CHAPTER V
HOW TWO MET IN HADES
The great gates of the stockade swung slowly open, and a motley crowd came in from the barges which had brought them from Tiumen, and the older inhabitants gathered in long lines to see them pass, all except the dicers, who remained intent on their game.
But Pavlof lay where he was. The sight of the weary women and children, smelling like wild beasts from the close confinement of the barges, was always a saddening one.
The newcomers were drafted off to the already crowded kameras, and the grey-clad droves settled again to their aimless wanderings.
While Pavlof still lay musing over his late studies—the man with the barrow, the man with the dog, and the man who was like a carthorse—one of the newly arrived came out of the log house where he had been to deposit his grey sack containing his belongings, and strolled along past the spot where Pavlof lay. A big man with fair hair and beard. It was only when he had passed that Pavlof got an impression of him. But the impression was so startling that he jerked out an involuntary "Good God!" and sat up suddenly and remained staring intently after the man. He argued himself out of the impression and leaned back against the wooden house again.
But presently the newcomer came strolling back. Pavlof sat up again in rigid scrutiny. Then their eyes met and Pavlof sprang up and ran to him.
"Palma! Is it possible?" he gasped, with a mighty fear dragging rough hands across his heart-strings.
"What—Pavlof?" and their hands gripped tightly.
"It's good to see the face of a friend even in hell," said Palma, with something of his old heartiness. "All the same, I'm sorry to see you here, Paul Ivanuitch."
"And I you, Serge Petrovitch. And your wife—Hope Ivanovna?" he asked anxiously. "She is not here?"
"No, thank God! She is not here."
"Thank God for that!" said Pavlof earnestly. "But where she is I do not know, nor whether I have anything to thank God for in her not being here. It is twelve months since they took me and I have had no word of her since," and his face broke for a moment, and then pinched the tighter.
"Sit down here in the sun and tell me your news," said Pavlof. "Where are you for?"
"Kara—ten years."
"And why?"
"God knows!" said Palma, as he threw himself down on the dry spot where Pavlof had been sitting, and Pavlof dropped alongside. "I don't know, and they don't know, or at all events they haven't told me. I have thought and thought till my brain cracks with thinking, and the nearest I can get to it is that some of the folks we used to help have got mixed up with some of these other matters and so they drag us in. It is what I always feared, but if the work was to be done we had to take the risk. I tell you what, Pavlof," he said, thumping the ground with an angry fist, "I know now what it is that turns men's souls to gall and bitterness and makes devils of them. It is damnable work such as this. I never counselled force. I never did a thing but what I believed for the good of my fellows. But—my God!—if—ever—I—get—free, some one shall pay for all this."
"And all for what?" said Pavlof quietly. "For teaching men and women to look up instead of down, and that they are no longer slaves."
"Slaves they are and slaves they will remain until they break their bonds for themselves," said Palma hotly. "It will come, Pavlof. It must come. A nation cannot be ground down for ever by the handful on top."
"It will come in time, but the time is long, and the grinding is very bitter," and the silence that fell on them for a space was filled with gloomy thoughts.
"Where have they had you?" asked Pavlof presently.
"Petropavlovsk. And you?"
"Schlusselburg."
There was no need for details. Those two words supplied them to the very last letter. They have meant torture, madness, death, to many a man—and many a woman too—whose only crime was too advanced thought for their fellows.
"And Hope Ivanovna? How will she fare in your absence, Serge Petrovitch? Even if they have not taken her too?" It was the one thought and fear that had been churning through his brain ever since he had learned that she was not there.
"Ach God! Paul Ivanuitch, that is where they hit a man when he is down," said Palma, boiling over again at thought of it all, and emphasising his points with his fist on the ground. "The thought of her, alone and friendless, comes near to driving me crazy at times. She may be alive. She may be dead. She may be in the gutter. You know how things would go. They would seize everything I had and put in an administrator, and nothing gets through their fingers. And—and——" he stumbled, and looked piteously at Pavlof, his face working with deep emotion, and the bold blue eyes, which had always looked so merrily on the world, swimming now in a mist of bitterness. "Ach!—you cannot understand!" he jerked. "In a few months I was to have been a father, Paul Ivanuitch, and I had persuaded her to go to the country to give herself a chance. And here I am"—and the heavy fist smashed into the ground again—"and I do not know whether she is alive, or whether the child is alive. I do not know whether I am still a husband, or whether or not I am a father. God! I know only that I am no longer a man, but am becoming a devil at thought of it all. May his blackest curse blight them all for ever and for ever and for ever!"
And again a bitter silence fell upon them.
"Truly, the grinding is bitter," said Pavlof at last.
"And we are between the stones. But—sometimes—that which is between the stones will catch fire, Paul Ivanuitch, and then the grinders will see hell—as they did in France. God grant I be there to see it too!—and to help! I was becoming a man, and they have turned me back to the beasts. Hope Ivanovna is an angel, and she was making a man of me, and they will grind her to powder, like the rest of us. She would wait and wait, and hope and hope, and strive after news of me and find nothing, and then maybe she would die."
"I do not think she would die, Serge Petrovitch. She is very brave. She is too bold-hearted to be crushed by them. It is wonderful what a woman can stand."
"Ay—but—there are times"—said Palma gloomily.
"Ah—that. For that you must trust in God, Serge Petrovitch—as she would."
"It is true," nodded Palma. "I did not know so great good existed till I came to know her. They are nearer God than we are.... My God! My God!" he groaned, thinking only of his lost happiness, and forgetful for the moment of Pavlof. "And we were so happy and growing happier every day. And now——" and his fist rose and fell in a miserable abandonment of hope.
It was the first time in twelve dreary months that he had been able to speak to any one of all that had been in his heart. There was a gloomy satisfaction in unloading himself to one who knew and could understand.
"We grew nearer to one another with every day that passed," he went on reminiscently, losing sight, in the opened flow of his own thoughts, of the fact that one man's joy may be, and often is, his neighbour's pain. "She had won me, heart and soul, to her work in spite of myself, Paul Ivanuitch. It was for her work's sake that she married me. She told me so, and I, like a fool, believed that in time I could wean her from it and have her all to myself. But it was all the other way. Since ever we were married I have had no other thought than what would please her most. I had come to see through her eyes. I had come to love the things she loved because she loved them. And now——" and he came to earth again with angry fist.
"And she, Serge Petrovitch?" asked Pavlof quietly, and if Palma had glanced at his face he would have found it white and cold. "She had come to love you also?"
"Surely," said Palma, with conviction. "A man may be mistaken about any other woman's feelings but never about his wife's, Paul Ivanuitch. Yes, she had come to love me, and our love was growing day by day."
