"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 walked across the room to give him an opportunity to think it over. "You look to me like one who has seen better days," I said, when I returned. "You evidently came from a very good family; you are an educated man, and you are young. In all probability you joined the nihilists without really meaning to do so, and having later been selected for this work here, on account of your ability, you were afraid to refuse it. Suppose that I should keep you imprisoned a year, or even two, what is that to the fate that awaits you if you refuse to do as I ask, or to that which you would have met, if you had refused to obey the men who commanded you to come here? Answer me."

"A joke."

"Precisely. Now, here is another question. If I should let you go free after you betray those men to me, what would your life be worth the moment you got upon the street, even if I provided you with pa.s.sports out 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 in Siberia, which is about the same thing. In the mean time you can write to any one whom you wish to have know that you are still alive; you can receive replies under an a.s.sumed name, and----"

"Enough, sir. I accept. You guessed rightly when you said that I am not a nihilist at heart. I am one because I love a woman who is one. That will suffice for the present. Later, I may tell you more about it. I am disposed to make another condition concerning her but I see that it would 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 tell you."

"You may be quite sure of it, if it is a reasonable one. Now tell me your 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 be for to-night. To-morrow I will see you and will keep my word in every respect. In the mean time I want you to think over all that you have to say to me so that we may lose as little time as possible when we meet again."

I left him then and went to the door. Outside, waiting in the corridor was the prince, and in a few words I explained to him what had taken place during his absence at the same time apologizing for having sent him from the room. Then I asked that the captain of the palace guard be sent for, and in a few moments Jean Moret was placed in his care. After that the prince and I smoked another cigarette together and then parted for the night.

"Mr. Derrington," he said, as he was about to take his leave, "I am more 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 that he was there, and thought that we were entirely alone."

"I knew he was there the moment we entered the room," I replied. "It is my habit to glance at everything in sight whenever I enter an apartment, and I do it now without realizing that I do so, if you can understand the seeming paradox. When we pa.s.sed the threshold I saw instantly that one of the curtains did not hang properly, so I seated myself in a position from which I could keep it in view. Twice I saw that it moved; a very little to be sure, but enough to satisfy me that somebody was concealed behind it That is the reason why I rather forced the conversation in English. The rest you know. I am convinced that the man we captured is the victim of circ.u.mstances, and I think I can make him very valuable."

"Well," acknowledged the prince, "there might have been a man behind every 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 draw from Russia."

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

"My G.o.d! And even now there may be others of the same sort in the palace."

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

Moret confessed to me the following day, and I speedily was convinced that my suppositions concerning him were correct. He had not had the brutal courage to carry out his orders; and already he had received several warnings from his compatriots that if another week pa.s.sed without his accomplishment of the design, his own life would pay the forfeit. He was in that room awaiting my arrival when he heard me approaching with the prince, and had concealed himself behind the curtain without any definite purpose other than to hear all that he could.

It is hardly necessary, and there is not s.p.a.ce, for me to go into the details of my subsequent talks with Moret. Suffice it to say that the information I gleaned in that way, proved of inestimable value to my work. From it I learned the names of all the leading nihilists of St.

Petersburg and Moscow, their meeting places, their pa.s.swords, and several of their ciphers. Concerning their plans for the future, beyond those 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 to know. Nor is it necessary that I should describe my subsequent interviews with the emperor. My plans were adopted almost without a correction--and most of those I suggested myself--so that by the time I had been an inmate of the palace for a week, the reorganization of the Fraternity of Silence was well under way, and ere a month had pa.s.sed it was an established fact.

There was one point upon which Moret stubbornly refused to talk, and that was concerning the woman who had led him into the difficulty, and who, he confessed, was the brains and the real head of the society. I questioned him very closely and so decided in my own mind that she was prominent at the capital; but at the last he positively refused to answer any further questions concerning her, saying that he would rather go to Siberia and have done with it at once, than to betray her.

