LUCY HARDING.
LUCY HARDING.
LUCY HARDING.
LUCY HARDING.
CHAPTER I.NICOL PATOFF.
In the summer of 189– I was one of a party of tourists who were going to St. Petersburg. There were eight of us, all women, strong, fearless and self-reliant, and all natives of Massachusetts. Two were from Boston, three from its suburbs, and three, including myself, from Ridgefield, a pretty little inland town among the Worcester hills. We had a guide, of course, Henri Smeltz, a German, and if his credentials, which I now think he wrote himself, were to be believed, he was fully competent to take charge of eight women with opinions of their own and as much knowledge of the country they were to visit as he had. It had been the dream of my life to see the water-soaked city, and when the opportunity came I accepted it eagerly, with, however, some dread of the fatigue of the long journey and the annoyances I might meet in the capital of the czar. I was not a good sailor and I had a great dislike for traintravel, and by the time we had crossed the Atlantic and the Continent and were on the Gulf of Finland, I was in a rather limp and collapsed condition. But I rallied as the bright July day wore on, and when the Russian officers came on board I was quite myself and felt able to cope with them all if necessary. I had nothing to fear. I was an American citizen and wore the colors of my country in a knot of ribbon on my dress. My passport was all right, so far as I knew. But better than this was the fact that I could speak Russian with a tolerable degree of accuracy. I was fond of languages, and during my school days had mastered German and French to the extent of reading and writing them fluently. My teacher was Nicol Patoff from St. Petersburg, who, outside of his school hours, had a class in Russian which I joined, and astonished both Nicol and myself by the readiness with which I acquired the difficult language which the most of my companions gave up in despair after a few weeks’ trial and in spite of the entreaties of Nicol, who assured them that with a little patience what seemed so hard would be very easy.
He was a tall, handsome young man, with large, dark eyes which seemed always on the alert, as if watchingfor or expecting something which might come at any moment. All we knew of him was that he was from St. Petersburg. That his father, who was dead, had once been wealthy, in fact had belonged to the minor nobility, but had lost most of his money, and this necessitated his son’s earning his own living, which he could do better in America than elsewhere. This was the story he told, and although he brought no credentials and only asked to be employed on trial, his frank, pleasing manners and magnetic personality won him favor at once, and for two years he discharged his duties as teacher of languages in the Ridgefield Academy to the entire satisfaction of his employers. Many conjectured that he was a nihilist, but there was about him a quiet reserve which kept people from questioning him on the subject, and it was never mentioned to him but once. Then a young girl asked him laughingly if he had ever known a nihilist intimately.
“But, of course, you haven’t,” she added. “I suppose they only belong to the lower classes. You might see them without knowing them well.”
For a moment the hot blood surged into Patoff’s face, then left it deadly pale as he replied: “I have seen and known hundreds of them. They belong to all classes,high and low, rich and poor—more to the rich, perhaps, than the very poor. They are as thick as those raindrops,” and he pointed to a window, against which a heavy shower was beating. “There is much to be said on both sides,” he continued, after a few moments. “You are subjected to tyranny and surveillance, whichever party you belong to. It is a case of Scylla and Charybdis. Of the two it is better to be with the government than to be hounded and watched wherever you go and suspected of crimes you never thought of committing. A nihilist is not safe anywhere. His best friend may betray him, and then the gendarmes, the police. You have no idea how sharp they are when once they are on your track.”
This was a great deal for him to say, and he seemed to think so, for he stopped suddenly and, changing the conversation, began to speak to me in German and to correct my pronunciation as he had never done before.
During the next few weeks he received several letters from Russia, and grew so abstracted in his manner that once when hearing our lesson in Russian he began to talk to us in French, then in German, and finally lapsed into English, saying with a start: “I beg your pardon. My thoughts were very far away.”
“Where?” the girl asked who had questioned him on nihilism.
He looked at her a moment with a peculiar expression in his eyes, and then replied: “In Russia, my home, where I am going at the end of this quarter.”
We were all sorry to lose him, and no one more so than I, although I said the least. There was something in his eyes when they rested upon me and in his voice when he spoke to me which told me I was his favorite pupil, but if he cared particularly for me he never showed it until the day before he left town, when he called to say good-by. I had been giving my hair a bath and was brushing and drying it in the hot sun when he came up the walk. I disliked my hair and always had. It was very heavy and long and soft and wavy, and I had the fair complexion which usually goes with its color; but it was red, not chestnut or auburn, but a decided red, which I hated, and fancied others must do the same, and when I saw Nicol coming up the walk I shrank back in my seat under the maple tree, hoping he would not see me. But he did; and came at once to me, laughing as I tried to gather up into a knot my heavy hair, which, being still damp, would not stay where I put it. I know he said something about Godiva, thenchecked himself with “I beg your pardon,” as he saw the color rising in my face; and, lifting up a lock which had fallen down, he said: “I wish you would give me a bit of this as a souvenir.”
“Are you crazy,” I asked, “to want a lock of my hair? Why, it is red!”
“I know that,” he said; “but it is beautiful, nevertheless, especially in the sunlight. I like red. Can I have a bit?”