And the silence that fell on them now was gloomy only on Pavlof's part, for Hope's love evoked a glow in Palma's heart even in the bare recollection.
And presently it came to him that their talk had been wholly of himself and his affairs.
"And you, Paul Ivanuitch, why did they take you?" he asked.
"I was working quietly among the poor, as Hope Ivanovna would have had me"—he could not forbear himself that trifling share in her—"and I had no thought of ill to any man. But they carried me off one night and my place knew me no more."
Palma nodded. "And never said what for or why."
"Yes. They gave me credit for an intention to place myself in a position of illegality. But no such intention was in me—that is, as I interpret the laws."
"And where are you for?"
"The provinces—five years. Minusinsk I'm assigned to."
Palma nodded. "That is not so bad. Escape from the provinces is not difficult, they say, though it's none too easy to get back home. I was talking to a man who had been through it, as we came along on the barge. He got home all right, but he could not keep out of it, and now he's going to Kara with chains on his legs."
"Yes, it generally ends that way, I believe. Which is your kazarm?"
"Number eight. It was crammed to suffocation, they say, before we came in, and now there are twenty more of us. The days are bearable, but the nights are simply hell."
"Simply hell. If Dante had slept for a week in a Siberian kamera he'd have had something more to write about."
"And when do we go on? Do you know?"
"I think we were only waiting for you. I saw them selecting a convoy guard this morning."
"The sooner the better."
That night, in his fetid corner under the over-loaded sleeping-bench, Paul Pavlof found it more impossible to sleep even than usual.
It was not an easy matter at any time, with over a hundred foul fellow-sleepers above and all around one. The sighs, the coughs, the groans, the stertorous snortings and snorings, the restless movements which travelled spasmodically along the packed sleeping-benches from whatever spot they started till they stopped on the pachyderm carcase of some heavier sleeper than usual, the quarrels, the cursings, the jingle and clink of fetters, the poisonous, ammoniacal smells of all those foul bodies, the sickening heat, the insects and vermin—truly, to any man accustomed to the simple virtues of cleanliness of body and mind, sleep in such a place was not a matter of easy accomplishment, and Palma's short, descriptive word was amply earned. Yet at times Pavlof had found sleep not impossible.
But that night it was very far beyond him. He lay awake and with his eyes wide open, too, in spite of the pungency of the atmosphere which weighed on his eyelids like coins on the eyes of the dead, and set his eyeballs smarting. And, though the mirk and reek, and the heavy darkness, and the thick log walls of the kazarm cut short his bodily vision, the white soul of him looked past these and caught glimpses of visions of another kind, and in the sight of them he smiled. Now, when a convict on the great Siberian road smiles to himself in his kamera of a night, he is half-brother to the saints or joint tenant with a madman, and the madman, I am inclined to think, has the pleasanter time of it.
CHAPTER VI
HOW THE WHITE SEEDS GREW
As Pavlof had expected, the following day saw them on the road.
Palma and he, as political prisoners, had the right to travel in a bumping teléga. They both gave up their places in favour of less capable travellers—Palma yielding his to an ailing wife who was following her husband into exile, and Pavlof dividing his among some of the bigger children, whose mothers had failed to convince the convoy officer that they were under twelve. Whatever their ages, their small feet soon tired of the road, and they showed their thanks to the tall man with the pleasant lean face—whose eyes still smiled at them even when the day's march was drawing to a close—by shy offerings of the wild flowers they had gathered during their perambulatory spells.
Their road lay up hill and down dale, through fine rolling country—mighty stretches of prairie land gemmed with flowers, dense forests of birch and poplar with evergreens clustering thick below, and now and again wide fields of corn still green in the ear, and, at long intervals, straggling villages of weather-beaten log houses where the women gave the children food.
The children, indeed, had much the best of it, even when they had to walk all the way and grew very tired before the resting-place was reached. For they carried no burdens, visible or invisible, and, of all that the grown folks carried, the burdens that were not seen were the heaviest.
Even when they were tired the children would break out of the straggling line, and flit to and fro among the flowers, and come back laden with wild roses and bluebells and buttercups and daisies, and prattling with delight in their short-lived treasures in a way that braced weary mothers afresh for the rest of the journey.
For the first day or two both Pavlof and Palma felt even the sixteen or twenty-mile course a long one. The stone bags and casemates of Schlusselburg and Petropavlovsk do not make for muscularity.
But the fresh air was a tonic. The season had been a rainy one so far, and they were spared the torment of the dust. The full day's rest each third day gave them time to recover, and before the first week was out they found the day's march within their powers, though the monotony of it soon began to pall.
They walked side by side and spoke much together, and, bit by bit, Pavlof came to know much of Hope's life in Odessa, and satisfied himself that her marriage had made for her happiness.
It was new life to Palma to talk of Hope Ivanovna to one who knew and understood her, and who was never tired of listening. He could talk of her all day long, her sayings and her doings, her goodness and her beauty; and the fragrance of her memory shortened the stages, and softened the asperities of the road and the discomforts of the crowded rest-houses.
And if Paul Pavlof spoke little it was because he thought the more, and because he had no text so good to speak upon. And in the reeking darkness of the kameras where they were herded at night like cattle, he looked past the cramping horrors and discomforts, and smiled—and showed as yet no signs of madness.
The Great Siberian Road is kin to Death of the Equal Foot as a leveller of distinctions. Here men are equals in most respects, even though the politicals receive an extra few farthings a day to live upon, and have a right to bump their bones to pieces in the springless telégas instead of tramping on their own two feet. Those are matters of small importance, however, in the darkness of the overhanging cloud. To all, the past is equally dead—a closed book; to all, the future is a hopeless blank—a book sealed with many seals, and every seal a sorrow.
In the comparative privacy of the dilapidated rest-house where they lay the second night and all the third day, the burly ex-convict, Ignatz, the man who looked like a carthorse, came to them and asked if they would join a trade union the prisoners had been forming among themselves, and of which he had been chosen president on account of his unique knowledge of the ropes.
This idea of the "artel" was new to them, and Pavlof especially was interested.
"What is it for?" he asked.
"We club funds, barin, and stand by one another."
"What to do?"
"Everything, barin. We help you to buy food on the road, and if you want tobacco or vodka we can get it for you. Later on we can perhaps get chains loosed for those who wear them, but that's not till we're well into Yeniseisk. And when you get footsore we hire a teléga and ride in turns. Oh, the artel is very useful, I assure you."
"Well, those things are none of them much good to us. What else?"
"If you care to risk a bolt we can arrange that for you, barin. But I do not advise it. It's dangerous, and only one out of a dozen gets clear as a rule. The rest pay—with their skins."
"And how would you escape from the provinces if you wanted to?"
