“No doubt your Imperial Highness has every influence to avert the disgrace from Count Lavrovski’s head. In the meanwhile I and my men are ready to escort your Imperial Highness back to Petersburg.”
“Like a schoolboy who has been playing truant. Well! I shall be glad to leave this city, with its unpleasant associations. We will start homewards to-night.”
And Nicholas Alexandrovitch, tired and enervated, dismissed the chief of the police with a smile and a bow.
It had been a curious adventure, and he wondered if he would ever hear the true version of it, or if those who had so daringly planned it, would ever come under the far-reaching clutches of the police.
That this was extremely unlikely both he himself and the astute Krapotkine were fully aware when, during the rapid journey back to Petersburg, they discussed the possibility of bringing the miscreants to justice.
The Tsarevitch himself had never as much as set eyes yet on any of his abductors; the only one he had ever seen throughout his captivity had been Maria Stefanowna, of whose face he caught but a mere glimpse in the fiaker that eventful night, when she was disguised as the odalisque, and the two or three moujiks, purported to be deaf-mute, who had been his servants and guardians in his imprisonment. That, through a description of them made by the Tsarevitch, some faint clue might be obtained was just possible; but Krapotkine well knew that the chances of tracing a man by mere verbal description are excessively remote. As for the house, or even the locality where so exalted a prisoner had lived and breathed for over two weeks, there was no hope of ever arriving at a conclusion as to its whereabouts. The Tsarevitch was a complete stranger in the city, and could not even have told in which direction it lay. The outside of the house he had never seen, nor anything in it, save the two rooms he had inhabited.
The chief of the police bit his moustache in impotent fury, when he realised how magnificently the whole plot had been carried through, and how, in all probability, the daring conspirators would also escape after the great victory they had gained, in the liberation of Dunajewski and his brother Nihilists.
The same night on which their prisoner was once more restored to liberty, at about the same hour, the members of the brotherhood sat once more together in committee, smoking and chatting gaily. The president, who seemed quite restored to his former urbane self, was talking of Maria Stefanowna, whom he regarded as the saviour of them all. All the older men looked up to her as one who had prevented lifelong remorse from haunting the rest of their lives; and the younger ones as the prophetess of their Utopia, who would lead them to victory through her wise counsels and daring deeds.
There was eager expectancy on all the faces round, and many were the glances that stole towards the clock that seemed to be ticking in a provokingly slow way.
Ah! at last! there was the sound of footsteps outside, and soon the door was opened, and four of the comrades, including Mirkovitch, came in. They were greeted with a unanimous cry of inquiry, “Well?”