Chapter XV: Upon the Nameless Island

It was the afternoon of the day, and the _Esmeralda_ lay at anchor under the lee of one of the rocky islets which abound upon the southern shores of Finland. They had warped her to the sheer rock, so that she lay snug and hidden and sheltered from the wind-driven tide which raced between the island and its neighbour. A loom of haze above her funnel alone spoke of life within her. Her crew had gone ashore to stretch their legs, and were to be discovered upon the beach in all those attitudes of repose which seamen court. The sun fell upon the barren rock and upon their faces, but did not wake them. They had kept the long vigil, and this was their hour of rest.

The day had been one of tempest since the dawn: and though it was now late in the afternoon and the rain had ceased to fall, there was a thunder of surf upon the outer islands of the archipelago and the open water frothed white with foam. But the creek into which they had moored the _Esmeralda_ was sheltered both from the wind and seas. Sheer walls of granite towered above the decks of the yacht; a girdle of tiny islets, stretching far out to the Gulf or back to the distant shore of Finland, was her defence against the breakers. She rode proudly at her moorings as though conscious of the victory which the night had given her.

This haven had been made at the dawn of the day by men who knew every channel and landmark in the Gulf. They had welcomed it, for therein they could think of food and sleep, and forget that the Russian was at their heels. Though the truce might prove but a truce of hours, it was a gift of God to those whose eyes ached with watching, whose limbs were cold with wet, whose tongues were parched with thirst. The gale which sprang up with the coming of the light was a befriending gale to them. They said that no ship of war would venture near them while the surf thundered, and the mist of spray made clouds above the land, and the west wind screamed in the Gulf. And so they slept, and the sunshine of the later day was a balm of light to their eyes, and welcome warmth suffused bodies that had been stiff and cramped with the bitter cold of the Baltic night.

Though Paul had gone ashore with his crew, it was not to sleep. The few hours of rest he had snatched in the earlier hours of the day sufficed for him. He, perhaps, of all the little company, understood most truly the malevolence of Fate in casting him back to the shelter of the island at an hour when he should have been in the great sea-road of the Baltic. The Land of the West, wherein liberty lay, seemed to have become a land beyond the horizon of his dreams. He looked out from the island upon the whitened billows and remembered that Russian ships, sent to the pursuit of him, were watching and waiting in the channel of the Gulf. The distant shore, high and rocky and barren, spoke of coast patrols and Finns who soon must learn that a strange yacht lay in the harbour of the islands; of peasants who would run to carry the news to Helsingfors that a few kopecks might be thrown to them. Scheme as he would, he could contrive no plan whereby the peril wrought of the gale might be turned. He must wait for a smoother sea and a fairer wind. And waiting was an agony of doubt scarce to be supported.

All this was in his mind when Marian awoke at midday and was rowed by old John Hook to the little patch of beach which permitted them to land upon the nameless island. He met her at the water-side and lifted her from the boat; but he would tell her nothing of his thoughts, for he saw that colour had come again to her face and that the great rings beneath her eyes had been washed out by the waters of sleep. She was, indeed, almost the light-hearted pretty creature who had won his love at the Governor’s house; and when he looked into her brightening eyes and heard her girlish laughter, love came surging up to compel forgetfulness of all else.

“I have been waiting for you,” he said tenderly. “The hours were long.”

“They will race now,” she answered, as she locked her hand in his. “We shall see each other growing old, Paul. Oh, is it not good to breathe again? I could run, run, run to the world’s end.”

She dragged him on, hastening with joy of her freedom, telling him a hundred things at once, asking unfinished questions and waiting for no answer. When they had come to the high place of the rock she curled herself up on the ground and there she feasted her eyes on the panorama of whitened sea and whirling gull and desolate island. The man lay beside her, content that he had won her this hour of happiness.

“I cannot believe it,” she said, while the spindrift freshened her face and the wind swept the curls from her little ears, “I cannot believe that we are here. How should a day make such a difference? How should our lives run so evenly through long years and then turn so swiftly, carrying us away from everything we have ever known to things we never dreamed of? A month ago I was a governess in the house at Kronstadt. I taught the twins to grow up in the way they did not want to go. But to-day, where am I? what am I? Why are these things hidden from us? And if it is so strange to-day, what will it be next year and the year after? Oh, if one could look even for a moment into the glass of life!”

“But you cannot,” said Paul stolidly. “There is no glass except the glass of your mind and conscience. We cannot look; we can only act, Marian. And that is what we have been doing, you and I, though God knows what kind of a story we have written or where it will end. At this moment we are on an island near Hango, and we wait there until the wind and the sea go down. When that happens we shall go aboard the _Esmeralda_ again, and to-morrow we shall come to Stockholm.”

She clapped her hands, and regarding her environment wistfully, she cried--

“It is a world of islands, a world without life. There can be no spot on all the earth as lonely as this. And yet it is a city to me now. I could people it with the birds; the rocks should be the churches and buildings for me. Paradise lies on the broad road when one has been a month and has not seen the sun.”

He stroked her face, encouraging her to forget that her freedom might depend upon the whim of the wind.

