It was the end of the trek for Nathan. In that simple privilege, that soft lap, those cool, gentle hands that stroked his hair, the soothing touch on his bowed back, the whispered words of comfort and incentive, the lad came to know at last the great, indefinable, unfathomable solace of a loving woman’s ministering tenderness. He did not want a mate—not then. He wanted only a mother. And he got a mother. He got a mother-spirit glorious. Richly it was his, for the taking; how richly he never dreamed at the time. There was no less respect nor mate-love for Nathan on the girl’s part in that moment, because he wanted the mother in her. If he had not wanted it, she would have been disappointed. Other things would come afterward—perhaps—after he had found himself, satiated his starved, emaciated soul with her gentle sympathy and wisdom of his need.
It was a strange scene to occur far in the empire of the ill-fated Romanoffs. New England was twelve thousand miles removed at that moment. And yet at the ends of the earth these two who needed each other so greatly had found Arcadie. And all was well!
Heavier and thicker fell the snow outside. All sounds were muffled. The world was shut out. The odorous oil lamp sputtered fussily—a perturbed chaperone. Pleasant crackling of flame leaped now and then in the little stove. Yet the war had been fought for this moment. Years before, this tiny car had left the Moscow shops for this moment. It had been drawn to Irkutsk and left precisely here for this moment. All things on earth had moved forward and existed down to and for this moment. And Nathan felt that whatever happened now, life from this moment would never be the same again—not quite the same.
In his life there was now a Woman!
CHAPTER XVII
ENTANGLING ALLIANCES
I
It was cherry-blossom time in Japan.
Not only had the war ended in precisely the way the war should end, but Nathan and Madelaine had lived through that horrible winter of 1918-1919 in the typhus pest house that was Siberia and come through unscathed.
It had been an overwhelming revelation to Nathan of the woman he was growing to love with all the untwisted, unleashed, latent forces that were best within him during the horror days of that winter. Cool, poised, positive, Madelaine had never flinched, never complained, never shirked the most terrible and revolting of situations. For two months she had lain down to sleep each night in a medical train side-tracked but fifty feet from carloads of frozen corpses piled like billets of wood on freight trains in the forty-below-zero weather, waiting wholesale interment far outside the city in the spring.