TEMPTATION.
Paul left the Governor’s house with a light step. The sun shone for
him again; the surge of the sea was sweet music for his ears; the
green heights of the distant shores were a joy to his eyes.
“To-night,” he said to himself, “to-night she will leave Alexander,
to-night she will eat white bread and see the sky again.” But more
often the thought was, “To-night she will be near me, she will think
of me, she will know that I have spoken to the General.”
He walked swiftly, holding the paper as he would have held a jewel, in
the hollow of his hand. It was his purpose to seek out old Sergius and
to make sure that the hardly-gained order was enacted without delay.
This purpose carried him through the heart of the town toward the
arsenal. He had a cheery word and a nod for such of his friends as he
passed; but he would stand to speak to none, and when he met Bonzo
face to face in the great square he begrudged the minutes of delay.
“Sacré bleu! you walk like the devil!” said Bonzo, taking from his
mouth a cigar as long as a pistol. “Are you going back to Alexander,
my son?”
Paul laughed, and displayed the paper triumphantly.
“There is no more Alexander,” he said with fervour; “she is to be at
Fort Katherine to-night. I have the General’s order. He remembers that
she is an Englishwoman, and he is wise.”
Bonzo opened his cunning eyes.
“Oh,” he said, “it is that, then. I thought there was something. So
Nikolai is touched. Ho, ho! She has been on her knees to him. Now he
will go on his knees to her. Quelle farce!”
Paul wondered if this man had ever known a moment’s love, or sympathy
for a fellow-creature; but he was careful to conceal his thoughts and
to overlook the jest.
“The General is afraid of the English tongues,” he said simply. “I
think that he is right to be afraid. She is no criminal, my Colonel,
and we are not a savage people. She will be just as safe at Fort
Katherine, and we shall not suffer because she eats white bread.”
Bonzo laughed.
“You should all wear petticoats!” he exclaimed boorishly; “you should
go to a nunnery and mope and mew together. How shall such fellows be
soldiers?”
He turned on his heel, for he remembered he was speaking of his chief;
but as he resumed his walk he cried with a careful assumption of
indifference:
“Mind you don’t run away with her yourself, Captain Paul; she is not
in Fort Katherine yet!”
Paul stood still and choked the word which rose to his lips. He was
about to resent with heat the suggestion that he could be guilty of
this dishonour; but Bonzo had already turned the corner of the square,
and the younger man stood still to repeat the words of temptation
again and again.
“She is not in Fort Katherine yet!”
Paul laughed and walked on. At a distance of ten paces he stopped
again, and began to read the paper he had treasured so earnestly.
“The Englishwoman to be removed at sunset, and to be delivered into
the custody of Rothmister Siebenski at Fort Katherine.
“Stefanovitch.
“At Kronstadt, April 19, 1895.”
Paul read the paper three times. He turned it over and over, as though
seeking for some name which should be written upon it.
“So,” he said to himself, “he has forgotten to write the name of
Sergius upon it. He who delivers this paper may carry the Englishwoman
from Fort Alexander. The Captain will not be there at sunset; he will
be in the café or at the barracks. The Sergeant would not question my
authority, since I come straight from the great house, and here is the
General’s order. Holy God! what an idea!”
He continued his walk, but at a more rapid pace. The suggestion which
Bonzo had thrown out jestingly began to haunt him. He heard a voice
whispering: “It is possible. She would suffer no more. She would lie
in your arms. It would be your business to see that she did not betray
Kronstadt. She would be your wife--the friend of Russia.”
He laughed aloud as men will at the first swift advance of some
triumphant temptation which they have the wish but not the strength to
resist. His hurried walk carried him from the square to the café,
where he had drunk with Bonzo on that night of Marian’s arrest. He
entered and called for a glass of absinthe. Destiny, now busy with
him, contrived that he should take a seat wherefrom he could look over
the harbour and spy out his own little launch lying a biscuit toss
from the quay. She had been a present to him from his kinsman, Prince
Tolma. They said that there was no faster yacht in all the Baltic; men
pointed to her as the work of the great Yarrow, and wagered that she
would outsteam the fleetest cruiser then lying in the roads. Paul
spent most of his money upon this little ship. She was his toy, his
plaything. He loved to steam in her to the islands of the Finnish
shore, and there to camp for days at the zenith of the summer. He had
a better knowledge of the Gulf than many a master mariner. His servant
Reuben, the young Englishman sent out by the Yarrow people to tend the
launch, was devoted to him heart and soul. “He would be the very man
for this,” Paul said to himself; “he would remember that she is an
Englishwoman.” And so he drank off his absinthe and went out into the
sunshine again.
Kronstadt had begun to sweat with her day’s work then. The great
hammers clanged unceasingly in the arsenal; the bellow of steam
whistles echoed across the water; the cries of seamen, their oaths,
their songs, filled the nearer harbour. Squadrons passed weary from
long drill; the courtyards of the barracks were full of troops
hungering for dinner; launches steamed swiftly between the outlying
forts and the mainland. Paul remembered that this tumult of the active
life was very dear to him. He loved Kronstadt as a child loves its
home. He looked across the sea to the granite walls and to the guns
shining as silver in the blaze of sunlight, and he asked himself how
it would be if he were cut off from this iron home for ever, branded
as a traitor, spoken of with curses, the mock of those who had
honoured him.
“Bah!” he said, “that day will never come. I shall deliver the paper
to Sergius; he will take a file of men and conduct the prisoner to
Fort Katherine. I must do my duty. I am a servant of the Czar. I will
forget that she has loved me.”
But as he walked the voice of the tempter spake again.
“Reuben is down there upon the quay. He would have steam up in your
yacht by sunset. You could find a few drunken artillery men to act as
your file. It would be a long time before they would discover your
flight. She would be a wife to you--the woman you love.”
He cursed the tempter, but called to his man Reuben, and was answered.