Princess Zara

by Ross Beeckman

  CHAPTER VII

  FOR LOVE OF A WOMAN

  I had discovered at a glance that the spy was not a Russian; and thatbeing the case he was presumably engaged in his present occupation forpay only, and I believed that I could turn what seemed to be acatastrophe into a decided advantage. Experience had taught me long agothat the Russian nihilist is a fanatic who possesses distorted ideas ofpatriotism upon which he builds a theory of government, and thatnothing short of death can turn him from his purpose. But with theforeigners who ally themselves with the fortunes of thenihilists--Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, etc.--it is different. Theyare always open to argument--for pay--although they are hardly to berelied upon even then, for they will sell out to another with the samecelerity with which they formerly disposed of themselves to you.

  "You are a Frenchman, are you not?" I asked this man, as soon as wewere alone together.

  "Yes," he replied, reluctantly.

  "Do you know what is in store for you now?"

  "Siberia, or death; one is as bad as the other. I'm only sorry that Idid not have a chance to use my knife before you struck me; that'sall."

  "I have not a doubt of it. And yet you may escape both, Siberia anddeath, if you are reasonable."

  "How? I'll be reasonable fast enough if you can prove that to me."

  "Do you speak English?"

  "Yes; as well as I do French, and Russian, and German, and half a dozenother languages."

  "Then you heard and understood everything that passed between theprince and me?"

  "Certainly. I might have pretended that I did not, if I had thought todo so. Still it would have made no difference, any way."

  "Not much, that's a fact. Why did you hide in this room?"

  "To hear what you said. To get what information I could. I certainlydid not do it for the fun of the thing."

  "Well, my man, I will make a bargain with you. If you will tell me allthat I want to know and answer truthfully every question I ask, I willengage that you shall neither go to Siberia nor to your death. You willgo to prison, and I will keep you there long enough to find out if yourinformation is correct. If it is, I will set you free as soon as I canafford to do so; if it is not, then Siberia, and the worst that thereis in that delightful country, too. What do you say?"

  "How long will you keep me in prison?"

  "A month--six months--a year--as long as I deem it necessary. I shallwant you near me where I can talk to you frequently, whenever the fancytakes me."

  "I'll see you damned first."

  "Very well. I'm sorry for you. A few months in a comfortable prison,with the best of food, books to read, paper and pens at your disposal,permission to communicate with your friends as often as you please solong as I see your letters before they are sent away, ought to bepreferable to ending your life in the mines of frozen Siberia; but thechoice is yours."

  "It is."

  "Then why don't you accept my offer?"

  "Because I don't believe you. You will get all that you want out of me,and then I will travel East any way."

  "That is a chance that you will have to take." I arose and walkedacross the room to give him an opportunity to think it over. "You lookto me like one who has seen better days," I said, when I returned. "Youevidently came from a very good family; you are an educated man, andyou are young. In all probability you joined the nihilists withoutreally meaning to do so, and having later been selected for this workhere, on account of your ability, you were afraid to refuse it. Supposethat I should keep you imprisoned a year, or even two, what is that tothe fate that awaits you if you refuse to do as I ask, or to that whichyou would have met, if you had refused to obey the men who commandedyou to come here? Answer me."

  "A joke."

  "Precisely. Now, here is another question. If I should let you go freeafter you betray those men to me, what would your life be worth themoment you got upon the street, even if I provided you with passportsout of the country?"

  "Nothing."

  "They would find you, wouldn't they?"

  "To a certainty."

  "And kill you?"

  "As surely as you stand there."

  "On the other hand, if I send you to a prison here in St. Petersburg,as I have proposed, you will be thought by them to be dead, or inSiberia, which is about the same thing. In the mean time you can writeto any one whom you wish to have know that you are still alive; you canreceive replies under an assumed name, and----"

  "Enough, sir. I accept. You guessed rightly when you said that I am nota nihilist at heart. I am one because I love a woman who is one. Thatwill suffice for the present. Later, I may tell you more about it. I amdisposed to make another condition concerning her but I see that itwould be useless; and perhaps you will grant me a favor if I ask it,when you discover that I have not deceived you in what I shall tellyou."

