"After all, my friends," resumed the stalwart Russian, now laying his trump card on the table, "I am sure, if you were asked, you, none of you, would wish to see our great plot come ignominiously to grief through the liberation of our prisoner by the Russian police, and all of us convicted without having attained anything, after having dared so much. Any hour, any minute now, may see us all in the clutches of the Third Section, while Nicholas Alexandrovitch leaves my house free and unscathed. Every second heightens our peril and diminishes the chances of our triumph. At least if we fall, for there seems no likelihood of our being able to escape undetected, let us have accomplished something that will leave our names for ever glorified in the eyes of every patriot in Russia."
Thus was the doom of the prisoner sealed; very little discussion followed. Unwillingly, but still unanimously, they had given their consent to the dastardly deed which Mirkovitch but too willingly offered to do for them. One or two of them asked for a respite–twenty-four hours–during which, after all, some news of Volenski might yet arrive. The old Socialist, satisfied at having carried his point, willingly agreed to wait till the morrow, and a final meeting therefore was convened for the next day, at the same hour. The president had said nothing. What was his influence against that of his grim comrade? The tide of feeling, a mixture of mistaken duty and misguided enthusiasm, had sealed the fate of the young Tsarevitch.
The weight of indecision seemed to have been lifted from the minds of them all. Althought they neither smoked nor chatted, according to their wont, the gloom had quite given place to irrevocable determination. No more questions or surmises were put forward as to Volenski's probable fate or their own certain doom. the word "assassination" had sounded once, pronounced by many lips with a shudder. It was now called "execution"; Mirkovitch, the willing executioner; they, the judges who had arrested and condemned a prisoner just as their tyrants did with the millions over which they held sway.
Half an hour later they were all preparing to depart, sober and silent, with thoughts of the great morrow. No one had taken much notice of Maria Stefanowna, whose large dark eyes had been fixed on her father, as if he held her in a trance. When most of them had gone she also slipped out of the room, not waiting to see if Mirkovitch was accompanying her, as she brushed past him. Out in the street she hailed a fiaker, jumped in alone, and was driven rapidly in the direction of the Heumarkt.
Chapter XV
Maria Stefanowna's position in the great Socialist brotherhood was a curious one. The only woman among so many men, she yet knew all their secrets and plans, and, though young, had often been of good counsel to them.
Mirkovitch, her father, had early in life accustomed his motherless daughter to his mysterious ways and curious, weird speeches. Maria had been born and bred in the hatred of the rulers who sat upon the Russian throne, and listened to all her father's sometimes bloodthirsty schemes, not often sharing in them, but always with silent approval.
When the brotherhood, after full deliberation, decided to entrust her with the most important rôle in the abduction of the Tsarevitch, she felt proud and happy at the thought of being for the first time of use to the great cause, which she had just as much at heart as the most enthusiastic among them. When Dunajewski and his comrades had been arrested the girl's ears were filled with horrible tales of the tortures they would undergo, both whilst in prison at Moscow and afterwards during that weary tramp across the snowy desert, with horrible intervals of so-called rest in overcrowded, evil-smelling halting places; then the mercury mines, that in three years change the hale and hearty youth into an old man, palsied and imbecile.
And the cruel fate could be spared them if she, Maria, was clever enough to play the part that had been assigned to her, could lure the Tsarevitch into a prison, not only comfortable, but luxurious, where he would only be kept until those poor martyrs at Moscow were once more restored to liberty and happiness.
She threw herself into the part of the enterprising odalisque, with the finesse and coquetry peculiar to all the daughters of the East, and the next day was able to receive with pride and delight the congratulations and thanks of the brotherhood, assembled to do her honour.
She guessed her father's dark thoughts with regard to the helpless prisoner under his charge, but so far had had no occasion to tremble for his safety. She knew most of her comrades as being of refined and temperate nature, knew the high-minded, aristocratic president, the gentle and dreamy Poles, who were in strong majority, and felt that her father's evil designs would be held well in check.
But when Volenski, the trusted messenger, gave no sign of the success of his mission, when all spirits waxed gloomy and lips began to murmur, Maria's heart began to beat anxiously, both for the safety of the young captive and for the honour of the cause.
The great cause that she revered and worshipped, to which she meant to dedicate her life, was about to be polluted by a crime so foul, so cowardly, that Maria Stefanowna's whole soul rose in rebellion, and imperiously demanded of her woman's wit to find a means of averting so terrible a catastrophe; and it had been she who had led Nicholas Alexandrovitch to what threatened to become an unknown grave. She looked shudderingly at her hands, and wondered if some of the young blood would not leave on them a lifelong stain.
All night she paced up and down her room in restlessness and terror. At times she thought she could hear her father's footsteps creeping stealthily towards the prisoner's room, and then she had to stop her ears not to hear the last agonised cry of the young man, surprised and helpless in the hands of his assassin.
It was broad daylight before her nerves and brain found a short respite from the terrible anxiety that had tortured her, since that last decisive speech of her father's at the meeting last night. Womanlike, she had obstinately pondered till she thought she saw a way out of the difficulty. Being a Russian she was very devout. She prayed long and earnestly for the success of her scheme, which was to save the prisoner from murder, and her comrades, her father, the great cause itself, from eternal shame.
Chapter XVI
It had been a weary, an anxious time of waiting for Count Lavrovski, while forced to sit patiently at the hotel, watching for news of the truant, and sending reports of the Tsarevitch's imaginary attack of measles to the authorities at home.
But obviously the deception could not be carried on much longer. Already the Tsaritsa had spoken of coming herself to Vienna and nursing her son, and one or two imperious demands had been made through the ambassadors for bulletins, signed by the great physicians, who no doubt had been called in to attend upon the illustrious patient. A day or two more would see the catastrophe, all the more terrible as Lavrovski's deceit would be taken as a sure sign of complicity; and the old Russian now cursed his own weakness in not having immediately shifted the responsibility of this fearful calamity from his own shoulders, which would have been, as events proved, by far the wisest course to pursue. Disgrace would have been the result then–perhaps an order to spend a couple of years abroad; but now he saw no hope before him, only a vision of Siberia, there to end the last years of his life.
He had looked, half shudderingly, half resolutely, at the tiny revolver that would be his supreme and forlorn hope. No doubt, in consideration of his long years of faithful service to the family, his Imperial master would grant him the inestimable boon of death, instead of the slow tortures of a Siberian prison.
Oh! how Count Lavrovski wished he had never consulted that French detective, or having done so, had confided the whole truth to him, for had he not led him into these additional days