"That's easy. Settle down and be good and quiet and mild as milk till you're ready. Start in the spring when the cuckoo sings, and walk away through the woods."
"And to get back into Russia?"
"Ah! That's another thing, barin. I struck north myself the first time, till I got among the Ostiaks, but it is rough work. How much shall we say now? If the artel can't help you, you can help the artel, and the weaker folk will fare the better."
"Very well!—for sake of the weaker folk, and if we want your help we will let you know," which was quite satisfactory to the burly president-treasurer, who pocketed their donations and went away smiling like a carthorse who has just filched a carrot from a neighbour's cart.
"You hope to get away, Paul Ivanuitch?" said Palma, after he was gone.
"I may. It's as well to learn what one can, anyway. The surveillance is very nominal in the provinces from all that I can learn. In fact, they do say that some of the officials wink at evasions, and almost urge you to go."
"How then?"
"They draw the prisoner's allowances all the same, you see, while the prisoner lives as he can in the woods and costs them nothing. They count on the final difficulty of getting across the last fence into the home pasture. I should think his idea of steering far north is probably the best."
"If you get away will you promise me something, Paul Ivanuitch?" said Palma earnestly.
"Surely! I will do anything I can."
"Will you seek out my wife, and tell her—tell her not to grieve for me? I know just how she will take it. She will be blaming herself for having drawn me into it all. And there is no need. Tell her I rejoice in what we were able to do together, and I regret nothing except that we were parted for a time. Tell her to leave Russia and get to London. There is money waiting for her there—at Rothschilds'. I foresaw what might come and provided for it. Tell her to have a letter always at the Poste Restante for me, saying where I shall find her. I will come to her as soon as I can—ay, though I have to come red-handed. You don't need to tell her that; simply say that I will come. You will tell her all that, Paul Ivanuitch?"
"I will tell her all that—if I get away, and if I find her, Serge Petrovitch."
"You can escape if you will, Paul Ivanuitch," he said, laying his hand eagerly on Pavlof's arm. "Promise me that you will escape and tell her all this."
"I would do much to be of service to Hope Ivanovna, Serge Petrovitch. I will do what I can."
"Ay!—I remember," said Palma, looking at him thoughtfully. "Well, I can trust you, Paul Ivanuitch. I would trust you with my life."
"You may trust me, Serge Petrovitch. A man has but one life and he can put it to no higher use than the service of his friends."
And thereafter Palma suffered more cheerfully, in the thought that sooner or later Hope Ivanovna would hear news of him and the assurances of his endless love and devotion.
Perhaps the most visibly cheerful member of all their company was old Gregory of the barrow. In his former estate he was lowest of the low, and of no account. Here, through the fewness of his wants and the consequent equanimity and cheerfulness of his bearing, he walked head above his fellows, and became a dispenser of largesse.
He persisted in keeping as near to Pavlof and Palma as he could manage it, and wherever he might start in the line, before long the squeak of his barrow and the clink of his chains were heard just behind them.
"Hi! You're in a mighty hurry to get there, Old Squeaky Barrow," some would growl, as he pushed past them.
"All right! All right!" he would chirp, with a face like a winter apple. "I like to be in good company, and these two barins are for me."
His barrow was rarely empty, and its most frequent occupant was the small girl with the slate-blue cat to whom he had given rides in the prison yard at Tomsk. She flatly refused to ride in a teléga among strange people. She toddled along holding by her grim-faced father's hand, and clasping her cat with the other arm until she was tired, and then climbed up into Old Gregory's barrow or her father's arms, and prattled away to one or other as merrily as though life were one long picnic, and convicts and prisons were not.
And when "Little Darling," as old Gregory called her, was walking on her own account, or being carried by her father, the squeaky barrow was still never empty. Now it held some other tired child clasping a bunch of flowers; now the impedimenta of some weary mother. And as to largesse, he was for ever giving away bits of brick tea to the women who had children, and scraps of food to the children themselves.
"It doesn't take much to keep me alive," he chirped, when they wondered at him. "You see, when one hasn't been used to much one doesn't need it. Yes! Yes! Yes! Take it, take it! I don't want it."
Palma, too new a convert to altruism to lose himself entirely in thought of others, and unbuoyed by that which had by this time taken full possession of Pavlof, found the going tedious, and more than once broke out into furious commination of the bureaucrats who sat like a curse on the land. Small annoyances fretted him even among the greater ones. More than once he turned and vented his feelings on old Gregory's squeaky wheel, while the old man gaped on him, with open mouth and wondering eyes.
"To the devil with you and your wheel!" growled Palma.
"Ey, ey!" gasped old Gregory.
"Stop that infernal squeaking or keep away, man. It's enough to drive one crazy."
"Ey, ey!" said old Gregory. "I know when I'm in good company, barin!"
"Find it elsewhere, then."
"He's a good old soul and you'll soon get used to it," said Pavlof. "Let us be thankful we're not pushing barrows ourselves, nor even wearing chains."
One afternoon, the long wavering line, articulated here and there with the dancing gleam of a Cossack bayonet, was straggling through a forest of larches, beneath which thick undergrowths of laurel and rhododendron rose on each side in solid green walls. The ground was very broken, great rocks draped with lichens and moss pushed through here and there and shouldered the road where they would. At no one moment could more than a section of the crawling procession be seen. The day had been hot, the stage a long one, every one was longing wearily for the rest-house.
Pavlof and Palma stumbled along in dogged silence. The only sound beyond the shuffling tread of tired feet and the dull clink of fetters, was the shrill cheep-cheep of old Gregory's barrow, and the grind of its wheel on bare patches of rock. Little Dushenka was riding in the barrow, but even she was silent and sat nodding her curly head to the jolt of her carriage in unison with the slate-blue cat's, both just sufficiently awake to keep their places and no more.
And whenever old Gregory looked at them he smiled through his weariness and murmured, "Ey, ey! The little wife is enjoying herself." And the little wife said "Yes! Yes! Yes!" and little Dushenka and the slate-blue cat nodded, "Thank you, little father! Thank you!"
And suddenly there was a stir behind, a gasp of amazement from the prisoners, and in a moment pandemonium—hurtling curses from the guards and the quick reports of their Berdans. One foaming Cossack sprang in front of the gaping line and threatened its broken ranks with rifle and bayonet. The rest dashed into the undergrowth, and their rifles rang through the forest aisles as through the vaulted heights of a cathedral.
A dozen of the prisoners had made a bolt for freedom, by prearrangement evidently and undoubtedly by signal, for they had gone as one man. The rest, innocent even of intention, after gazing for a time with open mouths, sat down in the road, glad of the halt, though possibly in cases regretful at its cost.
And presently the Cossacks returned dragging their spoils with them—three dead men and four more bleeding from bullet wounds, three bashed almost into pulp with rifle stocks. Whether any had escaped they could not be sure till the roll was called.
