He could by no manner of
means put his hand on it again in the dark. He groped systematically
in the loose earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was passing
meantime, the precious night on which he counted to get away into the
forests, his only chance of escape. For a moment he was tempted by
despair to give up; but recalling the quiet, sad face of the heroic
girl, he felt profoundly ashamed of his weakness. She had selected him
for the gift of liberty and he must show himself worthy of the favour
conferred by her feminine, indomitable soul. It appeared to be a sacred
trust. To fail would have been a sort of treason against the sacredness
of self-sacrifice and womanly love.
There are in his book whole pages of self-analysis whence emerges like
a white figure from a dark confused sea the conviction of woman's
spiritual superiority--his new faith confessed since in several volumes.
His first tribute to it, the great act of his conversion, was his
extraordinary existence in the endless forests of the Okhotsk Province,
with the loose end of the chain wound about his waist. A strip torn off
his convict shirt secured the end firmly. Other strips fastened it at
intervals up his left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent the
slack links from getting hooked in the bushes.
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