trusted in that. I looked forward to the time! Oh! with such hope and impatience. I could have helped. And now suddenly this appearance of recklessness—as if he had not cared. …”
She remained silent for a time, then obstinately she concluded—
“I want to know. …”
Thinking it over, later on, while I walked slowly away from the Boulevard des Philosophes, I asked myself critically, what precisely was it that she wanted to know? What I had heard of her history was enough to give me a clue. In the educational establishment for girls where Miss Haldin finished her studies she was looked upon rather unfavourably. She was suspected of holding independent views on matters settled by official teaching. Afterwards, when the two ladies returned to their country place, both mother and daughter, by speaking their minds openly on public events, had earned for themselves a reputation of liberalism. The three-horse trap of the district police-captain began to be seen frequently in their village. “I must keep an eye on the peasants”—so he explained his visits up at the house. “Two lonely ladies must be looked after a little.” He would inspect the walls as though he wanted to pierce them with his eyes, peer at the photographs, turn over the books in the drawing-room negligently, and after the usual refreshments, would depart. But the old priest of the village came one evening in the greatest distress and agitation, to confess that he—the priest—had been ordered to watch and ascertain in other ways too (such as using his spiritual power with the servants) all that was going on in the house, and especially in respect of the visitors these ladies received, who they were, the length of their stay, whether any of them were strangers to that part of the country, and so on. The poor, simple old man was in an agony of humiliation and terror. “I came to warn you. Be cautious in your conduct, for the love of God. I am burning with shame, but there is no getting out from under the net. I shall have to tell them what I see, because if I did not there is my deacon. He would make the worst of things to curry favour. And then my son-in-law, the husband of my Parasha, who is a writer in the Government Domain office; they would soon kick him out—and maybe send him away somewhere.” The old man lamented the necessities of the times—“when people do not agree somehow” and wiped his eyes. He did not wish to spend the evening of his days with a shaven head in the penitent’s cell of some monastery—“and subjected to all the severities