The captain of the convoy stormed at his men, and they flung back his curses from the corners of their eyes. The prisoners looked downcastly on the bruised, the broken, and the dead, spread before them as an object lesson for future would-be absconders.
Little Dushenka stared with the rest, her blue eyes wide with wonder. And suddenly she scrambled down from the barrow, and ran to one of the bodies, and knelt by it with her cat still in her arms.
"Little father!" she cried, in her fluty treble. "Have the bad men hurt you? Oh, what have they done? Won't you speak to me, little father?" and the little round face bent anxiously over the grim dead one, which yet had been dear to her.
Pavlof went to her where she knelt peering into the dead man's face.
"Stand back there!" stormed the captain, in the middle of his furious harangue to his men.
But there was a stricken little heart in question, and Pavlof paid no heed to him. He drew the child up into his arms and soothed her with gentle words.
"Dushenka, little Dushenka! Your father has gone to be with your mother."
"Has he, then?—truly?"
"Truly, dear. He has gone home."
"Back to Russia?"
"To a much better place than even Russia."
"Is it possible? Then why did he not take us with him?"
"You will go too in God's good time if you are a good girl."
"And Katinka too?" hugging her little cat close to make it quite clear that it must be both or none.
"We must see how Katinka behaves."
"What are they doing with my papasha?"
"They are putting him into one of the carts. But that is only the outside of him. He himself has gone to your mother."
"Ah—truly?" and the little maid, lost in wonder, settled herself in the arms of the tall man with the deep, kind eyes.
"Give her to me, barin," said old Gregory, as the captain came striding up with menace in his face. "She won't feel so heavy in the barrow. I will be her papasha and take care of her now."
"You are not my papasha, but you shall take care of us, Gregory Gregorievitch, because you are good and we like your barrow."
"Now then, which of you were mixed up in this matter?" demanded the captain, of the quivering line.
"You"—to Pavlof. "Whose child is that?"
"Her father lies there," said Pavlof, pointing after the dead man.
"And you knew him?"
"Only through seeing him with the child."
"You had an artel? Of course you had an artel. Who was president?"
Pavlof shook his head. "You know artel rules, Excellency. He who speaks dies."
"I'll artel you all. He who doesn't speak shall—— Stay!" and his keen eyes ran rapidly over the crowding faces. "Yes! I remember. You!" pointing a finger like a bayonet at Ignatz, the burly ex-convict. "Step out here! I have seen you busy among them. Are you president?"
"I was, Excellency. But this was quite against my notions. I urged them against it. It was foolishness."
"I'll president you! Knock off all those chains," he cried to his men, "and bring them here. It is right the president should wear the chains of office."
They prized open the fetters of the dead and wounded, and hammered them on to the burly one's arms and legs, forty-five pounds weight in addition to the five he carried of right—or wrong. Then, chuckling at his Solomon-wisdom, the captain set the convoy in motion, with the decuple-burdened Ignatz as leader, and watched his heavy progression with a connoisseur tilt of the head and a smile of malevolent gratification.
And the abjects, quickened and saddened by this clap of sudden death, plodded gloomily behind the creaking carts. For the carts had become elevated to the dignity of biers, and the motley crowd had become even more of a funeral procession than it was before.
CHAPTER VII
HOW THE SEEDS BORE FRUIT AND FLOWER
The sleeping kameras of the half-way house were quieter than usual that night. So far as absence of noise was concerned it was almost possible to sleep. The gloom of the day's happenings hung heavy on them all. Perhaps the future also cast its shadow.
Ignatz, the chain-bearer, lay on the ground near Pavlof and Palma, and whenever he moved he rattled like an armoury.
The short remainder of the afternoon's march had told on him, strong as he was. They had seen the veins swell out in his neck and forehead till they looked like bursting. And his eyes, when he stumbled into the stockade, were dim and shot with blood; partly no doubt with the weight of his burden, for where five-pound fetters are a burden fifty-pound are torture; and more, perhaps, from the injustice of it, for he had spoken truly when he said the rest had gone against his advice.
"Can you stand it, my friend?" asked Pavlof.
"No, barin."
"They will see that and take them off."
"Yes, barin."
"If you can get through to-morrow, the next day is rest day, and then we change convoys, and the new man may not be a devil."
"Yes, barin."
They did what they could to ease his burdened state, fed him, gave him drink, packed his fetters with rags torn from their clothing; but not much was possible to them, and Ignatz lay brooding all night like a spirit in chains.
Next day his torment waxed with the sun. He plodded doggedly on, and Pavlof, from behind, watched the martyrdom keenly, and his trained eye told him that the man could not stand it much longer. It was painful to watch, even at a distance, the sufferer's vain attempts at easement; the chained hands knitted behind the swollen neck; clasped on the crown of his half-shaven head with the dangling chains about his ears; the heavy head thrown back to balance the weight in front; the gradual bowing of the broad shoulders; the blind, stumbling step.
"He can't stand much more of that," said Pavlof. "He'll either break down or break out."
But Ignatz staggered through the heat of the morning journey, and fell flat only when they reached the eating-place.
Pavlof tried to get him to eat, but the blood-shot eyes looked dumbly at him out of the black-flushed face and he only shook his head.
The captain strolled round smoking a cigarette. He came to have a look at his work.
"Well, Mr. President? How goes it now? Stand up when I speak to you!" he ordered, and Ignatz staggered to his feet and stood swaying.
"You won't be quite so forward in forming an artel another time, my man, or if you do you'll keep it in order, eh?"
But Ignatz had nothing to say.
"When you reach the étape to-night you shall shed one chain, and I shall advise the captain of the next convoy to take off one each night till you get back to normal. By that time you will have learned your lesson maybe."
He flicked the ash from his cigarette and turned to go.
Then, instantly, with the spring of a tiger, without a sound save the indrawing of a great breath, and a clank and a dull thud, Ignatz was on him. With his bunched fetters he felled him like an ox, sat on him, and, before the others had found their wits, was demolishing the captain's last semblance to humanity with smashing blows from twenty-five pounds of rusty iron chain.
It was done in a moment. The captain was probably dead before he reached the ground, for the great knots of chain came down on the back of his head with the force of a sledge-hammer But Ignatz sat on his body pounding away still as if his own life depended on it.
All who saw had leaped up with cries of horror. It was the sergeant of the convoy who took the only way to end the matter. He snatched a rifle from a gaping Cossack, took careful aim, and fired. Ignatz, in the act of pounding, rolled over on his victim and the episode was closed. The sergeant took charge of the convoy, the bodies were placed in one of the telégas, and the procession moved on.
