Chapter II: “a Spy Within the Gate.”

General Stefanovitch, the deputy-governor of Kronstadt, entered his library every morning at half-past eight precisely that he might kiss his daughters upon the cheek and wish their governess “good-day.” The years brought no variation of the ceremony; the same words were spoken, the same compliments passed. When the General had unusual leisure, he devoted some moments of it to a measured flirtation with the young lady who taught his children. When he had no leisure, he gave her a haunting leer or kissed the tips of his fingers to her if his daughters were not looking.

“Bon jour, Varia.”

“Bon jour, cher papa.”

“Et tu, Rina?”

“Bien, cher papa.”

Marian Best, the General’s governess in the year 1895, always said that when the old soldier laughed the top of his head threatened to come off like the half of an egg. But this alarming effect was rather the result of his weakness for painted eyebrows than of any deficiency of head or skull. Sixty years of life had not satisfied his vanity. A glance from a woman’s eyes could still release the flow of compliment and childish affectation. Marian said that he seemed at such moments to be treading upon hot plates. His shrivelled body swelled until his close-laced stays were strained to bursting point; he bowed continually, and laid upon his breast a hand blue and long and almost fleshless. She dreaded those mornings when he was not busy; it was a relief to her when she heard his sword clanging in the stone passage of the house or saw old Ivan running for his great boots.

“Ah, you must learn our language,” he would say often; “you must learn the verb ‘to lofe.’ Some day we will have the lesson by ourselves, mademoiselle. You shall repeat the little word after me until you are perfect. Ho, ho, ho! Will you not have me for your master, Meess Best? Shall I not teach well, hein?”

“Cher papa, qu’est-ce que tu dis à mademoiselle?”

“Rien, ma chère, rien du tout.”

Sometimes, when “the Dolls” sat staring with inquiring eyes at his amatory contortions or strange pursuits of nimbleness, he would entertain for them anything but a father’s love. He could not caper as he would with the children for his audience. The snatched whisper or stolen leer was not satisfying. He tasted the dry bones of flirtation when he was hungering for the baked meats. It was difficult to believe that this perfumed old dandy, whose head was like a shining ball of mahogany, and whose eyebrows were an uncertain quantity, was the master of Kronstadt and of her garrison, the sentinel of the mighty Russian Empire, the keeper of the gate and of the freedom of millions. Yet Russia knew no more faithful servant; there was no more devoted soldier of the Czar in all the kingdom; no man whose pride in the citadel of the gate was so enduring and ever-present. General Stefanovitch lived for his work; the gaunt and bare Governor’s house upon the north shore of the island was a palace for him; he desired no other gardens but the garden of fort and bastion, of shallowing sea and impassable rampart. His world lay in that calcareous, barren island which God had set in the Gulf of Finland for the protection of Russia. His vanities, his personal “scenery and effects,” as Marian Best described them, were trifles of his leisure. He forgot them in an instant when Kronstadt was named. She was all to him--the mighty tablet upon which his life’s work was recorded.

Thus it befell that the moments when he could employ himself with amatory recreations were few. The half of an hour with his children in the morning, a few words to them at night, sufficed for the proper performance of the domestic _rôle_. At other times he was the martinet, the hundred-eyed guardian of the gate, the precise soldier who ruled with an ungloved hand of iron. Men feared his look; the dungeons of the fortress echoed with the groans of those upon whom the lash of his displeasure had fallen; the lightest breath of his suspicion, blowing upon any who served him, withered up the blossoms of that man’s fortune. They saw he was a just man, but one who knew not forgiveness.

Nine o’clock in the morning was the hour which found the General at his writing-desk in the private cabinet of the Governor’s house. Neither fast nor feast gave grace to those who awaited him. He would enter the room as the clock struck; the echoes of the bell would not have died away before the grim Colonel Bonzo, the second in command, would have saluted and laid the report before him. Upon the morning which followed carnival, the young officers, who had not been to bed, declared his punctuality immoral. No rose gathered at the hour of the dew was fresher than Nikolai Stefanovitch when he saluted the Colonel as the clock struck nine. Painted, powdered, prim--he bowed to those who awaited him with the inflexible courtesy of an automaton. The eyes which had just beamed upon Marian Best, as they had beamed upon eight governesses during the past five years, were now cold and steely and devouring. A great silence fell upon those in the ante-room when he passed through. Even the iron-framed Bonzo stiffened at his approach.

“Good morning, Colonel. You have the papers?”

“Here, my General.”

General Stefanovitch fixed his eyeglass and began to peruse the bulky document. He had read but a few lines when a subdued exclamation and a shuffling of feet again drew his attention to his subordinate. Such a breach of the discipline of silence was not to be endured; a sudden flight of the General’s eyebrows, which seemed to run up to the top of his head, marked his displeasure and impatience.

“You spoke, Colonel?” he asked.

“I wished to speak, my General.”

“Now, when I read the despatches?”

“If you please, my General.”

General Stefanovitch let his glass fall and deliberately rolled up the report. Such an interruption had not been known during the twenty years he had spent at Kronstadt. It remained for Bonzo to justify himself.

