Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/239

Rh daughter of the rich merchant to the man who had been deprived of his rights as a citizen and banished to the tundras. Through her marriage with Feklin she lost by her own free will her citizen rights as well and assumed with him the life of banishment, whose full measure of denial and deprivation has never been sensed by anyone that has not spent years in those north Siberian wastes.

They began their wedding journey in a prison car that was to take them eastward, then up over the Ussuri line to Habarovsk, from where, by wagon and on foot, they were to travel to the wild, solitary spot in the Far North which the tribunal of justice had selected for their home. There among the marshes and the forests which rotted in them they were to build their nest and raise their brood to the life which their foster-mother, this Lady Justice, chose for them.

Though their love was powerful and pure and could surely live down the greatest hardships, might not sickness and the all-searching cold of the north invade their poorly built shelter and extinguish their fire and with it the life of these two burning human souls? For a long time the prison could not forget Feklin and his Maria. Often, when the wind roared and blew driving snow against the prison windows, one of the prisoners would sigh and ask with evident emotion in his voice:

"Well, what about Alexei and Maria? Are they still alive?" No answer was possible to this heart-stirring question.