The future is ever the outcome of the past, as every deed is the fruition of thought, conscious or otherwise. These dire happenings brought the travellers face to face, in the most abrupt and uncompromising fashion, with the great elemental facts of life and death; and close behind them, and interwoven with them, were the more complex perceptions of life in death and death in life. Their hearts were bruised and tender, their understandings were quickened to the mighty meanings of things.
They spoke less now, as they tramped side by side, but thought the more, and the thoughts of both were continually of the woman they both loved, and of her desolation in her loneliness.
Pavlof heard his friend murmur her name in his uneasy sleep. Once, as they tramped in silence, Palma broke out in unconscious utterance of his thoughts, "God! if I only knew that all was well with her!" and never knew that he had spoken. And Paul Pavlof, as he heard it, smiled to himself as he smiled of a night in the darkness of the kamera.
There come a day at last when they passed between two great brick pillars, set up one on each side of the road.
"What are these?" asked Palma.
"We were in Tomsk. Now we are in Yeniseisk."
"So!" and they went in silence and knew that the time drew near when they must part—one for the comparative freedom of the provinces, the other for the terrible tramp of two thousand rough miles to Kara, a dreary journey with a drearier ending.
"You will do that which I asked of you, Paul Ivanuitch?" said Palma presently. "You will escape, and seek out my wife, and tell her all that is in my heart for her? ... My God! My God! what a pitiful wreck I have made of her life, and I had hoped so much for her!"
"I will do what I can, Serge Petrovitch."
And that night, as they lay side by side in the kamera, Pavlof said to him, "Are you sleeping, Serge Petrovitch?"
"I cannot sleep."
"Then draw your coat above your head and put it close to mine. So! Now, listen! To-morrow we reach Achinsk, and there we part company. You made me promise to do something for you, for the sake of Hope Ivanovna. Will you promise now to do something for me?"
"Surely, Paul Ivanuitch! I will do anything you want."
"Swear it!"
"I swear it—if it is anything within my power."
"It is within your power and you are pledged. Listen! When they call the roll in Achinsk you will answer to my name and I to yours. You will become Paul Pavlof. I shall become Serge Palma."
"Good God, Paul Ivanuitch!—What——?"
"You will go to the provinces in place of me."
"But——"
"You will wait till the cuckoo sings in the spring——"
"But—Paul——"
"And then you will walk away and strike north for the land of the Ostiaks"—he felt Palma's body shaking as with an ague. "You will be very cautious, for Hope Ivanovna's sake. And when you find her you will tell her that Paul Pavlof did his best to live up to her teaching."
"It is your life you are giving for me, Paul Ivanuitch," said Palma hoarsely.
"For you and for Hope Ivanovna. But perhaps not. I shall try east from Kara if the chance offers."
Palma was silent for a time, the magnitude of the sacrifice struggling within him against the sudden mighty hope that Pavlof's offer had kindled.
"It is too much, Pavlof," he said brokenly at last.
"You promised."
"Ay, but—this——"
"You must think of your wife—and the child."
"Ah God—the child!" and he strove against it no more.
Nine months later, "Serge Palma," lean and wiry, and worn with the road, but cheerful of face, and with that in his deep-set eyes which drew men's liking, trudged through the deep spring snows into Kara and found his place among the forlorn and downtrodden.
And in Yeniseisk, "Paul Pavlof," big and bluff, fair-haired and blue-eyed, listened eagerly for the song of the cuckoo which should tell him it was time to be up and going.
And this great sacrifice and its acceptance were tribute to the love two men bore to one most gracious woman.
CHAPTER VIII
HOW HOPE WRESTLED WITH SATAN AND GOT HER OWN WAY
"It is well with the child, Marya," said Hope Palma, as she rose from her knees by the bedside and kissed the dead face of her three-months old baby.
But Marya Ostronaya wept inconsolably.
"Dear heart!—Matushka! It is no good to weep—he is safely home. He will never know prison cell and chains. He was dearer to me than my life, but I thank God He has taken Him to Himself. And I do not think he suffered, Masha."
"No, he did not suffer. See the smiling face of him," wailed old Marya. "It is the face of an angel from heaven."
"In heaven, Masha, dear, and that is still better. He will have found my father and mother. Ah, how they will welcome him! He is safe. And I am glad."
Her face was thinner than it used to be, chastened to a rarer delicacy by the troubles of the past six months, and the great dark-blue eyes seemed larger by reason of the soft touch of sorrow below them. But the brave true spirit shone through undimmed, seemed even to shine the brighter for the fining and chiselling of its tenement.
Since the day she had, at Serge's earnest persuasion, gone away into the country for the sake of the expected one, troubles had pursued her like a pack of winter wolves. That hasty and, in her condition, recklessly dangerous visit to the city flung her on the rack concerning him. All their efforts after news of Palma beat themselves to pieces against the adamantine silence of the authorities, like spray against a rock.
He had been arrested and carried off by the police—simply that, and nothing more. He had disappeared from human ken, as many another had done before him.
His estate was placed in the hands of an official administrator, pending developments, and his wife was left to get along as best she could. And all this at the time when, of all times in her life, a woman needs every help and consideration that outward circumstance may procure for her.
That the little one, when it came, was weakly, was not to be wondered at. The wonder was that either it or its mother survived so dreadful a time. For three months the tiny life flickered gently in their tender hands and then went quietly out.
It was with a new and deeper reverence that Hope recalled the memory of her own mother, who had suffered in her time as she was suffering now.
She had her father's intrepid spirit, however. Bend she must before the repeated blows, but break she would not, and as soon as her baby was buried she turned everything she possessed into money, and went up to St. Petersburg to prosecute inquiries after her husband.
Wherever he might be she was determined to follow him, if it were humanly possible to do so. It was for love of her that he had been drawn into the net, and her place was by his side. And, moreover, the motives which had in the first place induced her to join her life to his had grown into a close and true affection. He had loved her very warmly, and his nature had deepened and developed by contact with hers. Her marriage had turned out a success, in spite of the fact that she entered into it more from love of duty than for love of the man she married.
The search after news of him was heart-breaking work, however. Post sent her to Pillar, Pillar to Post; an endless round of supercilious insolences and cold evasions. Her patient endurance of the harassments of her quest might have worked upon a flint, but the hearts of the bureaucrats were unmoved.
Her beauty, however, wrought for her where her anxious pleading and visible distress failed. The results of all her inquiries focussed at last upon one, Colonel Zazarin, of the Ministry of the Interior, as the man who could help her in her search if he would. Her patient pertinacity in time procured her an interview with him.
Colonel Zazarin was a man of commanding bodily presence, but his face was predatory, his eyes and mouth lairs of low gods. Hope recoiled from him with the instinct of a dove from a hawk, of a lamb from a wolf, of a pure woman from a foul man.
