Kitabı oku: «The Price of Power», sayfa 4
Chapter Seven.
Tells Tragic Truths
When, with extreme difficulty, I slowly struggled back to a knowledge of things about me, I found myself, to my great surprise, in a narrow hospital-bed, with a holy ikon upon the whitewashed wall before me, and a Red Cross sister bending tenderly over me.
Beside her stood two Russian doctors regarding me very gravely, and at their side was Saunderson, our Councillor of Embassy.
“Well, how are you feeling now, Colin, old man?” the latter whispered cheerfully.
“I – I don’t know. Where am I?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
“My dear fellow, you can thank your lucky stirs that you’ve escaped from the bomb,” he said.
“The bomb!” I gasped, and then in a flash all the horrors of that sudden explosion crowded upon me. “What happened?” I inquired, trying to raise myself, and finding my head entirely enveloped in surgical bandages. “What happened to the others?”
“The Grand Duke was, alas! killed, but his daughter fortunately escaped only with a scratch on her arm,” was his reply. “The carriage was blown to atoms, the two horses and their driver and footman were killed, while three Cossacks of the escort were also killed and two injured.”
“Then – then she – she is alive!” I managed to gasp, dazed at the tragic truth he had related to me.
“Yes – it was a desperate attempt. Fifteen arrests have been made up to the present.”
And while he was speaking, Captain Stoyanovitch advanced to my bedside, and leaning over, asked in a low voice:
“How are you, Trewinnard? The Emperor has sent me to inquire.”
“Tell His Majesty that I – I thank him. I’m getting round – I – I hope I’ll soon be well. I – I – ”
“That’s right. Take great care of yourself, mon cher,” he urged.
And then the doctors ordered my visitors away, and I sank among my pillows into a state of semi-consciousness.
How long I lay thus I do not know. I remember seeing soldiers come and go, and at length discovered that I was in the hospital attached to the artillery barracks on the road to Warsaw Station. Beside me always sat a grave-eyed nursing sister, silent and watchful, while ever and anon one or other of the doctors would approach, bend over me, and inquire of her my condition.
Saunderson came again some hours later. It was then night. And from him, now that I was completely conscious, I learnt how, after the explosion, the police had in the confusion shot down two men, afterwards proved to be innocent spectators, and made wholesale indiscriminate arrests. It was believed, however, that the man I had seen, the perpetrator of the dastardly act, had escaped scot-free.
Dozens of windows in the market-hall opposite where the outrage was committed had been smashed, and many people besides the killed and injured had been thrown down by the terrific force of the explosion.
“The poor Grand Duke Nicholas has, alas! been shattered out of recognition,” he told me. “His body was taken at once to his palace, where it now lies, while you were brought here together with the Grand Duchess Natalia. But her wound being quite a slight one, was dressed, and she was driven at once to the Winter Palace, at the order of the Emperor. Poor child! I hear that she is utterly prostrated by the fearful sight which her father presented to her eyes.”
I drew a long breath.
“I suppose I was struck on the head by some of the débris and knocked insensible – eh?” I asked.
“Yes, probably,” he replied. “But the doctors say the wound is only a superficial one, and in a week’s time you’ll be quite right again. So cheer up, old chap. You’ll get the long leave which you put in for the other day, and a bit more added to it, no doubt.”
“But this state of things is terrible,” I declared, shifting myself upon my side so that I could better look into his face. “Surely the revolutionists could have had no antagonism towards the Grand Duke Nicholas! He was most popular everywhere.”
“My dear fellow, who can gauge the state of the Russian mind at this moment? Plots seem to be of daily occurrence.”
“If you believe the reports of the Secret Police. But I, for one, don’t,” I declared frankly.
“No, no,” he said reprovingly. “Don’t excite yourself. Be thankful that you’ve escaped. You might have shared the same fate as those poor Cossacks.”
“I know,” I said. “I thank God that I was spared. But it will be in the London papers, no doubt. Reuter’s man will send it; therefore, will you wire to my mother at once. You know her address – Hayford Manor, near Newquay, Cornwall. Wire in my name, and tell her that the affair is greatly exaggerated, and that I’m all right, will you?”
He promised.