He took from his vest pocket a small pair of scissors, and handed them to me. I was too confused for a moment to speak. No one before had praised my hair. I had made faces at it in the glass. My brother, who was a few years older than myself, called me Carrots and Red-top, and, when in a very teasing mood, pretended to light a match on it. And Nicol called it beautiful, and wanted a lock of it as a souvenir. My first impulse was to give him the whole, if I could, and be rid of it; but, as I gathered the shining mass in my hand, and saw how the sunlight made it brighten and glisten, I began to have a certain feeling of pride in it, it was so long and thick and glossy, and curled around my fingers like a living thing.
“Yes, you can have some of the old, red stuff, if youwant it,” I said, laughingly; and, taking his scissors, I cut a tress where it could not be missed and handed it to him.
He was my teacher, my friend; he was going away, and I felt I scarcely knew how toward him, as, with my hair still down my back—for it was not yet dry, sat beside him, while he talked of Russia, and the difference between life there and in America, appearing all the while as if there was something he wished to say, but could not, or dared not.
“Domestic life there is not what it is here. You would not like it,” he said.
“I know I shouldn’t,” I answered, quickly, and he went on: “But it is home to me. My people are well born, and I must cast my lot with them, whether for good or bad.”
“I hope not for bad,” I said, with a little lump in my throat.
“That depends upon the standpoint from which you look,” he replied. “If I join the nihilists, and you sympathize with them, you will think I go for good. If I side with the government, and help hunt the nihilists down, and your sympathies are there, you will say I go for good.”
“Never!” I answered, hotly, stamping my foot upon the ground. “Nihilism may be wrong, but I detest the government, with its iron heel upon the poor people, and in a way upon your czar, who is kept more in ignorance of what is taking place than I am. You are all slaves, every one of you, from the czar in his palace to the poor serf in his mud house on the barren plain. I wish I could give your grand dukes a piece of my mind!”
Nicol laughed at my heat, and answered: “You didn’t have that red hair given you for nothing, did you? I wish you might give them a piece of your mind, but am afraid it would do no good. Russia is pretty firm in her opinion of herself. I wish she was different. I have learned many things in your country which I shall not forget. My life has been very pleasant here, and my thoughts will often travel back to Ridgefield, and the freedom such as we Russians do not know.”
“Why not stay, then?” I asked, the lump in my throat growing larger, and making my voice a kind of croak.
“That is impossible,” he replied. “Russia may be bad, but I can no more stay away from it than the bird can stay away from the nest where its young are clamoring for the food it is to bring them.”
“You have friends to whom you are going!” I said;and he replied: “Friends? Yes; thick as the leaves on the trees in summer, and they are waiting for me. I am going into danger or honor. I have not quite made my choice.”
“You are not a nihilist?” I exclaimed, starting to my feet, as if to get away from him.
With a low, musical laugh, habitual to him when he laughed at all, which was seldom, he put up his hand and drew me back upon the seat.
“I thought you sympathized with the nihilists?” he said.
“I do,” I answered; “but it is hard to associate you with one. I think of them as a kind of desperadoes, made so by oppression.”
“There you are mistaken,” he replied. “I told you once that the nihilists are found with the rich as often as with the poor. Some time you may, perhaps, read of a gang of people starting for Siberia, and I may be with them. If not, there will be others in it just as heartbroken at leaving their homes as I should be. Pray for them, but do not be troubled for me. I shall escape. I was not born to be a slave, a prisoner, and there is not power enough in all Siberia to keep me, if I choose not to stay.”
He stood up, tall and straight, and his eyes flashed with a fire I had never seen in them before. After a moment he resumed his seat, and continued: “There is no doubt that Russia is hovering on the crater of a volcano, which may, at any moment, burst out like Vesuvius. But St. Petersburg is a right jolly place, after all, and it is my home. I hope you will go there some day. Your knowledge of the language will make it easy for you, and you will not find us a bad lot, or know a nihilist from a partisan of the government. They are all mixed in together. If you go, I may or may not be there, but find No. — Nevsky Prospect. It was once my home, where we kept forty servants, falling over each other and doing less work than half a dozen do in America. It is part of the system. Here is my card. Good-by, and God bless you!”
He passed his hand caressingly over my hair, and, stooping, kissed me on my forehead. Then he left me, and I put my head upon the back of the seat, and cried, with a feeling that something had gone out of my life which had made it very pleasant.
For a long time I expected to hear from him, but no word had ever come, and years had gone by, and I was a woman of nearly thirty-five, with my schooldays behindme, but with a vivid remembrance of that part of them when Nicol was my teacher. His card was all I had left of the handsome young Russian who had stirred my girlish heart as no other man had ever done. I had never forgotten what he said to me of the gang bound for Siberia, asking me to pray for them, and, in imagination, I had often seen that gang, and he was always in it, and when I prayed I am afraid it was for him—for Nicol alone. And now I was going to his country, and might possibly meet him, if he was there. He would be older, and probably married. But that did not matter. The pain in my heart and the lump in my throat when he bade me good-by were gone. That chapter was closed, but I was thinking of it, and of him, when I had my first meeting with a Russian gendarme.