After a second prolonged stare at her face, the Colonel's haughty rigour abated somewhat. He questioned her at length, promised to look the matter up, and told her to return in three days. When she went back he had more questions to put and told her to call again, and again, and yet again.
She knew he was amusing himself with her, and that he could probably have put his hand on the necessary papers in five minutes at any time, had he chosen to do so. Questions always, endless questions, she might have been a criminal and he the examining magistrate by the number and irrelevancy of his questions, and she found it more and more difficult to retain her equanimity under it all.
Then, to her great annoyance, he took to calling upon her at her apartments, to ask still further questions, and to convey trifling scraps of information which only kept her hungry for more. With all her might she strove to keep her anger down, and to close the eyes and ears of her understanding to the meaning of the Colonel's distasteful attentions.
But it was desperately hard work. It grew beyond her bearing, and at last one day she broke out stormily, "Colonel Zazarin, if you have anything to tell me, tell it me, and let me be gone. If not, pray say so, and I will try elsewhere," and the Colonel gazed at her admiringly.
"Quite so, quite so," he said. "But you are so impetuous"—she had been in St. Petersburg a month, and knew just as much of what she wanted to know most, as on the day she arrived, and of some things much that she would have been glad not to know. "A matter such as this needs time, my dear young lady, time and much careful inquiry. It would not do to make any mistake. Is it your intention to follow your husband—that is, in case we should find that he has been sent away?"
"Certainly I shall follow him. Where should a wife be but with her husband? Where has he been sent?"
"In certain cases condemnation cancels all obligations of the kind," said the Colonel smoothly.
"What do you mean?"
"Supposing, for example, your husband should have been sent to Siberia, the law sets you free. Your husband has no further claim upon you."
"The law, the law!" she fired. "Your law! I hold myself under something higher. If you will not help me——"
"Well, well! I have not said I would not help you——"
"Where have they sent him?"
"——To the Kara mines," said the Colonel at last.
She had feared it and had been prepared for it. Yet Kara was better than the grave. But then she had never been to Kara.
"I shall follow him."
"Have you money?"
"The law—your law has seized my money," she said bitterly. "I must go as I can."
"Will you permit me to——"
"No, no," and she started up in haste. No woman could mistake what that meant.
"Well, well! But you are so impetuous. If you will go you will have to get a permit to travel with a convoy."
"That I have a right to—even by your law."
"Certainly."
"Then I will avail myself of it. To whom shall I apply?"
"I will see to it for you, if you will not permit me to——"
"Where can I get it? How soon can I start?"
"I will find out. Perhaps you can make it convenient to call at my office to-morrow. It is a terrible journey. You have no idea what it means. Months of travel, and at the very worst time of year. Wait, at all events, till the spring."
"I would start this moment if I could. I shall know no rest till I get there."
"Undoubtedly," said the Colonel, who knew a great deal more about it than she did.
By one pretext and another he managed to retard the granting of the permits for nearly two months. Then there were delays upon the road, and a weary wait at Tiumen till the Irtish opened. So that May was well advanced before she found herself at last sitting inside the wire cage of the great convict barge which carried herself and five hundred more into exile, and watched the yellow banks drift by into the past like the lives and hopes they were leaving behind them.
CHAPTER IX
HOW HOPE SHORTENED THE LONG ROAD
In spite of her high courage and fervent spirit, Hope Palma never recalled without a shudder the horrors of that long journey down the Volga, over the Urals, down the Irtish and up the Ob, to Tomsk, and thence along the great Siberian road to Irkutsk. The physical trials of the road, the defective supply of coarse food, the bone-bruising bumping of the springless telégas, the promiscuous herding at night in the filthy, unventilated étapes—the convict stage-houses—where the tortured children cried incessantly till they slept and sometimes never woke, and the equally tortured mothers tended them in stony despair—these things burnt themselves into her very soul, and would have broken a less courageous spirit.
Old Marya had had to be left behind. The paternal Government provided transport, such as it was, for convicts' wives and children, but Marya had no such claim, and with unflinching kindliness Hope had sent her home to her own people. And the loss of her faithful and whole-hearted sympathy was to her almost as the loss of a part of herself.
What money she had she hoarded with miserly care, for there was no knowing for what high service it might avail at the end of her journey. Every rouble might be a step towards Serge's enlargement, and she treasured her pieces as the woman of the Gospel.
And yet, at times, the miseries of those about her prevailed. The little ones crept into her heart and her purse, and precious coins were dispensed for slabs of brick tea and cakes, for any possible sweetening of the bitterness which came home to her so closely. With her sweet, firm face and glowing eyes, and the tender pity of a guardian spirit, she lived and moved among them like an angel of mercy, and smoothed their little passages—to exile or the stars, as the case might be—as well as she was able, and in such gentle ministries found relief from her own griefs and fears.
She talked with the women as they walked, learned their pitiful stories, and gave them much wise counsel which they accepted for the sake of her brick tea, and remembered long after she and her tea had passed out of their lives. She argued with them day by day, and scolded them by night, for their many and obtrusively undeniable sins of omission and commission. She saved many a tiny life by her care and insistence. That, indeed, was a doubtful benefit to the little ones themselves, but she could not stand by and see them die. And, by her own words and her own high courage, she strengthened into hopefulness many a heart that was weary to death of its load and embittered with the bearing of it.
But each day now brought brighter weather, and to that extent softened the asperities of the road. The birches and poplars fluttered trembling welcomes as they passed, as though they feared the law might take official cognizance of more; the children began to stray outside the slow-moving line to gather bunches of forget-me-nots and wild roses, and Hope's sore heart was gladdened and her eyes filled as the shy little tokens of their remembrance were tendered her.
The aspect of the country surprised her greatly. She had thought of Siberia as a mighty desert of snow and ice and desolate wastes. But here were great sweeps of growing corn, and pastures and farmsteadings. There were rolling rivers and rustling forests. They walked in clouds of dust and the children picked flowers by the wayside.
But this was midsummer, and Siberia in summer and Siberia in winter are as different as heaven and hell.
CHAPTER X
HOW THREE PASSED WITHOUT MEETING
"On the Volga there is a Cliff," but the bureaucrats, for reasons of their own, object to all mention of it. For it recalls a glorious time, long since, when the bureaucrats went under, and for a space a free man ruled a free race—even in Russia. And the would-be-frees still sing of that time long since—but they sing of it below their breath, for the ears of the bureaucrats are long and their hands are heavy.
There are cliffs also on the Yenisei, blue and fair, across the mile-wide stretch of swift-flowing water; and these cliffs, too, are known to free men, and known still better to those who are not free.
