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.
The one--that Palma, if recaptured, might be sent to the Kara
mines--a more than likely possibility. For though the officials, for
the benefit of their own pockets, might wink at escapes, recapture
entailed severest punishment.
The other--that definite news might reach them, from Serge himself of
his escape, or through some of the constantly arriving prisoners that
he was dead.
In his capacity of doctor, pending the arrival of a successor to the
late official, Paul had access to the prisons, and he questioned all
newcomers cautiously for news. But in this the utmost care was
necessary, for his position was utterly irregular and in flagrant
contravention of all official rules. It was dependent on the caprice
of a man who had every reason to regard him as an obstacle in his
path. It was only the general fear of a further outbreak of the
terrible prison scourge, which permitted him to exercise his
profession at all. For typhus is no respecter of uniforms, and when
once it got loose there was no knowing where it would stop.
Colonel Zazarin dropped in occasionally to see if Madame Palma was
sickening of life at Kara; the gendarmes called at least once every
day, as they did at the house of every out-prisoner, to see that they
were still there; and of friendlier visitors she had no lack.
But at times Hope Palma's heart grew so weary of this shadowed
waiting, that she came to feel, at last, that news of any kind, even
the worst, would be better than no news at all.