CHAPTER XI

HOW HOPE FOUND LESS THAN SHE EXPECTED AND MORE

It was with a much reduced party that Hope travelled from Irkutsk on the final journey to Kara--almost the Ultima Thule of exiledom, but not quite. There are exiles more dreadful in their hopeless exclusion even than dreaded Kara. With such, fortunately, we have nothing to do. The mere dry facts of life in the Yakut uluses twist the very heart-strings with pity and indignation.

Wintry weather set in before they reached the Shilka. Navigation was over for the season, and the river ice was not yet solid enough for travel. So they took the rough mountain road on foot, men and women--no children now, for which Hope was most devoutly thankful--and tramped doggedly on through the pines and firs, with the keen winds whipping their faces, and the snow wreaths laying pitfalls for their stumbling feet wherever a mountain stream had overflowed the path.

It was a terrible experience, but even the Kara Road has an end, and it was with a heart beating furiously with many emotions that Hope Palma saw at last the scattered buildings of Ust Kara lying in the white basin of the hills.

Would she find Serge alive? And if alive, in what state of misery? Anything might have happened in the eighteen months since he was taken from her.

Would Colonel Zazarin recognise her?

Would he dare to continue his attentions, to the annoyance of her husband and herself? His presence there would quadruple all her fears and troubles and all Serge's difficulties and hardships, and yet any resentment of his insidious friendliness might lead to disaster. She judged him utterly unscrupulous, and they were as absolutely in his hands, for life or death, as rats in a trap. It was surely a malign fate that threw him across her path again.

But she was growing hardened to the blows of misfortune. Hardened?--hardened to the blows maybe, but softened by the sore heart-bruising, and wishful only to salve her wounds with the balm and oil of service, and ready to leave the rest in higher hands. For all her thinking in all these years had only brought her at last to this--that life, with all its crying wrongs and unattainable rights, is past any human understanding, and that he or she who has looked upon these things, and known the agony of them, must take one of two courses--either abandon hope altogether, or rest it implicitly beyond the power of man.

It was the following day before they reached the Lower Diggings and trooped wearily into the great stockade of the prison, where the Governor and several officials stood awaiting them.

The roll was called over, the convicts detailed to their various homes of unrest, and Colonel Zazarin approached the group of forlorn women who had accompanied their husbands or come to join them.

One by one they were dealt with and told where to go, and Hope's heart came near to suffocating her as he approached her last of all.

"So you dared this terrible journey after all, Madame," he said courteously enough. "He should surely be a good husband for whom a wife undertakes so much." She bowed silently, and he continued--

"It was not out of any discourtesy that I left you to the last, but that I might have the pleasure of conducting you myself. If you will follow me I will take you to your husband," and she followed him in silence.

He led her out of the big prison gate and down the valley.

"You will find him better circumstanced than he might have been," said the Colonel. "And, curiously enough"--with a short laugh--"I feel under some obligation to him for having paved the way to my appointment here. They had a bad outbreak of typhus in the spring. The prisoners died like flies; the doctor died. Your husband offered to take his place"--at which Hope wondered much--"and under the circumstances he was allowed to do so"--at which she wondered still more--"though it was directly against the rules. Under his care the Governor died"--she did not feel much surprise at that.--"I do not say he would not have died in any case. Still your husband failed to keep him alive, and they pitched on me as his successor. I hesitated, I must confess. Then I decided to accept the appointment and---- Ah, here we are Madame!"

They stood before a tiny house built of rough logs, with dim little windows, and long icicles hanging from the eaves. The Colonel opened the door, without knocking, and walked in.

"The nest is empty," he said. "We will wait until the bird returns. I did not tell him you were coming, because one never knows what may happen, and to raise false hopes is a cruelty. It is not a palace," he said, with a shrug, "but it is better than a kamera inside the stockade."

"It will be home," said Hope quietly, lest continued silence should provoke his resentment.

