Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/150



ONCE knew a woman, one of my patients, now dead, to whom the most extraordinary thing in the world happened, and the most mysterious and touching.

She was a Russian, Countess Marie Baranow, a very great lady, of exquisite beauty. You know how beautiful the Russians are, or, at least, how beautiful they seem to us—with their delicate noses, their sensitive mouths; their eyes so close together, of an indefinable colour, a blue grey; and their cold, rather hard, charm. They have something wicked and seductive, haughty and melting, tender and severe, utterly charming to a Frenchman. At bottom, perhaps, it is only the difference of race and blood that makes us see so much in them.

Her doctor had, during many years, known that she was threatened by a disease of the chest, and endeavoured to persuade her to come to France for the winter, but she obstinately refused to quit St. Petersburg. At last, in the autumn of last year, the doctor compelled her to leave for Mentone.

She was alone in her compartment of the train, her servants occupying another. She leant against the window a little sadly, watching the country and the villages as she whirled past, feeling very isolated, very lonely in life.

At each station her footman, Ivan, came to see if his mistress had everything she desired. He was an old servant, blindly devoted, ready to obey any order she might give him.

Night fell, the train rolled on at full speed. She could not sleep, she was totally unnerved. Suddenly the idea occurred to her of counting the money given to her at the last moment in French gold. She opened her little bag and emptied on to her lap the glistening stream of metal.

But, of a sudden, a breath of cold air caught her cheek. She lifted her head in surprise. The door opened. The Countess Marie, in dismay, threw a shawl over the money spread out in her lap, and waited. A moment afterwards a man appeared, bare-headed, wounded in one hand, panting, and in evening dress.

He reclosed the door, sat down and looked at his neighbour with a glittering eye, then wrapped his wrist in a handkerchief.