Chapter Thirty Three. Describes a Momentous Audience.

A dead silence fell in that small, business-like room, wherein the monarch, the hardest-working man in the Empire, transacted the complicated business of the great Russian nation.

Outside could be heard a sharp word of command, followed by the heavy tramp of soldiers and the roll of drums. The sentries were changing guard.

Slowly—very slowly—His Majesty placed a sheet of blotting-paper over the document he had written, and then turning to the tearful girl, asked:

“Will not this individual, Danilo Danilovitch, furnish me with proofs? He is a Revolutionist, yet that is no reason why I should not see him. From what you tell me, Markoff holds him in his power by constantly threatening to betray him to his comrades as a police-spy. I must see him. Where is he?”

“He has accompanied us from London, Your Majesty,” was my reply. “I had some difficulty in assuring him that he would obtain justice at Your Majesty’s hands.”

“He is an assassin. He killed my brother Nicholas; yet it seems—if what you tell me be true—that Markoff compelled him to commit this crime.”

“Without a doubt,” was my reply.

“Then, Revolutionist or not, I will see him,” and he touched the electric button placed in the side of his writing-table.

A sentry appeared instantly, and at my suggestion His Majesty permitted me to go down the long corridor, at the end of which the dark, thin-faced man, in a rather shabby black suit, was sitting in a small ante-room, outside which stood a tall, statuesque Cossack sentry.

A few words of explanation, and somewhat reluctantly Danilovitch rose and followed me into the presence of the man he was ever plotting to kill.

The Emperor received him most graciously, and ordered him to be seated, saying:

“My niece here and Mr Trewinnard have been speaking of you, Danilo Danilovitch, and have told me certain astounding things.”

The man looked up at his Sovereign, pale and frightened, and His Majesty, realising this, at once put him at his ease by adding: “I know that, in secret, you are the mysterious ‘One’ who directs the revolutionary movement throughout the Empire, and the constant conspiracies directed against my own person. Well,” he laughed, “I hope, Danilovitch, you will not find me so terrible as you have been led to expect, and, further, that when you leave here you will think a little better of the man whose duty it is to rule the Russian nation than you hitherto have done. Now,” he asked, looking straight at the man, “are you prepared to speak with me openly and frankly, as I am prepared to speak to you?”

“I am, Your Majesty,” he said.

“Then answer me a few questions,” urged the Imperial autocrat. “First, tell me whether these constant conspiracies against myself—these plots for which so many hundreds are being banished to Siberia—are genuine ones formed by those who really desire to take my life?”

“No, Sire,” was the answer. “The last genuine plot was the one in Samara, nearly two years ago. Your Majesty escaped only by a few seconds.”

“When the railway line was blown up just outside the station; I remember,” said the Emperor, with a grim smile. “Four of your fellow-conspirators were killed by their own explosives.”

“That was the last genuine plot. All the recent ones have been suggested by General Markoff, head of the Secret Police.”

“With your assistance?”

The man nodded in the affirmative.

“Then you betray your fellow-conspirators for payment—eh?”

“Because I am compelled. I, alas! took a false step once, and His Excellency the General has taken advantage of it ever since. He forces me to act according to his wishes, to conspire, to betray—to murder if necessity arises—because he knows how I dread the truth becoming known to the secret revolutionary committee, and how I fully realise the terrible fate which must befall me if the actual facts were ever revealed. The Terrorists entertain no sympathy with their betrayer.”

“I quite understand that,” remarked the Sovereign. And then, in gracious words, he closely questioned him regarding the assassination of the Grand Duke Peter outside the Opera House in Warsaw, and heard the ghastly truth of Markoff’s crime from the witness’s own lips.

“I read the letters which I secured from the Palace of the Grand Duke Nicholas,” he admitted. “They were to the same effect as Your Majesty has said. In one of them His Excellency the General confessed his crime.”

“You threw the bomb which killed my brother, the Grand Duke Nicholas?”

“It was intended to kill Her Highness the Grand Duchess,” and he indicated Natalia, “and also the Englishman, Mr Trewinnard. The General was plotting the death of both of them, fearing that they knew his secret.”

“And in England there was another conspiracy against them—eh?”

“Yes,” replied the man known as the Shoemaker of Kazan. “But Mr Trewinnard and the Chief of Criminal Police, Ivan Hartwig, discovered me, and dared me to commit the outrage on pain of betrayal to my friends. Hence I have been between two stools—compelled by Markoff and defied by Hartwig. At last, in desperation, I sent an anonymous letter to Her Highness warning her, with the fortunate result that both she and her lover—a young Englishman named Drury—disappeared, and even the Secret Police were unable to discover their whereabouts. I did so in order to gain time, for I had no motive in taking Her Highness’s life, although if I refused to act I knew what the result must inevitably be.”

“All this astounds me,” declared the Emperor. “I never dreamed that I was being thus misled, or that Markoff was acting with such cunning and unscrupulousness against the interests of the dynasty and the nation. I see the true situation. You, Danilo Danilovitch, are a Revolutionist—not by conviction, but because of the drastic action of the Secret Police, the real rulers of Russia. Therefore, read that,” and he took from his table the Imperial ukase and handed it to him.

When he had read it he returned it to the Emperor’s hand, and murmured:

“Thank God! All Russia will praise Your Majesty for your clemency. It is the reform for which we have been craving for the past twenty years—fair trial, and after conviction a just punishment. But we have, alas! only had arrest and prompt banishment without trial. Every man and woman in Russia has hitherto been at the mercy of any police-spy or any secret enemy.”

“My only wish is to give justice to the nation,” declared the Sovereign, his dark, thoughtful eyes turned upon the dynamitard whose word was law to every Terrorist from Archangel to Odessa, and from Wirballen to Ekaterinburg.

