“No, not dead!” The worst was over, and the man hurried on. “There was much connected with your arrest that you did not know. You believed that it was due to your association with the Brotherhood. You were wrong. You were arrested because the Grand Duke Ivan admired your wife.”
The Professor’s shoulders shook, but he said no word. Age dulls the capacity to feel; cools the passions as well as the affections. The old man had borne much; no further shock could greatly move him.
“You disappeared. Ivan was kind to your wife, but declared that your arrest had been ordered by the Emperor himself, and that he could do nothing. Soon you were reported dead. Not long after he married her—morganatically, of course. She is not to be too much blamed. She was penniless, alone, in a strange land, with a child to support. She married him. When you stole your child you stole it from her.”
The Professor’s dry lips moved. “I did not know,” he murmured.
“No, you did not know. The fault was not yours, but that of the system we are trying to destroy. So much for the past! Now for the future. Will you obey the orders of the Brotherhood?”
Maxime’s voice dropped, and he sat silent, watching the older man dumbly fighting through the shock. Pity was in his eyes, but relentlessness was there also—the relentlessness of the priest who pities the victim, but does not drop the sacrificial knife. Patiently he waited for the other to speak.
At last the words came, and Maxime’s face flushed with triumph as he heard them.
“What does the Brotherhood require?” the Professor asked hollowly.
The younger man stretched out his hand to the great globe that stood beside him and twirled it on its axis. “In March, just two years ago,” he began, “the ship Orkney sailed from London for St. Petersburg with five millions in gold on board, consigned to the Russian government. It was the people’s gold, borrowed on the people’s credit, to aid in enslaving the people. We swore it should never reach St. Petersburg. We kept our word. The Orkney was wrecked in the night in the Gulf of Bothnia—no one survived to tell where. Russia long sought for it in vain. We ourselves sought for it in vain. But now, at last, a clue has reached our hands.”
“Well?”