Hearts in exile

CHAPTER XII

HOW HOPE CAME SLOWLY BACK

It took Hope Palma many days to accommodate herself to the strange circumstances in which she found herself, but it needed very little simulation on her part to play the role of invalid.

Five thousand miles of travel hold certainties of discomfort under the best of conditions. Five thousand miles with convict convoys——! One shudders at the bare thought of it, when the mere sight of such a travelling party chills the heart and haunts the imagination for days. It is liberty and humanity at its lowest; Might trampling Right in the mud; the apotheosis of sheer brute force and, as often as not, of sheer brutality. You cannot get away from facts, and these things are.

To any woman such a journey must needs have been packed with horrors. To one like Hope Palma, trained from her earliest days to the most vital sympathy with her burdened fellows, vicarious sufferer in all their woes, and suffering the more the more she knew and understood,—to Hope Palma those nightmare months of travel were like the brush of a vicious censor blotting out the brightness of life with a raw black smudge. But the brush of the censor obliterates the desirable, which still at times peeps tantalisingly through; and the things that would show through this venomous smudge were horrors which neither time nor will could efface.

She had forced herself to the needs of that terrible journey by sheer force of will, and had the need continued she too would have endured. But, the necessity over, and the tight-strung nerves loosed, they lapsed in the recoil to a flaccidity quite abnormal.

For many days she lay spent and spilled, and apparently careless of living, her one primal desire for quietness and solitude.

Madame Roskova's kind heart craved much larger ministry, both bodily and mental, than was permitted it. She would have coaxed back and built up her patient's strength with cunning dishes, and reasoned her away from the past with assurances of present safety and comfort, and promises of future happiness. But Hope begged so plaintively to be allowed just to lie at rest that Madame could but comply.

"Just to lie quiet, dear Madame Roskova, that is all I require. I have been sorely bruised, and healing is in quiet," said Hope.

"Da!" said Madame. "I am glad I stayed. Perhaps, after all, you know best, child. When one is all unstrung like that one woman is worth ten men, even if one of them is one's husband and a doctor. I know!"

Pavlof, too, began to fear that her health had suffered permanent injury through the trials and hardships of the road, but he knew also that the hardest blow of all had been the one that had fallen upon her just when she believed she had reached the goal of all her strenuous endeavour. He knew that a sick heart makes a sick body, and at risk of forfeiting the esteem of Madame Roskova, and greatly to the exercising of her mind, he judged it truest kindness to Hope to obtrude himself upon her as little as possible.

And Madame Roskova's wonder grew with the hours. That two people, presumably attached to one another, could come together, after two years of arduous separation and biting anxiety, and treat one another as coolly as did these two, struck her as something quite abnormal and worthy of serious attention. It was plain to a much meaner intelligence than hers that here was a serious breach of some kind, and her well-meant efforts at the healing of it caused them no little inconvenience.

Man-like, and strong in his own inflexible uprightness of intention, Pavlof saw no good grounds for Hope's extreme distaste to the only arrangement possible under the circumstances.

After all—except for the delicacy of the previous conditions that had obtained between them—it was the arrangement which not only had the sanction of the Free Command, but was definitely required by it for the safety of the female members.

It was hardly to be expected, perhaps, that he should enter into Hope Palma's feelings in al! their depth and intensity. These were hers by nature and by training and by force of singular circumstance.

Every hair of her head was precious to him. To save her from injury or insult he would suffer any extremity. And she knew it, and knew too that his love for her, veil it as he might, was as strong as ever it had been, and here they were placed in surely as curious and trying a relationship as ever man and woman endured. Perhaps she feared for him. Perhaps she feared for herself. Perhaps she knew not what she feared, and yet felt the very sense of fear a torment and a treason.

And in the shadow of that fear a coolness lay between them which sorely troubled the soul of Anna Roskova.

Madame Roskova, however, was much too discreet to talk about the matter outside. Here was something beyond her understanding, and at times she was hard put to it to keep herself in hand.

She would have given much to feel herself at liberty to discuss the whole affair with Marya Verskaïa. But Marya was young and a chatterbox, and not to be trusted in so delicate a matter. Besides, she had never been married, and so could not be expected to understand all the fine shades of abnormality which Madame's own keen eyes and ears detected in the relations of Hope and Pavlof.

She had seen many strange things in her life, and some very terrible ones, had Anna Roskova, but none had ever struck her as more curious than the behaviour of this strange pair. She puzzled over it, shook her head over it, communed much with herself over it; did everything, in fact, which a much-tried and bewildered woman possibly could do, except talk about it to other people.

She was not by nature a silent woman. In fact, to hear her cheerful tongue going at times you might almost have thought she enjoyed hearing it herself, and possibly you would not have been very far wrong. But she had learned wisdom and the golden virtue in a bitter school and over more important, though never more puzzling, matters. And concerning any subject she considered better not talked about she could be as silent as the grave, or as loquacious as a prize parrot, and, in the latter case, with just as little import of information.

But if she denied herself outside she made up for it inside. She spoke seriously to Paul and feelingly to Hope. She reasoned, she argued, she lectured, but she could not turn them from their curious ways. And surely no sorer trial can any woman be called upon to endure than an insoluble puzzle right under her nose.

Not that she could bring herself to let them see that she was beaten. That would have been worse even than the actual fact. They saw, of course, that she was much exercised in her mind about them, and at times they were hard set to evade her pointed sallies.

"Serge Petrovitch!" she broke out one day in her brusque, motherly way, "you are not doing your duty by your wife."

