CHAPTER XXXI.
A REASSURING SEARCH.
THE capture of the man with the Greek name proved disastrous to the Executive Committee. It was the first link in a chain of most important arrests. The trap set at his house caught the very tall man with the Tartarian features; this led to the arrest of Purring Cat, and the residence of Purring Cat, in its turn, ensnared a pretentiously dressed man, in whom the superior gendarme officers were amazed to find their own trusted secretary, the man whom Makar knew as “the Dandy.” Makar’s arrest at Miroslav had tended to strengthen the Dandy’s position somewhat, but now that he was in the hands of the enemy himself, it seemed as if the medical student’s sweeping system of “counter-espionage” had burst like a bubble. Makar was in despair. He spoke of new plans, of new sacrifices, until Zachar silenced him.
“All in due time, my dear romanticist,” he said to him. “A month or two later I shall be delighted to be entertained with the fruit of your rich fancy; not now, my boy.”
The four arrests were a severe blow to the undertaking of which Zachar had been placed in charge. He was overworked, dejected, yet thrilling with nervous activity. But his own days were numbered. An air of impending doom hung over the Czar and his “internal enemies” alike.
Good fortune seemed to attend the state police. While the gendarmes of the capital were celebrating their unexpected haul an intellectual looking man was locked up in a frontier town as a “vagrant,” that is, as a man without a passport, who subsequently proved to be one of the active Terrorists the detectives had long been looking for. He was the “grave bard,” one of the twin poets of the party. Shortly after his arrest the Russian government received word from the police of the German capital that a prominent Russian Nihilist known among his friends as “My Lord,” a sobriquet due to his elegance of personal appearance and address, had spent some time in Berlin and was now on his way to St. Petersburg. A German detective followed the man to the frontier and then, shadowed by Russian spies, he was tracked to a house on the Neva Prospect, the leading street of St. Petersburg. There it was decided to arrest him Friday, March 23.
A little after 4 o’clock of that day Zachar and the ex-Governor’s daughter left their home, where they were registered as brother and sister, and took a sleigh, alighting in front of the Public Library, in the very heart of the city. Instead of entering the library, however, which the sleigh-driver thought to be their destination, they parted, continuing their several journeys on foot.
It was an extremely cold afternoon. The beards of pedestrians and sleigh-drivers and the manes of horses were glued with frost; their breath came in short painful puffs. It was getting dark. The sky was a spotless, almost a warm blue. To look at it you would have wondered where this sharp, all-benumbing cold came from. There was an air of insincerity about the crimson clearness of the afternoon light.
Zachar wore a tall cap of Persian lamb, flattened at the top, and a tight-fitting fur coat. He walked briskly, his chest thrown out, his full pointed beard hoary with frost, his cheeks red with the biting cold.