"There is no accounting for tastes," he said, with another shrug and a depreciatory glance round, at the crude brick stove with its little core of heat in a bank of white ashes, the bare floor, the rude table, the couple of comfortless chairs. It was all harsh and cheerless, and might well have excited the distaste of even a more hardened campaigner than Colonel Zazarin.

"I prefer it to St. Petersburg," said Hope, and Colonel Zazarin shrugged his absolute incomprehension of such a state of mind.

"You could have been much more comfortable there, if you had chosen, my dear. I would have----"

"Oh, don't! Pray don't! I beg of you!" And the Colonel shrugged again and kicked some snow off his boot against the stove. Perhaps the pitiful appeal of her strained white face was not entirely without its effect, upon even him.

But, as her eyes tuned themselves by degrees to the obscurity, her heart began to flutter furiously again. It was in her throat. It was choking her.

For, on the rough wooden shelf alongside the stove, stood a woman's workbasket, with some unmistakable woman's work thrown carelessly on top of it. Before the stove lay a pair of woman's slippers; from a hook hung a woman's gown; and to Hope's quickened eye there started out from the gloom--like accumulating evidences at a trial--a dozen other almost infinitesimal signs of female occupancy of the hut.

Her usually placid brows were knitted as she glanced quickly at Colonel Zazarin, in the belief that there was some mistake. He was watching her keenly, and she looked away lest he should see what was in her.

"You must give me credit for doing my best to dissuade you from coming, Madame Palma," he said, with a gleam in the dark eyes. "It is a lonely life, you know, and a loose one. Convicts have no rights, you see. They are outside the law, though at times they make laws unto themselves. And the Free Command here has its own peculiar notions, and adapts itself to its own peculiar circumstances."

Then the door opened, and a woman came in and stood staring at them. She threw off her hood and sheepskin coat, and revealed a shapely figure and a fine frank face, full at the moment of a great curiosity.

"Ah, Madame Roskova, I have brought you a visitor. This is Madame Palma come out to join her husband," said Zazarin.

"You are very welcome," said the woman, with courteously veiled amazement, and stretched a hearty hand to the astonished Hope. "The Doctor is up at the prison, but he should be in shortly. This will be a very great surprise for him. Can I offer your Excellency a cup of brick tea? Madame is quite ready for one, I can see," and she began to bustle about the preparation of it, poking up the fire and reaching down the samovar.

His Excellency made a grimace, and continued to watch Hope Palma. She had submitted dizzily to Madame Roskova's handshake. She watched her movements through a mist--of the brain as well as of the eyes.

What did it mean? Why was this woman here in Serge's house--in her place? Her face looked good. Her manner betrayed no confusion of guilt. What did it mean?

"Da!" said Madame Roskova, after vainly trying to light a small lamp. "I forgot to fill it," and proceeded to haul out a tin of oil to remedy her neglect. "Ach!"--as the tin proved empty--"I will run across and----"

Before she had got on her hood, however, there was a sound of heavy boots kicking against the doorpost to get rid of the snow, the door opened, and Paul Pavlof came in.

In the dim light he could not at first see who his visitors were, but he expressed no surprise at sight of the official uniform. Surprise visits from the vigilant watchdogs at any time of night or day were a matter of course.

Then, recognising the Governor, he took off his cap, and said, "Ah, Excellency, we are honoured."

"I have brought you a visitor, Palma," said the Colonel.

"A visitor, Excellency?"

"Your wife."

"My--God!"--and he caught her just in time to anticipate the Colonel.

For, at sight of his entrance, Hope had sprung to her feet. And at sound of his voice she gave a little cry, and tottered two steps towards him, and fell.

"Poor dear!" said Madame Roskova, full of sympathy. "The journey has been too much for her," and would have helped him.

"Permit me, Excellency," said Pavlof, through his teeth, and carried her against his pounding heart into the tiny bedroom, boarded off one end of the cottage, and Madame hurried in after them.

"Can I be of any assistance?" asked the Governor, when he came back.

"None, I thank your Excellency. She will come round presently. Madame is attending her. No doubt the journey has been a trying one."

"And your patients?"