I knew with what eagerness my aged mother always followed all my movements, for I made it a practice to write to her twice every week with a full report of my doings. I was as devoted to her as she was to me. And perhaps that accounted for the fact that I had never married. My father, the Honourable Colin Trewinnard, had been one of the largest landowners in Cornwall, and my family was probably one of the oldest in the county. But evil times had fallen upon the estate in the last years of my father’s life; depreciation in the value of agricultural land, failing crops and foreign competition had ruined farming, and now the income was not one-half that it had been fifty years before. Yet it was sufficient to keep my mother and myself in comfort; and this, in addition to my pay from the Foreign Office, rendered me better off than a great many other men in our Service.
Through Stoyanovitch, on the following morning, I received a message from Natalia. He said:
“Her Highness, whom I saw in the Palace an hour ago, told me to say that she sent you her best wishes for a speedy recovery. She is greatly grieved over the death of her father, and, of course, the Court has gone into mourning for sixty days. She told me to tell you that as soon as you are able to return to the Embassy she wishes to see you on a very important matter.”
“Tell her that I am equally anxious to see her, and that she has all my sympathy in her sad bereavement,” I replied.
“Terrible, wasn’t it?” the Imperial equerry exclaimed. “The poor girl looks white, haggard and entirely changed.”
“No wonder – after such an awful experience.”
“There were, I hear, twenty more arrests to-day. Markoff had audience with His Majesty at ten o’clock this morning, and eight of the prisoners of yesterday have been sent to Schusselburg.”
“From which they will never emerge,” I said, with a shudder at the thought of that living tomb as full of horrors as was the Bastille itself.
“Well, I don’t see why they should, my dear friend,” the Captain replied. “If I had had such an experience as yours, I shouldn’t feel very lenient towards them – as you apparently do.”
“I am not thinking of the culprit,” I said. “He certainly deserves a death-sentence. It is the innocents who, here in Russia, suffer for the guilty, with whom I deeply sympathise. Every day unoffending men and women are arrested wholesale in this drastic, unrelenting sweeping away of prisoners to Siberia. I tell you that half of them are loyal, law-abiding subjects of the Tzar.”
The elegant equerry-in-waiting only grinned and shrugged his shoulders. He was too good a Russian to adopt such an argument. As personal attendant upon His Majesty, he, of course, supported the Imperial autocracy.
“This accursed system of police-spies and agents-provocateurs manufactures criminals. Can a man wrongly arrested and sent to the mines remain a loyal subject?”
“The many have to suffer for the few. It is the same in all lands,” was his reply. “But really the matter doesn’t concern me, my dear Trewinnard.”
“It will concern you one day when you are blown up as I have been,” I exclaimed savagely.
Shortly afterwards he left, and for hours I lay thinking, my eyes upon that square gilt holy picture before me, the ikon placed before the eyes of every patient in the hospital. Nurses in grey and soldiers in white cotton tunics passed and repassed through the small ward of which I was the only occupant.
The pains in my head were excruciating. I felt as though my skull had been filled with boiling water. Sometimes my thoughts were perfectly normal, yet at others my mind seemed full of strange, almost ridiculous phantasies. My whole career, from the days when I had been a clerk in that sombre old-fashioned room at Downing Street, through my service at Madrid, Brussels, Berlin and Rome to Petersburg – all went before me, like a cinema-picture. I looked upon myself as others saw me – as a man never sees himself in normal circumstances – a mere struggling entity upon the tide of that sea of life called To-day.
We are so very apt to think ourselves indispensable to the world. Yet we have only to think again, and remember that the unknown to-morrow may bring, us death, and with it everlasting oblivion, as far as this world is concerned. Queen Victoria and Pope Leo XIII were the two greatest figures of our time; yet a month after their deaths people had to recall who they were, and what they had actually done to earn distinction.
These modern days of rush and hurry are forgetful, irresponsible days, when public opinion is manufactured by those who rule the halfpenny press, and when the worst and most baneful commodities may be foisted upon the public by means of efficient advertisement.
The cleverest swindler may by payment become a baronet of England, even a peer of the realm, providing he subscribes sufficient to Somebody’s Newspaper Publicity Agency; and any blackguard with money or influence may become a Justice of the Peace and sentence his fellows to fourteen days’ imprisonment.
But the reader will forgive me. Perhaps remarks such as these ill become a diplomat – one who is supposed to hold no personal opinions. Yet I assert that to-day there is no diplomat serving Great Britain in a foreign country who is not tired and disgusted with his country’s antiquated methods and her transparent weaknesses.
