CHAPTER XII

HOW HOPE CAME SLOWLY BACK

It took Hope Palma many days to accommodate herself to the strange circumstances in which she found herself, but it needed very little simulation on her part to play the role of invalid.

Five thousand miles of travel hold certainties of discomfort under the best of conditions. Five thousand miles with convict convoys----! One shudders at the bare thought of it, when the mere sight of such a travelling party chills the heart and haunts the imagination for days. It is liberty and humanity at its lowest; Might trampling Right in the mud; the apotheosis of sheer brute force and, as often as not, of sheer brutality. You cannot get away from facts, and these things are.

To any woman such a journey must needs have been packed with horrors. To one like Hope Palma, trained from her earliest days to the most vital sympathy with her burdened fellows, vicarious sufferer in all their woes, and suffering the more the more she knew and understood,--to Hope Palma those nightmare months of travel were like the brush of a vicious censor blotting out the brightness of life with a raw black smudge. But the brush of the censor obliterates the desirable, which still at times peeps tantalisingly through; and the things that would show through this venomous smudge were horrors which neither time nor will could efface.

She had forced herself to the needs of that terrible journey by sheer force of will, and had the need continued she too would have endured. But, the necessity over, and the tight-strung nerves loosed, they lapsed in the recoil to a flaccidity quite abnormal.

For many days she lay spent and spilled, and apparently careless of living, her one primal desire for quietness and solitude.

Madame Roskova's kind heart craved much larger ministry, both bodily and mental, than was permitted it. She would have coaxed back and built up her patient's strength with cunning dishes, and reasoned her away from the past with assurances of present safety and comfort, and promises of future happiness. But Hope begged so plaintively to be allowed just to lie at rest that Madame could but comply.

"Just to lie quiet, dear Madame Roskova, that is all I require. I have been sorely bruised, and healing is in quiet," said Hope.

"Da!" said Madame. "I am glad I stayed. Perhaps, after all, you know best, child. When one is all unstrung like that one woman is worth ten men, even if one of them is one's husband and a doctor. I know!"

Pavlof, too, began to fear that her health had suffered permanent injury through the trials and hardships of the road, but he knew also that the hardest blow of all had been the one that had fallen upon her just when she believed she had reached the goal of all her strenuous endeavour. He knew that a sick heart makes a sick body, and at risk of forfeiting the esteem of Madame Roskova, and greatly to the exercising of her mind, he judged it truest kindness to Hope to obtrude himself upon her as little as possible.

And Madame Roskova's wonder grew with the hours. That two people, presumably attached to one another, could come together, after two years of arduous separation and biting anxiety, and treat one another as coolly as did these two, struck her as something quite abnormal and worthy of serious attention. It was plain to a much meaner intelligence than hers that here was a serious breach of some kind, and her well-meant efforts at the healing of it caused them no little inconvenience.

Man-like, and strong in his own inflexible uprightness of intention, Pavlof saw no good grounds for Hope's extreme distaste to the only arrangement possible under the circumstances.

After all--except for the delicacy of the previous conditions that had obtained between them--it was the arrangement which not only had the sanction of the Free Command, but was definitely required by it for the safety of the female members.

It was hardly to be expected, perhaps, that he should enter into Hope Palma's feelings in al! their depth and intensity. These were hers by nature and by training and by force of singular circumstance.

Every hair of her head was precious to him. To save her from injury or insult he would suffer any extremity. And she knew it, and knew too that his love for her, veil it as he might, was as strong as ever it had been, and here they were placed in surely as curious and trying a relationship as ever man and woman endured. Perhaps she feared for him. Perhaps she feared for herself. Perhaps she knew not what she feared, and yet felt the very sense of fear a torment and a treason.

And in the shadow of that fear a coolness lay between them which sorely troubled the soul of Anna Roskova.

Madame Roskova, however, was much too discreet to talk about the matter outside. Here was something beyond her understanding, and at times she was hard put to it to keep herself in hand.

She would have given much to feel herself at liberty to discuss the whole affair with Marya Verskaïa. But Marya was young and a chatterbox, and not to be trusted in so delicate a matter. Besides, she had never been married, and so could not be expected to understand all the fine shades of abnormality which Madame's own keen eyes and ears detected in the relations of Hope and Pavlof.

She had seen many strange things in her life, and some very terrible ones, had Anna Roskova, but none had ever struck her as more curious than the behaviour of this strange pair. She puzzled over it, shook her head over it, communed much with herself over it; did everything, in fact, which a much-tried and bewildered woman possibly could do, except talk about it to other people.

She was not by nature a silent woman. In fact, to hear her cheerful tongue going at times you might almost have thought she enjoyed hearing it herself, and possibly you would not have been very far wrong. But she had learned wisdom and the golden virtue in a bitter school and over more important, though never more puzzling, matters. And concerning any subject she considered better not talked about she could be as silent as the grave, or as loquacious as a prize parrot, and, in the latter case, with just as little import of information.

But if she denied herself outside she made up for it inside. She spoke seriously to Paul and feelingly to Hope. She reasoned, she argued, she lectured, but she could not turn them from their curious ways. And surely no sorer trial can any woman be called upon to endure than an insoluble puzzle right under her nose.

