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.
"We did it for the best, as we thought, Hope Ivanovna. We met in the
prison at Tomsk and changed names so that he might get back to you
the sooner."
"You changed names?" she echoed vaguely.
"Serge took my place at Minusinsk for simple exile. I came on to
Kara instead of him. He was to get away in the spring and get back
to you as soon as he could. Now listen to me, Hope Ivanovna, for all
our lives are at stake. Here they know me only as Serge Palma. You
must suffer that or Serge will suffer."
"They know you only as Serge Palma?" she gasped, repeating his words
as a child repeats a lesson it does not understand.
"Yes. But you must speak softly, Hope Ivanovna. Here I am Serge
Palma," he said, slowly and distinctly, "and if by any mischance they
discover the truth it will mean disaster to Serge, and to you, and to
me. Do you understand?"
"Oh, I do not know! I do not know. You must give me time, Paul."
"Serge," he said, in an insistent whisper. "You must call me Serge.
Try to remember, Hope Ivanovna."
Here Madame Roskova came in with a steaming cup of tea, and the lamp
replenished with neighbourly oil, and words of homely cheer such as
she would have used to a sick child.
"Da! That is better now! Drink this, my dear, and then come and
thaw yourself before the stove. Nothing like a cup of hot tea when
you're feeling down. And you have got the cold of five thousand
miles in your bones, I expect. And now I must run across again to
Marya Verskaïa as I promised----"
"Don't go, Madame! Pray don't go!" cried Hope, almost hysterically.
"Da, then! Marya will never forgive me if I don't, my dear," laughed
Madame. "And by the time I get back you two will have found
yourselves and we can talk things over comfortably."
She still had on her cloak and hood from her late quest after oil,
and now with a hearty "God with you!" she was gone.
"Come out to the stove, Hope Ivanovna," said Paul gently. "You are
frozen as Madame Roskova says."
"My heart is frozen, I think, and my brain too," she said, as she
dropped forlornly into the chair he placed for her, and sat gazing
into the stove.
And presently, as she began to recover from the first numbing shock,
and her wits began to travel, she said, like the child repeating its
half-forgotten lesson----
"Here you are Serge Palma! And I----! My God! My God! What shall
I do?" as it all came upon her in a heap, and she sprang up wildly as
though to go.
"You must trust me, Hope Ivanovna," said Pavlof gently, and took and
held one of the cold little hands.
"Yes, yes! But----"
"Listen again, Hope Ivanovna! If you will trust me all will be well.
Here I am Serge Palma, and you----"
"And I----?" as he hesitated, knowing so well the fine temper of her
spirit.
"For a time," he jerked hurriedly, "till we hear that Serge is clear,
you will have to pass to the world as my wife. There is nothing else
for it."
"My wife!"--the very words roused tumult in his heart and sent the
hot blood spinning through his veins at a gallop. Ah, if it could
have been so! What a heaven the bare little hut would have become!
He would have asked nothing else of God.
But the words had a widely, wildly different effect on Hope.
"Pass--as--your--wife!" and she sprang up, incarnate scorn,
magnificent, blazing, scarifying--she who lay so brokenly in her
chair but a moment before.
"So this is the meaning of it all!"--and, if it had been, he had
surely withered where he stood, scarce daring to raise his eyes to
hers, lest she should see in them that which must be in them for her
alone of all women in the world until he died.
"It is for this you have planned and schemed and tricked? For this!
Shame on you, Paul Pavlof!--to dupe a woman who would have trusted
you with her life--and more!"
"That is hard to hear, Hope Ivanovna," he said quietly. "No such
thought has ever entered my head. Still less the thought that I
should ever have to tell you so. We thought only of you in the
matter, but--it has miscarried. You see, we did not calculate on
your coming out here."
"Then you should have done," she said angrily. "Did you expect me to
sit down and fold my hands and weep? How little you know of
women!"--with most withering scorn.
"It is true.... We thought to restore your happiness, and I was
ready to give my life for it--and we have only digged a pit for you."
"I must go back," she said, the brief fire burning out already, and
she turned mazily towards the door. "I will go back to Serge."
"Listen to me, Hope Ivanovna," he said, venturing a firm hand on her
arm, which still shook from the storm. "I would hold my life as
nothing if it could accomplish your wishes. But it cannot. It is
impossible for you to go back at present. Yours was the last convoy
of the year. There are no convoys back and the Shilka is closed.
For your own sake, if not for Serge's, you must stop here for the
present."
"As your wife!" spurted the volcano once more.
"Nominally as my wife--for your own sake and Serge's. For me--as the
most sacred trust God ever imposed upon a man. You must trust me,
Hope Ivanovna. You will have to trust me. There was a time when you
would have trusted me without my having to plead for it--and I at all
events have not changed."
She made an angry gesture with her hand.
"If it should become known that I am not Serge Palma, and that Serge
is at large in the provinces, his chances of escape will be gone."
"And you would suffer!" scorned the final spark.
"Only in this way can I protect you from insult here--and worse.
Kara is no place for a woman to live alone. Our guards are scum of
the earth and have right of entry to all our houses at any time of
day or night."
The thought of Colonel Zazarin and her utter helplessness overwhelmed
her and she dropped back into her chair.
"What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?" she moaned, and turned
instinctively for refuge from the certain evil to the proffered help
whose good faith she had never had reason to doubt before. "Paul!
Paul! tell me what I must do."
He was on his knees by her side in an instant, and taking her hand he
said gently, "Only trust me, Hope Ivanovna. Trust me as you used to
do and not a hair of your head shall suffer while life is left me."