"How then, Anna Vassilievna?" he answered quietly. "All that she needs at present is rest and she is getting it. You see——"

"Oh yes, I see what I see. But all the same—" and a cryptic nod comprehended all she declined to put into words, and startled Pavlof's fears lest her womanly insight should have pierced their shaky armour. "Has she ceased to care for you, then?" and his fears vanished.

"I have no reason to suppose her feelings have changed in any way, Anna Vassilievna."

"No! Then how in Heaven's name did she ever come to marry you? You have not changed to her. I see that well enough. But she—why, it seems to me that she is absolutely afraid of you at times. Have you been hard to her——?"

"Never in my life."

"Well, well! It passes belief. Maybe in your long parting she has found—but nay, she is an angel for goodness. That I know, but as cold as ice. And then, if so, why would she follow you here? Well, well! It just means that you will have to begin all over again, Serge Petrovitch. You will have to woo her as you did before."

"She will be all right again soon, Anna Vassilievna. It is just that she is worn out with the road."

"Ah da! The road has worn her body, no doubt, but not her soul. There is fire and to spare behind that cold face unless I am blind. You must break down the barriers if you want to come into your own again, Serge Petrovitch."

"We must give her time, Anna Vassilievna."

"Ah da! Time! Life is not long enough to waste in waiting. Let yourself go, Serge Petrovitch. Do as your heart bids you. Your eyes are bright for her, and your heart is soft to her, when you are in here. But when you get in there it is like two icebergs meeting."

"She will come to herself if we give her time," was all she got for her pains, and then she would try her hand on her patient in the inner room with equal fortune.

The days passed very slowly in that narrow little room, but after all those months of arduous travel Hope was content simply to lie still, and would have been still more content if she could have lain without thinking. For much thought concerning the pass she was in tended only to confusion and tribulation of mind.

Madame Roskova was kindness itself, but to Hope's quivering anxieties there was danger to their present tranquillity in the very plenitude of her thoughtfulness.

"Wouldn't you like to tell me all about it, my dear?" Madame would ask, in so sympathetic a voice that Hope could hardly resist it. For it was the thing of all others that would have relieved her own mind and the situation in every way. But Paul had decided otherwise, and he doubtless understood things better than she. And Madame's very next words confirmed the wisdom of his decision.

"There is trouble of some kind between you, I can see, and there is nothing eases one's mind like a good talk."

And therein lay the danger. For what was said in the inner room might well get outside under similar compulsion, and all their lives would be in peril.

So—"The only trouble is that I am a weaker thing than I thought, dear Madame Roskova," Hope made shift to answer.

"Da!" said Madame. "Weaker! And you come five thousand miles with the convoys, and been giving yourself away all the time, I'll be bound."

"It tells upon one afterwards," said Hope wearily. "When one is in it one just goes on and on. But afterwards it all comes back upon one in a heap. It seemed to me at first that if I lay still all the rest of my days it would not be too long to rest, but your kindness and the quiet are giving me new life. I am very, very grateful."

"Well, well!" said Madame, permitting no evidence of repulse. "You know your own business best, my dear. But don't starve him to death. Good men are none too plentiful, and Serge Petrovitch is much above the average. He thinks of every one else before himself, and many of us wouldn't be here but for him. And when one sees him sore and troubled one cannot but feel for him. He loves you as much as ever, my dear. I can see it in his eyes," and if the little room had not been so dim she would have seen the sudden tumult of colour that flickered tremulously over the sweet, pale face.

Again and again, with the persistency of a much-puzzled woman, she returned to the charge, and did her best to arrive at a proper comprehension of this strange married pair; and that not simply for the satisfaction of her womanly curiosity, but that she might do what she could to make matters straight between them.

And many a sigh she heaved as she wished herself in Hope's place and her own dear man in Serge Petrovitch's. How different things would have been between them! Ay, though the road had worn her to rags. For every scrap of her would have clung to his heart and drawn fresh life from it. Well, well! folks were built on very different lines and some of the lines were uncommonly queer ones.

But worn out bodies revive more quickly than sick souls. Time came when the little inner room could no longer offer sanctuary to Hope's troubled modesty without provoking suggestion of perversity, and visibly returning strength left her no excuse for not joining the others. She had spun out the fine thread of her bodily weakness till it was threadbare, and persistence must obviously before long translate "I can't" into "I won't."

She was looking forward with dread to the levelling of her defences, and the openness to attack to which the common routine of daily life in so circumscribed a sphere must expose her, when there came to her temporary relief one of those ghastly prison happenings which are possible only under the terrible irresponsibility of autocratic and bureaucratic power.

The tension within the little hut was slackened by the counter-irritant without, but at a cost in bodily suffering to those chiefly concerned which brought home to Hope, in tragic fashion, the rigours of the régime under which the community at Kara lived.

CHAPTER XIII

HOW HOPE GOT GLIMPSE OF HELL

The Free Command at Kara was a community hybrid of the ticket-of-leave and exile systems. Prisoners who had served their terms in the prison or the mines without discredit were permitted to live outside, where and how they could, on condition that they did not leave the neighbourhood.

Government made them a trifling allowance of a few pence a day, they were permitted to receive remittances from home if there was any one there able to send them, and they might supplement their meagre incomes within certain very narrow lines if they could find any means of doing so. Exercise of the professions was absolutely forbidden, and as most of them were professional men, or in training therefor, their hardships were many.

Life in the Free Command was less like living death than the life of the prisons and the mines, but it was subject to many bitter trials, not the least of which was the constant and ruthless surveillance of their insolent Cossack guards. At any hour of the day or night the sheepdogs might walk in upon them to see that they were still there and plotting no mischief.

