Page:The Career of a Nihilist.djvu/31

not one disturbing noise, broke upon the majestic quiet of the night. The lake was calm; and the gentle rhythmical plash of the waves lulled his senses, without driving away the glorious visions which thronged his excited brain.

A new leaf of his life was to be turned. A few days hence he would be thousands of miles away in his own country, in another world, amid entirely new surroundings. How great the changes since he had left St Petersburg! There were hardly half-a-dozen of his old companions left in the League. Only two of them were at that moment in the capital. All the rest were new people, recruited during the three years of his absence.

Would they be able to agree, and to work together without much friction? But no matter! he had great confidence in his own power of adaptability as a practical conspirator. Of old he had been particularly fond of being thrown into entirely new places, where everything and everybody were new to him. He felt reviving in him the lust for struggle and for danger, and the cool dogged pluck, of those whom defeat renders only more obstinate and persistent.

A contemptuous smile passed over his lips as he thought of the boasts of the police mentioned by George. The fools! They supposed things to be at an end, when they were only beginning! He knew by reputation the most prominent of the new men. Some of them he remembered having met at the meetings of the students’ secret clubs. They must have grown into splendid fellows since then. It was rare luck indeed to cast in one’s lot with such men. He had been pained of late by the thought that his three years’ absence had reduced to the strength of a spider’s thread the links which united him with his people. Now he knew that they were as closely united in common brotherhood as ever. The fulness of affection which breathed from their message found in his heart a warm response. How could he fear any possible friction or misunderstanding with men who could think of sparing him, personally a stranger to most of them, whilst they themselves were under fire?

He did not for a moment flatter himself that there was anything in himself to merit this consideration. Though he had but just entered upon manhood, the precocity and intensity of his life had supplied him with experience which would have amply sufficed for a man ten years his senior. At twenty-seven he was a staid man, who had long outlived the