The papers speak vigorously of Britain’s power, but men in my service – those who know real international truths – smile at the defiant and well-balanced sentences of the modern journalist, whose blissful ignorance of the truth is ofttimes so pathetic. Yes, it is only the diplomat serving at a foreign Court who can view Great Britain from afar, and accurately gauge her position among modern nations.
For ten days I remained in that whitewashed ward, many of my friends visiting me, and Stoyanovitch coming daily with a pleasant message from His Majesty. Then one bright morning the doctors declared me to be fit enough to drive back to the Embassy.
An hour later, with my head still bandaged, I was seated in my own room, in my own big leather armchair, with the July sun streaming in from across the Neva.
Saunderson was sitting with me, describing the great pomp of the funeral of the Grand Duke Nicholas, and the service at the Isaac Church, at which the Tzar, the Court, and all the corps diplomatique had attended.
“By the way,” he added, “a note came for you this morning,” and he handed me a black-edged letter, bearing on the envelope the Imperial arms embossed in black.
I tore it open and found it to be a neatly-written little letter from the Grand Duchess Natalia, asking me to allow her to call and see me as soon as ever I returned to the Embassy.
“I must see you, Uncle Colin,” she wrote. “It is most pressing. So do please let me come. Send me word, and I will come instantly. I cannot write anything here. I must see you at once!”
Chapter Eight.
Describes a Mysterious Incident
Two days later, the ugly bandages having been removed from my head, Natalia was seated in the afternoon in my den.
Exquisitely neat in her dead black, with the long crape veil, she presented an altogether different appearance to the radiant girl who had sat before me on that fatal drive. Her sweet face was now pale and drawn, and by the dark rings about her eyes I saw how full of poignant grief her heart had lately been.
She had taken off her long, black gloves and settled herself cosily in my big armchair, her tiny patent-leather shoe, encasing a shapely silk-clad ankle, set forth beneath the hem of her black skirt.
“I was so terrified. Uncle Colin, that you were also dead!” the girl was saying in a low, sympathetic voice, after I had expressed my deepest regret regarding the unfortunate death of her father, to whom she had been so devoted.
“I suppose I had a very narrow escape,” I said cheerfully. “You came out best of all.”
“By an absolute miracle. The Emperor is furious. Twenty of those arrested have already been sent to Schusselburg,” she said. “Only yesterday, he told me that he hoped you would be well enough in a day or two to go to the Palace. I was to tell you how extremely anxious he is to see you as soon as possible.”
“I will obey the command at the earliest moment I am able,” I replied. “But how horribly unfortunate all this is,” I went on. “I fully expected that you would be in England by this time.”
“As soon as you are ready, Uncle Colin, I can go. The Emperor has already told me that he has placed me under your guardianship. That you are to be my equerry. Isn’t it fun?” she cried, her pretty face suddenly brightening with pleasure. “Fancy you! dear old uncle, being put in charge of me – your naughty niece!”
“His Majesty wished it,” I said. “He thinks you will be better away from Court for a time. Therefore, I have promised to accept the responsibility. For one year you are to live incognito in England, and I have been appointed your equerry and guardian – and,” I added very seriously, “I hope that my naughty niece will really behave herself, and do nothing which will cause me either annoyance or distress.”
“I’ll really try and be very good, Uncle Colin,” declared the girl with mock demureness, and laughing mischievously. “Believe me, I will.”
“It all remains with you,” I said. “Remember I do not wish it to be necessary that I should furnish any unfavourable report to the Emperor. I want us to understand each other perfectly from the outset. Recollect one point always. Though you may be known in England as Miss Gottorp, yet remember that you are of the Imperial family of Russia, and niece of the Emperor. Hence, there must be no flirtations, no clandestine meetings or love-letters, and such-like, as in the case of young Hamborough.”
“Please don’t bring up that affair,” urged the little madcap. “It is all dead, buried and forgotten long ago.”
“Very well,” I said, looking straight into her big, velvety eyes so full of expression. “But remember that your affection is absolutely forbidden except towards a man of your own birth and station.”
“I know,” she cried, with a quick impatience. “I’m unlike any other girl. I am forbidden to speak to a commoner.”
“Not in England. Preserve your incognito, and nobody will know. At His Majesty’s desire, I have obtained leave of absence from the service for twelve months, in order to become your guardian.”
“Well, dear old Uncle Colin, you are the only person I would have chosen. Isn’t that nice of me to say so?” she asked, with a tantalising smile.
