THE MEETING
They had imprisoned many of the women in one of the stables behind the
great yard of the station. So numerous were the captives that the common
cells had been full and overflowing long ago. Zaniloff, charged with the
command to restore order in the city at any cost, cared not a straw what
the world without might say of him. The rifle, the bayonet, the
revolver, the whip--here were fine tools and proved. Let but a breath of
suspicion frost the burnish of a reputation and he would have that man
or woman at the bar, though arrest might cost a hundred lives. Thus it
came about that those within the gates were a heterogeneous multitude to
which all classes had contributed. The milliner's assistant crouched
side by side with the Countess, though she still feared to touch her
robe. There were professors' daughters and dockers' wives, ladies from
the avenue and ladies from the hovels. And just as in the great arena
beyond the walls, so here Pride was the staff of the well-born,
Prejudice of the weak.
Amid this trembling company, in the second of the stables, the gloom
shrouding her from suspicious observation, none noticing so humble a
creature, Alban found Lois and made himself known to her. The amiable
civilian with his two or three hundred words of English seemed as
guileless as a child when he announced Master Zaniloff's message and
dwelt upon his honorable master's beneficence.
"You are to see this lady, sir, and to tell her that if she is honest
with us we shall do our best to clear her of the charge. She knows what
that will mean to name the others to us and then for herself the
liberty. That is his excellency my master's decision."
"Much obliged to him," said Alban, dryly, and perhaps it was as well
that Herr Amiability did not catch the tone of it.
"We have much prisoner," the good man went on, "much prisoner and not so
much prison. That is as you say a perplexity. But it will be better;
later in the time after. Here is the girl, this is the place."
He bent his head to enter the stable and Alban followed him, silently
for very fear of his own excitement. There was so little light in the
place that he could scarcely distinguish anything at first, nothing,
indeed, but great beds of straw and black figures huddled upon them. By
and by these took shape and became figures of women of all ages and
types. Many, he perceived, were Jewesses, dark as night and as
mysterious. Their clothes were poor, their attitude courageous and
quiet. A Circassian, whose hair was the very color of the straw with
which it mingled, stood out in contrast with the others. She had lately
been flogged and the clothes, torn from her bleeding shoulders, had not
been replaced. Near by, the wife of a professor at the University, young
and distinguished and but yesterday welcomed everywhere, sat dumb in
misery, her eyes wide open, her thoughts upon the child she had left.
Not among these did Alban find Lois, but in the second of the great
stalls still waiting its complement of prisoners. He wondered that he
found her at all, so dark was this place; but a sure instinct led him to
her and he stopped before he had even seen her face.
"Lois dear, I am sure it is Lois."
She started up from the straw, straining wild eyes in the shadows.
Awakened from her sleep when they arrested her, she wore the dress which
she had carried to her haven from the school, quite plain and pretty,
with linen collars and cuffs in the old-fashioned style. Her hair had
been loosely plaited and was bound about her like a cord. She rested
upon the palms of her hands turned down to the pavement. There was but
one other woman near her, and she appeared to be asleep. When she heard
Alban's voice, she cried out almost as though they had struck her with
the whip.
"Why do you come here?" she asked him wildly. "Alban, dear, whatever
made you come?"
[Illustration: "Why do you come here?" she asked him wildly.]
He stepped forward and kneeling down in the straw he pressed his cold
lips to hers and held them there for many minutes.
"Did you not wish me to come, Lois?"
She shivered, her big eyes were casting quick glances everywhere, they
rested at last upon the woman who seemed to sleep almost at her feet.
"They will hear every word we say, Alb, dear. That woman is listening,
she is a spy."
"I am glad of it, she can go and give her master a message from me.
Tell me, Lois, do not be afraid to speak. You knew nothing of Count
Zamoyski's death. Say that you knew nothing."
She cowered and would not answer him. A dreadful fear came upon Alban.
He began to tremble and could not keep his hands still upon her
shoulders.
"Good God, Lois, why do you not speak to me? I must know the truth, you
didn't kill him."
She shrank back, laughing horribly. The pent-up excitements of the night
had broken her nerve at last. For an instant he feared almost for her
reason.
"Lois, Lois dear, Lois, listen to me; I have come to help you. I can
help you. Lois, will you not hear me patiently?"
He caught her to him as he spoke and pressed her burning forehead to his
lips. So she lay for a little while, rocked in his arms as a child that
would be comforted. A single ray of sunshine filtered through a slit in
the wall above, dwelt for a moment upon her white face and showed him
all the pity of it.
"Lois, why should you speak like this because I come to you? Is it so
difficult to tell the truth?"
"Did they tell you to ask me that, Alban?"
"It was forced from me, Lois. I don't believe it. I would as soon
believe it of myself. But don't you see that we must answer them? They
are saying it, and we must answer them."
She struggled to be free, half resenting the manner of his question, but
in her heart admitting its necessity.
"I knew nothing of it," she said simply, "you may tell them that, Alban.
If they offered me all the riches in the world, I could not say more. I
don't know who did it, dear, and I'd never tell them if I did."
A little cry escaped his lips and he caught her close in his arms again.
It was not to say that he had believed the darker story at which
imagination, in a cowardly mood, might hint, but this plain denial, from
the lips of Lois who had never told him a lie, came as a very message of
their salvation.
