"Why not? Why should we not speak of love now--now, aye, and always?

Or is your pa.s.sion so poor and sickly a thing that a puff from the wind of propriety kills it? Not speak of such things! I would plight my love to you across the very body of the dead man!" She spoke with pa.s.sionate vehemence. "Remember what I told you--your life is mine.

You cannot escape me. Now, tell me, do you love me?"

"I have given my answer, and if you ask that question again to-day I will not stop in the room," I said angrily: the woman's persistency increasing my disgust.

She laughed--a half hysterical laugh of anger.

"So you will not stop in the room and will never, I suppose, return.

Be careful," she cried, with one of her quick pa.s.sionate changes. "Or I will send you away and never let you come back except begging for mercy on your knees for yourself and your sister." She turned away and stood by the window; and I could see by her movements that she was struggling with violent emotions.

She came back at length, the face paler and the voice not so steady.

"I will ask you if you love me," she said. "And I dare you to go away from the room."

I accepted the challenge without an instant's hesitation.

"I am going. I will see you when you are cooler," and I went to the door.

With a quick rush she prevented my opening it, and putting her back to it stared at me in the most violent pa.s.sion, which thickened her voice as she spoke.

"You shall go directly--if you wish to. You will make me hate you, one day, Alexis, and then--I will kill you."

"It will be far better for me to come some other time," I said, anxious to leave.

"You will have plenty of opportunities, never fear," she retorted, with a very angry sneering laugh. "And what is more, you will not dare not to use them. Listen--it is love for you drives me to this--a love that you can never escape now, Alexis, even if you had the will."

She paused; but I said nothing. I had nothing to say. All I wished was to get away.

"Do you think there is anything I would not do for your love, Alexis?

I have told you there is nothing--told you so scores of times. Now, I have proved it. Do you hear--proved it. I proved it a few nights ago when this hand plunged the dagger hilt deep into my husband's heart--for your sake."

I started back and looked at the woman in horror.

"Yes, this hand"--she held it out--"so white, smooth, deft, and shapely. Don't start from it. There is no blood shewing on it now.

And never was. I know how to thrust a dagger home too cleverly to leave a trace of either blood or guilt on me. In all this Moscow of ours the one person who is deemed above all others guiltless--is myself. Had it been in reality the Nihilist deadly secret stroke that men deem it, it could not have been more cunningly contrived, more secretly planned, more fatally executed. Yet the motive was not hate of a Government, but love for a man. For you, Alexis: you and you only. Now do you wish to go?"

She moved away from the door; but I made no attempt to go. The horror of her story had fascinated me.

"There was a tinge of hate in it, too, mark you, and more than a tinge.

But I'll tell you all. You ought to know, since you were in reality the cause of all. You gave me the motive, suggested the occasion, and provoked that which led to it. More than that, too, you can by a single word from me be made to bear the brunt. Now, will you go?"

Was the woman mad that she spoke in this way? If so, there was a devilish method in her madness, as the story she told quickly shewed me.

"I knew the day would come when either I should kill him or he would kill me; for he was a devil. Well, you roused all that was most evil, vicious, and fiendish in him in that interview; and when I saw him he was like a man bereft of his wits. Every form of reproach he could heap on me in cold, contemptuous, galling sneers he uttered with all the calculated aggravation that could make a taunt unbearable. He threatened me in every tone of menace: and when I answered, turned suddenly furious and struck me violent blows and vowed to kill me. It was then I recalled your words, that there was a Nihilist plot against his life; and I vowed I would be the means of carrying it out; for I knew I could easily put suspicion away from me. I lured him cunningly to that part of the house where he was found, plunged the dagger into his breast, put into his pocket the forged warning of a Nihilist attack, opened the house at a point where a man could have entered, fastened to the dagger the Nihilist watchword, and then crept away to my own rooms."

"It was a h.e.l.lish plot," I exclaimed, hotly.

"It was inspired by love for you, Alexis. It was truly 'For Freedom's sake.' Freedom that should unite us for ever."

"Do you think I could ever be anything to a woman whose hand is red with murder?" I cried, in indignant horror.

"It was done for you--for love of you, Alexis."

"Love has no kin with murder," I exclaimed, bitterly.

"Your life is mine, remember," she answered, firmly. Her determination and strength were inexhaustible. "This makes you ten thousand times more surely mine than ever. I told you you were the cause--and also, that you could be made to bear the brunt. Listen! You know well enough what chance a Nihilist has on whom the fangs of suspicion have fastened. You are a Nihilist. Your sister is one also. I know this.

Well, what chance, think you, would that Nihilist have of his life whose dagger it was that found its way between my husband's ribs. What then, if I had found the sheath of it and secreted it to save the man?

