When a person in Russia is suspected of crime, the law gives the police tremendous power, and there are few of the formalities to be gone through such as are peculiar to our own country; and in this instance Danevitch was in a position to do almost absolutely whatever he thought fit and proper to do.
The finding of the glove carried conviction to his mind that Anna Plevski was mixed up in this new plot for the destruction of the Emperor. So, without any ceremony, he proceeded to rummage her boxes and drawers for further evidence. The want of keys did not deter him; chisels and hammers answered the same purpose. His search was rewarded with a bundle of letters. These were hastily scanned; they were all, apparently, innocent enough; the majority of them were love letters. A few of these were signed ‘Peter Treskin’; the rest simply bore the initial ‘P.’ There was nothing in any of these letters calculated to cause suspicion, with the exception of the following somewhat obscure passage in a letter written a few days before the explosion:
‘The time is at hand when your faith and love will be put to a great test. The serious business we have in hand is reaching a critical stage, and success depends on our courage, coolness, and determination. You and I must henceforth walk hand-in-hand to that supreme happiness for which we have both toiled. We love each other. We must unite our destinies in a bond that can only be severed by death.’
Having learnt so much, Danevitch once more confronted Anna. She confessed she had a lover named Peter Treskin; they had quarrelled, however, and he had gone away; but she knew not where he had gone to, and she did not care if she never saw him again.
‘Perhaps you will be able to remember things better in a dungeon,’ suggested Danevitch, as he arrested Anna, and handed her over to the care of a gendarme.
She turned deathly white, but otherwise appeared calm and collected, and declared that she was the victim of a gross outrage, for which everyone concerned would be made to suffer.
Danevitch’s next move was to go to Treskin’s lodgings. He found that gentleman had been absent for three days. Here also a search was made for compromising papers. A good many letters from Anna Plevski were brought to light. They all breathed the most ardent love and devotion for the man; and the writer declared that she could not live a day without him, that for his sake she was prepared to peril her soul. But there were other letters—love letters—written to Treskin by a woman who signed herself Lydia Zagarin. This person not only betrayed by her writing that she was desperately, madly in love with Treskin also, but from her statements and expressions it was obvious that he had carried on an intrigue with her, and was as much in love with her as she was with him. She wrote from a place called Werro, in the Baltic provinces. Danevitch took possession of these letters, and continued his search, during which he came across a slip of paper which bore the printed heading, ‘The Technical School of Chemistry, St. Petersburg.’ On it was written this line: ‘Yes, I think I shall succeed.—Smolski.’
Apparently there was not much in this, but what there was was quite enough for Danevitch under the circumstances, and he had Professor Smolski arrested. It was a summary proceeding, but in times of excitement in Russia anyone may be arrested who may possibly turn out to be a guilty person. It is not necessary that there should be a shadow of a shade of evidence of guilt in the first instance; it is enough that there is a possibility of the police being right. But if they are wrong what does it matter? The person is released, and the police are not blamed. Danevitch, however, did not often go wrong in this respect; and in this instance, Smolski being a Professor in the Technical School of Chemistry, there were probabilities that he might be able to afford some valuable information respecting Treskin.
Smolski was one of those extraordinary types of men who, having conceived a certain thing to be right, are willing to risk fame, fortune, life itself, for the sake of their opinions. Smolski was undoubtedly a gentle, high-minded man; nevertheless he believed that the ruler of his country was a tyrant; that his countrymen were little better than slaves, whose social and political rights were ignored; that the ordinary means—such as are familiar to more liberally-governed countries—being useless to direct attention to their wrongs, violent measures were justified, and the removal of the tyrant would be acceptable in God’s sight. Holding these views—and though he was a family man and one respected and honoured—Smolski had allied himself with a band of arch-conspirators, whose head was Peter Treskin. He was calm, dignified, and collected under his arrest, and when he was interrogated, in accordance with Russian law, by a judge of instruction, he frankly admitted that he had been concerned in an attempt to bring about a better form of government; but he steadfastly refused to denounce any of his accomplices. He could die bravely, as became a man, but no one should say he was a traitor.
All this would have been admirable in a nobler cause; as it was, he simply proved that he had allowed his extreme views to blind him to the difference between legitimate constitutional agitation and crime—crime that, whether committed in the name of politics or not, was murder, and an outrage against God’s ordinance. Smolski, in common with most men, neglected the safe rule that letters should be destroyed when they are calculated to compromise one’s honour or betray one’s friends. And thus it came about that when the Professor’s papers were examined, not only were Isaac and Jacob Eisenmann brought into the police net, but many others; and in a diary he had kept there was a record of his experiments with the deadly compound which was destined to blow the monarch of the Empire into eternity, but which, owing to an accident or a blunder, had failed in its object so far as the Czar was concerned, though it had cruelly cut short the lives of many hard-working and worthy men. Under any circumstances, even if the Czar had been involved in the destructive influences of the infernal machine, many others must have perished with him. Such conspirators never hesitate to destroy nine hundred and ninety-nine inoffensive people if they can only reach the thousandth against whom they have a grievance.