Part 15 (1/2)
”Zara, my love!”
She wheeled upon me and clasped her hands together behind my neck, looking up at me with trouble-shrouded eyes, and with brows that were slightly corrugated by the perplexities of the moment.
”Listen to me, sweetheart,” she said, with her face so close to mine that I had all I could do to refrain from interrupting her. ”We must not belittle the perils that lie yonder. There are two lives in danger now, for if anything should happen to you, it would kill me also. I am selfish now, Dubravnik, in my concern for you, for after all it is myself whom I would protect, through you. But we must not belittle the danger. I know that you are brave and daring; that you have no fear. I realize that you view with contempt the perils that beset you, but oh, my love, suppose that you should not escape.”
”Why suppose it, Zara? I am here; the danger is there. We need not antic.i.p.ate it. Let us leave it to be met at the proper moment, forgetting for this once, that it exists.”
”No, no, we must control ourselves. We have been children for an hour or more, forgetful of all things save love; but now let us be what we are, a man and a woman who have perils to face.”
”And who, I trust, have the courage to meet them, Zara.”
”Ay, courage; but courage alone does not always accomplish the sought for end. Courage alone is not inevitably competent to meet and overcome conditions. And we need more than courage, Dubravnik; we need resource.”
”Resource is something with which we are both moderately well provided,” I suggested, smiling, and still refusing to accept her words as seriously as she intended them.
She stamped her foot impatiently upon the rug, and frowned a little, with a touch of petulance in her manner that was the most bewitching thing I had yet seen about her.
”Do be your own self for a moment,” she commanded me, withdrawing from my restraining arm and stepping away out of my reach.
”How can I be myself, when I see and realize only you?” I bantered her.
Then came another transition almost as startling as it was complete.
She threw herself bodily forward into my embrace, clasping her clinging arms about me, while she buried her beautiful face between my chin and shoulder and burst into a pa.s.sion of sobs which convulsed her so utterly that I was alarmed.
I had tried her too far with my bantering att.i.tude, and my apparent indifference to a threatening and terrible fate.
”Zara!” I said. ”My love!”
But she only sobbed on and on, and I held her crushed against me until the storm should pa.s.s, knowing that a great calm would succeed it, and that her present expression of emotion was only the safety valve for all that had pa.s.sed between us since the incident when our lips met for the first time.
CHAPTER XIII
LOVE WILL FIND A WAY
We crossed to the window together, and stood looking through it upon the snow clad streets of the city. The storm of the preceding day and night had entirely cleared away, leaving only the inevitable traces of its violence.
As we stood there, Zara pulled the lace curtains between us and the window, so that we were screened from view, while we were enabled, ourselves, to see with perfect distinctness, up and down the thoroughfare against which her home was fronted.
It might have been a Sunday morning, so peaceful and quiet was the scene, and so purely white was everything, in its covering of snow, while the crisp atmosphere of that cold but brilliant Winter day, sparkled and glinted in the suns.h.i.+ne as if thousands of microscopic diamonds were glistening there.
A solitary policeman pa.s.sed into our view and out of it again, a _britzska_ rushed past an adjacent corner with the horse at galloping speed; a child played with its father for a moment, within our range of vision, and then disappeared; a fur clad pedestrian ran up the steps of a nearby residence, and pa.s.sed inside of it; all these trivial incidents of observation, came and went, while we stood there, leaving behind them no impression save one of peace, quiet and security. Yet they impressed themselves upon my memory indelibly, and I can see before me even now, the vision of that afternoon in St. Petersburg, with the clinging right hand of my beloved one resting upon my shoulder, with my left arm about her warm and pulsing body, with love, in all its transcendent qualities, dominating all things real and unreal, and filling my heart, and soul, and my intelligence, with a perfection of blissful content which words cannot describe, and which may never be understood save by him who has experienced it.
What terror had Zara seen through that window, that had startled her so, just before we discovered and confessed our mutual love? Whatever it may have been, no evidence of it remained, to suggest disquiet in my own present sense of security. There was nothing there to menace me, and even though Zara's brother Ivan, and others of his kind, fanatics all, in their nihilistic tendencies, wild beasts in their blood l.u.s.ts, fiends in their methods, as they were--whatever they might threaten, seemed small indeed to me, in that moment of ecstasy. For it was a moment of ecstasy; the word ”moment” being measured by the rule of s.p.a.ce, limitless and unconfined.
Zara did not know who and what I was, save only that I was a man, and her lover. Beyond that, her imagination had not travelled, and her desires had not sought.
She did not understand that I was at the head of a great fraternity, organized and established by myself, and that I had under my control, if not obedient to my direct command, several hundred individuals within the limit of that city, who would serve me instantly, and who would fight to the death for me if there were need.