Suppose too, that I had kept back the discovery because of my guilty love for him. And further that he had come at the time to tempt my honour and that he was leaving the house when my husband, roused by the noise I made, met him; and that I saw the deed done?" She paused and changed her tone to one of fierce directness, as she continued:--"The dagger that killed Christian Tueski is your own weapon, known by its sheath to a hundred people: and that sheath, with your name on it, is in my possession. What chance of life would there be for you and yours if these things were made known. Now, do you wish to go?"

A hot and pa.s.sionate reply rose to my lips, but was checked before uttered. I thought of Olga, and I knew that every word this woman said was true--that no power in Russia could save my life or Olga's liberty if the tale were told now.

Delay I must have at any cost. Time in which to meet this woman's horrible cunning and daring plot. If I had hated her before, she was now loathsome; while the fears she had stirred on Olga's account intensified and embittered a thousandfold my resentment. Yet hateful as the task was, I was prepared to continue my part with her.

"You think this love?" I said, after a pause in which she had been waiting breathlessly for me to speak. "Do women love the men they hold to them by the tether rope of threats?"

"Do women kill for the sake of men they do not love?"

"Do you think to keep my love by threatening me with death?"

"Have I not inflicted death to keep you? Why do you wish to bandy phrases? My deeds speak for themselves. They shew you well enough what I will dare to keep you true to me. You are mine, Alexis, and no power shall ever part us. I have told you this often before. It was you who sought me, who proffered me your love, who poured on me your caresses and roused the love in me, and roused it never to cease. Do you think me a silly simple fool to be wooed and won and, when deserted, willing to do no more than wring my feeble hands and shed silly tears, and prate and maunder between my stupid sobs, that my heart is broken and that I fain would die--Bah! I am not of that sort.

I am a woman who can will and act, and fashion my own ends in my own way. It is not the stream that carries me, but I who turn the stream even though it be mingled with blood. No, no. If you play me false, Alexis, it is you, and not I, who shall die because my heart is broken."

She shewed this determination in every line of her beautiful face and movement of her magnificent figure, as she stood before me a lovely hateful type of a vengeful woman. She changed her mood, however, with astonishing suddenness and turned all softness and tenderness.

"But under all this lies my love," she said. "It was love drove me to everything. Your pledge, too, that made me feel, as nothing else could have done, the wall of separation between us while he lived; and my love could not endure it. Ah, how I love you!" and then in words burning with the fever of pa.s.sion, she spoke of her love for me, lingering over the terms as if the mere utterance of them were an ecstatic delight. She laid all to the account of this love, and then went on to name her terms--that I must marry her.

While she was speaking, I was thinking; trying to see some flaw in the devilish coil she had spread round me. But I could see none. Time might find a way: but even time she grudged, and did not mean to give.

"But we can't be married now at the moment when your husband is scarcely lying cold in his grave," I said, aghast at her cold-blooded proposition. "Every man and woman in Moscow would immediately think we had murdered him together in order to marry."

"Every man and woman will not know," she answered calmly. "Do you think there is no such thing as a secret marriage possible in this Holy Russia of ours, or that gold cannot buy silence here just as anywhere else in the world?"

"I know that a secret marriage under these circ.u.mstances would put the lives of us both into the keeping of anyone who knew of it, however well you paid them. The more you paid, indeed, the more certain the inference."

"I care nothing for that; nor will you if you love me as you have often sworn you do." She uttered this with the energy and pa.s.sion which always were shewn when she was crossed. But in this I was naturally as resolute as she.

"I will not do it," I said very firmly. "Understand me. I will not do it. It is nothing to do with love in any way at all: but simply self-protection. It would be sheer suicide, and that I can do much more simply in other ways. I refuse absolutely to put both our lives into the keeping of any man in Russia, however holy and however well bribed. When we are married, it must be openly, in the light of day and before men's faces; and that most certainly cannot be until all this excitement about your husband's death has died down, and the marriage can take place without causing suspicion. That must be at least six months hence--and probably a year or even two years."

"I won't wait," she cried instantly and angrily. "You want to break with me. I am no fool."

"As you will. Then instead of marrying me you can denounce me and come and see me beheaded or strangled. If you threaten me much longer," I said bitterly, "you will make me prefer one of the latter fates."

She bent close to me, trying to read my thoughts.

"And meanwhile?" she asked,

"Are you such a mad woman that you would have us placard the walls of the city with our secrets? Haven't we all Russia to hoodwink? Do you suppose your police agents and secret agents are all fools, to see nothing, think nothing, infer nothing? It may be hard for us to be apart, but what else is possible? Even this visit is fool-hardiness itself and may set a thousand tongues clacking. Heaven knows, if ever a pair of lovers had need of caution we have now! Have you dared so much for our marriage only to toss it all away now just for the lack of a little self-control? We must see very little of one another. That is the only possible course."