Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/203

Rh I replied that I had come on horseback over the mountains from Strétinsk.

"But how were you ever allowed to come here?"

"I was not allowed," I replied. "I came here without anybody's knowledge. I have been in Kará almost a week, and this is the first opportunity I have had to get out-of-doors unwatched."

I then told her that I had come to Siberia to investigate the life of the political convicts, and gave her a brief account of my previous Siberian experience. She looked at me like one half dazed by the shock of some great and sudden surprise. Finally she said, speaking for the first time in English: "Excuse me for staring at you so, and pardon me if I have not seemed to welcome you cordially; but I can hardly believe that I am awake. I am so excited and astonished that I don't know what I am doing or saying. You are the first foreigner that I have seen since my exile, and your sudden appearance here, and in my house, is such an extraordinary event in my life that it has completely overwhelmed me. I feel as Livingstone must have felt when Stanley found him in Central Africa. How did the remarkable idea of coming to Siberia and investigating the life of the political convicts ever enter your head?"

I was answering her question in English, when I heard a feeble and broken voice, which seemed to come from behind the oven, inquiring, in Russian, "Who is there, Nathalie? With whom are you talking?"

"It is an American traveler, mother, who has found us even here at the mines."

The feeble voice was that of Miss Armfeldt's mother, who had been asleep on a cot bed behind a low partition that partly screened the oven, and who had been awakened by our conversation. In a moment she came out to greet me — a worn, broken woman, sixty or sixty-five years of age, with soft gray hair, and a face refined, gentle, intelligent, but deeply lined by care and grief. Her eyes were swollen,