Part 14

The train still rushes along, beating rhythmic time to many tunes that are in my head; I gaze out of the window, at the whirling landscape that swings past like a giant chess-board, at the telegraph wires that dip, and then ascend slowly and dip again. Hours pass or days pass.... And the train stops.

Elise is hurriedly collecting cloaks and satchels.

"Where are we, Elise? Are we in Venice?"

"Not yet; not yet. We are in Vienna."

As I step from the train, two men whom I do not know approach me. One of them asks me if I am the Countess Tarnowska. He has not taken his hat off, and I do not deign to reply.

As I am about to pass him he lays his hand on my arm. The other man also comes forward, and, one on each side, they conduct me along the platform. I notice many people stopping to look at me.

Nothing seems to matter. I do not remember why we are in Vienna, nor whither we are bound. I notice that it is a bright, hot day, and I feel that I am walking in a dream.... I find myself thinking of Vassili; I wish he would come, and send these men away and take me home. I shall be glad when I am at home with Vassili and the children and Aunt Sonia.... Safely at home!

Then I remember--I have no home. I am a forsaken, demented creature whom Vassili cares for no longer. But where am I going? I am going to Paul Kamarowsky, who lives and loves me!... Again I weep with joy and thankfulness at the thought that Kamarowsky lives.

Now I am in a carriage driving through the streets of Vienna; and the two strange men are still with me. They are taking me to a hotel. We arrive. I pass through a large doorway and along some passages. Then I notice that it is not a hotel. It is a vast, bare room with wooden benches round the wall. Some men in uniform stand at the door, and I notice that they do not salute me when I enter.

Neither does an elderly man who is sitting at the desk rise or come to meet me. He looks at me steadily and asks me many questions; but I pay no heed to him. The windows are open; I can hear the sound of a piano very far away; somebody is practising a romance by Chaminade that I used to play at Otrada.... How sad a piano sounds when played by an unseen hand in the silence of a sunlit street!

The man at the desk speaks in German to the uniformed men; they take my golden wristbag from me, and conduct me out of the bare room down a long passage. As I go slowly forward between the two men I notice that from the far end of the passage a group of people are coming towards us. In the center of the group walks a man, handcuffed and wearing his hat crookedly at the back of his head, as if placed there by some other hand than his own. _It is Prilukoff!_

He sees me. A wave of livid pallor overspreads his face. Then he bends forward towards me and makes a movement with his lips, pressing them tightly together and shaking his head; he is trying to make me understand something. As they notice this the men at my side grasp my arm and make me turn quickly down another corridor. But I hear Prilukoff's voice shouting after me. He utters a Russian word: "Molci!" (Be silent).

The men thrust me rudely into an empty cell. I sit down on a bench fixed in a corner under the small, barred window and lean my head against the wall. I feel neither unhappy nor afraid; only weary, unspeakably weary; and almost at once I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. Never since I was a child at Otrada have I known such perfect rest--such utter oblivion poured upon such limitless weariness.

Suddenly my door is opened abruptly and one of the men enters; he takes me by the arm, and conducts me back to the large, bare room, where the elderly official still sits at his desk. And there, standing before him, I see Elise. She is weeping bitterly. I see her making those comical grimaces which always accompany her tears, as in Italy cheerful music accompanies a child's funeral. My mind--like a frightened bat that has flown into a room and darts hither and thither--flutters and plunges wildly through all my past life. I think of my mother, of little Peter, and of Bozevsky; I remember a pink dress I once wore here in Vienna, at a reception of the Russian Embassy.... I think of little Tioka and his days for saying "No." ... How far, how far away it all is! What a gulf of guilt and sorrow have my tottering footsteps traversed since then.... But now--now I will climb tremblingly, devoutly, the steep road that leads back to safety; humbled to my knees I will pour out my thanks. For Paul Kamarowsky is saved; he lives and will recover!

