UPON THE NAMELESS ISLAND.
It was the afternoon of the day, and the _Esmeralda_ lay at anchor
under the lee of one of the rocky islets which abound upon the
southern shores of Finland. They had warped her to the sheer rock, so
that she lay snug and hidden and sheltered from the wind-driven tide
which raced between the island and its neighbour. A loom of haze above
her funnel alone spoke of life within her. Her crew had gone ashore to
stretch their legs, and were to be discovered upon the beach in all
those attitudes of repose which seamen court. The sun fell upon the
barren rock and upon their faces, but did not wake them. They had kept
the long vigil, and this was their hour of rest.
The day had been one of tempest since the dawn: and though it was now
late in the afternoon and the rain had ceased to fall, there was a
thunder of surf upon the outer islands of the archipelago and the open
water frothed white with foam. But the creek into which they had
moored the _Esmeralda_ was sheltered both from the wind and seas.
Sheer walls of granite towered above the decks of the yacht; a girdle
of tiny islets, stretching far out to the Gulf or back to the distant
shore of Finland, was her defence against the breakers. She rode
proudly at her moorings as though conscious of the victory which the
night had given her.
This haven had been made at the dawn of the day by men who knew every
channel and landmark in the Gulf. They had welcomed it, for therein
they could think of food and sleep, and forget that the Russian was at
their heels. Though the truce might prove but a truce of hours, it was
a gift of God to those whose eyes ached with watching, whose limbs
were cold with wet, whose tongues were parched with thirst. The gale
which sprang up with the coming of the light was a befriending gale to
them. They said that no ship of war would venture near them while the
surf thundered, and the mist of spray made clouds above the land, and
the west wind screamed in the Gulf. And so they slept, and the
sunshine of the later day was a balm of light to their eyes, and
welcome warmth suffused bodies that had been stiff and cramped with
the bitter cold of the Baltic night.
Though Paul had gone ashore with his crew, it was not to sleep. The
few hours of rest he had snatched in the earlier hours of the day
sufficed for him. He, perhaps, of all the little company, understood
most truly the malevolence of Fate in casting him back to the shelter
of the island at an hour when he should have been in the great
sea-road of the Baltic. The Land of the West, wherein liberty lay,
seemed to have become a land beyond the horizon of his dreams. He
looked out from the island upon the whitened billows and remembered
that Russian ships, sent to the pursuit of him, were watching and
waiting in the channel of the Gulf. The distant shore, high and rocky
and barren, spoke of coast patrols and Finns who soon must learn that
a strange yacht lay in the harbour of the islands; of peasants who
would run to carry the news to Helsingfors that a few kopecks might be
thrown to them. Scheme as he would, he could contrive no plan whereby
the peril wrought of the gale might be turned. He must wait for a
smoother sea and a fairer wind. And waiting was an agony of doubt
scarce to be supported.
All this was in his mind when Marian awoke at midday and was rowed by
old John Hook to the little patch of beach which permitted them to
land upon the nameless island. He met her at the water-side and lifted
her from the boat; but he would tell her nothing of his thoughts, for
he saw that colour had come again to her face and that the great rings
beneath her eyes had been washed out by the waters of sleep. She was,
indeed, almost the light-hearted pretty creature who had won his love
at the Governor’s house; and when he looked into her brightening eyes
and heard her girlish laughter, love came surging up to compel
forgetfulness of all else.
“I have been waiting for you,” he said tenderly. “The hours were
long.”
“They will race now,” she answered, as she locked her hand in his. “We
shall see each other growing old, Paul. Oh, is it not good to breathe
again? I could run, run, run to the world’s end.”
She dragged him on, hastening with joy of her freedom, telling him a
hundred things at once, asking unfinished questions and waiting for no
answer. When they had come to the high place of the rock she curled
herself up on the ground and there she feasted her eyes on the
panorama of whitened sea and whirling gull and desolate island. The
man lay beside her, content that he had won her this hour of
happiness.
“I cannot believe it,” she said, while the spindrift freshened her
face and the wind swept the curls from her little ears, “I cannot
believe that we are here. How should a day make such a difference? How
should our lives run so evenly through long years and then turn so
swiftly, carrying us away from everything we have ever known to things
we never dreamed of? A month ago I was a governess in the house at
Kronstadt. I taught the twins to grow up in the way they did not want
to go. But to-day, where am I? what am I? Why are these things hidden
from us? And if it is so strange to-day, what will it be next year and
the year after? Oh, if one could look even for a moment into the glass
of life!”
“But you cannot,” said Paul stolidly. “There is no glass except the
glass of your mind and conscience. We cannot look; we can only act,
Marian. And that is what we have been doing, you and I, though God
knows what kind of a story we have written or where it will end. At
this moment we are on an island near Hango, and we wait there until
the wind and the sea go down. When that happens we shall go aboard the
_Esmeralda_ again, and to-morrow we shall come to Stockholm.”
She clapped her hands, and regarding her environment wistfully, she
cried--
“It is a world of islands, a world without life. There can be no spot
on all the earth as lonely as this. And yet it is a city to me now. I
could people it with the birds; the rocks should be the churches and
buildings for me. Paradise lies on the broad road when one has been a
month and has not seen the sun.”
He stroked her face, encouraging her to forget that her freedom might
depend upon the whim of the wind.