More than once, Hope, lying listless in her little inner room, had been startled by the sudden intrusion of a coarse hairy face, surmounted by a fur shako, and two dull eyes, which glared stolidly at her and roved insolently round the room, and at last took themselves disappointedly away.

The officer in charge of the political prisoners and their wolfish keepers was one Captain Sokolof. Sokolof was in most respects a typical gendarme official, obstinate, conservative, none too quick of understanding outside the circumscribed routine of his profession. But, on the other hand, he was not intentionally more brutal than circumstances seemed to him to demand. He carried out the instructions transmitted to him from headquarters to the very last letter. Of his own accord he never added to them, and that was much.

His position was not without its anomalies, but he did not allow them to trouble him. Colonel Zazarin, as Governor, held supreme power, but Sokolof was in charge of the politicals, and was answerable for them, not to Zazarin, but to the Minister of the Interior. It was a command within a command, but as Zazarin never interfered with Sokolof they got on well enough and rarely clashed.

Sokolof's right-hand man was one Lieutenant Razia, a reduced copy of his chief, smaller in body, smaller in mind, if anything still more stubbornly wedded to the last letter of the law as demeaned by the Ministry of the Interior, since all his hopes of advancement lay therein; withal something of a brute in his callosity and harshness to those in his power, and hated accordingly, both in the prison and out of it. He was a low-browed, black-a-vised fellow, with a powerful projecting under-jaw, and most of his head behind his ears like a monkey's. Pavlof took a dislike to him at first sight, and never had reason to change his opinion.

Captain Sokolof had had a sharp attack of typhus in the summer, and was still unfit for duty. During his sickness and slow convalescence his duties and his mantle had fallen on Lieutenant Razin, and Razin made the most of them. So much so, indeed, that the souls of the prisoners—to whom Razin, if he could have managed it, would have permitted no such high indulgence—were stirred within them to the supreme point of revolt. And the revolt of the utterly helpless against irresponsible power armed to the teeth is one of the strange sights of the world.

An in-prisoner at Kara possesses nothing save his bare life, and such trifling ameliorations as the irresponsibles of their grace permit him. These are at best capricious, and when the small mind finds itself in power it loses no opportunity of self-magnification by the arbitrary exhibition thereof. It fusses and worries and curtails privileges which, small as they are, are still to the prisoner very spice of the life that is drearier than death. Under such conditions the trodden worms sometimes turn, and then comes the amazing sight of the powerless fighting the all-powerful, ants versus giants, a struggle that stirs one even in the hearing.

How shall men—and women no less—without a weapon, make head against their keepers armed to the teeth? How shall men possessed of nothing fight legionaries with the empire behind them? Even when a man has nothing, so long as he lives he has his life; and when a man counts his life as less than nothing he rises above his nature and becomes a menace and a danger to the oppressor.

The power which strips him of every thing but life thereby leaves him his sole means of defence. With their bare lives the abjects fight the ruthlessness that would trample them below the mud, and they generally win.

For, strangely enough, the autocratic power which condemns its victims to extremest bitterness of life still objects to their dying. Savage as are its methods, it still covets rank among the civilised of the earth; and an acute, hypersensitive fear of forfeiting its precarious position serves to hold its punitive hand just this side of death. It insists on life where death would be a grace. At times, indeed, its victims are driven to madness and despair. But that is not of first intention, it is incidental to the system, not authorised by it. For how shall a Government, which cannot keep its sheep in hand, control the doings of its underlings and wolf-dogs in the pastures five thousand miles away?

So when, through extra brutality, or the callous stupidity which is kin to it, the oppressed are driven to despair, they calmly say, "We prefer to die"; and, since other means are denied them, they say, "We will die of hunger," and they refuse to eat.

Then it becomes a case of endurance and bitter suffering on the one side, and of much trepidation on the other. For if these men die wholesale, and in such a manner, inquisition must follow and a calling to account. Yet the ruthlessness that has provoked so dire a test fears for its future control if it yield too soon. And so the dreadful duel goes on. On the one side threats and futile attempts at forced feeding, followed in due course by promises; and on the other side the long-drawn agonies of slow starvation and the invincible determination to die sooner than give in.

Such is a hunger-strike among the Siberian exiles, and when Pavlof came in one day from his visitation of the prison with a clouded face, Madame Roskova was quick to perceive it.

It was the day Hope broke cover perforce and joined them in the outer room, and Madame had been jubilantly waiting his coming to reap the reward of her careful ministry.

"Here she is, Serge Petrovitch, and almost herself again! A little frozen yet, maybe, but you must complete the cure yourself. Nu! What's the matter with the man now?" as Pavlof bent and kissed Hope's forehead, and the blood rushed up into her pale face to meet his unavoidable salute.

"There is trouble up at the prison, Anna Vassilievna," he said gravely.

"What, then?" she asked, startled. For trouble inside the prison had more than once sent ripples over the high stockade, and had led to general restrictions and a tightening of bonds.

"Razin has gone too far. He has nagged and bullied till they are desperate. They have declared a hunger-strike, and some of them are not in condition to stand much of it."

"Da! That is bad. Who is in it?"

He named a dozen or so, and at mention of some of them Madame broke out into expressions of pity.