"You have made me very happy, Lois," he said, "now I can talk to them as
they deserve. Of course, I shall get you out of here. Mr. Gessner will
help me to do so. We have the whip hand of him all said and done, for
don't you see, that if you don't tell your people, I shall, and that
will be the end of it. Of course, it won't come to that. I know how he
will act, and what they will do when the time arrives. Perhaps they will
bundle us both out of Russia, Lois, thankful to see the back of us."
She shook her head, looking up to him with a wild face.
"I would not go, Alb dear. Not while my father is a prisoner. Who is
there to work for him, if I don't? No, my dear, I must not think of it.
I have my duty to do whatever comes. But you, it is different for you,
Alban, you would be right to go."
He answered her hotly with a boyish phrase, conventional but true.
"You would make a coward of me, Lois," he said, "just a coward like the
others. But I am not going to let you. You left me once before; I have
never forgotten that. You went to Russia, and forgot that we had ever
been friends. Was that very kind, was it your true self that did so?
I'll never believe, unless you say so now."
She sat a little apart from him, regarding him wistfully as though she
wondered greatly at his accusation.
"You went to live in another world, dear, and so did I. My father made
me promise that I would not try to see you for six months, and I kept my
word. That was better for you and better for me. If money had changed
you, and money does change most of us, you would have been happier for
my silence. I have told you about the letters, and that's God's truth.
If I had not been ashamed, I couldn't have kept my word, for I loved
you, dear, and I shall always love you. When my father sent you to Mr.
Gessner's house, I think he wished to find out if his good opinion of
you was right or not. He said that you were going to carry a sword into
Wonderland and kill some of the giants. If you came back to us, you were
to marry me, but if you forgot us, then he would never believe in any
man again. There's the truth for you, my dear, I tell you because it all
means nothing to me now. I could not go to London and leave my father in
prison here, and they will never release him, Alban, they will never do
it as things are, for they are more frightened of him than of any man in
Russia. When I go away from here, it will be to Petersburg to try and
see my father. There's no one else in all the world to help him, and I
shall go there and try to see him. If they will let me stay with him,
that will be something, dear. You can ask them that for me; when Mr.
Gessner writes, you can beg it of the Ministry in Mr. Gessner's name."
"Ask them to send you to prison, Lois?"
"To send me to my father, dear."
Alban sat very silent, almost ashamed for himself and his own desires.
The stupendous sacrifice of which she spoke so lightly revealed to him a
page in the story of human sympathy which he had often read and as often
derided. Here in the prison cell he stood face to face with human love
as Wonderland knew nothing of it. Supreme above all other desires of her
life, this desire to save her father, to share his sorrows, to stand by
him to the end, prevailed. The riches of the world could not purchase a
devotion as precious, or any fine philosophy belittle it. He knew that
she would go to Petersburg because Paul Boriskoff, her father, had need
of her. This was her answer to his selfish complaints during the years
of their exile.
"And what am I to do if they give you the permission, Lois?"
"To go back to London and marry Anna Gessner. Won't you do that, Alban?"
"You know that I shall never do so."
"There was a time when you would not have said that, my dear."
He was greatly troubled, for the accusation was very just. The
impossibility of making the whole truth plain to her had stared him in
the face since the moment of her pathetic confession when he met her on
the barge. Impossible to say to her, "I had an ideal and pursued it,
looking to the right and the left for the figure of the vision and
suffering it to escape me all the time." This he could not tell her or
even hint at. The lie cried for a hearing, and the lie was detestable to
him.
"There was a time, yes, Lois," he said, turning his face from her, "I am
ashamed to remember it now, since you have spoken. If you love me, you
would understand what all the wonders of Mr. Gessner's house meant to a
poor devil, brought up as I had been. It was another world with strange
people everywhere. I thought they were more than human and found them
just like the rest of us. Oh, that's the truth of it, and I know it now.
Our preachers are always calling upon the rich to do fine things for the
poor, but the rich man is deaf as often as not, because some little puny
thing in their own lives is dinning in their ears and will shut out all
other sounds. I know that it must be so. The man who has millions
doesn't think about humanity at all. He wages war upon trifles, his
money-books are his library, he has blinded himself by reading them and
lost his outlook upon the world. I thought it would all be so different,
and then somebody touches me upon the shoulder and I look up and see
that my vision is no vision at all, and that the true heart of it is my
own all the time. Can you understand that, Lois, is it hidden from you
also?"
"It is not hidden, Alban, it is just as I said it would be."
"And you did not love me less because of it?"
"I should never have loved you less, whatever you had done."
"I shall remind you of that when we are in England together."
"That will never be, Alban dear, unless my father is free."
She repeated it again and again. Her manner of speaking had now become
that of one who understood that this was a last farewell.
"You cannot help us," she said, "why should you suffer because we must?
In England there's a great future before you as Mr. Gessner's adopted
son. I shall never hear of it, but I shall be proud because I know the
world will talk about you. That will be something to take with me, dear,
something they can never rob me of, whatever happens. When you remember
who Lois was, say that she is thinking of you in Russia far away. They
cannot separate us, dear Alban, while we love."
He had no word to answer this and could but harp again upon all the
promise of his fine resolution. When the matter-of-fact official came to
find him, Lois was close in his embrace and there were tears of regret
in his eyes.