“And, Sire, on behalf of the Party of the People’s Will I beg to thank you for granting it to us,” said the man, whose keen, highly-intelligent face was now slightly flushed.

“What I have heard to-day from my niece’s lips, from Mr Trewinnard and from yourself, has caused the gravest thoughts to arise within me,” His Majesty declared after a slight pause. “Injustice has, I see, been done on every hand, and the Secret Police has been administered by one who, it seems, is admittedly an assassin. It is now for me to remedy that—and to do so by drastic measures.”

“And the whole nation will praise Your Majesty,” Danilovitch replied. “I am a Revolutionist, it is true, but I have been forced—forced against my will—to formulate these false plots for the corrupt Secret Police to unearth. I declare most solemnly to Your Majesty that my position as leader of this Party and at the same time an agent-provocateur has been a source of constant danger and hourly terror. In order to hide my secret, I was unfortunately compelled to commit murder—to kill the woman I loved. She discovered the truth, and would have exposed me to the vengeance which the Party never fails to mete out to its betrayers. Markoff had given me my liberty and immunity from arrest in exchange for my services to him. He held me in his power, body and soul, and, because of that, I was forced to strike down the woman I loved,” he added, with a catch in his voice. “And—and—” he said, standing before the Emperor, “I crave Your Majesty’s clemency. I—I crave a pardon for that act for which I have ever been truly penitent.”

“A pardon is granted,” was the reply in a firm, deep voice. “You killed my brother Nicholas under compulsion. But on account of your open confession and the service rendered to me by these revelations, I must forgive you. I see that your actions have, all along, been controlled by Serge Markoff. Now,” he added, “what more can you tell me regarding this maladministration of the police?”

Danilovitch threw himself upon his knees and kissed the Emperor’s hand, thanking him deeply and declaring that he would never take any further part in the revolutionary movement in the future, but exercise all his influence to crush and stamp it out.

Then, when he had risen again to his feet, he addressed His Majesty, saying:

“The Secret Police, as at present organised, manufacture revolutionaries. I was a loyal, law-abiding Russian before the police arrested my brother and my wife illegally, and sent them to Siberia without trial. Then I rose, like thousands of others have done, and fell into the trap which Markoff’s agents so cleverly prepared. No one has been safe from arrest in Russia—”

“Until to-day,” the Emperor interrupted. “The ukase I have written is the law of the Empire from this hour.”

“Ah! God be thanked!” cried the man, placing his hands together fervently. “Probably no man can tell the many crimes and injustices for which General Markoff has been responsible. You want to know some of them—some within my own knowledge,” he went on. “Well, he was responsible for the great plot in Moscow a year ago when the little Tzarevitch so narrowly escaped. Seventeen people were killed and twenty-three were injured by the six bombs which were thrown, and nearly one hundred innocent persons were sent to Schusselburg or to Siberia in consequence.”

“Did you formulate that plot?” the Emperor asked.

“I did. Also at Markoff’s orders the one at Nikolaiev where the young woman, Vera Vogel, shot the Governor-General of Kherson and two of his Cossacks. Again at Markoff’s demand, I formed the plot whereby, near Tchirskaia, the bridge over the Don was blown up; fortunately just before Your Majesty’s train reached it. It was I who pressed the electrical contact—I pressed it purposely a few moments too quickly, as I was determined not to be the cause of that wholesale loss of life which must have resulted had the train fallen into the river. Another attempt was the Zuroff affair, when an infernal machine charged with nitro-glycerine was not long ago actually found within the Winter Palace—placed there by an unknown hand in order to terrify Your Majesty. But I tell you the hand that placed it where it was found was that of Serge Markoff himself—the same hand which killed His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Peter in order to prevent His Highness telling Your Majesty certain ugly truths which he had accidentally discovered. And,” he went on, “there were many other conspiracies of various kinds conceived for the sole purpose of keeping the Empire ever in a state of unrest and the arrest of hundreds of the innocent of both sexes. Indeed, explosives—picric acid, nitro-glycerine, mélinite and cordite—were supplied to us from a secret source. Sometimes, too, when I furnished a list of, say, ten or a dozen of those implicated in a plot, the police would arrest them with probably thirty others besides, people taken haphazard in the streets or in the houses. Whole families have been banished, men dragged from their wives, women from their husbands and children, and though innocent were consigned to those terrible oubliettes beneath the level of the lake at Schusselburg, or in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. To adequately describe all the fierce brutality, the gross injustice and the ingenious plots conceived and financed by Serge Markoff would be impossible. I only speak of those in which I, as his unwilling catspaw, have been implicated.”

Her Highness and myself had listened to this amazing confession without uttering a word.

The Emperor, intensely interested in the man’s story, put to him many questions, some concerning the demands of the Party of the People’s Will, others in which he requested further details concerning Markoff’s crimes against persons, and against the State.

“This man in whom for years I have placed such implicit confidence has played me false!” cried the ruler presently, his face pale as he struck the table fiercely in his anger. “He has plotted with the Terrorists against me! He has been responsible for several attempts from which I have narrowly escaped with my life. Therefore he shall answer to me—this cunning knave who is actually my brother’s assassin! He shall pay the penalty of his crimes!”

“All Russia knows that at Your Majesty’s hands we always receive justice,” the Revolutionist said. “From the Ministry, however, we never do. They are our oppressors—our murderers.”

“And you Revolutionists wish to kill me because of the misdeeds of my Ministers!” cried the Emperor in reproach.

“If Your Majesty dismisses and punishes those who are responsible, then there will be no more Terrorism in Russia. I am a leader; I have bred and reared the serpent of the Revolution, and I myself can strangle it—and I promise Your Majesty that as soon as General Markoff is removed from office—I will do so.”