Chapter III: At the Coming of the Light

Marian Best opened her eyes dreamily, expecting to hear the boom of the morning gun ringing in her ears. She saw that it must be six o’clock of the day--time for her to think of “the Dolls” again, and of all the uncoloured drudgery of her life. She had travelled far, in her sleep, from the ice-bound fortress and the melancholy, prison-like abode of Nikolai Stefanovitch; had sojourned awhile in the lanes and orchards of her own Devonshire, there to gather flowers of her affection and to kiss the lips of the child she loved. But when she awoke, with a red glare of light playing in her eyes and the grip of the frost to benumb her limbs, she came quickly from the garden of her dreams and steeled herself to face the solitude and the gloom of her island home. And she knew that the child, whose lips she had touched in her sleep, was himself sleeping more than a thousand miles away, and that between them lay the barrier of city and of sea--and of a woman’s poverty.

She was surprised at the first that her room was not in darkness, and that she did not hear the voice of old Ivan asking if “Missa” would “take a tea”; but anon the rustle of her silk skirt and the shape of the great stove looming up in the ruddy light brought her to a remembrance of the time and place, and she knew that she had dozed before her fire at the hour of the General’s dinner.

That was her moment of respite; the moment when she could shut herself in her room and be mistress of her thoughts and enjoy that dominion of self which no eye may share. When first she came to Kronstadt to teach the General’s daughters those scraps of English which pass for culture in Russia, she had welcomed this hour as the ultimate possibility of her day; an hour when she could write to little Dick, her brother, and remember the home she had left--the unforgotten voices and the harvest time of love. As the months passed and the terrible winter fell upon the land, and even the friendly sea below her windows was bound in the chains of the frost, she began almost to be afraid of herself and of the solitude. It may be that the work to which she had set her hand could not fail to react upon her mind, and so to war against her nerves that the creak of a door or the fall of a foot upon the stair would bring her to piteous trembling and dread. The secret she guarded so well was a heavy burden. Grim spectres followed it, haunting her, or whispering words that seemed to still her heart and to bring cries of fear to her lips. There were moments when a realisation of all she had done, and would do, drove her to such depths of terror that her reason seemed to be leaving her. At other moments she could call herself a spy and laugh at the word. The living death of the mines, the horrid sights and sounds of Russian prisons, were no more than fairy tales to such a mind. She was only a woman, she said, and who would harm her? She would tell them it was a jest, and they must believe her. That pretty assumption of a child-like innocence, which had befriended her often when she had cajoled Captain Paul and obtained from him those secrets of the citadel for which her friends in London were willing to pay so great a price, that innocence should befriend her to the end. And the end was near now. She carried bound about her own body, a very part of herself, as it were, the precious sketches and maps and diaries for which she had laboured so earnestly. She foresaw the day when the shadow of the living death would lie upon her path no more; when an English home would harbour her and English hands would shield her from peril, and the child she loved would be ever near her. For his sake she would go on, for his sake self should be forgotten with that new and sweetening impulse which the winter months had brought to her. She dare not tell herself that such an impulse was love for the man whose country she had betrayed and whose honour she had played with.

Many of these thoughts came to her in the moment of waking, when she sat in her great chair and watched the fantastic shapes of light and shadow; or listened to the moan and crash of the ice now mastered by the warmth of later February and losing dominion over the sea. Her room lay in the north wing of the Governor’s house, and was built out upon the ramparts, so that when she pulled aside her curtain she beheld a mighty moving field of shining floes, here decked with hummocks which had the glitter of jewels, there broken into tiny bergs and floating islands of snow; or again washed by the foaming waves which cast the waters up in fountains of spray and displayed a hundred changing lights as the moonbeams fell upon them. Grim and forbidding, above this holocaust of the driven ice, stood the forts and batteries of the northern channel. Marian remembered the long summer days she had spent with Captain Paul in those steel-walled chambers of the secrets; how she had paced the ramparts for a measurement of them; how greedily she had learnt the lessons in gunnery; how in the silence of this very room she had written down the answers to the questions her English friends asked her, that thereby she might purchase liberty for herself and for the child. To-night these memories were full of an unexplained sadness. She recalled carnival--three weeks had passed since that folly--and the words of love spoken to her then. A yearning for sympathy, a sense of weakness, a consciousness that one man at least in Kronstadt could bring blood to her cheeks and light to her eyes, contributed to her sense of solitude. She found herself standing in the darkness and telling herself that she was utterly alone. Then fear--fear she knew not of what--swept upon her like a freshet; there came to her the horrid thought that she was watched; that unseen eyes followed her even in the privacy of her room; that a man stood close to her and had but to stretch out his hand to touch her own. The terror of such imaginings served to freeze her very blood in her veins. She staggered to the wall and switched on the light. But the lamp showed her an empty room--she was alone with her fears, to laugh at them, to forget them as she had forgotten them a hundred times since she had come to Kronstadt.