"The cold is helping us. Captain Sokolof has taken the turn. We shall be rid of it in a month. But it will be as bad as ever in the spring unless----"

"All your representations have gone forward, but there is no reply yet."

"Your Excellency would be amply justified in authorising the work. It is a case of many lives or deaths."

"You know what they are," said the Colonel, with a shrug. "We are a long way off and the nearer things get the first claim. However, we will see, if no word comes. One is not absolutely required to commit suicide because those others are too busy with their own concerns. I trust your wife will not suffer from her journey."

He went out and Pavlof hurried back into the inner room.

Madame Roskova had opened Hope's cloak and dress and was bathing her forehead with cold water.

"She will be all right in a minute or two," she said. "Go and make the tea. It will do her more good than anything."

"Go you and make the tea, Anna Vassilievna, and I will see to her," said Paul, and Madame gave him her place and left them.

Presently Hope's eyes fluttered, opened, and she lay gazing starkly up in the glimmer of light that came from the fire in the outer room. Pavlof waited quietly till her eyes turned questioningly on him.

"Where is he?" she asked in a whisper.

"He is on his way back home by this time, I hope," said Paul softly.

"On his way home? Serge on his way home--and I here? Oh, my God!" and she sat up and gazed at him in a very stupor of amazement. "How? Why? What does it all mean?" jerked from her trembling lips.

"We did it for the best, as we thought, Hope Ivanovna. We met in the prison at Tomsk and changed names so that he might get back to you the sooner."

"You changed names?" she echoed vaguely.

"Serge took my place at Minusinsk for simple exile. I came on to Kara instead of him. He was to get away in the spring and get back to you as soon as he could. Now listen to me, Hope Ivanovna, for all our lives are at stake. Here they know me only as Serge Palma. You must suffer that or Serge will suffer."

"They know you only as Serge Palma?" she gasped, repeating his words as a child repeats a lesson it does not understand.

"Yes. But you must speak softly, Hope Ivanovna. Here I am Serge Palma," he said, slowly and distinctly, "and if by any mischance they discover the truth it will mean disaster to Serge, and to you, and to me. Do you understand?"

"Oh, I do not know! I do not know. You must give me time, Paul."

"Serge," he said, in an insistent whisper. "You must call me Serge. Try to remember, Hope Ivanovna."

Here Madame Roskova came in with a steaming cup of tea, and the lamp replenished with neighbourly oil, and words of homely cheer such as she would have used to a sick child.

"Da! That is better now! Drink this, my dear, and then come and thaw yourself before the stove. Nothing like a cup of hot tea when you're feeling down. And you have got the cold of five thousand miles in your bones, I expect. And now I must run across again to Marya Verskaïa as I promised----"

"Don't go, Madame! Pray don't go!" cried Hope, almost hysterically.

"Da, then! Marya will never forgive me if I don't, my dear," laughed Madame. "And by the time I get back you two will have found yourselves and we can talk things over comfortably."

She still had on her cloak and hood from her late quest after oil, and now with a hearty "God with you!" she was gone.

"Come out to the stove, Hope Ivanovna," said Paul gently. "You are frozen as Madame Roskova says."

"My heart is frozen, I think, and my brain too," she said, as she dropped forlornly into the chair he placed for her, and sat gazing into the stove.

And presently, as she began to recover from the first numbing shock, and her wits began to travel, she said, like the child repeating its half-forgotten lesson----

"Here you are Serge Palma! And I----! My God! My God! What shall I do?" as it all came upon her in a heap, and she sprang up wildly as though to go.

"You must trust me, Hope Ivanovna," said Pavlof gently, and took and held one of the cold little hands.

"Yes, yes! But----"

"Listen again, Hope Ivanovna! If you will trust me all will be well. Here I am Serge Palma, and you----"

"And I----?" as he hesitated, knowing so well the fine temper of her spirit.

"For a time," he jerked hurriedly, "till we hear that Serge is clear, you will have to pass to the world as my wife. There is nothing else for it."