“Well, Colonel?”

“It is this, my General: the plan of Battery No. 3 was put into the hands of the English Government a week ago.”

Colonel Bonzo stood like a statue when the words were spoken. The terrible news had been the burden of his night; he had heard it, and yet twelve hours had passed before he had dared to speak. Now the deed was done and the blow would fall--the blow of anger, of recrimination, it might be of punishment.

Five minutes, it may be, passed before General Stefanovitch found his tongue. During that time he seemed outwardly to be unconscious of the place or the word, but in reality his mind was seeking to and fro for the first link of the chain which reason must forge for him. To Bonzo’s surprise no martinet answered him. The voice was low and in command; he did not speak in anger.

“Where does this news come from?”

“By telegram last night--from the Prince.”

“How is it that I did not hear of this before?”

Bonzo half raised his hands as though in a gesture of excuse.

“There was carnival upon the ice, my General.”

“Yes----?”

“And when I returned at midnight, and you were still down there, I did not think you would wish it.”

He stood stammering and stuttering, but the other, awakened by all the impulses of duty, smote the table with his fist until the very glass in the windows of the room was shaken.

“Not wish it?--I--whose honour is at stake. By heaven, Colonel Bonzo, what do you mean?”

The Colonel’s heart quaked, but he was glad that the moment had come. He had waited for this, and now he took courage.

“I mean, my General, that we have first to ascertain if the plan of Battery 3, which the English Government is said to possess, is the correct plan or no. These English would give much for the secret of Kronstadt. Is it not possible that a part of the ten thousand pounds they offer to him who shall help them has gone into the pocket of an impostor? I say that it is possible. I say that it is the only explication. The Prince is deceived; the plan is a forgery. We shall laugh in our sleeves by-and-bye, and sell the people in London more secrets. It will keep their tongues still and help us to hang the spies. Oh! be assured, my General, if there is any man in the city who has betrayed us, many hours shall not pass before we lay our hands upon him.”

The Colonel spoke with great earnestness; there was a light of anger and of determination in his eyes; his great hands trembled with his desire to be acting. Like his master, the island fortress was to him a sacred citadel; his life, his work lay there; his honour was offered upon that altar of granite and of steel. The two men had laboured side by side for twenty years; they were more than friends, they were brothers in a great and insurpassable trust. And now a common peril was before them both. They could not wholly realise it; they dare not tell themselves that a spy was within the gate; they were ready to be deceived if it were only for a day.

“I was a fool not to think of it at the first,” said Stefanovitch, taking heart as the other spoke. “If they have a plan of Battery 3 in London, it is not our plan. I will tell the Prince so to-day. He should not have been deceived like that. He should not charge the fidelity of those who have grown old in this service. We will see to it that he is answered, Bonzo. You shall make it your business to draw up our case, if that be necessary. Why does he not suggest at the same time that these English have a plan of my house----”

“Or of heaven?” said the Colonel bluntly. “They are as likely to get it as the drawings of Battery 3. And why of Battery 3, my General? Why not of Fort Peter, of Alexander, of Menzikoff? They have sought these things long enough. Why should one be taken and the other left? Are they children at Petersburg that they believe any tale which is told them in London? Do they think that we sleep while spies are busy on our ramparts? Oh, it is a jest, Nikolai, a jest, and we should be the first to laugh at it.”

Colonel Bonzo’s laugh had grown rusted from long disuse, so that when he asked help of it the answer was loud and grating like the bark of a dog. His earnestness had led him to address Stefanovitch in the familiar style which the men assumed when no janissaries of office overheard them, and this familiarity was not resented.

“You say well,” replied the General, fixing his glass for the first time since he had heard the tidings; “the Prince jests with us and we shall answer him with another jest; it will be a list of all the people who have entered Battery 3 since it was built. He shall then tell us who is the spy, and we shall know what to do. Eh, Colonel, we shall know what to do? Then let Captain Paul come to me.”

Paul Zassulic had gone to bed at four o’clock in the morning. During two short hours he had dreamed of Marian Best--of a garden of eternal summer of which she was mistress. But when six o’clock struck and twenty trumpets sounded the reveille from the ramparts, he had dragged himself wearily from his couch and turned gloomily to his monotonous work in the fortress. A roseate flush of the lagging sun which fell upon the field of the ice as a die of crimson and of gold, awakened him at last from his depression. A crisp wind of morning gave colour to his face; the keen air was as a tonic to his veins. When he stood up to salute his chief there was the seal of health upon his cheeks, the light of untroubled youth in his eyes.

“You sent for me, my General?”

Stefanovitch, who loved Paul as a son, surveyed him critically through the searching eyeglass before he answered.

“Certainly, Captain, I sent for you. You have heard the news?”

“The news, General?”

“As I say, the news--that they have the plan of Battery 3 in London, sold to them by someone who knows it as you know it or as I know it.”

Stefanovitch spoke with assumed unconcern, as though the matter were the most trifling he could mention. It was his habit to avoid any outward display of anger; his glance was ever more feared than his word. Paul knew this habit well; he dreaded it as a criminal may dread the jests of his judge.

