AT THE COMING OF THE LIGHT.
Marian Best opened her eyes dreamily, expecting to hear the boom of
the morning gun ringing in her ears. She saw that it must be six
o’clock of the day--time for her to think of “the Dolls” again, and of
all the uncoloured drudgery of her life. She had travelled far, in her
sleep, from the ice-bound fortress and the melancholy, prison-like
abode of Nikolai Stefanovitch; had sojourned awhile in the lanes and
orchards of her own Devonshire, there to gather flowers of her
affection and to kiss the lips of the child she loved. But when she
awoke, with a red glare of light playing in her eyes and the grip of
the frost to benumb her limbs, she came quickly from the garden of her
dreams and steeled herself to face the solitude and the gloom of her
island home. And she knew that the child, whose lips she had touched
in her sleep, was himself sleeping more than a thousand miles away,
and that between them lay the barrier of city and of sea--and of a
woman’s poverty.
She was surprised at the first that her room was not in darkness, and
that she did not hear the voice of old Ivan asking if “Missa” would
“take a tea”; but anon the rustle of her silk skirt and the shape of
the great stove looming up in the ruddy light brought her to a
remembrance of the time and place, and she knew that she had dozed
before her fire at the hour of the General’s dinner.
That was her moment of respite; the moment when she could shut herself
in her room and be mistress of her thoughts and enjoy that dominion of
self which no eye may share. When first she came to Kronstadt to teach
the General’s daughters those scraps of English which pass for culture
in Russia, she had welcomed this hour as the ultimate possibility of
her day; an hour when she could write to little Dick, her brother, and
remember the home she had left--the unforgotten voices and the harvest
time of love. As the months passed and the terrible winter fell upon
the land, and even the friendly sea below her windows was bound in the
chains of the frost, she began almost to be afraid of herself and of
the solitude. It may be that the work to which she had set her hand
could not fail to react upon her mind, and so to war against her
nerves that the creak of a door or the fall of a foot upon the stair
would bring her to piteous trembling and dread. The secret she guarded
so well was a heavy burden. Grim spectres followed it, haunting her,
or whispering words that seemed to still her heart and to bring cries
of fear to her lips. There were moments when a realisation of all she
had done, and would do, drove her to such depths of terror that her
reason seemed to be leaving her. At other moments she could call
herself a spy and laugh at the word. The living death of the mines,
the horrid sights and sounds of Russian prisons, were no more than
fairy tales to such a mind. She was only a woman, she said, and who
would harm her? She would tell them it was a jest, and they must
believe her. That pretty assumption of a child-like innocence, which
had befriended her often when she had cajoled Captain Paul and
obtained from him those secrets of the citadel for which her friends
in London were willing to pay so great a price, that innocence should
befriend her to the end. And the end was near now. She carried bound
about her own body, a very part of herself, as it were, the precious
sketches and maps and diaries for which she had laboured so earnestly.
She foresaw the day when the shadow of the living death would lie upon
her path no more; when an English home would harbour her and English
hands would shield her from peril, and the child she loved would be
ever near her. For his sake she would go on, for his sake self should
be forgotten with that new and sweetening impulse which the winter
months had brought to her. She dare not tell herself that such an
impulse was love for the man whose country she had betrayed and whose
honour she had played with.
Many of these thoughts came to her in the moment of waking, when she
sat in her great chair and watched the fantastic shapes of light and
shadow; or listened to the moan and crash of the ice now mastered by
the warmth of later February and losing dominion over the sea. Her
room lay in the north wing of the Governor’s house, and was built out
upon the ramparts, so that when she pulled aside her curtain she
beheld a mighty moving field of shining floes, here decked with
hummocks which had the glitter of jewels, there broken into tiny bergs
and floating islands of snow; or again washed by the foaming waves
which cast the waters up in fountains of spray and displayed a hundred
changing lights as the moonbeams fell upon them. Grim and forbidding,
above this holocaust of the driven ice, stood the forts and batteries
of the northern channel. Marian remembered the long summer days she
had spent with Captain Paul in those steel-walled chambers of the
secrets; how she had paced the ramparts for a measurement of them; how
greedily she had learnt the lessons in gunnery; how in the silence of
this very room she had written down the answers to the questions her
English friends asked her, that thereby she might purchase liberty for
herself and for the child. To-night these memories were full of an
unexplained sadness. She recalled carnival--three weeks had passed
since that folly--and the words of love spoken to her then. A yearning
for sympathy, a sense of weakness, a consciousness that one man at
least in Kronstadt could bring blood to her cheeks and light to her
eyes, contributed to her sense of solitude. She found herself standing
in the darkness and telling herself that she was utterly alone. Then
fear--fear she knew not of what--swept upon her like a freshet; there
came to her the horrid thought that she was watched; that unseen eyes
followed her even in the privacy of her room; that a man stood close
to her and had but to stretch out his hand to touch her own. The
terror of such imaginings served to freeze her very blood in her
veins. She staggered to the wall and switched on the light. But the
lamp showed her an empty room--she was alone with her fears, to laugh
at them, to forget them as she had forgotten them a hundred times
since she had come to Kronstadt.
The friendly light helped her quickly to this task of forgetfulness.
The hand which pressed upon her beating heart dropped to her side. She
ran to the door and looked out into the great corridor of the north
wing. The silence of night lay upon it. Gladly she turned back to her
own cosy room, to the warmth of the stove and the welcome privacy. A
moment at the glass, a moment before a photograph of little Dick set
boldly upon an easel, a touch of the dress here, a touch of the hair
there, a pose of the dainty head, a silent question, “Will he be there
to-night?” satisfied the personal instinct. She knew that they awaited
her in the drawing-room; “the Dolls” would sit, one on either side of
her, just now and hold her hand. The General himself would leer at her
from the depths of an arm-chair and ask her to sing “Bid me to lofe.”