"My wife!"--the very words roused tumult in his heart and sent the hot blood spinning through his veins at a gallop. Ah, if it could have been so! What a heaven the bare little hut would have become! He would have asked nothing else of God.

But the words had a widely, wildly different effect on Hope.

"Pass--as--your--wife!" and she sprang up, incarnate scorn, magnificent, blazing, scarifying--she who lay so brokenly in her chair but a moment before.

"So this is the meaning of it all!"--and, if it had been, he had surely withered where he stood, scarce daring to raise his eyes to hers, lest she should see in them that which must be in them for her alone of all women in the world until he died.

"It is for this you have planned and schemed and tricked? For this! Shame on you, Paul Pavlof!--to dupe a woman who would have trusted you with her life--and more!"

"That is hard to hear, Hope Ivanovna," he said quietly. "No such thought has ever entered my head. Still less the thought that I should ever have to tell you so. We thought only of you in the matter, but--it has miscarried. You see, we did not calculate on your coming out here."

"Then you should have done," she said angrily. "Did you expect me to sit down and fold my hands and weep? How little you know of women!"--with most withering scorn.

"It is true.... We thought to restore your happiness, and I was ready to give my life for it--and we have only digged a pit for you."

"I must go back," she said, the brief fire burning out already, and she turned mazily towards the door. "I will go back to Serge."

"Listen to me, Hope Ivanovna," he said, venturing a firm hand on her arm, which still shook from the storm. "I would hold my life as nothing if it could accomplish your wishes. But it cannot. It is impossible for you to go back at present. Yours was the last convoy of the year. There are no convoys back and the Shilka is closed. For your own sake, if not for Serge's, you must stop here for the present."

"As your wife!" spurted the volcano once more.

"Nominally as my wife--for your own sake and Serge's. For me--as the most sacred trust God ever imposed upon a man. You must trust me, Hope Ivanovna. You will have to trust me. There was a time when you would have trusted me without my having to plead for it--and I at all events have not changed."

She made an angry gesture with her hand.

"If it should become known that I am not Serge Palma, and that Serge is at large in the provinces, his chances of escape will be gone."

"And you would suffer!" scorned the final spark.

"Only in this way can I protect you from insult here--and worse. Kara is no place for a woman to live alone. Our guards are scum of the earth and have right of entry to all our houses at any time of day or night."

The thought of Colonel Zazarin and her utter helplessness overwhelmed her and she dropped back into her chair.

"What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?" she moaned, and turned instinctively for refuge from the certain evil to the proffered help whose good faith she had never had reason to doubt before. "Paul! Paul! tell me what I must do."

He was on his knees by her side in an instant, and taking her hand he said gently, "Only trust me, Hope Ivanovna. Trust me as you used to do and not a hair of your head shall suffer while life is left me."

"Oh, I trust you! I trust you! But it is past thinking of----"

"It will come all right if you will trust me, Hope Ivanovna. Serge is to send me word as soon as he is free, and then we can arrange for you to join him. Until then you shall be as safe here as if--as if"--Ah God! as safe as if she were indeed his wife! And he knew it and she knew it--"as if Serge himself was here to take care of you," was what he managed to say.

She sat for a while gazing into the stove with pinched brow, and then with bewildering suddenness she flamed out again.

"And this--this Madame Roskova, who lives with you?"

But Paul was past the point of upsetting by any unexpected exhibition of the vagaries of the feminine mind. Woman had always been to him as a dainty sealed book. The high hopes he had once had of a loving study of the sacred leaves had been ruthlessly nipped in the bud. He was to learn in harder ways.

"Anna Vassilievna is the wife of Dr. Feodor Roskof, whom we all know," he answered gravely. "They were working among the poor in Petersburg, as we were in Odessa. They sent him to Yakutsk and her here. Her one desire in life is to join him, but they will not permit it, and it is perhaps just as well, for it would kill her if she went."

"But why is she here--with you?"

