CHAPTER II

HOW ONE WENT FORTH ALONE

So, in due course, Hope Arskaïa became Hope Palma, and no littleness of mind imputes to Paul Pavlof from the fact that, when he got the offer of a small medical appointment in Moscow, he accepted it instantly, and Odessa knew him no more. He was very human, and he loved Hope Arskaïa to the very depths of his aching heart. Consideration for his own peace of mind might not have carried him to this final extremity of exile. He might, indeed, have found a gloomy satisfaction, something not very far removed from a flagellant pleasure, in watching her from afar, meeting her occasionally, and nursing in secret the thought that her heart had surely been his before she consummated her great self-sacrifice to duty by becoming Palma's wife.

But he was too big a man for that. If Hope could sacrifice herself for her life's work, so he could sacrifice himself for love of her.

It would indeed have been a sore trial to any man to watch from the outer darkness the happiness which, under equal circumstances, might have been his.

If he had seen any possibility of service to Hope he would have suffered and rejoiced. But there was no visible call for sympathy on Hope's account after her marriage with Palma. She seemed quite contented, nay, even happy, and Pavlof, pondering this strange matter in the light of a deeper understanding of her than most, imputed to her neither lightness nor forgetfulness.

He had known her better than any, and he knew that, compared with the work which she looked upon as an inheritance of sacred obligation from her father, her own well-being, prosperity, happiness, were as nothing and less than nothing.

To some it may seem that altruism so complete as this is visionary and overdrawn. The history of the evolutionary movement in Russia has given us many examples. Not that I would, for one moment, be supposed to hint that Russia monopolises, or even possesses in higher degree than other countries, this mighty force of self-sacrifice. But, in happier lands, the self-sacrificing dree their weirds below the level surface of life, obscure and unknown; whereas, in Russia, their lives and sufferings and deaths are, by force of circumstances, flashed luridly on the screen and set the startled world aghast at times.

He saw that she was contented in her new life. His presence in Odessa could afford her no pleasure, might even cause her a twinge of regret at times, for, with all the will in the world, a quiet face was all he could compass, and cheerfulness was hardly to be expected of him.

So he called upon her once after her marriage, to say farewell, and then he went away to Moscow.

He might have denied himself even this visit, and he debated the matter within himself for some time before deciding on it. Then it seemed to him that Hope might reasonably feel hurt by such avoidance, and by such a lapse from the ordinary rules of courtesy, and he went.

Old Masha had followed her mistress into the new life. She received him with all the old friendly favour which would have put him in Palma's place if the turning of the wheel had rested with her.

"I will tell her you are here, Paul Ivanuitch," said Masha, scanning his face, woman-like, for sign of his feeling, but lingering still.

"I am going away to Moscow, Marya. I have come to say goodbye."

"Ach!" said old Masha knowingly, and stood looking at him.

"Tell me, Marya. Is she happy?"

"Yes, she is happy, Paul Ivanuitch," and added quickly, "but you know she is not like others. It is not of herself she thinks. It is a terrible great change," she said, waving her simple old hands at the sumptuous appointments of the room. "I am almost afraid to speak aloud at times, it is all so fine. But it doesn't trouble her one bit, and it is not that she cares for. It seems to me sometimes that we have half the poor people of the city on our hands, and there are fresh ones every day."

"And Palma is good to--to you, Marya?" he asked, with an almost imperceptible quiver of the lip, which old Marya did not fail to catch, though her eyes were not as strong as they were once. She knew so well all that lay behind it.

"He is very good, Paul Ivanuitch. He is a bigger man than I thought. He is very generous. My God! how the money goes! I am afraid in the night sometimes that it will come to an end, but there is always plenty next day. I did not know any one had so much money."

"I will send you my address in Moscow, Marya. If ever I can do anything for--for you--or for her, will you promise to let me know?"

"Surely. It is good to know one has a friend to turn to. Now sit down and I will tell her you are here."

He did not sit down, but stood looking at the big oil paintings on the wall--Prince Peter, and Serge's mother, and Serge himself when he was a small boy. And the rich hangings to the windows and doors, and the carved table and buffet and chairs, stole in upon his senses without his knowingly looking at them, though he remembered them all afterwards, because they were the things she lived among. And then the door opened, and he was face to face with Hope herself.