"Da! They will die," she said forebodingly. "No one knows what it is like till they have been through it. We tried it once in the women's kamera at Irkutsk. They took away all our underclothing, that we had bought with our own money too, and made us wear convict clothes. And they took away our mats and made us sleep on the bare boards, and they threatened to whip us. So we struck, and sometimes of a night I find myself lying in the cold and dark again, and not a scrap of food inside my lips for ten days. And mostly we were very still. The silence was like the coming of death, only full of agonies at first. And some of us moaned, though it was a point of honour among us not to, and one night I bit my finger nearly through and sucked the blood to keep myself quiet. Ah God! a terrible, terrible time! And I am sorry for them."

"And how did it end?" asked Hope, anxiously horrified.

"Oh, they gave way when two of us died. It was the fourteenth day, I heard afterwards. We lost count ourselves. You see, we just lay day and night without moving, and there was nothing to mark the time. We beat them," she said, with a gleam in her kind eyes, "but it was very terrible," and sat, hands in lap, unusually idle, brooding over the thought of it.

So deeply did their minds become engaged upon this matter that, for the moment, their personal concerns fell into the background, and Hope had time to accustom herself, unwatched, to the innumerable little awkwardnesses of the false position into which fate had cast her.

Pavlof almost lived in the prison, but refused to sleep there. The kameras at night are unwholesome at best, and he did not consider the scattered huts of the Free Command wholesome places for women to sleep alone in.

So he always came home to them sooner or later, and brought with him the shadow of the silent struggle which was going on behind the grim teeth of the great stockade.

He told them briefly of the grievous suffering patiently endured, for the agonies come first, and are followed by the lethargy which, failing respite, sinks quietly into death.

He told them, as the days passed, of the growing discomfort of the authorities. The strikers demanded the dismissal of the infamous Razin, in addition to the restitution of their abrogated privileges.

Too ready a compliance on the part of the governor would be equivalent to the hanging of a sword above his head for similar emergencies; too late a compliance meant loss of life and trouble with the authorities at home. Colonel Zazarin was a man of wrath in those days, and it was dangerous to approach him.

He would endeavour to strike the happy mean—happy, that is, for himself, but a lengthening horror for the rest—by yielding to the prisoners' demands when, in his opinion, they had purchased the right with a sufficiency of suffering. The risk lay in missing the psychological moment when the scale should stand on the even balance between life and death, and on Pavlof, as acting medico, was laid the heavy responsibility of deciding when that moment had arrived.

Day after day he spent in the gloomy kameras, gloomier now than ever, with death in its grimmest form hanging over them, waiting with the patience of the inevitable till the time should come to drop silently and finally down.

Several times each day he registered the falling temperatures and weakening pulses of the sufferers, suffering much himself in all that they endured. More than once he urged Zazarin to step down and save them. But in Zazarin's judgment the malcontents had not yet suffered enough, and he held grimly aloof. For the doctor being a prisoner himself, Zazarin took measure of him by himself, believed that he would magnify the risks, and so discounted all his representations.

Night after night Pavlof came home with gloomier face; and, full of the bitter thoughts his reports evoked in her, Anna Roskova went about her duties in the silence of a deeply touched soul which knows and understands. Her critical eye no longer troubled itself with the shortcomings of this most curious married couple. Death was abroad, nay, close at hand, and this was no time for hypercriticism of abnormal curiosities among the living. So, through the tension without and the sufferings of many, Hope's personal troubles were lightened somewhat, and her mind had little time to dwell on itself for thought of those others lying in the deepening gloom of the kameras till death should set them free. The respite was grateful to her, though the indirect cause of it shocked and wounded her sorely.

Madame Roskova questioned Paul minutely as to the symptoms of his patients each night, and lived again her own bitter experience in his telling of them.

"You will lose some of them, Serge Petrovitch," she said, with gloomy emphasis, on the twelfth night of the strike.

"I told Zazarin so yesterday. I have told him so twice to-day. Two or three are just on the line and may slip over at any time."

"He is a brute. What does he say?"

"He says that those who pull through will not forget it as long as they live."

"He is right. It wouldn't be surprising if others besides did not forget it either. The only surprising thing about it is that a man like that has been allowed to live so long."

"He is a hard man," admitted Pavlof wearily. He had just come from an ineffectual tussle with the hard man.

"Hard men and soft men are all alike when they are dead men," said Madame grimly.

"That does no good, Anna Vassilievna. The next man is just the same. The others never learn."

"I'm not so sure of that," said Madame. "If one man is killed for his brutality the next is like to go warily lest he follow."

But Pavlof shook his head. "Force never was a remedy, and it never will be. If you killed half-a-dozen Governors there would still come one who would grind us all to powder. The spring is poisoned. Until the source is sweet the water will be bitter," and weary as he was—for the bruising of the inner man tells also on the outer—he picked up his cap and flung on his coat, and went back to see if the imminent shadow had settled down on any of his patients. If Zazarin lost any of them it should not be for lack of warning.

Hope and Anna Roskova sat before the stove hopeful of better news when he returned. But he did not come back that night, and they understood that matters were at a critical stage.

In the kinship of the great shadow, Anna Roskova began to speak of things that had come within her own experience, and Hope sat frozen with horror at the recital of hardships and persecutions almost past belief—of solitary confinements, prolonged till richly dowered minds gave way; of brutal whippings, the indignities alone of which would have sufficed to break most women's spirits; of life in the huts of the Northern barbarians, which some of their company had endured and marvellously survived; of batterings at the hands of brutal Cossacks; of despairing suicides; of more merciful shootings deliberately provoked.

And in the hearing of such things, bravely borne by men and women whose gravest fault was too great a love for their down-trodden fellows, Hope's own troubles seemed light and of small account. She took shame to herself for taking them so much to heart, forgetting that the wearing of her body had had much to do with the depressing of her soul.