I desisted, therefore, believing that ultimately he would denounce her to me without knowing that he had done so, and events proved that I was right although they also demonstrated that it would have been much better 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 the hotel to the palace with the prince, I was prepared to commence work in earnest; 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 weeks of preparation for the stupendous task I had set myself; and you will understand that there were countless things to do, unnumbered details to arrange, and a thousand and one ramifications of the work to be planned 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 may be its duties, is at least a monumental task; but the organization of such a bureau as this one whose very existence must remain a secret from all the world, presented difficulties not to be met with or contended against under any other circ.u.mstances.

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 and file of that army should know of my existence, as it was related to them. With the chiefs of departments and sections, it was necessary that I should have intercourse and interviews, but I had already made my mental selection of persons to fill those positions, when I arrived in St. Petersburg, and the organization of the several departments was to be left in their hands.

I was determined that there should be no phase of Russian life which could hide itself away from the skill of my investigating forces; from palace to hovel, from the highest official in the Russian diplomatic service and in the army to the meanest servant or laborer, my sources of knowledge must extend, and every detail of it all must necessarily be so complete as to render it not only exact, but absolutely under my personal control and direction, without however in any way creating the suspicion that I was personally interested. Presently you will understand more perfectly how this all came about, and in quite a natural way it would seem, for always things accomplished seem easy enough to the casual observer; and you who read are only observers after all. You are receiving a bit of unwritten history which closely concerned the Russian empire and without which the a.s.sa.s.sination of Alexander would undoubtedly have happened many years before it did, for I give to myself the credit of having extended the days of that really great but much misunderstood Moscovite gentleman.

At the time of my appearance in St. Petersburg the forces of nihilism had a.s.sumed proportions greater than they had ever attained before or will ever attain to again, thanks to my activities. The palace itself was a hotbed of conspiracy; the rank and file of the army was so disaffected that the officers never knew whom they could depend upon or whom they might trust; a secret pressure of the thumb, indeterminate in its character but nevertheless significant, was likely to be received from any hand clasp, no matter where given or with whom exchanged, and a princess or a countess was as likely to bestow it upon you as any ordinary person whom you might chance to meet. The pressure itself was merely a tentative question which might be translated by the words: "Are you a nihilist?" and you might understand it and reply to it by a returning pressure of acquiescence, or ignore it utterly, as you pleased. The pressure itself was so slight, was carelessly given and might so readily be attributed to a careless motion of the hand that it could not betray the person who made it; nor could the answering pressure do so.

I had not been long at the palace before I discovered that many of the high officials who had ready and constant access there had become inoculated with the nihilistic bacilli and although I had no doubt that many of them were at heart loyal to the emperor, I already knew better than they did the immensity of the obligation they had undertaken in swearing allegiance to an a.s.sociation of persons dominated by fanatics and by actual criminals whose trade was murder and whose chiefest pleasures and relaxation was the study of how best to bring about entire social upheaval.

The confession of Moret enabled me to read every sign however slight that was made by these persons and the four weeks of my domicile in the apartment of the palace that had been a.s.signed to me served me as nothing else could have done in this respect.

You have already been told that this was by no means my first experience in St. Petersburg and with nihilism; but I must confess that extensive as my information had been and was I had never for a moment contemplated the vast resources of this revolutionary order, its unlimited ramifications and its boundless possibilities for evil. To discover as I speedily did that princes of the blood, that ladies high in place, that generals in the army and lesser officers under them were among the ranks of the nihilists, was an astounding fact which I had not contemplated and which I was ill prepared to receive so soon after my arrival. It extended the requirements of my operation; it increased ten fold, nay a hundred fold, my obligations to the czar in whose service I was now sworn.

It seems difficult to imagine a beautiful woman as being at the head and front of such an organization which discusses murder and which arranges for wholesale a.s.sa.s.sination with the same equanimity of conscience that a hunting party at an English country estate would arrange for the slaughter of rabbits and pheasants.

