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Updated: June 25, 2025
"If you were Czar himself, I should not hesitate to denounce you as the tyrant and mutilator of a poor defenseless woman." "And to whom, pray, will you tell this romantic story of yours?" he laughed hoarsely. "To your prison walls below the lake at Kajana? Yes, M'sieur Gregg, you will go there, and once within the fortress you shall never again see the light of day.
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!"
Now he was on his way home, and had come up through Kuopio, and had got on past Kajana already, but now it had just begun to snow, and as the storm grew worse, he pressed on to reach the cabin of a friend who lived not far ahead; and he intended to stay there until the storm should subside and the weather be fit for travelling once more.
"We do not use the knout in the Russian prisons nowadays," he said briefly. "His Majesty has decreed its abolition." "But you adopt torture in Kajana and Schusselburg instead." "My time is too limited to discuss our penal system, m'sieur," he exclaimed impatiently, while I could well see that he was anxious to escape before I made any further charges against him.
I never believed that so much iniquity existed in the world, or that men could fight a defenseless woman with such double-dealing and cruel ingenuity. Ah! the tortures I endured in Kajana are beyond human conception. Yet surely Oberg and Woodroffe will obtain their well-merited deserts if not in this world, then in the world to come. Are we not taught by Holy Writ to forgive our enemies?
But, you infernal cur, you did not know that those who attempt to thwart Xavier Oberg either die by accident or go for life to Kajana or the mines! And he spurned the body with his foot and laughed to himself as he gloated over his dastardly crime. "I watched his rage, unable to utter a single word.
He even went so far as to obtain a ministerial order for my banishment to Saghalien and brought it to me to Kajana, declaring that if in one month I did not consent he should allow me to be sent to exile. While I was in Kajana he knew that his secret was safe, therefore by every means in his power he urged me to consent to the odious union.
"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."
You read in the newspapers, without a doubt, how the Baron Xavier Oberg, the persecutor of Finland, the enemy of education, the relentless foe of the defenseless, the man who ordered women to be knouted to death in Kajana, the heartless official whom the Finns called "The Strangler," was blown to pieces by a bomb thrown beneath his carriage as he drove to the railway station at Helsingfors on his way to have audience with the Emperor.
Next second, however, I held my breath, and I think I must have turned pale. My pocket was empty! My wallet had been stolen! Entirely and helplessly I had fallen into the hands of the tyrant of the Czar. His own personal interest would be to consign me to a living tomb in that grim fortress of Kajana, the horrors of which were unspeakable.
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