At eight o’clock the next morning she sat in a chair, looking at her husband, who was still in bed, sleeping peacefully. He had an early appointment, but she could not bring herself to wake him. She was going to do so a minute or two later, she pleaded with herself, and then they would have tea together. The samovar was singing softly in the next room. It was of her love and of her happiness it seemed to be singing. Her joy in her honeymoon swelled her heart and rose to her throat. “I am too happy,” she thought. As she remembered her determination to go to her native place, she added: “Yes, I am too happy, while Sophia is in her grave and Hessia is pining away in her cell. I may be arrested at any moment in Miroslav, but I am going to do my duty. I must keep Elkin and the others from abandoning the revolution.”
CHAPTER XLII.
OMINOUS FOOTSTEPS.
CLARA alighted from the train at a station immediately preceding Miroslav. She was met by Olga, the girl with the short hair and sparse teeth who was engaged to the judge, the two reaching the city partly on a peasant’s waggon, partly on foot. At sight of the familiar landscape Clara seemed weird to herself. It was her own Miroslav, yet she was worse than a stranger in it. She felt like a ghost visiting what was once his home. On the other hand, the unmistakable evidences of the recent riot contracted her heart with pain and brought back that Reproach.
Olga took her to a “conspiracy house.” This was a basement in the outskirts of the town, whose squatty windows faced the guardhouse of military stores and commanded a distant view of the river. The only other tenants of that courtyard were three sisters, all of them deaf and in a state of semi-idiocy. The basement had been rented soon after Clara’s flight. It consisted of three rooms, all very meagrely furnished. Lying under the sofa of the middle room was a wooden roller, which had once been intended for a secret printing office. One of the walls was hung with a disorderly pile of clothes of both sexes—the shed disguises of passing conspirators.
But very few members were allowed to visit her. Those who were saluted her with admiring looks and generally treated her as a heroine, which caressed her vanity most pleasantly. With a temerity born of an acquired habit of danger, not unmixed with some bravado, Clara was burning to visit her parents, her sister and her mother-in-law, and to take a look at her native neighbourhood. Her friends made an effort to keep her indoors. She would not be restrained, assuring them that she was going to take good care of herself, but she finally offered to compromise on a meeting with her sister, provided she brought her little girl with her.
“I am crazy to see her,” she said, meaning the child.
“See little Ruchele! Why you are crazy, Clara!” Olga declared. “If you do all Miroslav will know the very next day that ‘Aunt Clara’ is in town.”