But I was destined soon to discover that even this could be true. I was destined soon to be brought in contact with a beautiful woman who was not only high in place and a favorite with the czar himself, but who was veritably a leader in the plots against him.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PRINCESS' ORIENTAL GARDEN

In order better to carry out the plans I had made it was necessary that I should depart from the palace and I secured apartments in a respectable but quiet section of the city, where I established myself under the name of Dubravnik; and it was generally understood by those who came in contact with me that I was a pardoned exile who had been permitted to return under stipulated conditions, as such men are sometimes, though rarely, allowed to do. In the mean time I had gathered around me several certain individuals whom I had known and employed in the past, and whom I knew from experience that I could trust; and there was not one Russian among them. The Russian may be trusted always wherever his heart is involved and his political conscience is at rest, but never unless those forces are working in sympathy with the employment of his hands and head.

I sent to Paris for Michael O'Malley whose long residence there had outwardly transformed him from an Irishman to a Frenchman, and who for convenience spelled his name Malet, thus retaining the sound without the substance. He opened a cafe, which because of its excellence speedily became the resort of the higher officers of the Russian army stationed at St. Petersburg. Every one of the waiters in his establishment were spies in his employ brought with him from Paris, and not one of them knew of my existence. Thus they did their work in the dark, but they did it well. Another Irishman, Tom Coyle, who looked like a Russian, established a cab stand on the English plan, and he had a small army of men under him who worked in the same way as Malet's servants. A Frenchman and his wife--their names were St. Cyr--ran a high cla.s.s intelligence office, and furnished valets, maids, cooks, coachmen, etc., for the best families at the Russian capitol. I had one a.s.sistant who taught singing to the n.o.bility, and another who was a master at arms and gave lessons in the science of handling all kinds of weapons. In the less pretentious quarters of the city I had proprietors of fourth rate cafes on my list; also loungers, loafers, seeming drunkards, laborers. But more important than these I succeeded in securing for one of my best men--an American--the management of the city Messenger Service; and one by one he contrived to replace the messengers by others of his own selection, until many of them were unknowingly members of my staff. Unknowingly, mind you, for therein existed much of the secret of my power. My workers did not know what they did. Canfield really did great work for me while he held that position, and I must not neglect to give him credit for it.

O'Malley, Coyle, the St. Cyrs and Canfield were really therefore the several component parts of my immediate staff and those five were the only persons among all my hundreds of workers who knew Dubravnik to be their chief; and it is a perfectly safe statement to say that in all St. Petersburg, nay in all the world at that time, there were but nine persons living who had the least knowledge or even suspicion of my business; the nine were the czar, Prince Michael, the five already named, myself and Moret now in solitary confinement although in a comfortably appointed room in one of the prisons.

It is well that I should say a word or two in reference to these a.s.sistants of mine, in pa.s.sing.

O'Malley was an Irishman of the finest type of bluff and honest manhood. I have known him and tried him through many a difficulty where his sterling qualities of character, his rugged honesty of purpose, his unfailing loyalty and devotion to me and his uncanny qualities as an investigator had endeared him to me both professionally and personally beyond the expression of mere words to describe it. I knew that I could rely upon him absolutely in all emergencies and that he was utterly fearless in the face of any danger that might present itself. By opening the cafe described, patronized by the elite of the Russian capital he merely followed out a plan long before undertaken in Paris for a like purpose and through the workings of his waiters and other employees he possessed sources of information and facilities for investigation unprecedented in their far reaching possibilities. There is many a whispered word and undertoned conversation carried on at a supper table over the coffee or a bottle of wine which finds its way into the ears of servitors and O'Malley's duties consisted not alone in piecing together after they were supplied to him these sc.r.a.ps of conversation, but in having his workers spy upon certain personages when they appeared at the cafe and so antic.i.p.ate secrets which they might have to unfold. Even he had lesser men in authority under him and many of those who were almost directly under his employ believed that they were allied to the regular secret police and did not know of their employer's official capacity.