CHAPTER XVIII

HOW THE NEWS CAME THAT DREW THEM TOGETHER

Hope delayed makes the heart sick, but it does not kill. And the sick heart craves human sympathy as the storm-beaten flower craves the sun. And when the sun shines the flower turns towards it and is grateful.

As the weeks and months passed and brought no further news of Serge, Hope's expectation began to weaken, and at last to die.

"Surely," she said to herself, "if he were alive he would have managed to send the promised word to Paul in some way. Mikhail Barenin's news must be true."

Pavlof, in rigid honour, suggested the possibility of the word having been duly sent and having been arrested on the way.

Pressed to the wall by her questionings, however, he had to acknowledge that the prearranged message would have come in such a form that the most vindictive or hyper-sensitive censor could not possibly have read into it any but the most patently domestic intelligence.

Pressed still harder, he had to confess that, in spite of the hopes he so constantly impressed upon her, his own were growing weaker.

With a heavy heart he offered to do all in his power to further her wishes, whatever they might be, even to the point of helping her to leave Kara. But was forced, in discussion, to acknowledge it a useless risk and likely to lead to no result.

"You want to get rid of me," said she.

"I would count my life as nothing if it could help you," was his reply.

It may not be accounted very surprising that, under conditions so complex, Hope Palma's heart turned somewhat, and almost imperceptibly, towards this man into whose companionship she had been so strangely and so closely cast.

Her heart was sick. It had fed on hope till hope was bare as a bone and no longer afforded her starved soul any nourishment.

It was over two years since she saw her husband last. She was very human and she craved human sympathy. Where should she turn for it but to this man whose heart and hand were open to all, and who alone could enter fully into her griefs and perplexities?

His unselfish devotion and ceaseless thought for others, his clean heart and high bearing, these things were daily under her eyes, and they wrought upon her as the soft rain and sunshine on the flower.

That he loved her still as passionately as ever, she knew, in spite of all his cautiousness and frosty veilings. But she knew, too, that no word of love would ever pass his lips while the possibility of wrong to his friend might remain.

Is it strange that, as the blank months drew drearily past, her heart turned towards him? And did so with no more sense of unfaithfulness to her husband than a widowed heart may have, which aches for living love while yet not wholly forgetful of the dead.

By slow degrees hope sickened and died, and she came at last to believe in her heart that Mikhail Barenin's story must be true and that Serge was dead.

Pavlof, however, though he hungered body and soul for that still closer companionship with her which Circumstance, first handmaid of Providence, seemed to be doing her utmost to bring about, found strength and relief in the fierce fight in which he was engaged.

Hope, and his hopes concerning her, were never out of his thoughts, but the typhus kept him busy. Death no longer crept insidiously, but stalked boldly, and snatched his victims where he would, and Pavlof, beaten here and beaten there and losing everywhere, still faced him valiantly and would not leave the field.

It was about midsummer--when the fever was at its worst, and the kameras were like pest-houses, and his very soul was sick of the losing fight, though no sign of it showed in his face or body--that further news reached him concerning Serge Palma, and left him little room to doubt that his friend was dead.

Among the new arrivals one day was a man suffering from a gunshot wound in the thigh. It was not of recent date, but had broken out afresh through forced marching before the first healing was thoroughly accomplished.

Paul had him placed in hospital, and patched him up again, and gave instructions that he was not to move till the wound was perfectly healed. The man had bumped from Irkutsk in a springless teléga, and the hospital bed, poor as it was, was heaven to his bruised bones and torn flesh.

His name was Felix Ostrog. He was of the people, a bright, intelligent fellow who had imbibed evolutionary doctrines and done his small best to spread them. Hence--Kara.

It was in questioning him about his wound that Pavlof lighted on the news that cleared his path.

"It was thus, barin," said Ostrog. "There was in my artel in the convoy a man named Pavlof----"

"Ah!" said Paul, with a sudden accession of interest. "What was his first name?"

"Paul, barin, Paul Pavlof."

"I knew a Paul Pavlof. What was he like?"

"A bold fellow, with yellow hair and beard and blue eyes, a brave man and fearless as the devil."

"Yes, yes, get on!"

"We were in the hills by Karnsk. There are thick woods there, you know. Pavlof had been restless all along, and I knew he would make a break when the chance offered. It is no good one man bolting, you know. That gives one no chance. We talked as we walked, Pavlof and I and the others, and it was arranged that when he gave the signal a dozen of us would try the trick in different directions. Out of the lot there would be a chance for one or two, and the rest must pay the piper. The time came. We were in thick woods and we scattered like rabbits. It was shouts and shots, and screams from the women, and then I was lying in the brush with this hole in me. They found me soon enough. I had not got twenty yards away. And one by one they dragged the others in, all but two, who got clear----"

"And Pavlof was one of them?" asked Paul, in a fever.

"No, barin, Pavlof lay alongside me with a bullet through his head, and he was dead. It was a pity, for he was a fine-looking man----"

"You are sure he was dead?"

"Quite sure, barin, for he lay next to me, and they left him there when they threw me into the teléga and formed up and moved on. Oh, yes; he was dead, or they would not have left him there. And I saw the hole through his head. No man could live with a hole like that in his head."

"So!" said Paul, very thoughtfully. "Now you must lie quite still till you heal up."

"I could lie quite still for ever, barin."

That night, as Paul went up the hill to see his patient in the tent, his pulse was racing, and not with typhus.

Captain Sokolof was off his head and maundering fitfully of things and scenes that did not redound over much to his credit.

Hope and Madame Roskova were sitting outside the tent to escape as much as possible these unconscious revelations, and when Pavlof had visited his patient, and given his nurses fresh instructions, and promised them an orderly in case he got too much for them, he asked Hope to walk back with him down the hill.