  "You may be quite sure of it, if it is a reasonable one. Now tell meyour name."

  "You do not care about my true name, I suppose?"

  "I want the one by which you are known among the nihilists."

  "Jean Moret."

  "And here, in the palace?"

  "The same."

  "I shall send you to your prison now. I cannot promise what it will befor to-night. To-morrow I will see you and will keep my word in everyrespect. In the mean time I want you to think over all that you have tosay to me so that we may lose as little time as possible when we meetagain."

  I left him then and went to the door. Outside, waiting in the corridorwas the prince, and in a few words I explained to him what had takenplace during his absence at the same time apologizing for having senthim from the room. Then I asked that the captain of the palace guard besent for, and in a few moments Jean Moret was placed in his care. Afterthat the prince and I smoked another cigarette together and then partedfor the night.

  "Mr. Derrington," he said, as he was about to take his leave, "I ammore than ever convinced that you are the right man in the right place.Tell me how you discovered the presence of that spy. I had no idea thathe was there, and thought that we were entirely alone."

  "I knew he was there the moment we entered the room," I replied. "It ismy habit to glance at everything in sight whenever I enter anapartment, and I do it now without realizing that I do so, if you canunderstand the seeming paradox. When we passed the threshold I sawinstantly that one of the curtains did not hang properly, so I seatedmyself in a position from which I could keep it in view. Twice I sawthat it moved; a very little to be sure, but enough to satisfy me thatsomebody was concealed behind it That is the reason why I rather forcedthe conversation in English. The rest you know. I am convinced that theman we captured is the victim of circumstances, and I think I can makehim very valuable."

  "Well," acknowledged the prince, "there might have been a man behindevery one of the curtains and I would not have thought to suspect it.This service alone, Mr. Derrington, is worth all the pay you will drawfrom Russia."

  "Yes," I replied, "for I believe that the spy will confess to me thathe was sent there with orders to murder the czar."

  "My God! And even now there may be others of the same sort in thepalace."

  "No; I hardly think that. The nihilists would not be likely to sendmore than one at a time on such a dangerous errand."

  Moret confessed to me the following day, and I speedily was convincedthat my suppositions concerning him were correct. He had not had thebrutal courage to carry out his orders; and already he had receivedseveral warnings from his compatriots that if another week passedwithout his accomplishment of the design, his own life would pay theforfeit. He was in that room awaiting my arrival when he heard meapproaching with the prince, and had concealed himself behind thecurtain without any definite purpose other than to hear all that hecould.

  It is hardly necessary, and there is not space, for me to go into thedetails of my subsequent talks with Moret. Suffice it to say that theinformation I gleaned in that way, proved of inestimable value to mywork. From it I learned the names of a
ll the leading nihilists of St.Petersburg and Moscow, their meeting places, their passwords, andseveral of their ciphers. Concerning their plans for the future, beyondthose in which he was personally engaged, Moret knew almost nothing;but he did put me in the way of finding out nearly all that I wished toknow. Nor is it necessary that I should describe my subsequentinterviews with the emperor. My plans were adopted almost without acorrection--and most of those I suggested myself--so that by the time Ihad been an inmate of the palace for a week, the reorganization of theFraternity of Silence was well under way, and ere a month had passed itwas an established fact.

  There was one point upon which Moret stubbornly refused to talk, andthat was concerning the woman who had led him into the difficulty, andwho, he confessed, was the brains and the real head of the society. Iquestioned him very closely and so decided in my own mind that she wasprominent at the capital; but at the last he positively refused toanswer any further questions concerning her, saying that he wouldrather go to Siberia and have done with it at once, than to betray her.I desisted, therefore, believing that ultimately he would denounce herto me without knowing that he had done so, and events proved that I wasright although they also demonstrated that it would have been muchbetter for all concerned had he trusted me implicitly in the beginning.

  Thus, at the end of a month succeeding the night of my ride from thehotel to the palace with the prince, I was prepared to commence work inearnest; but it must not be supposed that I had been idle, personally,during that time.

  In fact I was never so busy in all my life as during those four weeksof preparation for the stupendous task I had set myself; and you willunderstand that there were countless things to do, unnumbered detailsto arrange, and a thousand and one ramifications of the work to beplanned and plotted and thoroughly comprehended, not alone by myself,but by the men I would gather around me to work under my direction.

