He was a Pole, and, being a Pole, he conspired, not because he believed in all the Utopian theories set forth by his brother conspirators, but because it was in his blood to plot and plan against the existing government.
Whether these plots and plans ever resulted in anything tangible, any great reform out there in Russia, he never troubled his mind much to think. He was too young to think of the future; the present was the only important factor in his existence.
He usually shrank from extreme measures. Mirkovitch’s bloodthirsty speeches grated upon his nerves, and having spent a miracle of ingenuity in combining some deadly plot that would annihilate the tyrant and his brood, Iván would have preferred that it should not be carried out at all, but left as a record of what a Pole’s mind can devise against his hated conquerors.
It was not indecision; it was the horror of a refined and even plucky nature, of deeds that would not brook the light of day. He would have liked to lead a Polish insurrection, but feared to handle an assassin’s dagger.
He had vague theories about the “People,” lofty notions of their immense brain power, downtrodden by powerful officialism, and he looked forward to the days when that somewhat undefinable quantity would frame its own laws, appoint its own rulers. How that great object was to be accomplished he had no practical notions; Mirkovitch said by killing those now in power; Lobkowitz, their much decorated president, said, by careful diplomacy and an occasional wholesome fright. The younger men dreamed, the older ones plotted, and still the throne of the Romanoffs was far from tottering.
And Iván dreamed with the dreamers and plotted with the plotters, eager to help, yet shrinking from decisive action.
He had discovered the Tsarevitch’s proposed incognito journey to Vienna and the opera ball. He was a young man of fashion in society, invaluable to the Socialists, for he went everywhere, heard all the gossip, and repeated to them what they wished to hear.
He planned out the abduction in all its details. Mirkovitch was to lend his house, in which to receive the captive, and his daughter was to entice him therein. Baloukine and his brother were to watch the proceedings. And, after that, he, Iván, would do something perilous, all alone, he cared not what, as long as he did not have to lend a hand in abducting a helpless youth into a dangerous trap.
Nicholas Alexandrovitch had fallen into that trap, with his eyes shut, wholly unsuspecting. It had been well set at a time and place when most young men, be they prince or peasant, are eager for adventures, and the Tsarevitch was barely twenty, and had come to Vienna to enjoy himself.
The bright eyes of the odalisque, as seen through her black velvet mask, seemed full of promise of enjoyment to come; her manners, essentially Viennese, were provoking to the verge of distraction, and human nature, even disguised in the garb of the heir to an empire, would have to undergo very radical changes, ere at twenty years of age it could resist the blandishments of so enterprising an odalisque.