She longed to confide in Madame Roskova. The very relation of the whole matter between herself and Pavlof would have been such a mighty relief, both as to the past and as to the future. In the light of full knowledge Anna Roskova could have made things so easy and straightforward for her. But Pavlof had judged otherwise, and to act against his advice might bring down upon them, and on Serge, troubles beyond her understanding.

If Madame Roskova had some dim expectation that her own unburdening might provoke response in kind, she was disappointed. She gave Hope every opportunity, endeavoured even to lead her gently in that direction, but, in the fear of committing herself, Hope hardly dared to open her mouth about her own concerns, though she could question Madame eagerly enough as to the details of these terrible happenings. And Anna Roskova misjudged her of a cold and reticent nature, and marvelled at its alliance with so frank and beautiful a face.

It was midday before Pavlof came in, tired to death, but in great relief of mind. The hunger-strike was over. One of the strikers had died in the night.

"Who?" asked Madame anxiously.

"Sophie Rubova."

"Ah, the poor child. I knew her mother. Well?"

"We did our best to save her by forcing her to swallow. But it was too late. She was a mere shadow and too frail to stand any handling. I went at once to Zazarin. He was for blaming me. I reminded him of my three separate reports yesterday, of which I had copies, and he shut up. He came down to the prison and pledged his word to satisfy all their grievances. If he had only done it yesterday he might have saved the poor little Sophie. But perhaps she is better dead. She would have suffered from it all her life, as some of the others will."

"It is simple murder and that man is a devil," said Madame Roskova bitterly. "May God cast it all up to him when his time comes!"

CHAPTER XIV

HOW THEY LIVED TOGETHER AND YET APART

As Hope had foreseen, the recovery of her health, sufficient at all events to permit of her undertaking household duties, was the signal for Madame Roskova's departure.

She had hinted at it many times, and had yielded as often to Hope's earnest entreaties and remained.

"My dear," she would say of a night, with more than a suggestion of reproof in her manner, "Serge Petrovitch and I have been very good friends, and I am greatly beholden to him, but he will begin to hate me soon if I keep you away from him like this. It is not in nature and it is not right. If you really want me to stop, you two occupy this room, and I will sleep on the hearth out there."

"No, no, Anna!" Hope would make haste to reply. "You must not go. Serge is quite content and so am I, I do assure you. It is enough for us that we are together," and then would she blush rosy red in the merciful darkness and wonder if her soul was imperilled past redemption by such unblushing lying.

And Anna Roskova said little but wondered much, and sighed for her own lonely exile in Yakutsk, and thought again how different it would have been with them, and deemed Hope but a cold wife.

But with returning health and the retuning of her jangled nerves, Hope's outlook on life became to assume its normal aspect. Matters began to settle themselves into their proper places and to take their proper proportions. She saw that no one was to blame for what had happened, that the strange mischance which had cast her into Pavlof's keeping, while her husband wandered at large between Yeniseisk and London, was the outcome of no plot, but a valiant attempt to benefit her. She recovered her trust in herself and her faith in Paul Pavlof. She saw that Pavlof was right, and that the only thing possible to her was to wait patiently till they should hear from Serge. And she set herself bravely to adapt herself to the required conditions.

And so it was with a certain equanimity that she one day received Madame Roskova's announcement that Marya Verskaïa was sick and had begged her to come and stop with her, and she was going on the morrow.

"Da!" said Madame, when Hope raised no objection, but simply expressed her regret at Marya's illness. "So you are reconciled to him at last and don't mind my going! That is right and as it should be, and I am glad of it."

"I am very, very grateful for all your kindness, Anna. I never can forget all you have done for me. But—as you say——"

"Da, child! That is all right! I am rejoiced to think that all is right again between you. I have thought you a stone, for the lack is not on his part. He loves you as much as ever. He is on fire for you, and no wonder. I can hear it in his voice when he speaks to you, and see it in his eye when he looks at you. He just worships you, my dear. So be you good to him, for he is a man beyond most."

And Hope knew it all and was troubled for him. For she knew that the fire would never break forth to her undoing. It might burn and burn till it consumed him, but the flame would never scorch her nor the smoke besmirch.

"You will let me bring in some of the others now and then?" asked Madame Roskova, before she went next day. "They are all hungry to see you, and they will talk and talk and it will do none of you any harm now. It has been all I could do to keep them away. But now you are all right again——"

"Surely, Anna! I shall be glad to see them now. While I was lying broken there it would have driven me crazy, but now I shall be glad."

So Madame Roskova squeezed into a corner of the little hut up the valley with Marya Verskaïa and Dmitri Polokof, and sorely missed the wider atmosphere of the doctor's house. For Marya had a lively tongue, and her alleged sickness did not extend to it or in any way affect it, and ceaseless chatter becomes at times a weariness to the flesh, to say nothing of the soul.

Dmitri, when he heard of Madame Roskova's coming, breathed a silent but fervent "God be thanked!" and welcomed her warmly. Marya launched twenty questions at her concerning Madame Palma before she had got her cloak off, and Anna, knowing her friend, replied with discretion and supplied no grist but only chaff to Marya's chattering little mill.

So Hope Palma and Paul Pavlof entered upon a new phase of the strangely twisted story of their lives—a phase which tested and tried them both in many ways, and was to Pavlof as the breaking of seals and the dipping, chancily and hazardously, into the pages of the unknown. He learnt much of woman and her ways, and at times it set his head spinning, and at times twisted his heart-strings. Learning is bitter-sweet; at times a deep delight, and again, a long travail; and the understanding of even one woman was beyond the wisdom of the Preacher whose experience had been wider than most.