She was looking very well, very bright and cheerful, more richly dressed than he had ever seen her, more beautiful than ever.

His face was thinner even than it used to be, and his deep eyes deeper, and keener, and more ardent, she thought, but just the same straight, honest eyes that always met your own frankly and squarely, and held no equivocations. Perhaps there was something of a shadow in them now, but it might be only that they looked deeper in their settings than before. In truth there was in them the shadow of a slight reserve to which she had not been accustomed. For in spite of himself he felt a touch of resentment at her cheerfulness, and a touch of anger with himself for so feeling.

"You are going away, Paul Ivanuitch?" said Hope, when she had greeted him.

"I am going to Moscow, Hope Ivanovna. I have got an appointment there. It is not much, but it may lead to more."

"You will be missed here. Will you still be able to carry on the work there?"

"Oh, surely. I hope to have still larger opportunities. My work will lie among the very poor, and there is never any lack of them."

"It would grieve me to think of you dropping it."

"I will carry it on as you would have it, Hope Ivanovna, as long as I am able. When you have set it in one's heart it would be as hard to drop it as it would be to forget yourself."

"There is so much to be done and so few to do it," she said earnestly.

"You are always busy?"

"Always busy."

"And quite happy?"

"Quite happy. I have no time for anything else."

"I am glad," he said quietly. "If ever I can serve you in any smallest thing, I beg of you to let me know."

"There is no one I would sooner turn to for help, Paul, if that time should ever come. I wish----"

She looked wistfully at him, and he knew that she was wishing it was in her power to do something to brighten his own path in life. But the only thing she could have done she had not seen well to do, and nothing else was possible.

"God be with you, Hope Ivanovna, and give you every good." He stooped and kissed her hand, and she bent and kissed his forehead.

"Would you not stop and see Serge----"

"No, I thank you, Hope Ivanovna. I leave to-night, and I still have some calls to make," and he was gone.

She told Palma of his visit, when he came in, and he, in his hearty way, regretted that she had not kept him to dinner.

"It's ages since we met, and we used to be good friends at one time. Let me see--" and his eyes rested thoughtfully on Hope's face, as he cast back in his mind--"yes--I don't think Pavlof and I have met since our marriage. I suppose that was it. I don't believe Paul Ivanuitch has ever quite forgiven me for carrying off the prize. But really, you know, I was not to blame. Was I now?"

"No, you were not to blame, Serge, and I'm quite sure Paul Ivanuitch bears no malice. He will be very lonely in Moscow. I cannot help feeling sorry for him."

"Oh, he'll soon make heaps of friends."

But Hope knew better, and her own great happiness set his lonely way in deeper shadow in her thoughts.

For she was happy. In marrying Serge Palma she had given but small consideration to her own feelings. And Palma, perfectly aware of that, had set himself diligently to win her to himself.

He had tried at first, in the quietest and most unobtrusive manner possible, to introduce into her life new elements of interest, which might, he hoped, in time wean her from those labours among the poor and downtrodden which she looked upon as her great work in life.

His manner of life had been, in almost every respect, the very opposite of hers. He had always had more money than he could use. He had always flung it about generously. He had never had to scrimp and save in his life, and self-denial was as absolutely unknown to him as the absence of the necessity for it was unknown to his wife. Whereby no doubt he had missed much, and had been to that extent docked of his full stature.

He treated Hope with the greatest generosity, gave her everything he thought she could possibly want, which included very much which she did not want at all, and in every possible way showed her that the one desire of his heart was to win her completely, and so round their union into a perfect circle of happiness.

In order to win her to his own ways, he found it advisable at times to go hand in hand with her along her chosen paths. And, bit by bit, for very love of her, he found himself going further than ever he had dreamed of going. For very love of her he found himself first tolerating, then enjoying, this new way of life because it was her way. Hers was the finer spirit, and by degrees he came to look through her eyes at matters which had lain under his nose all his life, but which he had never seen until his love for her quickened his understanding.

She was a whole new world to him, a sweet apocalypse, and, by degrees, those things which had sufficed him before came to be as nothing and less than nothing to him.