"She is here because it is not safe for any woman to live alone in Kara, nor for only women to live together. Madame Roskova lived alone with Marya Verskaïa in a little house up the valley. But the Cossacks entered their room night after night, on any pretext or none, so Dmitri Polokof took Marya into his house and Anna Vassilievna came here. She is a good woman and a true wife. She occupies that room. I sleep here before the stove."

"You will tell her how matters stand with us?"

"I think not," he said thoughtfully. "No!-- If ever it comes out it will be better for her that she has not known."

"But--Paul!"--in a tone of pained remonstrance at his obtuseness.

"Serge."

And then, with a discreet preliminary knock, and a hitherto unknown difficulty in finding the latch, the door opened and Madame Roskova came in.

"Da, now! That is better!" she said, beaming benevolently upon them. "Madame understands things, and is no longer jealous of me. Oh yes, you were, my dear! I could see it in your eyes. And quite right too. I would have felt just the same myself. But there was no reason, I assure you, my dear. He is a fine man is your man, and easier to get on with than most. But my own dear man still stands first with me, and will do as long as I live. Now it's all right. I have arranged matters with Marya and Dmitri. They can make room for me with a little squeezing, so I'll just take with me what I need now, and the rest can wait till to-morrow," and she bustled away towards the inner room.

"What does she mean? You are not going, Madame?" cried Hope, with the eyes of a startled deer.

"Why, child, you don't surely think I know no better than that? Da! It is like your kind heart, but it's ill coming in between man and wife. I've not been married twenty years without learning one or two little things, and that's one of them. Why, it'll be quite like a new honeymoon for you. No, indeed! How would I like it myself, and don't I wish I had the chance! Ah God! Yes!"

"Don't go, Madame! Pray don't go!" cried Hope desperately. "There is no need whatever for you to go."

"And you been parted from him for nearly two years!" said Madame reprovingly. "Why, my dear, you would hate me like poison before morning."

"Oh, I won't! I won't! I promise you I won't! I will love you all the more if you will stop, dear Madame. I beg of you to stop."

"Nu, then! I do not understand!" said Madame, looking curiously from Hope to Pavlof and back again. "It is a cold wife, surely. Have you been bad to her, or is she not thawed yet? What she needs is your arms round her again, Serge Petrovitch. She has forgotten the feel of it and is a little bit afraid of you. I will take myself off as quick as I can, and then you can have her all to yourself," and she went on into the inner room, murmuring, "No, no! I know better than that," and they heard her still rumbling to herself like a good-humoured volcano, as she gathered her things together.

Hope's eyes, as she turned on Pavlof, were the eyes of the hunted doe at bay.

"She must stop," she said, in a fierce whisper. "If you don't make her stop I will go out and sleep in the snow, whatever comes of it." And, seeing by his face that he was at his wits' end, her own came to his relief, "Tell her I am ill and need her help."

"Anna Vassilievna," he said, going to the door of the inner room. "My wife begs you to stop--for a night or two at all events. She is worn and broken with the journey. She would be grateful for your company and assistance."

"And you? You say so too?" said Madame, coming to the door and looking out on them in unqualified surprise. "Well, well! You are a strange pair, surely! But if you ask it, Serge Petrovitch, I may not say you nay, after all you have done for me. But I must run across again and tell Marya and Dmitri, and assuredly they will think me crazy--and you too, no less."

And presently she was back again, and set about getting supper ready, but each time her eyes lighted on Hope's downcast face and languid figure, she shook her head and said to herself, "Da! I do not understand! I hope she hasn't got the fever."

And Paul Pavlof fell asleep on his mat before the stove just before daylight, pondering vaguely the strange workings of the feminine heart and mind, slightly oppressed at thought of this complication of burdens thrown upon him by Hope's unexpected arrival, yet with a warm inner glow at his heart, like the core of heat in the white ashes of the stove, at thought of her there under his roof. Hope! Hope Ivanovna! Ah!--Hope Palma!

But in spite of it all, or because of it all, when he did fall asleep he slept soundly, for in the short space of an hour he had passed through livelier emotions than Kara usually knows in a year.