They sat long before the stove in silence that first night of their solitariness, both their minds running swiftly in the same direction but on different lines.

When would they hear from Serge?

Would they ever hear from him?

Supposing they did not?

Supposing they heard of his death?

The silence was verging on the irksome when Pavlof broke it, in fear that it might become painful to her.

"I am glad you let Anna Vassilievna go, Hope Ivanovna. It tells me that you trust me."

"She has been very good to me and I shall always be grateful to her, but——"

"Since you can trust yourself in my hands, it will make things easier for you to be without her, I think."

"It would have been impossible to go on much longer like that."

"She is a good woman——"

"She was growing importunate about us. If we could only have told her the whole matter—"

"A whisper of it getting out would have destroyed us all. Anna Vassilievna is more trustworthy than most, but the matter is so very strange that it would have been almost too much to expect her to keep it entirely to herself. Even if she did not speak of it her manner might have set folks wondering, and one cannot be too careful when lives are at stake."

"I have no doubt you are right. In any case it is too late to tell her now," she said quietly.

There was in this new atmosphere a sense at once of relief and restraint. With Anna Vassilievna's puzzled eye no longer on them, they were able to be themselves again, without necessity for guarding every word and look. And this in itself was a mighty relief, for false pretence is mother to awkwardness, and the natural man is the honest one, the man who is just himself and claims no more.

And now, too, they could discuss their affairs in a way that was not possible before, and therein also lay elements of enlightenment.

But, even in this new freedom, there was also a novel sense of restraint, in the ever present knowledge that they two, of all people in the world, were alone together in surely as strange and anomalous a companionship as the world had ever seen.

And these mingled feelings again made at once for speech and for silence, and so their talk was intermittent and discursive.

Pavlof, when he spoke to her, kept his eyes rigidly on the glowing embers, lest she should see in them that which would not be suppressed, but which he still would not have her see. And how should he, untutored man, know that she saw it all in the very stiffness of his manner, that it cried aloud to her in every tone of his voice whenever he pronounced her name.

For to woman has been given a sense denied as a rule to man. She knows by instinct when a man loves her. And Hope Palma knew that this man loved her still, in spite of himself, as much as he had ever loved her, and that was with every fibre of his being.

And so, when her eyes rested on him, she already found a difference in him since Anna Vassilievna left them. For eyes, after all, are but windows, and the soul that looks out of them colours all it sees with somewhat of itself.

And yet, again, perhaps, after all, there was in him a subtle and almost indefinable change bred of these new circumstances—the unintentional outward manifestation of these mixed feelings of freedom and restraint. He was at once stiffer and gentler than when Anna was there. For then he had to assume a warmth of demeanour befitting their supposed relationship, and to both of them it was merely an assumption and meant nothing. And now that no assumption was necessary, though all the warmth was in him still, his fear lest his real feelings should show through stiffened his manner and made it seem unduly cold and formal.

Many were the nights they sat so, during the first weeks of their release from Madame Roskova's kindly supervision, discussing at times, and from every point of view, Serge's chances of escape and the prospects of their hearing of it, but as often sitting in the silence of their long, long thoughts.

"You really think Serge would be able to get clear away, Paul Ivanuitch?" she would ask.

"From all we could learn there was no great difficulty, Hope Ivanovna. It is not like Kara, you see. Will you pardon me reminding you again that here I am Serge Petrovitch——"

"Oh, I am sorry. I cannot get used to it."

"It is only that I fear if you call me Paul Ivanuitch in private it may slip out at other times and lead to trouble."

"I will remember. You see, I have always thought of you as Paul Ivanuitch, and it is not easy to begin thinking of you as Serge Petrovitch."

"I know, and I am sorry for the necessity. If it were not of importance I would not ask it."

"And when do you think is the soonest we could hear from him?"

"He would get away in the early spring. It might take him some months to get back to Russia. He would strike up north, which would make it longer but safer. Then he would seek you first. Where would he learn that you had come out after him?"

"Old Masha would tell him that, if he found her."

"He would seek her at once when he could not find you. Where would she be?"

"I had to send her back to her people in Old Khersonese. They had been very good to me when I was ill—when my baby was born."

"Ah—God, yes!"—with a face full of sympathy—"I did not dare to ask you, Hope Ivanovna. Serge told me. What—did it——?"

"He died. And I was glad. Such a dear little fellow! But when he was dead I knew it was best so."

"It was very sore upon you, Hope Ivanovna."

"It was hard to lose him, but I knew it was better for him, and so I did not mourn for him, and in my heart I have him always."

It was only round the stove at night, however, that they had time for disjointed conversation, or, as the case might be, for brooding thought. Pavlof was working energetically with brain and hand to stamp out the hidden germs of typhus from the prison kameras—as far as that was possible without burning the whole place down. It was an almost impossible task. Hercules himself would have given it up in despair and applied the cleansing flame.

He talked hard and worked harder. But the Governor, absolute as were his powers over his prisoners, would not authorise the expenditure of a single rouble on sanitary matters without express permission from headquarters. Roubles were none too plentiful and had to be accounted for to the last kopeck. Men and women were sent there because they were superfluous. As Zazarin tersely put it. "Lives are cheap, but money is always dear. If we tell them a man is dead that ends it, but roubles never die, and we have to account for them."