In a cleft of the hills on the eastern bank, three free men lay in the sun and watched the slow, methodic passage of the pendulum ferry as it swung to and fro from bank to bank. It was loaded to the brim each time it left the further bank and it went back empty. But the crowd on this side grew but slowly, and the packed mass on the other side seemed undiminished by the stolid bites of the big black boat.
"Da!" said one of the men in the cleft. "There is no end to them."
"It is the first party of the season. They have been piling up," said one of the others.
"Women, too, and children," said the third, and thought of one woman and a possible child.
"Always women and children," said the first, "and it is a hard road they travel."
And on the crowded boat, as it swung down stream to the length of its tether, one woman looked across at the blue hills and thought that somewhere away behind them lay the man she had come so far to find, and she hoped that it was well with him.
When that load was landed there came a delay in the passage, and those who had already crossed stood up and crowded the bank to see why the boat was coming over empty. But as it drew in they saw that this journey was devoted entirely to the convenience of one passenger. He lay back in a three-horsed tarantas and seemed to eye the motley crowd on the bank with a more than usually keen and searching scrutiny.
At sight of him a hasty word flew round among the Cossack guards, and they threw up their rifles to the salute. And Hope Palma, who had been watching with the rest, sat down suddenly on the bare earth behind them, and her face was pinched and clouded as she recognised her old tormentor, Colonel Zazarin.
"Nu!" said a woman to one of the soldiers, as the carriage sped away in a cloud of dust. "The great man is in a hurry. Who is he, little father?"
"It is the new Governor of Kara. The last one is dead of the fever."
"Tell us, little father," said one of the three in the cleft, as they lay on their stomachs, chin in hand, and watched the traffic below, "why should one man have the power to do all this? After all, he is only a man like you or me. Strip him and set him alongside me and he is neither more nor less than a man. And yet——"
"The trouble is that if you kill him there is always another to step into his place," growled the other.
"And he, again, is only a man like the first."
"You cannot alter facts by killing men," said the third quietly, very intent upon the scene below—"unless you kill enough," he added meditatively, "as they did in France. It is a system, and he is at the head. He is probably no worse than any other man——"
"That is not enough. When all the rest are in his hand he ought to be more than that. He ought to be the strongest and the best."
"Originally—far back—I suppose he was. But it is the system that is wrong——"
"And we others suffer."
"Yes, we others suffer, and will suffer till the system is altered. And that will never be done from the top, and can only be done from the bottom by the shedding of much blood. In France it ran in rivers."
"Tell us how they did it in France, little father!"
So, lying with his chin in his hand, in the slant beams of the sun, Serge Palma told them how France had once shaken off the thrall and risen red and free. And below them the ferry swung slowly to and fro, and the crowd on this side grew greater and greater, till at last the other bank was bare, and the re-formed convoy crept slowly away along the road like a crippled snake. And Hope Palma's spirits were troubled at the thought that, in seeking the man she wished to find, she must encounter again a man whom she had every reason to fear and mistrust.
When the convoy was out of sight, and the eastern hills had relapsed into their natural solitude, the three men in the cleft stole away along the river to find some friendly fisherman who would put them across and keep his mouth shut. And so Serge Palma, known as Pavlof, six weeks escaped from Minusinsk, toiled west in quest of his wife, as she was toiling east in quest of him.
A strange chance, truly, that brought these two within touch of one another and yet withheld the meeting. But life is threaded with just such narrow dividing lines. And sometimes we cross them, and with a single step the whole complexion of a life is changed for good or ill. But more often we press on all unconscious of that which lies so close. We escape disaster by a hair's breadth and miss fortune by an inch. And, though man be never so much a free agent, it is comforting still to believe that there is a higher hand which holds the twisted threads and guides the shuttle in its flight.
The journey had been a terribly trying one, and in spite of her high spirit and her ministry of help, Hope had felt her bodily strength waning daily.
At Irkutsk, with still a thousand miles between her and Kara, and that the roughest part of the road, she broke down and lay there for a month with a recurrence of her fever, born, no doubt, of the deadly atmosphere of the rest-houses.
When at last she was able to take the road again, the summer was past. The bracing freshness of the autumn air was very sweet after the weariness of the sick-room. She was glad to be among her fellows in affliction again. She pressed on with new hope and unabated courage.
CHAPTER XI
HOW HOPE FOUND LESS THAN SHE EXPECTED AND MORE
It was with a much reduced party that Hope travelled from Irkutsk on the final journey to Kara—almost the Ultima Thule of exiledom, but not quite. There are exiles more dreadful in their hopeless exclusion even than dreaded Kara. With such, fortunately, we have nothing to do. The mere dry facts of life in the Yakut uluses twist the very heart-strings with pity and indignation.
Wintry weather set in before they reached the Shilka. Navigation was over for the season, and the river ice was not yet solid enough for travel. So they took the rough mountain road on foot, men and women—no children now, for which Hope was most devoutly thankful—and tramped doggedly on through the pines and firs, with the keen winds whipping their faces, and the snow wreaths laying pitfalls for their stumbling feet wherever a mountain stream had overflowed the path.
It was a terrible experience, but even the Kara Road has an end, and it was with a heart beating furiously with many emotions that Hope Palma saw at last the scattered buildings of Ust Kara lying in the white basin of the hills.
Would she find Serge alive? And if alive, in what state of misery? Anything might have happened in the eighteen months since he was taken from her.
Would Colonel Zazarin recognise her?
Would he dare to continue his attentions, to the annoyance of her husband and herself? His presence there would quadruple all her fears and troubles and all Serge's difficulties and hardships, and yet any resentment of his insidious friendliness might lead to disaster. She judged him utterly unscrupulous, and they were as absolutely in his hands, for life or death, as rats in a trap. It was surely a malign fate that threw him across her path again.
But she was growing hardened to the blows of misfortune. Hardened?—hardened to the blows maybe, but softened by the sore heart-bruising, and wishful only to salve her wounds with the balm and oil of service, and ready to leave the rest in higher hands. For all her thinking in all these years had only brought her at last to this—that life, with all its crying wrongs and unattainable rights, is past any human understanding, and that he or she who has looked upon these things, and known the agony of them, must take one of two courses—either abandon hope altogether, or rest it implicitly beyond the power of man.
It was the following day before they reached the Lower Diggings and trooped wearily into the great stockade of the prison, where the Governor and several officials stood awaiting them.
The roll was called over, the convicts detailed to their various homes of unrest, and Colonel Zazarin approached the group of forlorn women who had accompanied their husbands or come to join them.
One by one they were dealt with and told where to go, and Hope's heart came near to suffocating her as he approached her last of all.