"Oh, I trust you! I trust you! But it is past thinking of----"
"It will come all right if you will trust me, Hope Ivanovna. Serge
is to send me word as soon as he is free, and then we can arrange for
you to join him. Until then you shall be as safe here as if--as
if"--Ah God! as safe as if she were indeed his wife! And he knew it
and she knew it--"as if Serge himself was here to take care of you,"
was what he managed to say.
She sat for a while gazing into the stove with pinched brow, and then
with bewildering suddenness she flamed out again.
"And this--this Madame Roskova, who lives with you?"
But Paul was past the point of upsetting by any unexpected exhibition
of the vagaries of the feminine mind. Woman had always been to him
as a dainty sealed book. The high hopes he had once had of a loving
study of the sacred leaves had been ruthlessly nipped in the bud. He
was to learn in harder ways.
"Anna Vassilievna is the wife of Dr. Feodor Roskof, whom we all
know," he answered gravely. "They were working among the poor in
Petersburg, as we were in Odessa. They sent him to Yakutsk and her
here. Her one desire in life is to join him, but they will not
permit it, and it is perhaps just as well, for it would kill her if
she went."
"But why is she here--with you?"
"She is here because it is not safe for any woman to live alone in
Kara, nor for only women to live together. Madame Roskova lived
alone with Marya Verskaïa in a little house up the valley. But the
Cossacks entered their room night after night, on any pretext or
none, so Dmitri Polokof took Marya into his house and Anna
Vassilievna came here. She is a good woman and a true wife. She
occupies that room. I sleep here before the stove."
"You will tell her how matters stand with us?"
"I think not," he said thoughtfully. "No!-- If ever it comes out it
will be better for her that she has not known."
"But--Paul!"--in a tone of pained remonstrance at his obtuseness.
"Serge."
And then, with a discreet preliminary knock, and a hitherto unknown
difficulty in finding the latch, the door opened and Madame Roskova
came in.
"Da, now! That is better!" she said, beaming benevolently upon them.
"Madame understands things, and is no longer jealous of me. Oh yes,
you were, my dear! I could see it in your eyes. And quite right
too. I would have felt just the same myself. But there was no
reason, I assure you, my dear. He is a fine man is your man, and
easier to get on with than most. But my own dear man still stands
first with me, and will do as long as I live. Now it's all right. I
have arranged matters with Marya and Dmitri. They can make room for
me with a little squeezing, so I'll just take with me what I need
now, and the rest can wait till to-morrow," and she bustled away
towards the inner room.
"What does she mean? You are not going, Madame?" cried Hope, with
the eyes of a startled deer.
"Why, child, you don't surely think I know no better than that? Da!
It is like your kind heart, but it's ill coming in between man and
wife. I've not been married twenty years without learning one or two
little things, and that's one of them. Why, it'll be quite like a
new honeymoon for you. No, indeed! How would I like it myself, and
don't I wish I had the chance! Ah God! Yes!"
"Don't go, Madame! Pray don't go!" cried Hope desperately. "There
is no need whatever for you to go."
"And you been parted from him for nearly two years!" said Madame
reprovingly. "Why, my dear, you would hate me like poison before
morning."
"Oh, I won't! I won't! I promise you I won't! I will love you all
the more if you will stop, dear Madame. I beg of you to stop."
"Nu, then! I do not understand!" said Madame, looking curiously from
Hope to Pavlof and back again. "It is a cold wife, surely. Have you
been bad to her, or is she not thawed yet? What she needs is your
arms round her again, Serge Petrovitch. She has forgotten the feel
of it and is a little bit afraid of you. I will take myself off as
quick as I can, and then you can have her all to yourself," and she
went on into the inner room, murmuring, "No, no! I know better than
that," and they heard her still rumbling to herself like a
good-humoured volcano, as she gathered her things together.
Hope's eyes, as she turned on Pavlof, were the eyes of the hunted doe
at bay.
"She must stop," she said, in a fierce whisper. "If you don't make
her stop I will go out and sleep in the snow, whatever comes of it."
And, seeing by his face that he was at his wits' end, her own came to
his relief, "Tell her I am ill and need her help."
"Anna Vassilievna," he said, going to the door of the inner room.
"My wife begs you to stop--for a night or two at all events. She is
worn and broken with the journey. She would be grateful for your
company and assistance."
"And you? You say so too?" said Madame, coming to the door and
looking out on them in unqualified surprise. "Well, well! You are a
strange pair, surely! But if you ask it, Serge Petrovitch, I may not
say you nay, after all you have done for me. But I must run across
again and tell Marya and Dmitri, and assuredly they will think me
crazy--and you too, no less."
And presently she was back again, and set about getting supper ready,
but each time her eyes lighted on Hope's downcast face and languid
figure, she shook her head and said to herself, "Da! I do not
understand! I hope she hasn't got the fever."
And Paul Pavlof fell asleep on his mat before the stove just before
daylight, pondering vaguely the strange workings of the feminine
heart and mind, slightly oppressed at thought of this complication of
burdens thrown upon him by Hope's unexpected arrival, yet with a warm
inner glow at his heart, like the core of heat in the white ashes of
the stove, at thought of her there under his roof. Hope! Hope
Ivanovna! Ah!--Hope Palma!
But in spite of it all, or because of it all, when he did fall asleep
he slept soundly, for in the short space of an hour he had passed
through livelier emotions than Kara usually knows in a year.