“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 behind me, 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.