“Hasn’t Count Pahlen determined upon any plan of action?”
“Within an hour from now he holds a meeting at his house to consider the state of affairs. But, mark my words, nothing will be done. All their resolutions will end in smoke. Fear will fall upon them when they hear that the incriminating document is in the hands of the enemy. Every man will look to his own safety. There will be a general flight. Nay, some, thinking to save their own necks, will voluntarily come forward to betray their fellows. And then, what will Monsieur l’Ambassadeur think, when he learns that his trusted daughter is a member of a conspiracy to dethrone the Czar, and more—has made use of the Embassy as a meeting-place for the conspirators?”
CHAPTER X
THE DOCUMENT FOUND
Of the two visitors to the Embassy, Count Baranoff was the first to take his departure.
“To the Citadel,” he said on stepping into his carriage, and the next moment he was being whirled along the Prospekt in the direction of the Neva.
The handsome stone bridges that now span that broad river were non-existent in the early years of the nineteenth century, the present Troitzkoi Bridge being then represented by a chain of pontoons, which, overlaid with smooth planks, afforded a level road from one bank to the other.
So long as the water continued frozen, and again after the current had resumed its free flow, one could rely upon finding the bridge in position, but the case was very different in early spring (and it was now the twenty-third of March), when the breaking up of the ice and the drifting of the bergs would cause the bridge to be taken to pieces and put together again two or three times in the course of a day.
The bridge was in position when Baranoff’s carriage came up, and he was driven rapidly over the shaking timbers to its northern end, where rose the Fortress of Peter and Paul, a building as familiar to the Petersburgers as the Tower to Londoners, with this difference, however, that whereas the latter is a memorial of the dead past the former is, to the Petersburgers, an object of present fear.
The edifice, a work of Peter the Great, was built originally to defend his new capital, but has become useless for such purpose, being now in the very heart of the city. In reality a brick fabric, it is faced externally with granite, and with its five bastions rising from the water’s edge has a somewhat majestic appearance.