“But I tell you I shall show you no leniency if you break any of the rules which must, of necessity, be laid down,” I declared severely. “As soon as I find myself well enough, you will take Miss West, your old governess, and Davey, your English maid, to England, and I will come and render you assistance in settling down somewhere in comfort.”
“At Eastbourne?” she cried in enthusiasm. “We’ll go there. Do let us go there?”
“Probably at Brighton,” I said quietly. “It would be gayer for you, and – well, I will be quite frank – I think there are one or two young men whom you know in Eastbourne. Hence it is not quite to your advantage to return there.”
She pouted prettily in displeasure.
“Brighton is within an hour of London, as you know,” I went on, extolling the praises of the place.
“Oh, yes, I know it. We often went over from Eastbourne, to concerts and things. There’s an aquarium there, and a seaside railway, and lots of trippers. I remember the place perfectly. I love to see your English trippers. They are such fun, and they seem to enjoy themselves so much more than we ever do. I wonder how it is – they enjoy their freedom, I suppose, while we have no freedom.”
“Well,” I said cheerfully, “in a week or ten days I hope I shall be quite fit to travel, and then we will set out for England.”
“Yes. Let us go. The Emperor leaves for Peterhof on Saturday. He will not return to Petersburg until the winter, and the Court moves to Tzarskoie-Selo on Monday.”
“Then I will see His Majesty before Saturday,” I said. “But, tell me, why did Your Highness write to me so urgently three days ago? You said you wished to see me at once.”
The girl sprang from her chair, crossed to the door, and made certain it was closed.
Then, glancing around as though apprehensive of eavesdroppers, she said:
“I wanted to tell you, Uncle Colin, of something very, very curious which happened the other evening. About ten o’clock at night I was with Miss West in the blue boudoir – you know the room in our palace, you’ve been in it.”
“I remember it perfectly,” I said.
“Well, I went upstairs to Davey for my smelling-salts as Miss West felt faint, and as I passed along the corridor I saw, in the moonlight, in my own room a dark figure moving by the window. It was a man. I saw him searching the drawers of my little writing-table, examining the contents by means of an electric-torch. I made no sound, but out of curiosity, drew back and watched him. He was reading all my letters – searching for something which he apparently could not find. My first impulse was to ring and give the alarm, for though I could not see the individual’s face, I knew he must be a thief. Still, I watched, perhaps rather amused at the methodical examination of my letters which he was making, all unconscious that he was being observed, until suddenly at a noise made by a servant approaching from the other end of the corridor, he started, flung back the letters into the drawer, and mounting to the open window, got out and disappeared. I shouted and rushed after him to the window, but he had gone. He must have dropped about twelve feet on to the roof of the ballroom and thus got away.
“Several servants rushed in, and the sentries were alarmed,” she went on. “But when I told my story, it was apparent that I was not believed. The drawer in the writing-table had been reclosed, and as far as we could see all was in perfect order. So I believe they all put it down to my imagination.”
“But you are quite certain that you saw the man there?” I said, much interested in her story.
“Quite. He was of middle height, dressed in dark clothes, and wore a cloth peaked cap, like men wear when golfing in England,” she replied. “He was evidently in search of something I had in my writing-table, but he did not find it. Nevertheless, he read a quantity of my letters mostly from school-friends.”
“And your love-letters?” I asked, with a smile.
“Well, if the fellow read any of them,” she laughed, “I hope he was very much edified. One point is quite plain. He knew English, for my letters were nearly all in English.”
“Some spy or other, I suppose.”
“Without a doubt,” she said, clasping her white hands before her and raising her wonderful eyes to mine. “And do you know, Uncle Colin, the affair has since troubled me very considerably. I wanted to see you and hear your opinion regarding it.”
“My opinion is that your window ought not to have been left open.”
“It had not been. The maid whose duty it is to close the windows on that floor one hour before sunset every day has been closely questioned, and declares that she closed and fastened it at seven o’clock.”
“Servants are not always truthful,” I remarked dubiously.
“But the intruder was there with some distinct purpose. Don’t you think so?”
“Without a doubt. He was endeavouring to learn some secret which Your Highness possesses. Cannot you form any theory what it can be? Try and reflect.”
“Secret!” she echoed, opening her eyes wide. “I have no secrets. Everybody tells me I am far too outspoken.”
“Here, in Russia, everyone seems to hold secrets of some character or other, social or political, and spies are everywhere,” I said. “Are you quite certain you have never before seen the intruder?”