She looked at him with quick expectation, and as soon as they were out of hearing, asked breathlessly, "Some news?"

"Yes, news, and I think definite and final," and he briefly told her what he had learnt from Ostrog.

She walked silently by his side, and finally said, very quietly--

"I am glad you have told me. Anything is better than that terrible suspense. Poor Serge! Yes, he is dead----"

They spoke little to one another that night, and presently she turned and went up the hill again, and he went back to his work.

But now his thoughts were unchained. If Serge were indeed dead, and there seemed no reasonable doubt of it, there was no earthly reason why they should not come together, no reason why the long fiction of their wedded state should not become fact at last. And he went about among his sick with a new light in his face, and a spark in his dark eyes that gave the sick men more hope of themselves and their prospects.

During the next few days he met Hope at least twice a day, but they hardly spoke, and then only in the presence of others. But Paul felt his heart going like a drum each time he climbed the hill, at thought of seeing her, and to his eyes she was changed. She was no longer an impossible Hope, but had suddenly become possible, and his thoughts and his pulses raced to meet her.

On the fourth night after he had told her Ostrog's news, he found it necessary to go to his house for a book he had promised to one of his few convalescents.

There was a light in the window. It might be only the police having a rake round in his absence, though that was not very likely, since discipline was much relaxed and he himself almost exempt from supervision.

It might be Hope come down on some errand similar to his own. He quickened his step to the quickening of his heart, turned the handle, and stood face to face with her.

For a moment they stood and looked at one another in a silence that was full of voices, heart calling to heart till there was no sound in all the world for them but the sound of it. The fires long pent up within him blazed out at last. He could no longer have checked them if he would. He would not if he could. His starved heart had burst the bonds so rigorously imposed upon it through all these weary months. The wall of partition was down and nothing stood between them.

The fire in his eyes evoked a responsive glow in hers. He threw out his arms towards her and strode over the dead past.

"Hope! Hope! My beloved! You must come to me. My heart is breaking for you," and he wound his arms about her, and strained her to him, and covered her face with hot kisses.

"At last! At last!" he panted. "My God! it has been hard to wait. And you----?" he flamed, fierce with the tumult that was in him. Had any intervened between them at that moment he would have rent him in pieces.

For answer she wound her arms round his neck and strained herself still closer to him, panting little sobs of joy and sorrow and pity, and then lay still in his arms with a restful sigh.

"God be thanked!" he said, in a voice so deep with emotion that it thrilled her as she lay against his leaping heart and knew that it was all for her.

He slipped back the hood of her cloak and stroked her hair, and kissed it and her eyes, again and again, and yet again and again, as though he would never cease.

"My cup is full. I have nothing left to ask for. Kara is heaven."

"Paul," she said, drawing his head down towards her. "You are sure, quite sure----"

He stopped her with kisses till she held him away.

"Sure we are justified?" she jerked out, between her efforts to stay him.

"My heart says so, dearest. It has hungered and waited all these months. It would have waited still had there been any need."

He turned the lamp to a glow-worm glimmer, and they sat long in the darkness, with no more than a whispered word between them now and again. It was enough that the barrier was down and they were together.

"My heart was dying of starvation," Hope murmured one time, "and you were so cold, so cold."

"Ah, you know why," he said. "The fire was so fierce that I had to cloak it with ice."

"And poor Anna!" said Hope again. "She looked upon me as the last strange product of civilisation, and no wonder."

"Yes, it exercised her greatly, but we will trouble her no more."

She was silent for a time. Then she said softly, "You will wait still awhile, Paul?"

"I will wait your time, dearest. The knowledge that I have your love makes a new man of me. All the rest can wait."

Then at last he took her up the hill again, and parted from her in the darkness before they reached the tent. And so, back to his patients, with a spring in his step and that light in his face which was like a breath of new life in the pungent wards.

Thanks to Pavlof's unremitting attentions, and the careful nursing of Hope and Madame Roskova, Captain Sokolof came slowly out of the shadows on the hillside and knew to whom he owed his life. His prison kameras were cleaner and emptier than he had ever known them, when at last he was able to resume his duties. But the fact that he still lived, where so many had died, was never absent from him.

He said little. Talking was not his strong point. But he never forgot, and he took his own way of showing what was in him.

Colonel Zazarin had escaped the infection. He believed that a Governor's first duty was to keep himself in condition to govern, even though he did it by proxy. He kept aloof from the prisons, therefore, and allowed no man near him whose duties took him into them. And so, for that time, he went free. But, since over-anxiety for life is not the best safeguard against disease, so in due course Colonel Zazarin fell into another pit in spite of all his precautions.

All through the lingering summer months the unequal fight in the prisons went on, a losing fight, incessant, heart-breaking. But for the inspiration of his new relations with Hope there were times when Paul would have cast himself down, sick to death of it all, and careless whether he ever got up again. But the thought of her, of her greater need than ever now of his help and comforting, of the still closer union that time would bring--these things braced him back to life. His heart was glad and his body responded to it, and brought him unscathed through the fiery furnace, though he spared himself no whit.

It was not till the first snows came that the virulence of the plague began to slacken, and it was a month longer before Paul felt himself at liberty to occupy his own house again.

Hope had been there for some weeks past with Madame Roskova to keep her company. But the moment Madame heard of Paul's coming she signified her intention of returning to Marya Verskaïa up the valley.

"And, my dear," she said, with impressive kindliness, to Hope, "I do hope you will be happier together than you were, and will live together as God meant you to do when He joined your lives."

And this time Hope did not ask her to stop.