He looked inspired now, a prophet of the Utopia that dwelt in all their hearts, the Utopia at which some of them would have arrived by the most gentle of means, but which this man would conquer by fire and sword.
They all knew what they would hear next; they knew what Mirkovitch had all through wished them to do. Most of them would willingly have stopped their ears not to hear the dreaded manifesto that this powerful man would in the next moment hurl at them.
“We have often had speeches here,” resumed Mirkovitch once more, “to inflame our enthusiasm against the tyrants that hold our destinies and those of our fellow-men in the palm of their hands. I am no orator; the speeches did not come from me. Some of you, who to-night seem weakest, spoke the loudest then. But I tell you, we have a great weapon in our hands against them, the one weapon that must, sooner or later, lay them prostrate at our feet, asking for the mercy they have never granted us.
“That weapon is fear. Let us strike terror in their hearts, my friends; they have no other vulnerable points. When we can, let us strike in the dark, at all times swiftly and surely, so that in days to come, very soon, they will look at each other with blanched faces and trembling lips, and murmur what they dare not say out loud, ‘My turn next perhaps.’ It is then, and then only, that we shall be the masters, when cowardly fear will place them grovelling at our feet. Then we can dictate, then we can negotiate, and before then what matter Dunajewski or Volenski, or a hundred such? What are their lives that we should hesitate for a moment to wield the weapon our own efforts have placed in our hands?”
He sat down once more, and a dead silence followed this speech. Enthusiasm was once more kindling in the gloomy faces around, once more the man with the iron will had imposed it on his weaker comrades, and when his mocking eyes again travelled round the room he could read on the faces before him the result of his powerful words; he could read it in the gradual disappearance of the anxious looks, the unspoken terrors; could read it in the young, dreamy eyes, now once more burning with the glow of enthusiasm, the thirst for valiant deeds, at peril of life and freedom.
“Mirkovitch is right,” was heard on all sides.
Perhaps some of them still shuddered when they realised what his being right meant to the helpless prisoner in the Heumarkt, but they were very few now, and when the president’s anxious eyes and Mirkovitch’s triumphant ones scanned all the faces there, they knew that if the grim Socialist’s wish was put to the vote there would be many “ayes” and very few “noes.”
“After all, my friends,” resumed the stalwart Russian, now laying his trump card on the table, “I am sure, if you were asked, you, none of you, would wish to see our great plot come ignominiously to grief through the liberation of our prisoner by the Russian police, and all of us convicted without having attained anything, after having dared so much. Any hour, any minute now, may see us all in the clutches of the Third Section, while Nicholas Alexandrovitch leaves my house free and unscathed. Every second heightens our peril and diminishes the chances of our triumph. At least if we fall, for there seems no likelihood of our being able to escape undetected, let us have accomplished something that will leave our names for ever glorified in the eyes of every patriot in Russia.”
Thus was the doom of the prisoner sealed; very little discussion followed. Unwillingly, but still unanimously, they had given their consent to the dastardly deed which Mirkovitch but too willingly offered to do for them. One or two of them asked for a respite—twenty-four hours—during which, after all, some news of Volenski might yet arrive. The old Socialist, satisfied at having carried his point, willingly agreed to wait till the morrow, and a final meeting therefore was convened for the next day, at the same hour. The president had said nothing. What was his influence against that of his grim comrade? The tide of feeling, a mixture of mistaken duty and misguided enthusiasm, had sealed the fate of the young Tsarevitch.
The weight of indecision seemed to have been lifted from the minds of them all. Although they neither smoked nor chatted, according to their wont, the gloom had quite given place to irrevocable determination. No more questions or surmises were put forward as to Volenski’s probable fate or their own certain doom. The word “assassination” had sounded once, pronounced by many lips with a shudder. It was now called “execution”; Mirkovitch, the willing executioner; they, the judges who had arrested and condemned a prisoner just as their tyrants did with the millions over which they held sway.