THE NEXT NIHILIST PLOT.
It seemed to me when I thought over my interview with Paula Tueski, that the complications which surrounded me could not possibly be increased. It was of course hopeless to think of leaving Russia except by some stratagem, or in disguise; and this would be all the more difficult because Olga must leave first, and her flight would undoubtedly turn attention on me.
A positively baffling set of conditions faced me therefore, whichever way I turned. If I stayed on, Paula Tueski would insist on the marriage, and the crisis would come that way. If I attempted to go, she herself would join with the police in following me, and the mere endeavour to fly would give just that colour to her story which would make all the world ready to believe it.
Again, if I tried the remaining alternative of proclaiming my identity, I had so egregiously compromised myself that I could not hope to escape heavy punishment of some kind; while it would certainly implicate Olga and at the same time have no effect against the direct lies Paula Tueski was ready to swear.
Above all, a great change had come over me. I wished to live and keep my freedom. The old indifference and apathy were gone. My object now was to get both Olga and myself out of the country in safety; and thus I took diametrically opposite views of difficulties which a few days previously—before I had made the discovery of my love for Olga—would have caused me little more than a laugh of amused perplexity.
Baffling as the puzzle was, however, it became infinitely more involved and perilous a few days later. Two fresh complications came to kill even every forlorn hope.
My Nihilist friends were responsible for the first.
The belief that I had struck down the Chief of the Secret Police and had done it in a manner so secret, mysterious, and impenetrable that it staggered the most ingenious police spies and defied the efforts of the astutest detectives, surrounded me with a glamour of wholly undeserved and undesired reputation.
The first intimation of this had reached me through Olga, and was followed by several others; and I received clear proof that I was now regarded as a sort of leader of the forlorn hopes of these wild and desperate men. A man who could alone and unaided achieve what I was believed to have accomplished was held capable of the greatest deeds. So they appeared to argue; and I was accordingly picked out next for a task of infinite danger and hazard in a plot of even more tremendous consequences than that of the recent murder.
It was nothing less than the assassination of the Czar.