She sat there thinking, forgetful of me, and I opened my miserable eyes and stared hopelessly at the clear, hard profile, so beautiful, so evil, so unutterably merciless. She had been sixteen when I was born, twenty years ago. She was now only thirty-six, and yet her face was almost old.
She turned upon me again with her ghastly smile. “You don't look pleased to see your mother, my dear. Perhaps I was a trifle rough with you at our first interview, but you've been spared a great many worse thrashings by having been separated from me at such an early age. I have a devilish temper, as you know. I'd probably have flogged you to death before you were out of your pinafores. I'd like to hear your history--oh, I've kept track of its outlines, I always thought you might some day be useful--but I don't dare take that handkerchief off of your mouth. That handkerchief belonged to my second husband, the Comte de Trème.... Yes, I went up in the world after I'd put Sergius into prison. I've been a great lady. It's a tremendous advantage to any career, to learn the grand air and to get a smattering of education. Poor Trème! He was n't quite the weakling that most of them have been. I have a certain respect for him actually. He was a good man, and no milk and water in his veins, either. If any one could have exorcised the devil in me, it was he. He did his best, but I was too much for him... and in the end, poor fool, he put a bullet into his brain because--oh, these idiot aristocrats!--of the _disgrace_. It was after Trème, a long while after Trème, when I was queening it in St. Petersburg,--because, you see, I did n't fall into disgrace at all; I let Trème shoulder it; he was dead, and it could n't hurt him, and I was glad to stab that high-nosed family of his,--about three years after his death, I suppose, when the ex-army captain came along. Brane, you know, Theodore Brane----He was a handsome chap, long and lean and blue-eyed. I lost my head over him. I was still pretty young, twenty or thereabouts. He would n't marry me, d---- him! And I was a fool. That's where I lost my footing. Well, this is going to put me back again and revenge me on that cold-blooded coward. We lived together, and we lived like princes--on Trème's fortune. You should have seen his family! It was when the Trème estate was bled dry that I happened to remember those jewels. Yes. I'd seen them in the cathedral at Moscow in a secret crypt, down under the earth. I was a child at the time, a little red-haired imp of nine or ten, and I got round a silly old sheep of a priest, and begged him so hard to let me go down through the trapdoor with him that he consented. He thought it could do no harm, I suppose,--a child of that age! I saw the Beloved Virgin of the Jewels! She stood there blazing, a candlestick made of solid gold burning on her right hand and her left--an unforgettable sight--the robe and the circlet that are here beside us now in Brane's double wall in North Carolina... God! it's strange--this life!