The man at my side is dragging me roughly forward. The elderly official at the desk has beckoned to me, and as I stand before him in a line with Elise he reads aloud from a sheet of foolscap. Suddenly I hear the words: "Complicity in the murder of Count Paul Kamarowsky...."

The murder? _The murder!_

Two of the uniformed men hold my arms.

"But," I try to say, with chattering teeth, "Count Kamarowsky lives ... he will recover."

The man replies, "Count Kamarowsky is dead."

I laugh out loud. The car on the switchback rushes, whirls, plunges--falls with me to destruction.

XLII

Like a dream within a dream.--POE.

It was in the prison infirmary that I first heard the details of what had passed in the Villa Santa Maria del Giglio, on that fatal morning of August the 3rd. As the nursing sister sat beside me, renewing from time to time the cold bandages placed on my throbbing forehead, she told me in low tones the mournful and tragic story. I listened as if I were listening in a dream to the story of a dream.

"When (she said) at early morning the Venetian servant-girl heard a knock at the door she went to open it, and a pale youth stepped quickly across the threshold. He asked for Count Kamarowsky, and bade the girl tell him that Nicolas Naumoff, of Orel, had arrived and desired to see him. The girl went to her master's door and knocked. He was awake and had risen. On hearing her message, he hurried out to meet his friend, for he loved him like a brother--"

("Ah, sister, I know, I know! He loved him like a brother!")

"When he saw Naumoff come in he went forward to meet him with open arms. The young man raised his hand and fired five shots point blank into his body. The Count fell to the ground; but even then he stretched out his arms to the young man and said: 'My friend, why have you done this to me? In what way have I ever harmed you?' The young man, with a cry as if he had awakened from a dream, flung himself on the ground at his feet. Then the wounded man showed him the balcony from which he might escape, and with fast-ebbing breath forgave him and bade him farewell."

("Oh, sister, sister, with fast-ebbing breath he forgave him and bade him farewell!")

"He was carried to the hospital, and the doctors wanted to give him chloroform while they probed the gaping, deep-seated wounds; but he would not take it. 'Do what you have to do without sending me to sleep,' he said. 'I shall have plenty of time to sleep--afterwards.' The doctors groped for the bullets in the lacerated flesh, and stitched up the five, deep-seated wounds.... When it was over he asked for you."

("Sister, sister, he asked for me!")

"He begged that you might be summoned quickly, and many telegrams were sent, but you neither came nor replied."

("I neither came nor replied!")

"On the third day he was better. He spoke to those around him, and again he asked for you, and hoped that you would come. In the hospital he was in the hands of an old and very famous surgeon; but alas! as Fate would have it--"

("What? what? As Fate would have it--?")

"As Fate would have it, the mind of this old and celebrated surgeon suddenly gave way. None knew that anything was amiss, as he stood that day at the bedside of the sufferer whom his skill had saved. He spoke to his assistants in the same calm, authoritative voice as usual, but he ordered that _the stitches should be taken out of the five wounds that were just beginning to heal_. Those around him recoiled in amazement. They were thunderstruck. But he repeated the disastrous order in the voice of one who is accustomed to command and to save lives that are in peril. Then--"

("What then? What then?")

"Then the assistants, doubting their own wisdom, but not that of the man who had been their master, obeyed, and reopened the five deep-seated wounds which were just beginning to heal. And again, as Fate would have it--"

(Ah, Fate! The ghoul, the vampire Fate! She who has pursued me since my birth! She who has caught us and crushed us all in her torturing grip, splintering us like frail glass bubbles in her hand! Now she had entered the sick room of Paul Kamarowsky, had brooded over his bedside, and in fiendish pleasantry had scourged the old surgeon's brain with madness, whipping it to frenzy as a child whips a top, guiding his hand to tear the injured body and reopen the fast-healing wounds.)