"So you dared this terrible journey after all, Madame," he said courteously enough. "He should surely be a good husband for whom a wife undertakes so much." She bowed silently, and he continued—
"It was not out of any discourtesy that I left you to the last, but that I might have the pleasure of conducting you myself. If you will follow me I will take you to your husband," and she followed him in silence.
He led her out of the big prison gate and down the valley.
"You will find him better circumstanced than he might have been," said the Colonel. "And, curiously enough"—with a short laugh—"I feel under some obligation to him for having paved the way to my appointment here. They had a bad outbreak of typhus in the spring. The prisoners died like flies; the doctor died. Your husband offered to take his place"—at which Hope wondered much—"and under the circumstances he was allowed to do so"—at which she wondered still more—"though it was directly against the rules. Under his care the Governor died"—she did not feel much surprise at that.—"I do not say he would not have died in any case. Still your husband failed to keep him alive, and they pitched on me as his successor. I hesitated, I must confess. Then I decided to accept the appointment and—— Ah, here we are Madame!"
They stood before a tiny house built of rough logs, with dim little windows, and long icicles hanging from the eaves. The Colonel opened the door, without knocking, and walked in.
"The nest is empty," he said. "We will wait until the bird returns. I did not tell him you were coming, because one never knows what may happen, and to raise false hopes is a cruelty. It is not a palace," he said, with a shrug, "but it is better than a kamera inside the stockade."
"It will be home," said Hope quietly, lest continued silence should provoke his resentment.
"There is no accounting for tastes," he said, with another shrug and a depreciatory glance round, at the crude brick stove with its little core of heat in a bank of white ashes, the bare floor, the rude table, the couple of comfortless chairs. It was all harsh and cheerless, and might well have excited the distaste of even a more hardened campaigner than Colonel Zazarin.
"I prefer it to St. Petersburg," said Hope, and Colonel Zazarin shrugged his absolute incomprehension of such a state of mind.
"You could have been much more comfortable there, if you had chosen, my dear. I would have——"
"Oh, don't! Pray don't! I beg of you!" And the Colonel shrugged again and kicked some snow off his boot against the stove. Perhaps the pitiful appeal of her strained white face was not entirely without its effect, upon even him.
But, as her eyes tuned themselves by degrees to the obscurity, her heart began to flutter furiously again. It was in her throat. It was choking her.
For, on the rough wooden shelf alongside the stove, stood a woman's workbasket, with some unmistakable woman's work thrown carelessly on top of it. Before the stove lay a pair of woman's slippers; from a hook hung a woman's gown; and to Hope's quickened eye there started out from the gloom—like accumulating evidences at a trial—a dozen other almost infinitesimal signs of female occupancy of the hut.
Her usually placid brows were knitted as she glanced quickly at Colonel Zazarin, in the belief that there was some mistake. He was watching her keenly, and she looked away lest he should see what was in her.
"You must give me credit for doing my best to dissuade you from coming, Madame Palma," he said, with a gleam in the dark eyes. "It is a lonely life, you know, and a loose one. Convicts have no rights, you see. They are outside the law, though at times they make laws unto themselves. And the Free Command here has its own peculiar notions, and adapts itself to its own peculiar circumstances."
Then the door opened, and a woman came in and stood staring at them. She threw off her hood and sheepskin coat, and revealed a shapely figure and a fine frank face, full at the moment of a great curiosity.
"Ah, Madame Roskova, I have brought you a visitor. This is Madame Palma come out to join her husband," said Zazarin.
"You are very welcome," said the woman, with courteously veiled amazement, and stretched a hearty hand to the astonished Hope. "The Doctor is up at the prison, but he should be in shortly. This will be a very great surprise for him. Can I offer your Excellency a cup of brick tea? Madame is quite ready for one, I can see," and she began to bustle about the preparation of it, poking up the fire and reaching down the samovar.
His Excellency made a grimace, and continued to watch Hope Palma. She had submitted dizzily to Madame Roskova's handshake. She watched her movements through a mist—of the brain as well as of the eyes.
What did it mean? Why was this woman here in Serge's house—in her place? Her face looked good. Her manner betrayed no confusion of guilt. What did it mean?
"Da!" said Madame Roskova, after vainly trying to light a small lamp. "I forgot to fill it," and proceeded to haul out a tin of oil to remedy her neglect. "Ach!"—as the tin proved empty—"I will run across and——"
Before she had got on her hood, however, there was a sound of heavy boots kicking against the doorpost to get rid of the snow, the door opened, and Paul Pavlof came in.
In the dim light he could not at first see who his visitors were, but he expressed no surprise at sight of the official uniform. Surprise visits from the vigilant watchdogs at any time of night or day were a matter of course.
Then, recognising the Governor, he took off his cap, and said, "Ah, Excellency, we are honoured."
"I have brought you a visitor, Palma," said the Colonel.
"A visitor, Excellency?"
"Your wife."
"My—God!"—and he caught her just in time to anticipate the Colonel.
For, at sight of his entrance, Hope had sprung to her feet. And at sound of his voice she gave a little cry, and tottered two steps towards him, and fell.
"Poor dear!" said Madame Roskova, full of sympathy. "The journey has been too much for her," and would have helped him.
"Permit me, Excellency," said Pavlof, through his teeth, and carried her against his pounding heart into the tiny bedroom, boarded off one end of the cottage, and Madame hurried in after them.
"Can I be of any assistance?" asked the Governor, when he came back.
"None, I thank your Excellency. She will come round presently. Madame is attending her. No doubt the journey has been a trying one."
"And your patients?"
"The cold is helping us. Captain Sokolof has taken the turn. We shall be rid of it in a month. But it will be as bad as ever in the spring unless——"
"All your representations have gone forward, but there is no reply yet."
"Your Excellency would be amply justified in authorising the work. It is a case of many lives or deaths."
"You know what they are," said the Colonel, with a shrug. "We are a long way off and the nearer things get the first claim. However, we will see, if no word comes. One is not absolutely required to commit suicide because those others are too busy with their own concerns. I trust your wife will not suffer from her journey."
He went out and Pavlof hurried back into the inner room.
Madame Roskova had opened Hope's cloak and dress and was bathing her forehead with cold water.
"She will be all right in a minute or two," she said. "Go and make the tea. It will do her more good than anything."
"Go you and make the tea, Anna Vassilievna, and I will see to her," said Paul, and Madame gave him her place and left them.
Presently Hope's eyes fluttered, opened, and she lay gazing starkly up in the glimmer of light that came from the fire in the outer room. Pavlof waited quietly till her eyes turned questioningly on him.
"Where is he?" she asked in a whisper.
"He is on his way back home by this time, I hope," said Paul softly.
"On his way home? Serge on his way home—and I here? Oh, my God!" and she sat up and gazed at him in a very stupor of amazement. "How? Why? What does it all mean?" jerked from her trembling lips.