“Then come upstairs,” he replied. “Come—both of you.”
And we followed a dark figure up to a back room on the second floor—a shabby bed and sitting-room combined.
He struck a match, lit the gas and pulled down the blind. Then as he faced us, a middle-aged man with deeply-furrowed countenance and hair tinged with grey, I at once recognised him—though he no longer wore the small black moustache—as the man I had met on Brighton Pier on the previous night.
“Well,” he asked roughly in Russian, “what do you want with me?”
I was gratified that he had not recognised Ivan Hartwig. For a moment he looked inquiringly at me, and no doubt recognised me as the Grand Duchess’s companion of the previous night.
His hair was unkempt, his neck was thick, and his unshaven face was broad and coarse. He had the heavy features of a Russian of the lower class, yet his prominent, cunning eyes and high, deeply-furrowed forehead betokened great intelligence. Though of the working-class, yet in his eyes there burned a bright magnetic fire, and one could well imagine how by his inflammatory speeches he led that crowd of ignorant aliens into a belief that by killing His Imperial Majesty they could free Russia of the autocratic yoke. Those men and women, specimens of whom were living in that house at Clapton, never sought to aim at the root of the evil which had gripped the Empire, that brutal camarilla who ruled Russia, but in the madness of their blood-lust and ignorance that they were being betrayed by their leader, and their lives made catspaws by the camarilla itself, they plotted and conspired, and were proud to believe themselves martyrs to what they foolishly termed The Cause!
The face of the traitor before us was full of craft and cunning, the countenance of a shrewd and clever man who, it struck me, was haunted hourly by the dread of betrayal and an ignominious end. Even though he might have been a shoemaker, yet from his perfect self-control, and the manner in which he greeted us, I saw that he was no ordinary man. Indeed, few men could have done—would have dared to do—what he had done, if all Tack had related were true. His personal appearance, his unkempt hair, his limp collar and loosely-tied cravat of black and greasy silk, and his rough suit of shabby dark tweed, his whole ensemble, indeed, was that of the political agitator, the revolutionary firebrand.
“I am here, Danilo Danilovitch,” Hartwig said at last very seriously, looking straight at him, “in order to speak to you quite frankly, to put to you several questions.”
The man started, and I saw apprehension by the slight movement in the corners of his mouth.
“For what reason?” he snapped quickly. “I thought you were here with a message from our Chief in Russia?”