The Czar's Spy, William le Queux [reading like a writer txt] 📗

No word was uttered, or if so, it was whispered so low that it did not reach me. For nearly five minutes I waited in impatience outside that closed door, until again the handle turned and my conductress beckoned me in silence within.

I stepped into a small, square chamber, the floor of which was carpeted, and where, suspended high above, was a lamp that shed but a faint light over the barely-furnished place. It seemed to me to be a kind of sitting-room, with a plain deal table and a couple of chairs, but there was no stove, and the place looked chill and comfortless. Beyond was another smaller room into which the old nun disappeared for a moment; then she came forth leading a strange wan little figure in a gray gown, a figure whose face was the most perfect and most lovely I had ever seen. Her wealth of chestnut hair fell disheveled about her shoulders, and as her hands were clasped before her she looked straight at me in surprise as she was led towards me.

She walked but feebly, and her countenance was deathly pale. Her dress, as she came beneath the lamp, was, I saw, coarse, yet clean, and her beautiful, regular features, which in her photograph had held me in such fascination, were even more sweet and more matchless than I had believed them to be. I stood before her dumbfounded in admiration.

In silence she bowed gracefully, and then looked at me with astonishment, apparently wondering what I, a perfect stranger, required of her.

"Miss Elma Heath, I presume?" I exclaimed at last. "May I introduce myself to you? My name is Gordon Gregg, English by birth, cosmopolitan by instinct. I have come here to ask you a question—a question that concerns yourself. Lydia Moreton has sent me to you."

I noticed that her great brown eyes watched my lips and not my face.

Her own lips moved, but she looked at me with an inexpressible sadness. No sound escaped her.

I stood rigid before her as one turned to stone, for in that instant, in a flash indeed, I realized the awful truth.

She was both deaf and dumb!

She raised her clasped hands to me in silence, yet with tears welling in her splendid eyes.

I saw that upon her wrists were a pair of bright steel gyves.

"What is this place?" I demanded of the woman in the religious habit, when I recovered from the shock of the poor girl's terrible affliction. "Where am I?"

"This is the Castle of Kajana—the criminal lunatic asylum of Finland," was her answer. "The prisoner, as you see, has lost both speech and hearing."

"Deaf and dumb!" I cried, looking at the beautiful original of that destroyed photograph on board the Lola. "But she has surely not always been so!" I exclaimed.

"No. I think not always," replied the sister quietly. "But you said you intended to question her, and did I not tell you that to learn the truth was impossible?"

"But she can write responses to my questions?" I argued.

"Alas! no," was the old woman's whispered reply. "Her mind is affected. She is, unfortunately, a hopeless lunatic."

I looked straight into those sad, wide-open, yet unflinching brown eyes utterly confounded.

Those white wrists held in steel, that pale face and blanched lips, the inertness of her movements, all told their own tragic tale. And yet that letter I had read, dictated in secret most probably because her hands were not free, was certainly not the outpourings of a madwoman. She had spoken of death, it was true, yet was it not to be supposed that she was slowly being driven to suicide? She had kept her secret, and she wished the man Hornby—the man who was to marry Muriel Leithcourt—to know.

The room in which we stood was evidently an apartment set apart for her use, for beyond was the tiny bedchamber; yet the small, high-up window was closely barred, and the cold bareness of the prison was sufficient indeed to cause anyone confined there to prefer death to captivity.

Again I spoke to her slowly and kindly, but there was no response. That she was absolutely dumb was only too apparent. Yet surely she had not always been so! I had gone in search of her because the beauty of her portrait had magnetized me, and I had now found her to be even more lovely than her picture, yet, alas! suffering from an affliction that rendered her life a tragedy. The realization of the terrible truth staggered me. Such a perfect face as hers I had never before set eyes upon, so beautiful, so clear-cut, so refined, so eminently the countenance of one well-born, and yet so ineffably sad, so full of blank unutterable despair.

She placed her clasped hands to her mouth and made signs by shaking her head that she could neither understand nor respond. I therefore took my wallet from my pocket and wrote upon a piece of paper in a large hand the words: "I come from Lydia Moreton. My name is Gordon Gregg."

When her eager gaze fell upon the words she became instantly filled with excitement, and nodded quickly. Then holding her steel-clasped wrists towards me she looked wistfully at me, as though imploring me to release her from the awful bondage in that silent tomb.

Though the woman who had led me there endeavored to prevent it, I handed her the pencil, and placed the paper on the table for her to write.

The nun tried to snatch it up, but I held her arm gently and forcibly, saying in French:

"No. I wish to see if she is really insane. You will at least allow me this satisfaction."

And while we were in altercation, Elma, with the pencil in her fingers, tried to write, but by reason of her hands being bound so closely was unable. At length, however, after several attempts, she succeeded in printing in uneven capitals the response:

"I know you. You were on the yacht. I thought they killed you."