And Hope had the housework to attend to, and, since it was but a small house, and she had much time and a natural instinct for neatness and making the most of things, she brought and kept it up to such a high plane of comfort that Paul Pavlof hardly knew himself in it. Comfortable, in a way, it always had been under Madame Roskova's rough-and-ready housekeeping, but Anna Vassilievna's time had always been subject to many outside calls from the sick and needy ones, which had not yet fallen upon the newcomer, and—well, Hope's ideas of comfort went further than Anna Vassilievna's.

Pavlof was so full of his Augean labours that he must discuss them with her of a night, and Hope rejoiced in the new element as a relief from the tension of those long brooding silences, which at times became beyond endurance painful.

Then Madame Roskova began to bring in her friends, who had been waiting impatiently to make Madame Palma's acquaintance, and once they began coming the little house was rarely free of them. For, since the privilege of visiting among themselves was about the only privilege the Free Command possessed, they availed themselves of it to the full.

Their lives were hard and meagre, but in many cases their capacities for enthusiasm, and even their enthusiasms, had survived their sufferings. How they managed to live on the trifling allowance made by the paternal Government they would have found it difficult to explain. Their condition, indeed, was almost analogous to that of the proverbial villagers who wrung a livelihood out of one another's washing. Anna Roskova, for instance, earned scanty kopecks by mending and stitching for the officers of the guard. Then there were occasional trifling remittances from friends at home, some of which reached them and some of which did not. But all helped one another, and among them they fought the wolf from the door.

They were most of them men and women of education and utterly unused to manual labour, save such as the mines had painfully taught them. And, since there was no opening for the professions, even if they had been allowed to follow them, they just grubbed along from hand to mouth as best they could and stubbornly refused to starve. They ate little and thought and talked much.

Paul Pavlof—whom they knew only as Serge Palma—was better circumstanced than most, by reason of his quasi-official duties. But his own wants were of the smallest, and his hand and house and slim purse had always been open to all who needed help.

Naturally, that house became the life-centre of the community and had rarely been without visitors of an evening, until the arrival of that least expected of all visitors turned the world upside down for some of them.

While Hope lay in the little inner room, desiring nothing but quiet, Anna Roskova had rigidly forbidden visitors the house, and the cheerfulness of the community suffered eclipse. Now that the shadow had passed they returned with doubled enjoyment, and Hope need never lack company.

They rejoiced in her courage in compassing that wearisome journey, and one and all made much of her. They brought her books and papers, such as they had, and were ready to sit and talk by the hour of Russia and their nipped hopes and blighted endeavours.

When the distasteful day was over they came quietly in, one by one, and, over the steaming samovar of coarse brick tea, lived their lives again, and even ventured at times to entertain hopes of the future.

Their eulogies of "Serge Petrovitch," his courage, his self-denial, his sympathetic care of both hale and sick, knew no end. They rang the changes on his high qualities of heart and mind, till—when she remembered that the Serge Petrovitch of these encomiums was not her Serge Petrovitch—she sometimes tired of hearing them. And again, at times, as the praises of this Serge Petrovitch were ringing in her ears, they would attach themselves by some strange perversion of the senses to that other Serge, and she would think more tenderly of him than ever.

And then when, one by one, the rest had crept quietly away to their comfortless little homes, envious somewhat, perhaps, of the happiness of Palma and his beautiful wife, they two would sit brooding over the handful of ashes in the stove, thinking out their own thoughts, their elbows almost touching, but between them a great fixed gulf.

"Is he alive or is he dead?" Hope would ask herself. "Is he in outer exile or pining in prison? Or has he won through to freedom, and is he spending himself and risking himself trying to find out what has become of me? Shall we ever learn what has become of him? How long shall I wait here? Where can I go if I leave?"

And all her questions remained perpetual questions and there was no answer to any of them.

And Pavlof, at her elbow, gazed steadily into the little core of rosy life among the grey ashes, and asked himself—

"Is he alive or dead? Shall we ever get word from him? And if we do not, what is to become of Hope Ivanovna? She will not be content to remain here. And yet—and yet——"

He wished her nothing but good. To compass her happiness he would willingly lay down his life, as he had done once already in taking Serge's place at the mines. He wished Serge nothing but good. He had proved it. And yet—and yet——

If Serge was dead—if the fiction of their lives could blossom into fact! Ah, the glory and the joy of it! The heaven of Kara! He would ask no better than to live there and die there, so she were there too.

How was it possible to restrain such thoughts with that quiet figure at his elbow, with the sweet, clear-cut face, and the great brooding eyes?

But when at last she rose and he quietly bade her good-night, though his voice told nothing of what was in him and the shadows veiled his eyes and face, she read him like a book, and held him in honour because of the strong, true heart that was in him.

And when she was gone he unrolled his mattress and stretched himself on it before the stove, and dreamed of heaven on earth in a Kara hut, such as none but he would have rejoiced in—unless he were blessed with the love of a Hope Ivanovna.

CHAPTER XV

HOW PAVLOF LEARNED HARD LESSONS

So the wintry days of their strange, anomalous life dragged on, and held no weariness of waiting for Paul Pavlof, rather a fulness of content as of one who, believing his treasure was lost to him for ever, has unexpectedly found it again.

But it was not so with Hope, and Pavlof got many an amazing sight into the sealed book, and learned more of women's ways than most men learn in a lifetime.

For he had his regular duties outside which kept his highest faculties alert and active. And she had too much time for painful thought, and, to a woman of Hope Palma's nature, the very fact of having to live and act so flagrant a lie as circumstances had forced her into, was to her feelings as the rasping of a file on a raw wound.