“I could only catch the silhouette of his figure against the moonlight, yet, to tell the truth, it struck me at that moment that I had seen him somewhere before. But where, I could not recollect. He read each letter through, so he must have known English very well, or he could not have read so quickly.”
“But did you not tell me in the winter garden of the Palace, on the night of the last Court ball, that Marya de Rosen had given you certain letters – letters which reflected upon General Markoff?” I asked.
She sat erect, staring at me open-mouthed in sudden recollection. “Why, I never thought of that!” she gasped. “Of course! It was for those letters the fellow must have been searching.”
“I certainly think so – without the shadow of a doubt.”
“Madame de Rosen feared lest they should be stolen from her, and she gave them over to me – three of them sealed up in an envelope,” declared my dainty little companion. “She expressed apprehension lest a domiciliary visit be made to her house by the police, when the letters in question might be discovered and seized. So she asked me to hold them for her.”
“And what did you do with them?”
“I hid them in a place where they will never be found,” she said; “at a spot where nobody would even suspect. But somebody must be aware that she gave them to me for safe-keeping. How could they possibly know?”
“I think Your Highness was – well, just a little indiscreet on the night of the Court ball,” I said. “Don’t you recollect that you spoke aloud when other people were in the winter garden, and that I queried the judiciousness of it?”
“Ah! I remember now!” she exclaimed, her face suddenly pale and serious. “I recollect what I said. Somebody must have overheard me.”
“And that somebody told Serge Markoff himself – the man who was poor Madame de Rosen’s enemy, and who has sent both her and Luba to their graves far away in Eastern Siberia.”
“Then you think that he is anxious to regain possession of those letters?”
“I think that is most probable, in face of your statement that you intend placing them before the Emperor. Of course, I do not know their nature, but I feel that they must reflect very seriously upon His Majesty’s favourite official – the oppressor of Russia. You still have them in your possession?” I asked.
“Yes, Uncle Colin. I feared lest some spy might find them, so I went up to my old nursery on the top floor of the Palace – a room which has not been used for years. In it stands my old doll’s house – a big, dusty affair as tall as myself. I opened it and placed the packet in the little wardrobe in one of the doll’s bedrooms. It is still there. I saw it only yesterday.”
“Be very careful that no spy watches you going to that disused room. You cannot exercise too much caution in this affair,” I urged seriously.
“I am always cautious,” she assured me. “I distrust more than one of our servants, for I believe some of them to be in Markoff’s pay. All that we do at home is carried at once to the Emperor, while I am watched at every turn.”
“True; only we foreign diplomats are exempt from this pestilential surveillance and the clever plots of the horde of agents-provocateurs controlled by the all-powerful Markoff.”
“But what shall I do, Uncle Colin?” asked the girl, her white hands clasped in her lap.
“If you think it wise to place the letter before the Emperor, I should certainly lose no time in doing so,” I replied. “It may soon be too late. Spies will leave no hole or corner in your father’s palace unexamined.”
“You think there really is urgency?” she asked.
I looked my charming companion straight in the face and replied:
“I do. If you value your life, then I would urge you at once to get rid of the packet which poor Madame de Rosen entrusted to you.”
“But I cannot place it before the Emperor just at present,” the girl exclaimed. “I promised secrecy to Marya de Rosen.”
“Then you knew something of the subject to which those letters refer – eh?”
“I know something of it.”
“Why not pass them on to me? They will be quite secure here in the Embassy safe. Russian spies dire not enter here – upon this bit of British soil.”
“A good idea,” she said quickly. “I will. I’ll go home and bring them back to you.”
And in a few minutes she rose and with a merry laugh left me to descend to her carriage, which was waiting out upon the quay.
I stood looking out of the window as she drove away. I was thinking – thinking seriously over the Emperor’s strange apprehension.
Two visitors followed her, the French naval attaché, and afterwards old Madame Neilidoff, the Society leader of Moscow, who called to congratulate me upon my escape, and to invite me to spend my convalescence at her country estate at Sukova. With the stout, ugly old lady, who spake French with a dreadfully nasal intonation and possessed a distinct moustache, I chatted for nearly an hour, as we sipped our tea with lemon, when almost as soon as she had taken her departure the door was flung open unceremoniously and the Grand Duchess Natalia burst in, her beautiful face blanched to the lips.
“Uncle Colin! Something horrible has happened; Those letters have gone!” she gasped in a hoarse whisper, staring at me.
“Gone!” I echoed, starting to my feet in dismay.
“Yes. They’ve been stolen – stolen!”