  The organization of a secret service bureau, no matter how general maybe its duties, is at least a monumental task; but the organization ofsuch a bureau as this one whose very existence must remain a secretfrom all the world, presented difficulties not to be met with orcontended against under any other circumstances.

  It was necessary that I should become the chief over an army of men,and it was equally imperative that not one person among the rank andfile of that army should know of my existence, as it was related tothem. With the chiefs of departments and sections, it was necessarythat I should have intercourse and interviews, but I had already mademy mental selection of persons to fill those positions, when I arrivedin St. Petersburg, and the organization of the several departments wasto be left in their hands.

  I was determined that there should be no phase of Russian life whichcould hide itself away from the skill of my investigating forces; frompalace to hovel, from the highest official in the Russian diplomaticservice and in the army to the meanest servant or laborer, my sourcesof knowledge must extend, and every detail of it all must necessarilybe so complete as to render it not only exact, but absolutely under mypersonal control and direction, without however in any way creating thesuspicion that I was personally interested. Presently you willunderstand more perfectly how this all came about, and in quite anatural way it would seem, for always things accomplished seem easyenough to the casual observer; and you who read are only observersafter all. You are receiving a bit of unwritten history which closelyconcerned the Russian empire and without which the assassination ofAlexander would undoubtedly have happened many years before it did, forI give to myself the credit of having extended the days of that reallygreat but much misunderstood Moscovite gentleman.

  At the time of my appearance in St. Petersburg the forces of nihilismhad assumed proportions greater than they had ever attained before orwill ever attain to again, thanks to my activities. The palace itselfwas a hotbed of conspiracy; the rank and file of the army was sodisaffected that the officers never knew whom they could depend upon orwhom they might trust; a secret pressure of the thumb, indeterminate inits character but nevertheless significant, was likely to be receivedfrom any hand clasp, no matter where given or with whom exchanged, anda princess or a countess was as likely to bestow it upon you as anyordinary person whom you might chance to meet. The pressure itself wasmerely a tentative question which might be translated by the words:"Are you a nihilist?" and you might understand it and reply to it by areturning pressure of acquiescence, or ignore it utterly, as youpleased. The pressure itself was so slight, was carelessly given andmight so readily be attributed to a careless motion of the hand that itcould not betray the person who made it; nor could the answeringpressure do so.

  I had not been long at the palace before I discovered that many of thehigh officials who had ready and constant access there had becomeinoculated with the nihilistic bacilli and although I had no doubt thatmany of them were at heart loyal to the emperor, I already knew betterthan they did the immensity of the obligation they had undertaken inswearing allegiance to an association of persons dominated by fanaticsand by actual criminals whose trade was murder and whose chiefestpleasures and relaxation was the study of how best to bring aboutentire social upheaval.

  The confession of Moret enabled me to read every sign however slightthat was made by these persons and the four weeks of my domicile in theapartment of the palace that had been assigned to me served me asnothing else could have done in this respect.

  You have already been told that this was by no means my firstexperience in St. Petersburg and with nihilism; but I must confess thatextensive as my information had been and was I had never for a momentcontemplated the vast resources of this revolutionary order, itsunlimited ramifications and its boundless possibilities for evil. Todiscover as I speedily did that princes of the blood, that ladies highin place, that generals in the army and lesser officers under them wereamong the ranks of the nihilists, was an astounding fact which I hadnot contemplated and which I was ill prepared to receive so soon aftermy arrival. It extended the requirements of my operation; it increasedten fold, nay a hundred fold, my obligations to the czar in whoseservice I was now sworn.

  It seems difficult to imagine a beautiful woman as being at the headand front of such an organization which discusses murder and whicharranges for wholesale assassination with the same equanimity ofconscience that a hunting party at an English country estate wouldarrange for the slaughter of rabbits and pheasants.

  But I was destined soon to discover that even this could be true. I wasdestined soon to be brought in contact with a beautiful woman who wasnot only high in place and a favorite with the czar himself, but whowas veritably a leader in the plots against him.