At times her heart grew sick with the weary indefiniteness of it all. She said to herself that she might wait and wait for ever, and waiting is the hardest work in the world. Then, when the fit was on her, she would break out, as she brooded over the fire of a night—

"Is this to go on for ever? Shall we ever hear from him?"

In their private intercourse she had come to discard the use of any appellation when addressing him. It lent a curtness to her speech which was foreign to her, but he understood her feeling, and suffered it without resentment. Paul Ivanuitch she must not call him, and Serge Petrovitch felt to her each time like a fresh endorsement of the lie that troubled her.

"We shall hear in time, Hope Ivanovna."

"You say it and say it, but shall we?"—defiantly. "Suppose we never hear?"

"Then—but we shall hear, Hope Ivanovna. There has barely been time yet for word to come, even if he got through at once. If I could shorten the time for you I would, but I cannot."

"It breaks my heart to think of him searching and searching and finding nothing, and wondering what has become of me."

"It is very sore for you, but we are doing the only thing possible."

"In the spring I will join a convoy and go back and look for him."

"If you think well," he would answer gloomily. "But where you would look I do not know. He might well be on his way back here in some guise or other, and then you would pass him on the road."

"You do not want me to go," she would fling at him.

"I would give my life to serve you, Hope Ivanovna. But I could not counsel you to go in search of him, for I fear it would be fruitless. He promised to let me know in such a way that no censor could guess what he meant. The moment we hear I will do everything in my power to further your going. Till then you are safest here, and I think Serge would have it so."

At other times she would fall into such a state of dull depression that Pavlof could hardly get a word out of her, and then he went gloomily, and watched anxiously for a recrudescence of the sickness from which she had suffered at Irkutsk. But it was heart-sickness that at such times made the body seem sick, and she would not allow him to doctor her.

And again, in the baffling vagaries of her brooding thought, she would find herself doubting him—him whom her better self knew to be the very soul of honour. And more than once her resentment at this sore bondage of fate showed itself unworthily in words that cut like arrows. It was all his fault. If he had let Serge come on to the mines she would have found him there. It was Pavlof's stupid interference that had set everything wrong and landed them all in this hateful coil.

And Pavlof, if he understood but dimly, trusted much, for he loved much. He suffered acutely because his hands were tied. There was nothing he could do but bear with her always with the utmost gentleness, and that he did.

"It is Hope Ivanovna," he would say to himself. "And she is tried beyond bearing."

He had given his life for her husband's, and she resented it and regarded him as an interferer. It taxed his equanimity to the utmost at times, but never by word or look did he show sign of what was in him, nor did he ever depart by a hair's-breadth from the straight line he had laid down for himself. He kept strictest guard on voice and look, and tuned them delicately to the necessities of the case, and bore with her patiently like the gallant gentleman he was.

But if he never flinched under her flailings, and showed no sign of wound, she knew when her arrows pierced. Then, in due course, she would recognise the wrong she had done him, and the swing of the pendulum would carry her to the other extreme. To salve the wounds she had dealt she would unbend towards him and become sweetness itself. To wipe out the memory of her ungraciousness she would become more than gracious.

And then in turn—and it needed a stout heart and a set jaw at times, for her sweetness was harder to be borne than her undeserved bitterness—it seemed to be he who was cold and hard, and held her at a distance.

But these were her extremes. Between times, and always, except when these gloomy fits mastered her, she was just her own sweet, high-spirited, clear-souled self, deeply interested in all his doings and in the welfare of the community, and life became sweet to Paul Pavlof.

If ever man was tried and tested to his heights and depths, it was Pavlof in this earlier period of their companionship.

To live in such strange case with the one woman who was more to him than all the rest of the world—so close to her—one with her to the general eye—bound, by the exigencies of the case, to tender her before others all those little observances of affection in which his heart would have rejoiced beyond words had they only been real—outwardly, all the happiness he had ever dared to hope for—inwardly, the keen sting of the mockery of it all!

Yes, he suffered much. "Without sorrow no one liveth in love," says old à Kempis. But at the heart of the sting was that keen, deep joy which is the very soul and core of love.

Can one wonder that his thoughts slipped brakes at times and ran wild and free? The wonder would have been if they had not, for after all he was but human.

Suppose no word ever came from Palma?

He had done all he could for his friend. But, at best, his chances were about even. Some indeed escaped. Thousands got away every spring, and blindly prowled the steppes and forests till the winter drove them in again. But the percentage who got clear away to freedom was not large. Still, there was always the chance, and Serge Palma had staked on that chance, and he was a man of intelligence and resource, and would strain every nerve to win through.

And if no word came?

Then—well, it would either mean that he had failed and been recaptured, or that he was dead, which was much the same thing; or—there was the trouble—that the word he had sent had never got through.

He might even then be vainly striving after news of his wife, while she sat here waiting in vain for news of him. And so it might go on, month after month, till Hope grew desperate. Then she would desperately set out to find him, an utterly hopeless task, to search the whole wide world to find one man, and that man as like as not dead.

If no word came, their position would remain just as it was until Hope left him, and was lost to him for ever. While she remained, he felt as a man may feel with whom a priceless gem is left in trust, and lies for safety in his banker's care. He gets no actual good of it. He dare not wear it. He may look at it at times, that is all. But still the knowledge that it is there, and in his charge, gives him a certain glow of satisfaction.

Just so Paul Pavlof carried in his inmost heart the priceless jewel of his love for Hope Palma. She belonged to another, and that other his friend, and so to him she was sacred. But no power on earth could keep him from worshipping her with all the might that was in him.

But, dimly behind all this, lurked two possibilities, either of which might solve the situation.