“You are glad to be free, Marian, as glad as I am! Some day, perhaps, we will remember this day and speak of it as the morning of our love. I do not think that they will follow us; there are few that can sail these seas. Even the fishermen come here reluctantly. It is a grave for sailors, as many a good fellow knows.”

“And yet _you_ come here?”

“It was the one thing left to do. We could not pass the ships they had sent out yonder; we could not go back; this was our only haven, unless we returned to the prison as they wished.”

She shuddered and drew close to him.

“We shall never go back, dearest; you think that?”

He began to pick at the rocky stones and to throw them into the froth of the breaking waves.

“I do not know,” he said after a long pause. “Who can say what the future will bring? But I am a Russian no more. I have no country now. It does not concern me.”

The infinite pathos of his words was not to be concealed from her. Never since he had carried her from the cell at Alexander had she understood so well the price he had paid.

“Oh, Paul, Paul!” she exclaimed bitterly, “what have I done? what crime have I committed that I should bring this upon you? Let me go back to Kronstadt. I am not worth your sacrifice. I can never repay. There is time yet.”

The man laughed at her distress, and, blaming himself because he had spoken, he answered by taking her face into his hands and looking into her tear-stained eyes.

“The crime you have committed,” he said, “is to be the sweetest woman on earth! The wrong which you have done is to make me love you so that without you there is no world for me! Why talk of repaying? Is there to be a reckoning between those who love? Have they not all things in common? Who hurts you hurts me. When you are content I am content. I lose a country to gain the whole world. If I am no longer a Russian, shall I not be the husband of Marian? Let us not talk of these things; it is ingratitude while we have the bread of life so abundantly. When that bread fails we will complain. To-morrow, if the wind goes down, we shall be at Stockholm. I shall leave the yacht there and take an English steamer for London. It will then be your turn to forget that you are an Englishwoman; you will be the wife of Zassulic; you will be the friend of Russia. All that you have learnt at Kronstadt will be forgotten; the friends who tempted you will be strangers to you henceforth. We will begin life again, pilgrims in a strange country. But we shall walk the way of life together, and so the journey will be easy.”

The shadow of regret passed from his face while he went on to speak of all he would do in London; how that he hoped much from his kinsman and from his own training as an engineer. Marian, in her turn, listened with smiling face, though she was telling herself all the time that she must prevent the sacrifice, must compel him to return to his work and his country; if possible, to return, not as one disgraced, but a man who had wrestled with a great temptation and had vanquished it. As for herself, she did not doubt that her wits would find a way whereby she might reach her own country. The present danger she was in, the peril of almost immediate discovery by the Russian ships, was not real to her. She could run again and see the sky and breathe the fresh air. She felt herself adrift upon the ocean of circumstance, and the voyage was not without its measure of excitement.

“You must go back, Paul,” she said very firmly when he had done speaking; “we must find a way and an excuse.”

“A way, Petite, when you have been seen upon my ship, and the Sergeant has told them that I took you from the fort? Oh, yes, that would be easy enough; they are such simpletons at Kronstadt; they will believe me when I say, ‘The prisoner escaped: it was an accident’; they will reward me--with a file of soldiers and lead for medicine. The day when I can return to Russia will be the day when stars fall at our feet and there is no longer any sun in the sky. It is foolish to talk of it. Henceforth you shall make a country for me; it shall be a country of the heart; the house will be the house of our affections. We shall laugh then to remember of what little worth are all those material things which at one time seemed so much to us; we shall laugh at to-day, and tell how we cheated old Bonzo after all.”

It was a brave effort to conceal from her the apprehension he felt; but the woman’s instinct rightly interpreted the words. When next he looked into her face she was gazing over the storm-tossed waste to the distant field of the open sea, where the west wind still blew with hurricane force and banks of gathering cloud were the gloomy heralds of the night to come.

“The wind befriends us,” she said thoughtfully, “but the wind will die away presently, and then----”

“And then the darkness will take its place, little woman. Even if they think we are here among the islands, they must spend days before they discover upon which island we are. While they are looking for us we shall be snug in the harbour at Stockholm. We must steal from harbour to harbour until we see that no ships follow, and then the little yacht will do the rest. There is no ship in Russia that can outsteam her with a clear sea before us. We shall wait for the clear sea and all will be well.”

They had left the grassy knoll at this time and had come up to the headland, wherefrom they could overlook the strange haven into which destiny had cast them. Marian beheld again the world of islands, vast, interminable, stretching as far as the eye could see away toward the Baltic or back to the Russia they had left. The gloom of water and sky, the cold gray light, the haunting solitude, the wash of the waves, the shrill note of the gull, oppressed her anew with a vast sense of her own loneliness. She thought that she was an outcast from the world. She pictured herself flying from man to the desolate places of the earth. A hundred years of time seemed to lie between her and the life she had lived. She reproached herself bitterly that she had rewarded so great a love with so terrible a gift--the gift of men’s slander and the insult of evil tongues, the brand of dishonour and the exile’s lot.

And this thought grew upon her, that she must save Paul from himself and go alone upon the way to which her folly had carried her.