Not that she could bring herself to let them see that she was beaten. That would have been worse even than the actual fact. They saw, of course, that she was much exercised in her mind about them, and at times they were hard set to evade her pointed sallies.

"Serge Petrovitch!" she broke out one day in her brusque, motherly way, "you are not doing your duty by your wife."

"How then, Anna Vassilievna?" he answered quietly. "All that she needs at present is rest and she is getting it. You see----"

"Oh yes, I see what I see. But all the same--" and a cryptic nod comprehended all she declined to put into words, and startled Pavlof's fears lest her womanly insight should have pierced their shaky armour. "Has she ceased to care for you, then?" and his fears vanished.

"I have no reason to suppose her feelings have changed in any way, Anna Vassilievna."

"No! Then how in Heaven's name did she ever come to marry you? You have not changed to her. I see that well enough. But she--why, it seems to me that she is absolutely afraid of you at times. Have you been hard to her----?"

"Never in my life."

"Well, well! It passes belief. Maybe in your long parting she has found--but nay, she is an angel for goodness. That I know, but as cold as ice. And then, if so, why would she follow you here? Well, well! It just means that you will have to begin all over again, Serge Petrovitch. You will have to woo her as you did before."

"She will be all right again soon, Anna Vassilievna. It is just that she is worn out with the road."

"Ah da! The road has worn her body, no doubt, but not her soul. There is fire and to spare behind that cold face unless I am blind. You must break down the barriers if you want to come into your own again, Serge Petrovitch."

"We must give her time, Anna Vassilievna."

"Ah da! Time! Life is not long enough to waste in waiting. Let yourself go, Serge Petrovitch. Do as your heart bids you. Your eyes are bright for her, and your heart is soft to her, when you are in here. But when you get in there it is like two icebergs meeting."

"She will come to herself if we give her time," was all she got for her pains, and then she would try her hand on her patient in the inner room with equal fortune.

The days passed very slowly in that narrow little room, but after all those months of arduous travel Hope was content simply to lie still, and would have been still more content if she could have lain without thinking. For much thought concerning the pass she was in tended only to confusion and tribulation of mind.

Madame Roskova was kindness itself, but to Hope's quivering anxieties there was danger to their present tranquillity in the very plenitude of her thoughtfulness.

"Wouldn't you like to tell me all about it, my dear?" Madame would ask, in so sympathetic a voice that Hope could hardly resist it. For it was the thing of all others that would have relieved her own mind and the situation in every way. But Paul had decided otherwise, and he doubtless understood things better than she. And Madame's very next words confirmed the wisdom of his decision.

"There is trouble of some kind between you, I can see, and there is nothing eases one's mind like a good talk."

And therein lay the danger. For what was said in the inner room might well get outside under similar compulsion, and all their lives would be in peril.

So--"The only trouble is that I am a weaker thing than I thought, dear Madame Roskova," Hope made shift to answer.

"Da!" said Madame. "Weaker! And you come five thousand miles with the convoys, and been giving yourself away all the time, I'll be bound."

"It tells upon one afterwards," said Hope wearily. "When one is in it one just goes on and on. But afterwards it all comes back upon one in a heap. It seemed to me at first that if I lay still all the rest of my days it would not be too long to rest, but your kindness and the quiet are giving me new life. I am very, very grateful."

"Well, well!" said Madame, permitting no evidence of repulse. "You know your own business best, my dear. But don't starve him to death. Good men are none too plentiful, and Serge Petrovitch is much above the average. He thinks of every one else before himself, and many of us wouldn't be here but for him. And when one sees him sore and troubled one cannot but feel for him. He loves you as much as ever, my dear. I can see it in his eyes," and if the little room had not been so dim she would have seen the sudden tumult of colour that flickered tremulously over the sweet, pale face.

Again and again, with the persistency of a much-puzzled woman, she returned to the charge, and did her best to arrive at a proper comprehension of this strange married pair; and that not simply for the satisfaction of her womanly curiosity, but that she might do what she could to make matters straight between them.

And many a sigh she heaved as she wished herself in Hope's place and her own dear man in Serge Petrovitch's. How different things would have been between them! Ay, though the road had worn her to rags. For every scrap of her would have clung to his heart and drawn fresh life from it. Well, well! folks were built on very different lines and some of the lines were uncommonly queer ones.

But worn out bodies revive more quickly than sick souls. Time came when the little inner room could no longer offer sanctuary to Hope's troubled modesty without provoking suggestion of perversity, and visibly returning strength left her no excuse for not joining the others. She had spun out the fine thread of her bodily weakness till it was threadbare, and persistence must obviously before long translate "I can't" into "I won't."

She was looking forward with dread to the levelling of her defences, and the openness to attack to which the common routine of daily life in so circumscribed a sphere must expose her, when there came to her temporary relief one of those ghastly prison happenings which are possible only under the terrible irresponsibility of autocratic and bureaucratic power.

The tension within the little hut was slackened by the counter-irritant without, but at a cost in bodily suffering to those chiefly concerned which brought home to Hope, in tragic fashion, the rigours of the _régime_ under which the community at Kara lived.