The Czar's Spy: The Mystery of a Silent Love

"Well--because no strangers are permitted here, you know. If your presence here was discovered you would not leave this place alive--so I warn you." "I am prepared to risk that," I said, smiling; at the same time my hand instinctively sought my hip-pocket to ascertain that my weapon was safe. "I wish to see Miss Elma Heath." The old nun nodded, fumbling with her lantern. I glanced at my watch and found that it was already two o'clock in the morning. "Remember that if you are discovered here you exonerate me of all blame?" she said, raising her head and peering into my face with her keen gray eyes. "By admitting you I am betraying my trust, and that I should not have done were it not compulsory." "Compulsory! How?" "The order of the Chief of Police. Even here, we cannot afford to offend him." So the fellow Boranski had really kept faith with me, and at his order the closed door of the convent had been opened. "Of course not," I answered. "Russian officialdom is all-powerful in Finland nowadays. But where is the lady?" "You are still prepared to risk your liberty and life?" she asked in a hoarse voice, full of grim meaning. "I am," I said. "Lead me to her." "And when you see her you will make no effort to speak with her? Promise me that." "Ah, Sister!" I cried. "You are asking too great a sacrifice of me. I come here from England, nay, from Italy in search of her, to question her regarding a strange mystery and to learn the truth. Surely I may be permitted to speak with her?" "You wish to learn the truth, sir!" remarked the woman. "I thought you were her lover--that you merely wished to see her once again." "No, I am not her lover," I answered. "Indeed, we have never yet met. But I am in search of the truth from her own lips." "That you will never learn," she said, in a hard, changed voice. "Because there is a conspiracy to preserve the secret!" I cried. "But I intend to solve the mystery, and for that reason I have traveled here from England." The woman with the lantern smiled sadly, as though amused by my impetuosity. "You are on Russian soil now, m'sieur, not English," she remarked in her broken English. "If your object were known, you would never be spared to return to your own land. Ah!" she sighed, "you do not know the mysteries and terrors of Finland. I am a French subject, born in Tours, and brought to Helsingfors when I was fifteen. I have been in Finland forty-five years. Once we were happy here, but since the Czar appointed Baron Oberg to be Governor-General----" and she shrugged her shoulders without finishing her sentence. "Baron Oberg--Governor-General of Finland!" I gasped. "Certainly. Did you not know?" she said, dropping into French. "It is four years now that he has held supreme power to crush and Russify these poor Finns. Ah, m'sieur! this country, once so prosperous, is a blot upon the face of Europe. His methods are the worst and most unscrupulous of any employed by Russia. Before he came here he was the best hated man in Petersburg, and that, they say, is why the Emperor sent him to us." "And he is uncle of this young lady, Elma Heath?" "Uncle? Ah! I don't know that, m'sieur. I have never been told so. His niece--poor young lady!--can that be? Surely not!" "Why not?" I asked. But the woman gave me no reason; she only exhibited her palms and sighed. She seemed to have compassion upon the girl I sought; her heart was really softer than I had believed it to be. "Where does this Baron live?" I asked, surprised that he should occupy so high a place in Russian officialdom--the representative of the Czar, with powers as great as the Emperor himself. "At the Government Palace, in Helsingfors." "And Elma Heath is here--in this grim fortress! Why?" "Ah, m'sieur, how can I tell? By reason of family secrets, perhaps. They account for so much, you know." "That is exactly my opinion," I said. "She has been brought here against her will." "Most probably. This is not a cheerful place, as you see. We have five months of ice and snow, and for four months are practically cut off from civilization and see no new face." "Terrible!" I gasped, glancing round at those dark stone walls that seemed to breathe an air of tragedy and mystery. The old castle had, I supposed, been turned into a convent, as many have been in Germany and Austria. Back in feudal times it no doubt had been a grand old place. "And have you been here long?" I asked. "Seven years only. But I am leaving. Even I, used as I am to a solitary life, can stand it no longer. I feel that its cold silence and dreariness will drive me mad. In winter the place is like an ice-well." The fact that the Baron was ruler of Finland amazed me, for I had half-expected him to be some clever adventurer. Yet as the events of the past flashed through my brain, I recollected that in Rannoch Wood had been found the miniature of the Russian Order of Saint Anne, a distinction which, in all probability, had been conferred upon him. If so, the coincidence, to say the least, was a remarkable one. I questioned my companion further regarding the Baron. "Ah, m'sieur," she declared, "they call him 'The Strangler of the Finns,' It was he who ordered the peasants of Kasko to be flogged until four of them died--and the Czar gave him the Star of White Eagle for it--he who suppressed half the newspapers and put eighteen editors in prison for publishing a report of a meeting of the Swedes in Helsingfors; he who encourages corruption and bribery among the officials for the furtherance of Russian interests; he who has ordered Russian to be the official language, who has restricted public education, who has overtaxed and ground down the people until now the mine is laid, and Finland is ready for open revolt. The prisons are filled with the innocent; women are flogged; the poor are starving, and 'The Strangler,' as they call him, reports to the Czar that Finland is submissive and is Russianized!" I had heard something of this abominable state of affairs from time to time from the English press, but had never taken notice of the name of the oppressor. So the uncle of Elma Heath was "The Strangler of Finland," the man who, in four years, had reduced a prosperous country to a state of ruin and revolt! "Cannot I see her?" I asked, feeling that we had remained too long there. If my presence in that place was perilous the sooner I escaped from it the better. "Yes, come," she said. "But silence! Walk softly," and holding up the old horn lantern to give me light, she led me out into the low stone corridor again, conducting me through a number of intricate passages, all bare and gloomy, the stones worn hollow by the feet of ages. On we crept noiselessly past a number of low arched doors studded with big nails in the style of generations ago, then turning suddenly at right angles, I saw that we were in a kind of _cul de sac,_ before the door of which at the end she stopped and placed her finger upon her lips. Then, motioning me to remain there, she entered, closing the door after her, and leaving me in the pitch darkness. I strained my ears, but could hear no sound save that of someone moving within. 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.