Part 30 (1/2)
Week after week, and month after month, the Baltic Fleet was declared to be on the point of departure. Time after time the Czar went on board to review it in person, and speak words of encouragement to the officers and crew. And every time, after everything had been p.r.o.nounced ready, some mysterious obstacle arose at the last moment to detain the fleet in Russian waters.
Journalists, naval experts, politicians and other ill-informed persons invented or repeated all sorts of explanations to account for the series of delays.
Only in the very innermost circles of the Russian Court it was whispered that the guardian spirit of the great Peter, the founder of Russia's naval power, had repeatedly come to warn his descendant of disasters in store for the fleet, should it be permitted to sail.
M. Auguste was earning his reward.
CHAPTER XXI
MY FUNERAL
The extreme privacy with which I had managed my negotiation with M.
Auguste completely baffled the plotters who were relying on the voyage of the Baltic Fleet to furnish a _casus belli_ between Russia and Great Britain.
They realized, of course, that some powerful hand was interfering with their designs, and they were sufficiently intelligent to guess that that hand must be mine.
But they were far from suspecting the method of my operations. They firmly believed that M. Auguste was still carrying out their instructions, and sowing distrust of England in the mind of Nicholas II. Indeed, on one occasion he informed me that the Princess Y---- had sent for him and ordered him not to frighten the Czar to such an extent as to make him afraid to let the fleet proceed to sea.
Unable to detect and countermine me, it was natural that they should become impatient for my removal.
Accordingly, I was not surprised to receive an urgent message from Sophia, late one evening, requesting me to come to her without delay.
By this time our friends.h.i.+p, if such it could be called, had become so intimate that I visited her nearly every day on one pretext or another.
Her greeting, as soon as I had obeyed the summons, showed me that a fresh development had taken place in the situation.
”Andreas, the hour has come!”
”The hour?”
”For your removal. Petrovitch has been here. He suspects something.
He has rebuked me severely for the delay.”
”Did you tell him I was not an easy man to kill?”
”I told him anything and everything. He would not listen. He says they have lost confidence in me. He was brutal. He said----”
”Well, what did he say?”
”He said--” she spoke slowly and shamefacedly--”that he perceived it took a man to kill a man.”
I smiled grimly.
”History tells us differently. But what then?”
”To-morrow I shall no longer be able to answer for your life.”
”You think some one else will be appointed to dispose of me?”