Chapter Four.
The Man with the Fatal Finger.
Three years ago, while I was writing a novel which deals with Nihilism, and which brought the heavy hand of the Press Bureau at Petersburg upon me, I contrived, in order to sketch my characters from life, to obtain an introduction to the little colony of Russian revolutionists which exists in secret in a northwestern suburb of London. I eventually won their confidence, and ingratiated myself with them by advocating Russian freedom in a series of articles in a certain London journal, which had the effect of enlisting public sympathy with the exiles in such a manner, that the editor received a number of donations, which he handed to me, while I in turn conveyed the money to my friend, Paul Grigorovitch, the head of the branch of the Narodnoe Pravo.
I was sitting at home, reading and smoking, in a very lazy mood, one winter’s evening, when the servant girl entered and handed me a soiled, crumpled letter, which, she said, had been left by a strange-looking foreign woman. This did not surprise me, for I sometimes received mysterious unsigned notes from my friends the refugees when they desired to see me. The exiles are continually under the observation of the “Okhrannoë Otdelenië,” or Secret Police attached to the Russian Embassy, hence the cautiousness of their movements.
I tore the envelope open and read its contents.
The words, written in a fine educated hand,—evidently a woman’s,—were: “Come to Springfield Lodge, St. Margaret’s Road, Regent’s Park, to-night at nine. Important.”
I confess the communication puzzled me, for I knew no one living at the address, and the handwriting was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, I resolved to obey the summons.
With some little difficulty I found the house. It stood back from the road, concealed behind a high wall. The thoroughfare was very quiet and eminently respectable. Each house stood in its own grounds, and had an air of wealth and prosperity about it, while the bare black branches of the great trees on either side of the road met overhead, forming a long avenue.