It might be that Captain Paul would join them if his duties were done;
and that he would linger on when Nikolai Stefanovitch had gone to his
library, and would remind her, not by word, but by look and unspoken
appeal and the silent tributes of homage, of the night of her promise,
of the night when he had touched her forehead with his lips and she
had not refused him.
The thought brought a deeper colour to her cheeks. She moved about her
room with the quick, nervous gesture of suppressed excitement. A man,
observing her, would have said that a well-trained mind governed every
act; he would have wondered, at the same time, that so fair a face
should have led its possessor so rarely to the mirror.
Marian Best knew little of the weapons with which nature had armed
her. The thick brown hair straggled in picturesque disorder upon her
forehead and her neck; rebelling curls showed themselves at every
movement; her dress was “thrown on,” but it fitted her to perfection;
she had no rings upon her fingers, but the white hands were the
prettier for the need.
Eight o’clock was being struck by the church bells of the town when at
last Marian left her room to join “the Dolls” in the salon of the
house. She had quite forgotten her strange fears of an hour ago, and
laughed at them when she trod the soft carpets of the corridor and
peeped into the chambers which opened off it. No one moved then in the
north wing. The rooms about her were tenantless and in darkness. When
she passed the library where old Nikolai Stefanovitch had set up his
holy of holies, she wondered to see the door of it open and a flicker
of red light upon the low-pitched ceiling. Once only since she had
been in the fortress had she dared to enter that room and to pry into
its secrets. She knew well that the book-shelves, upon which she
beheld the glare of the dancing light, were garners of maps and
documents which, could she possess them, would be a fortune to her;
she knew that here were locked away treasures for which spies had laid
down their lives unavailingly.
Never did she pass that study without some little tremor of heart and
mind. Now it would be the devil of rashness saying, “Enter and see”;
or, again, the spirit of prudence telling her that therein lay the
living death. To-night she heard the first of the voices, and prudence
was no more her friend. The desire to have done with it all, to flee
Russia and the land of bondage, possessed her to the exclusion of all
else. She longed for the sound of little Dick’s voice in the English
lanes she loved. There came to her out of the darkness a message which
said, “Search, and all that you want shall be found there.” She
refused to listen to it, and answered in her heart that she would
betray no more the country of the man who loved her. And this drove
her from the door, but not many paces, for presently she stood quite
still to listen for any sounds, and, hearing none, she gave herself up
to the less subtle arguments. She told herself that when the summer
came she would be in England, that the price of her work would have
been paid by the British Government, that she would build a home to be
the haven of her love.
So was she held, chained by hesitation to the precincts of the
corridor. The silence tempted her the more; she was sure that no man
in the house then thought of the north wing--that all were busy in the
kitchens below. A strong and conquering impulse sent her, at last,
with muted feet, back to her own room. She picked up a volume of
stories and deftly inserted a sheet of notepaper and a pencil between
the leaves. Quick and daring, and armed with all her courage, she ran
back to the General’s cabinet and entered it. She stood within the
holy of holies, and the shadow of the living death was all about her.
It was a spacious room, ill furnished and bare, save for the many
volumes which gave ornament to the walls. A ponderous writing-table
had the place of honour, and this was littered with bulky documents
and official books decorative in their disorder. Marian could see,
even by the feeble light cast from the open door of the stove, that
the General had been occupied very recently with public affairs,
for a big blue paper was open upon his blotting-pad and his pen had
rolled from the inkstand and smirched the paper. A heavy volume,
bound in red, lay cheek by jowl with the letter he had been writing;
and a wine-glass, half emptied, spoke of an occupation interrupted
only by the gong for dinner. That occupation would be resumed when
the clock struck nine. Marian remembered that it had just gone
eight, and with the remembrance there came upon her another moment
of apprehension--such a moment as she had known when she awoke from
her sleep in the arm-chair. A panic, overwhelming and irresistible,
seized upon her. She thought again that unseen eyes watched her in
the darkness. She ran from the room and stood panting in the corridor.
But the panic surrendered swiftly--as these fits were wont to do. She
laughed at herself when a minute had passed, and took heart of her new
resolution. She said that if anyone found her in the room she must be
ready with many an excuse--the excuse that the door of the stove was
open, that a cinder had fallen. When she entered the cabinet for the
second time, a great hope nerved her to resolution. It was the hope
that among the General’s maps there would be one of Fort Peter. She
lacked this alone for the completion of her work. She said that she
must have light; and growing bolder at the impulse, she found the
switch, and a blaze of soft rays illumined the apartment.
The brightness of the light awed her. She shielded her eyes with both
her hands, and stood irresolute for the third time. Not until many
minutes had passed was she able to read the gilt lettering of the
books upon the shelves. When resolution came at last generously, she
took a map down and unfolded it. It was the map of the southern
channel wherein Fort Peter stands. She saw the name joyfully, and
opened her book that she might have pencil and paper. But before she
could use them a hand was laid upon her shoulder; and when she sprang
up with a cry unsuppressed upon her lips, she found herself face to
face with Paul Zassulic.
All the little comedy of excuse she had planned so well failed in that
supreme moment to defend her. When she had faced her lover for a
moment, she knew that she had no word with which to answer him; and
all her courage deserting her, she stood white and trembling to hear
his accusation.