The thin-faced old woman saw her response—a reply that was surely rational enough—and her brows contracted with displeasure.

"Why are you here?" I wrote, not allowing the sister to get sight of my question.

In response, she wrote painfully and laboriously:

"I am condemned for a crime I did not commit. Take me from here, or I shall kill myself."

"Ah!" exclaimed the old woman. "You see, poor girl, she believes herself innocent! They all do."

"But why is she here?" I demanded fiercely.

"I do not know, m'sieur. It is not my duty to inquire the history of their crimes. When they are ill I nurse them; that is all."

"And who is the commandant of this fortress?"

"Colonel Smirnoff. If he knew that I had admitted you, you would never leave this place alive. This is the Schusselburg of Finland—the place of imprisonment for those who have conspired against the State."

"The prison of political conspirators, eh?"

"Alas, m'sieur, yes! The place in which some of the poor creatures are tortured in order to obtain confessions and information with as much cruelty as in the black days of the Inquisition. These walls are thick, and their cries are not heard from the oubliettes below the lake."

I had long ago heard of the horrors of Schusselburg. Indeed who has not heard of them who has traveled in Russia? The very mention of the modern Bastille on Lake Ladoga, where no prisoner has ever been known to come forth alive, is sufficient to cause any Russian to turn pale. And I was in the Schusselburg of Finland!

I turned over the sheet of paper and wrote the question—

"Did Baron Oberg send you here?"

In response, she printed the words—

"I believe so. I was arrested in Helsingfors. Tell Lydia where I am."

"Do you know Muriel Leithcourt?" I inquired by the same means, whereupon she replied that they were at school together.

"Did you see me on board the Lola?" I wrote.

"Yes. But I could not warn you, although I had overheard their intentions. They took me ashore when you had gone, to Siena. After three days I found myself deaf and dumb—I was made so."

Her allegation startled me. She had been purposely afflicted!

"Who did it?"

"A doctor, I suppose. They put me under chloroform."

"Who?"

"People who said they were my friends."

I turned to the woman in the religious habit, and cried—

"Do you see what she has written? She has been maimed by some friends who intended that the secret she holds should be kept. They feared to kill her, so they bribed a doctor to deliberately operate upon her so that she could neither speak nor hear. And now they are driving her to suicide!"

"M'sieur, I am astounded!" declared the nun. "I have always believed that she was not in her right mind, yet assuredly she seems to be as sane as I am, only willfully mutilated by some pretended friend who determined that no further word should pass her lips."

"A shameful mutilation has been committed upon this poor defenseless girl!" I cried in anger. "And I will make it my duty to discover and punish the perpetrators of it."

"Ah, m'sieur. Do not act rashly, I pray of you," the woman said seriously, placing her hand upon my arm. "Recollect you are in Finland—where the Baron Oberg is all-powerful."

"I do not fear the Baron Oberg," I exclaimed. "If necessary, I will appeal to the Czar himself. Mademoiselle is kept here for the reason that she is in possession of some secret. She must be released—I will take the responsibility."

"But you must not try to release her from here. It would mean death to you both. The Castle of Kajana tells no secrets of those who die within its walls, or of those cast headlong into its waters and forgotten."

Again I turned to Elma, who stood in anxious wonder of the subject of our conversation, and had suddenly taken the old nun's hand and kissed it affectionately, perhaps in order to show me that she trusted her.

Then upon the paper I wrote—

"Is the Baron Oberg your uncle?"

She shook her head in the negative, showing that the dreaded Governor-General of Finland had only acted a part towards her in which she had been compelled to concur.

"Who is Philip Hornby?" I inquired, writing rapidly.

"My friend—at least, I believe so."

Friend! And I had all along believed him to be an adventurer and an enemy!

"Why did he go to Leghorn?" I asked.

"For a secret purpose. There was a plot to kill you, only I managed to thwart them," were the words she printed with much labor.

"Then I owe my life to you," I wrote. "And in return I will do my utmost to rescue you from here, if you do not fear to place yourself in my hands."

And to this she replied—

"I shall be thankful, for I cannot bear this awful place longer. I believe they must torture the women here. They will torture me some day. Do your best to get me out of here and I will tell you everything. But," she wrote, "I fear you can never secure my release. I am confined here on a life sentence."

"But you are English, and if you have had no trial I can complain to our Ambassador."

"No, I am a Russian subject. I was born in Russia, and went to England when I was a girl."

That altered the case entirely. As a subject of the Czar in her own country she was amenable to that disgraceful blot upon civilization that allows a person to be consigned to prison at the will of a high official, without trial or without being afforded any opportunity of appeal. I therefore at once saw a difficulty.

Yet she promised to tell me the truth if I could but secure her release!

A flood of recollections of the amazing mystery swept through my mind. A thousand questions arose within me, all of which I desired to ask her, but there, in that noisome prison-house, it was impossible. As I stood there a woman's shrill scream of excruciating pain reached me, notwithstanding those