But Kamarowsky interrupted me.
“Hush, Marie, hush. I know that you have suffered much and that you have been led astray. But let the dead past bury the past. All I ask of you is the pure white page of the future.”
“You are generous, you are kind,” I said, and tears burned in my eyes. “But let me tell you, let me tell you all—”
“Mura,” he said, calling me by the tender pet-name of my childhood, “do not raise impassable barriers between us. What I have no knowledge of does not exist so far as I am concerned. The unknown is but a shadow; and I am not afraid of shadows. But if to that shadow you give a living shape and a name, it will rise between you and me, and I shall not be able to clasp you in my arms until I have destroyed it. Speak if you must. But, for our happiness, it were far better for you to keep silence—and to forget.”
“Ah, you are right! Let there be no more sorrow, no more tragedies around me. Take me away from Moscow, away from all who know me. I will keep silence, and forget.”
Our departure from Moscow was like a flight. I left a letter for Prilukoff, entreating him to forgive and forget me, begging him not to debar me from taking my way again towards safety and rehabilitation. I expressed to him my sympathy, my gratitude and regret; and I implored him in the name of all that he still held dear or sacred to return to his family and to his career, to the lofty and straightforward course of honor from which I, unhappy creature that I was, had unwittingly, unwillingly turned him aside.
Kamarowsky took us to the Riviera—from the snows of the north to the fragrant orange-groves of Nice and Hyères. The tinkling of sleighs gliding through the blue-cold streets of Moscow still seemed to ring in my ears when, lo! the lazy, sun-warm silence of the south enwrapped my senses in its languorous sweetness. The two children, dazed with the heat and the blueness around them, stood in amazement, with hands clasped and mouths open, at the sight of the golden oranges and the huge foliage of cacti and aloes, thinking that by some wonder-working charm they had been carried into fairyland.
The distant sails, aslant on the radiant indigo of the sea, looked like white butterflies poised on a stupendous flower of lapis lazuli....
For three brief days I thought that fate had not overtaken me, and that my sins would not find me out.
My sins! As in the old German fable the children are led into the depths of a forest, and left there to be lost and forgotten—even so did I think that my sins would be lost and forgotten, even so did I think that they would never issue again from the shade in which I had hidden them.