The change was very gradual, but it could not fail in time to attract the attention of those who sorely missed the jovial dispenser of largesse in Palma's former circles. His old friends chaffed him and laughed at him. He invited them to dinner and they fell under the spell of Madame Palma's beauty, to the extent, at all events, of swearing in marvellous language that Serge Palma was a mighty fortunate man. And if they still chaffed him at times, for his dereliction from their primrosy paths, his quiet smile turned all their shafts aside and even lodged them in their own bosoms. Not a man of them but would have done any mortal thing Madame Palma might have asked of him, however contrary to his natural inclination. But Hope had very soon taken their shallow measures, and not one of them did she find worth using in her great work.

For that work, while patently and undeniably of the most harmless description, and with no end or aim beyond the uplifting of the helpless and downtrodden, was still work at which the authorities looked doubtfully, if not actually askance, and it needed for its furtherance large souls who could be at once energetic and cautious and discriminating.

Even in such simple work as this there ran a vein of danger, in the fact that the downtrodden, when they awake to a sense of their condition, and of the causes of it, are liable to fits of fierce resentment; and at times fiery spirits will out and kindle conflagrations the stifling of which entails far-reaching consequences and suffering. And at such times the innocent are as like to suffer as the guilty--more like, perhaps, since the latter, with their foreknowledge of coming events, can also provide ways of escape.

Palma was redeeming to the full the promise he had made to Hope when he asked her to marry him. In her simple schemes of amelioration he was with her to the extent of her will. Against anything beyond he set his face like a flint, as indeed she did herself.

The people were nominally free, but they were not educated up to freedom. It was her aim, as it had been her father's, to lift them out of the sloughs, so that in due time they should be able to put their unknown powers to noblest uses. But as to any violent and precipitant exhibition of these as yet immatured powers, they never ceased to warn their poor folk with all the strength that was in them; and their poor folk met their warnings with vehement denial of any remotest thought of any such intentions, and talked among themselves afterwards in ways that would have given Serge Palma nightmares in powder magazines if he had dreamt of them.

He regarded some of her agents with considerable doubt, though she had chosen them with the utmost care and discrimination, and had tried them well before she leaned to any extent upon them.

"Now that fellow Petrof, Hope? Do you feel quite safe with him?" he asked her one day, when Dmitri of that name had come creeping up to beg Hope Ivanovna's assistance for Katerina, wife of Nicholas Korba. Katerina was expecting to be laid up, and her husband had managed to get into the hands of the police.

"I've known him a very long time now, Serge, and I have never found him take a kopeck for himself of what I have given him for other people."

"I wish he'd make more noise when he walks," said Palma, smiling himself at the meagreness of his grounds for disliking Dmitri. "He goes along like a snake, and it's all I can do to keep from putting my foot on him."

"He is very quiet. But, you see, they learnt to be that in the old times, and some of them can't get out of it."

"Well, we can only trust in Providence that they put the money you give them to the uses you intend."

"Where I give money they are mostly in such want that they would grudge it being used for anything else. But you are quite right, Serge. There is a risk, and I don't see how we can eliminate it more than we are doing by exercising every possible care and watchfulness. You assumed a great responsibility when you took over me and my work."

"I have never regretted it, my dear, and never shall, whatever comes or goes. You have opened the eyes of my understanding. In time I do believe you will make a fairly good man of me."

"You are very good to me, and to give up so much for me, Serge. You are a bigger man than I thought."

"With such a teacher who could fail to grow? I have only one regret in life, and that is that I cannot make you Tzarina and give you a free hand to work your fullest will."

"I wish you could. But the one without the other would be very little use. It is not the Tzar or Tzarina who obstruct, but those below them. And how they will ever be brought round I do not know."

"Well, all I want is that we should so carry on the work that it may not bring us into collision with the powers that be, for in that case the work would suffer check. We also, perhaps."

"Our intentions are good, at all events," she said thoughtfully, "and for the rest, as you say, we can only trust in Providence."

"Ah, my dear, good intentions they say, pave the road to--Siberia," he said, with a smile. "But we'll do our best to keep on the right side of that line, at all events."