The friendly light helped her quickly to this task of forgetfulness. The hand which pressed upon her beating heart dropped to her side. She ran to the door and looked out into the great corridor of the north wing. The silence of night lay upon it. Gladly she turned back to her own cosy room, to the warmth of the stove and the welcome privacy. A moment at the glass, a moment before a photograph of little Dick set boldly upon an easel, a touch of the dress here, a touch of the hair there, a pose of the dainty head, a silent question, “Will he be there to-night?” satisfied the personal instinct. She knew that they awaited her in the drawing-room; “the Dolls” would sit, one on either side of her, just now and hold her hand. The General himself would leer at her from the depths of an arm-chair and ask her to sing “Bid me to lofe.” It might be that Captain Paul would join them if his duties were done; and that he would linger on when Nikolai Stefanovitch had gone to his library, and would remind her, not by word, but by look and unspoken appeal and the silent tributes of homage, of the night of her promise, of the night when he had touched her forehead with his lips and she had not refused him.

The thought brought a deeper colour to her cheeks. She moved about her room with the quick, nervous gesture of suppressed excitement. A man, observing her, would have said that a well-trained mind governed every act; he would have wondered, at the same time, that so fair a face should have led its possessor so rarely to the mirror.

Marian Best knew little of the weapons with which nature had armed her. The thick brown hair straggled in picturesque disorder upon her forehead and her neck; rebelling curls showed themselves at every movement; her dress was “thrown on,” but it fitted her to perfection; she had no rings upon her fingers, but the white hands were the prettier for the need.

Eight o’clock was being struck by the church bells of the town when at last Marian left her room to join “the Dolls” in the salon of the house. She had quite forgotten her strange fears of an hour ago, and laughed at them when she trod the soft carpets of the corridor and peeped into the chambers which opened off it. No one moved then in the north wing. The rooms about her were tenantless and in darkness. When she passed the library where old Nikolai Stefanovitch had set up his holy of holies, she wondered to see the door of it open and a flicker of red light upon the low-pitched ceiling. Once only since she had been in the fortress had she dared to enter that room and to pry into its secrets. She knew well that the book-shelves, upon which she beheld the glare of the dancing light, were garners of maps and documents which, could she possess them, would be a fortune to her; she knew that here were locked away treasures for which spies had laid down their lives unavailingly.

Never did she pass that study without some little tremor of heart and mind. Now it would be the devil of rashness saying, “Enter and see”; or, again, the spirit of prudence telling her that therein lay the living death. To-night she heard the first of the voices, and prudence was no more her friend. The desire to have done with it all, to flee Russia and the land of bondage, possessed her to the exclusion of all else. She longed for the sound of little Dick’s voice in the English lanes she loved. There came to her out of the darkness a message which said, “Search, and all that you want shall be found there.” She refused to listen to it, and answered in her heart that she would betray no more the country of the man who loved her. And this drove her from the door, but not many paces, for presently she stood quite still to listen for any sounds, and, hearing none, she gave herself up to the less subtle arguments. She told herself that when the summer came she would be in England, that the price of her work would have been paid by the British Government, that she would build a home to be the haven of her love.

So was she held, chained by hesitation to the precincts of the corridor. The silence tempted her the more; she was sure that no man in the house then thought of the north wing--that all were busy in the kitchens below. A strong and conquering impulse sent her, at last, with muted feet, back to her own room. She picked up a volume of stories and deftly inserted a sheet of notepaper and a pencil between the leaves. Quick and daring, and armed with all her courage, she ran back to the General’s cabinet and entered it. She stood within the holy of holies, and the shadow of the living death was all about her.

It was a spacious room, ill furnished and bare, save for the many volumes which gave ornament to the walls. A ponderous writing-table had the place of honour, and this was littered with bulky documents and official books decorative in their disorder. Marian could see, even by the feeble light cast from the open door of the stove, that the General had been occupied very recently with public affairs, for a big blue paper was open upon his blotting-pad and his pen had rolled from the inkstand and smirched the paper. A heavy volume, bound in red, lay cheek by jowl with the letter he had been writing; and a wine-glass, half emptied, spoke of an occupation interrupted only by the gong for dinner. That occupation would be resumed when the clock struck nine. Marian remembered that it had just gone eight, and with the remembrance there came upon her another moment of apprehension--such a moment as she had known when she awoke from her sleep in the arm-chair. A panic, overwhelming and irresistible, seized upon her. She thought again that unseen eyes watched her in the darkness. She ran from the room and stood panting in the corridor.

But the panic surrendered swiftly--as these fits were wont to do. She laughed at herself when a minute had passed, and took heart of her new resolution. She said that if anyone found her in the room she must be ready with many an excuse--the excuse that the door of the stove was open, that a cinder had fallen. When she entered the cabinet for the second time, a great hope nerved her to resolution. It was the hope that among the General’s maps there would be one of Fort Peter. She lacked this alone for the completion of her work. She said that she must have light; and growing bolder at the impulse, she found the switch, and a blaze of soft rays illumined the apartment.

The brightness of the light awed her. She shielded her eyes with both her hands, and stood irresolute for the third time. Not until many minutes had passed was she able to read the gilt lettering of the books upon the shelves. When resolution came at last generously, she took a map down and unfolded it. It was the map of the southern channel wherein Fort Peter stands. She saw the name joyfully, and opened her book that she might have pencil and paper. But before she could use them a hand was laid upon her shoulder; and when she sprang up with a cry unsuppressed upon her lips, she found herself face to face with Paul Zassulic.

All the little comedy of excuse she had planned so well failed in that supreme moment to defend her. When she had faced her lover for a moment, she knew that she had no word with which to answer him; and all her courage deserting her, she stood white and trembling to hear his accusation.