We conversed with the officer for a few minutes. Then he turned to her and said, “Death is preferable to the life to which you had been consigned. You are indeed fortunate to obtain release, and you both have my best wishes for your future welfare.”
Wishing me bon voyage, he shouted the order to march, and a moment later the envious, despairing band of exiles moved slowly onward towards their doom.
As we drove back together in the direction of Kalmakova I asked her about her arrest. What she related astounded me.
“The spy who denounced me to the police was Madame Teréshkevna. There are claws beneath the velvet paw,” she said.
“Agraféna Teréshkevna!” I cried. “I thought she was a member of the Circle?”
“Yes. But it has since been ascertained that she is also in the pay of the Secret Police, and that she gives her brilliant entertainments in order to seek victims against whom to give information.”
As she went on to describe the circumstances of her arrest, and the horrors of her imprisonment in the Fortress, I sat silently listening, and wondering whether I should ever solve the mysteries connected with my adventure in Onslow Square.
The solution came in a curious manner about six months afterwards. Mariána and I, whose marriage was now publicly announced, had taken up our residence in London, and were frequently the guests of the Revolutionary refugees. At the house of one of these I met an elderly man who was introduced as Ivan Ivanovitch, which was, of course, an assumed name. It was he who explained the conspiracy against me.
“The Third Section received orders to suppress you,” he said. “It was hinted to an agent provocateur that your death would be gratifying, and Axinïa—who for some time had acted as maid to Agraféna Teréshkevna—aided by an adventurer named Goltmann, who assumed the part of ‘flunkey,’ formed a plot to kill you. We, however, were determined to frustrate their designs, and, assisted by Paul Maiefski, I kept a close watch upon them. We saw the girl Axinïa induce you to go to the house in Onslow Square, a key of which she had obtained, and where she had prepared a very ingenious death-trap. Madame was in the house at the time, as well as Goltmann, and the object was first to murder you, and secondly to secure the contents of your pockets, which they suspected contained letters from ‘politicals.’ Soon after you had been admitted Maiefski and I entered through a window, afterwards unlocking the door of the drawing-room and dragging you out of the suffocating fumes. There were sounds of quarrelling upstairs, and we took you up with us. The high words between Madame and her maid prevented us from being heard, and, leaving you insensible on the landing, we entered the room unobserved. The women were quarrelling about you, when Axinïa uttered some insulting words to Madame, and the latter, without more ado, drew a revolver from her pocket and shot the girl dead.