"As Fate would have it, the old surgeon gave other and still more dreadful orders. Ah, holy Virgin! how shall the horror be told?... When the bewildered assistants, aghast at what they had done, laid the sufferer back on his pillows, the slaying had been accomplished."

("The slaying had been accomplished!")

"With his last breath he called upon your name."

("With his last breath he called upon my name!")

XLIII

E son quasi a l'estremo. Luce degli anni miei, dove se' gita?

CARDUCCI.

If I were to be asked to name the darkest hour of my dark life, well do I know which of all my gloomy memories would raise its spectral face.

Not the terror-haunted hours of madness and crime, not the anguish-stricken nights passed at the bedside of those I loved, not my own life-struggles with the monsters of disease and dementia, tearing at the very roots of my life--no, the darkest hour of my life was that glorious summer morning in Venice, when I was brought from the prison of La Giudecca to attend my trial at the Criminal Court. The sun flung a sparkling net of diamonds athwart the blue waters of the lagoon, and the gondola bore me with peaceful splash of oar over the dancing waters. The gondolier steadied the swaying skiff at the wave-kissed steps, and I rose, drawing my veil about me, to disembark.

As I placed my foot on the steps--how often before, in happier days, had I thus stepped from my gondola, greeted and smiled upon by the kindly Venetian idlers!--I lifted my eyes. A crowd had assembled at the top of the steps and thronged the piazza. They stood in serried ranks, menacing and silent, leaving a narrow pathway for me to pass. I faltered and would have stepped back, but the carabinieri at my side held my arms and impelled me forward. At that moment some one in the crowd--a woman--laughed. As if that sound had shattered the spell that held them mute, the mob broke into a tumult of noise, a storm of hisses and cries, shrieks and jeers, hootings and maledictions, while, rising above it and more cruel than all, was the laughter, the strident, mocking laughter that accompanied my every step and gesture.

And there, tall and motionless in the midst of the laughing, hissing, shrieking mob, stood my father, his white hair stirring in the breeze, his eyes--the proud blue O'Rourke eyes--fixed upon me.

Oh, father, father whose heart I have broken, in that hour I paid the wages of my sin. Not these dark years of imprisonment, not the mantle of ignominy that clothes me with eternal defilement, not the gloomy solitude in which I see the gradual fading of my youth, not the horror of the past, nor the hopelessness of the future--not these are the deadliest of my punishments; but the memory of your white hair in the crowd that hissed its hatred, and laughed its contempt of your daughter, and the jeers that greeted you, and the rude hands that jostled you when you stepped forward and laid your hand in blessing on my degraded head.

* * * * *

Marie Tarnowska is silent. Her story is told.

EPILOGUE

The verdant landscape of Central Italy swings past the train that carries me homeward. The looped vines--like slim green dancers holding hands--speed backwards as we pass. Far behind me lies the white prison of Trani; and the memory of Marie Tarnowska and of her sins and woes drifts away from me, like some shipwrecked barque, storm-tossed and sinking, that I have gazed upon, powerless to help.

The long summer day is drawing to its close; above the Apennines where the sky is lightest the new moon floats like a little boat of amber on an opal sea. Like a fragment of a dream the song returns to my memory, the childish song of which I have never heard and shall never hear more than the first two lines:

When little children sleep, the Virgin Mary Steps with white feet upon the crescent moon...

As the train carries me homeward, back to the joys of life and love and freedom, back to the welcome of friends and the safety of a sheltered hearth, I think once more of her whom I have left in the gloom of her prison cell.

Soon, very soon, the hour of her release will strike, and the iron doors that have guarded her will open wide to let her pass.

What then, what then, Marie Tarnowska?

Who will await you at the prison gate? Surely Grief, Scorn, and Hatred will be there. But by your side I seem to see a guardian spirit, shielding your drooping head with outstretched wings. It is the sister of lost Innocence--Repentance; and in her wake comes the blind singer, Hope.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note

Original spelling, even where inconsistent, and punctuation have been preserved.

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.