“They have the plan of Battery 3 in London, General! Oh, but that is a lie!” he cried, looking from one to the other with dazed eyes and questioning glance; “it is a lie, I say, and I will tell them so! They cannot have the plan; it is impossible. Who should have given it to them? Who is there in Kronstadt who would sell his country’s secrets? Who is there that could sell them? You know that it is not true, my General. Lord God! that they should bring such a charge against me!”

Moment by moment he began to realise the gravity of the unspoken accusation. Sweat stood upon his forehead, tears welled up in his eyes. He had worked so unselfishly to make himself a good servant of Kronstadt that this overwhelming blow seemed to strike at the heart of his honour and his life. They had implied that he was unworthy of the trust--he, Paul Zassulic, who would have died willingly if the citadel had asked his life of him. They could put no greater affront upon him.

“It is a lie!” he continued to repeat, while Nikolai Stefanovitch watched him approvingly, and old Bonzo’s grey eyes twinkled cunningly; “it is a monstrous lie, General! No one has entered the fort but those who have work there; I will swear to it upon the Holy Gospel. If you doubt me, send for Seroff Ossinksy--he can tell you; he will laugh at the story as I would laugh at it were my honour not at stake. Oh, they cannot have the plan in London--you know that they cannot.”

He appealed to them pitifully, looking from one to the other questioningly, but he read nothing in their faces, neither of sympathy nor of reassurance. Bonzo wore, as ever, the changeless mask of iron severity; Stefanovitch lolled back in his chair and stared at the speaker as he would have stared at some defaulter hurried to the judgment.

“I know nothing,” he said in answer to the earnest protestations, “nothing at all beyond that which I am told by those in Petersburg. They say that the plan of the fort has been sold to the English; you, who were in command of the battery until a month ago, answer that it is impossible, because no stranger has ever been permitted within the enceinte. Is that so, Captain?”

“I will swear it, General, and my successor will swear it too.”

“You shall both swear it before the court which will investigate this report. If your word be accepted, there is an end of the matter. For my part I will tell you that I regard the story as ridiculous. The plan which the English have bought is a forgery; there can be no doubt of it. It rests upon us to convince the Prince of that, and to be unresting in our vigilance. I need say no more, Captain; I am not here to teach you your duty; the city is well served when she has servants like Paul Zassulic.”

Captain Paul opened his eyes. He had believed that they brought a charge against him; he knew now that they did not. The burden of suspicion was more than he could bear, and when it fell from his shoulders, an impulse of gratitude and devotion came upon him.

“Thank you, General,” he said simply. “I could ask nothing more than your approval.”

Stefanovitch dismissed him with a wave of the hand. He went from the room gladly, and with the purpose to seek out his sergeant at once and to question him. But before he had crossed the great courtyard of the house, someone touched him upon the shoulder; and when he turned about quickly he found that Bonzo had followed him from the room.

“Ha! Colonel, you are going my way,” he cried.

“I am going to the prison,” said the old soldier grimly. “It will be full enough by-and-bye if there is anything in this news.”

“But there cannot be anything, Colonel--I am ready to swear it upon the Gospels. No one has entered the fort----”

Bonzo shrugged his shoulders, his little eyes were screwed up until they shone like the eyes of a ferret.

“You say no one?” he asked.

“Certainly. I would swear it to the Emperor.”

“Do you forget that you had a visitor at the fort yesterday?”

“Yesterday?”

“I say so--the little Englishwoman, La Petite. What of her?”

Captain Paul could not have stopped in his walk more abruptly if a chasm had opened at his feet.

“You mean Mademoiselle Marian, my Colonel?”

“Certainly. Is she no one? Did you think so last night when you danced with her for two hours, eh, my friend? Shall I tell her how soon you forget the little lessons in gunnery? Shall I say that you are prepared to swear to the Emperor that she is nobody, hein?”

Captain Paul roared with laughter.

“Sapristi!” he cried, “that I should forget Mademoiselle Marian, and that you should remind me of her! Of course there is our spy. Why did I not think of it before? Oh, this will amuse the General when I tell him to-night. La Petite--who does not know which end you load a gun? She has made the plans, there cannot be a doubt of it. We will tell the people of Petersburg so. Jest for jest, n’est-ce pas, mon Colonel, and ours a little more foolish than theirs. _La belle Anglaise_--that I should forget her. Oh, quelle bêtise!”

The humour of the idea seized upon him uncontrollably, and upon the old soldier, so that they went down to their work laughing as lads at play. When they separated at last before the doors of the church of St. Vladimir, Captain Paul stood a moment to watch the other walking toward the prison. Then, being quite alone, his face paled suddenly, and he seemed about to reel against one of the pillars of the cathedral.

“My God!” he thought, “if the jest should be no jest!”

* * * * *

Old Bonzo, lumbering along the narrow streets of Kronstadt, was saying to himself, “She is too innocent; she shall be watched--night and day--the little Englishwoman.”