“You are glad to be free, Marian, as glad as I am! Some day, perhaps,
we will remember this day and speak of it as the morning of our love.
I do not think that they will follow us; there are few that can sail
these seas. Even the fishermen come here reluctantly. It is a grave
for sailors, as many a good fellow knows.”
“And yet _you_ come here?”
“It was the one thing left to do. We could not pass the ships they had
sent out yonder; we could not go back; this was our only haven, unless
we returned to the prison as they wished.”
She shuddered and drew close to him.
“We shall never go back, dearest; you think that?”
He began to pick at the rocky stones and to throw them into the froth
of the breaking waves.
“I do not know,” he said after a long pause. “Who can say what the
future will bring? But I am a Russian no more. I have no country now.
It does not concern me.”
The infinite pathos of his words was not to be concealed from her.
Never since he had carried her from the cell at Alexander had she
understood so well the price he had paid.
“Oh, Paul, Paul!” she exclaimed bitterly, “what have I done? what
crime have I committed that I should bring this upon you? Let me go
back to Kronstadt. I am not worth your sacrifice. I can never repay.
There is time yet.”
The man laughed at her distress, and, blaming himself because he had
spoken, he answered by taking her face into his hands and looking into
her tear-stained eyes.
“The crime you have committed,” he said, “is to be the sweetest woman
on earth! The wrong which you have done is to make me love you so that
without you there is no world for me! Why talk of repaying? Is there
to be a reckoning between those who love? Have they not all things in
common? Who hurts you hurts me. When you are content I am content. I
lose a country to gain the whole world. If I am no longer a Russian,
shall I not be the husband of Marian? Let us not talk of these things;
it is ingratitude while we have the bread of life so abundantly. When
that bread fails we will complain. To-morrow, if the wind goes down,
we shall be at Stockholm. I shall leave the yacht there and take an
English steamer for London. It will then be your turn to forget that
you are an Englishwoman; you will be the wife of Zassulic; you will be
the friend of Russia. All that you have learnt at Kronstadt will be
forgotten; the friends who tempted you will be strangers to you
henceforth. We will begin life again, pilgrims in a strange country.
But we shall walk the way of life together, and so the journey will be
easy.”
The shadow of regret passed from his face while he went on to speak of
all he would do in London; how that he hoped much from his kinsman and
from his own training as an engineer. Marian, in her turn, listened
with smiling face, though she was telling herself all the time that
she must prevent the sacrifice, must compel him to return to his work
and his country; if possible, to return, not as one disgraced, but a
man who had wrestled with a great temptation and had vanquished it. As
for herself, she did not doubt that her wits would find a way whereby
she might reach her own country. The present danger she was in, the
peril of almost immediate discovery by the Russian ships, was not real
to her. She could run again and see the sky and breathe the fresh air.
She felt herself adrift upon the ocean of circumstance, and the voyage
was not without its measure of excitement.
“You must go back, Paul,” she said very firmly when he had done
speaking; “we must find a way and an excuse.”
“A way, Petite, when you have been seen upon my ship, and the Sergeant
has told them that I took you from the fort? Oh, yes, that would be
easy enough; they are such simpletons at Kronstadt; they will believe
me when I say, ‘The prisoner escaped: it was an accident’; they will
reward me--with a file of soldiers and lead for medicine. The day when
I can return to Russia will be the day when stars fall at our feet and
there is no longer any sun in the sky. It is foolish to talk of it.
Henceforth you shall make a country for me; it shall be a country of
the heart; the house will be the house of our affections. We shall
laugh then to remember of what little worth are all those material
things which at one time seemed so much to us; we shall laugh at
to-day, and tell how we cheated old Bonzo after all.”
It was a brave effort to conceal from her the apprehension he felt;
but the woman’s instinct rightly interpreted the words. When next he
looked into her face she was gazing over the storm-tossed waste to the
distant field of the open sea, where the west wind still blew with
hurricane force and banks of gathering cloud were the gloomy heralds
of the night to come.
“The wind befriends us,” she said thoughtfully, “but the wind will die
away presently, and then----”
“And then the darkness will take its place, little woman. Even if they
think we are here among the islands, they must spend days before they
discover upon which island we are. While they are looking for us we
shall be snug in the harbour at Stockholm. We must steal from harbour
to harbour until we see that no ships follow, and then the little
yacht will do the rest. There is no ship in Russia that can outsteam
her with a clear sea before us. We shall wait for the clear sea and
all will be well.”
They had left the grassy knoll at this time and had come up to the
headland, wherefrom they could overlook the strange haven into which
destiny had cast them. Marian beheld again the world of islands, vast,
interminable, stretching as far as the eye could see away toward the
Baltic or back to the Russia they had left. The gloom of water and
sky, the cold gray light, the haunting solitude, the wash of the
waves, the shrill note of the gull, oppressed her anew with a vast
sense of her own loneliness. She thought that she was an outcast from
the world. She pictured herself flying from man to the desolate places
of the earth. A hundred years of time seemed to lie between her and
the life she had lived. She reproached herself bitterly that she had
rewarded so great a love with so terrible a gift--the gift of men’s
slander and the insult of evil tongues, the brand of dishonour and the
exile’s lot.
And this thought grew upon her, that she must save Paul from himself
and go alone upon the way to which her folly had carried her.