There was no light or heat and the place smelt dank and foul. His heart sinking to his boots Roger stood still for a moment, listening to the eerie echo of the warders' retreating footsteps. Then there fell complete and utter silence.
Nerving himself against the unexpected, he shuffled forward a few paces, his hands outstretched before him. His feet made a softly-padding sound, so he judged the floor to be covered with a layer of sodden straw. At about twelve paces from the door his fingers suddenly came in contact with damp, rough-hewn stone. Feeling about with his hands, in places he touched slime, and as he continued his investigation, he discovered that he was in an underground cell which measured about four paces by three, and had at one side of it a solid stone slab raised some eighteen inches from the floor which could be used as a seat or for lying down.
Seating himself upon it he cupped his chin in his hands and began afresh to contemplate his hopeless situation. After a few moments a faint sound from the far corner of the cell caught his attention. A second later he jumped to his feet and cowered back against the wall. He could not see them but he knew that there were rats there, perhaps swarms of them; and he had heard stories of the feet of living prisoners, in just such circumstances as he now found himself, being gnawed away by packs of rodents made desperate by hunger.
Roger was no coward. Before he reached the age of twenty he had challenged, fought and killed one of the finest swordsmen in all France; with a weapon in his hands he was prepared, if need be, to prove his metal against heavy odds; but the thought of his clothes and flesh being torn from him in small pieces by scores of sharp little teeth utterly unnerved him. The sweat of terror broke out upon his face and he began to shout for help with all the power of his lungs.
No answer came to his frantic cries, and after a while, he fell silent. The sounds from the corner of the cell told him that there was a number of rats there, but they came no nearer. Gradually calmness returned to him, and with the perspiration now cold upon his forehead, he sat down again.
For some time his mind was too numb with misery for him to think coherently; then he remembered that in one thing at least he had been granted a reprieve; he had not so far been searched.
Taking the papers from his inner pocket he fumbled among them in the darkness, until, by his sense of touch he had decided which of them must be the laisser-passer. He then got out his tinder-box, and with some difficulty succeeded in igniting it. When at last the paper burst into a flame, he heaved a sigh of relief. At least he had succeeded in destroying one damning piece of evidence against him.
Yet, as he looked up he cowered back again. The flame was reflected in the corner of the cell by a galaxy of little starlike lights, the eyes of the rats who were watching him, and there could not be less than a score of them.
When he had recovered from that unnerving turn he took from his pocket the Swedish Order. Since it was his first decoration, and a great honour for so young a man, he was most loath to part with it, but he knew that it would cost him his life if it was found upon him. The sodden straw was a good six inches deep, since one layer had been thrown down upon another and it seemed improbable that the cell had been cleaned out for years. Digging the toe of his boot into the" soggy mess, he scooped a hole until he reached the floor, laid the much prized jewel and ribbon on the exposed stone, and trampled the decaying straw well down over it.
He heaved another sigh; partly of regret but partly also of relief. He had enjoyed the possession of it for barely forty-eight hours, but it could not now convict him of being in league with Russia's enemies; since it was most unlikely that it would be found for months to come, and, even if it were, no proof could be brought that it was he who had hidden it there.
With a little gleam of humour it occurred to him how admirable it would be if only he could lay Count Yagerhorn's ghost as easily as he had disposed of the other two more material objects which had threatened to bring him to an untimely grave.
There remained, too, Orlof's letter; but, lacking a knife or scissors, he knew that it would be extremely difficult to get it from its hiding-place, and influenced partly by the unlikelihood of its being discovered there and partly by his belief in its immense potential value, he decided not to attempt its destruction.
Puzzle his wits as he would he could not even hazard a theory as to how the Count had met his death. It could not possibly have been a heart-attack, as had he been liable to such a seizure it would have taken him while he was being flogged into insensibility. It could not have been suffocation either, since he distinctly recalled giving Zaria implicit instructions to ease the Count's gag if that became necessary; and he did not believe for an instant that Zaria would have failed to carry out his orders. The flogging with a riding switch across the head and shoulders could not possibly have been the cause of his death, seeing that he had survived for the best part of three hours afterwards.
At length Roger gave up the riddle and his thoughts drifted to the strange fate which had carried him so far from home. He thought of his dear, wicked Georgina, and wondered if she had returned yet to her beloved Stillwaters or was somewhere in the distant Mediterranean, travelling with her father. He thought, too, of his sweet-faced mother with her circumscribed yet active existence, bounded by her charities and her Hampshire garden; and of his father, that rampaging, forthright, jolly sea-dog of an Admiral. His small but stately home in Lymington was in fact several thousand miles away, but in mental distance it seemed a million.
Roger began to feel very tired, but he knew that he dared not sleep. As long as he kept awake the rats would keep their distance, but if he once allowed himself to drop off, the foul creatures would sneak up and begin to nibble at his extremities. .
Now and again he stood up and, for a little, paced the narrow cell to keep himself awake and warm; yet, despite these periods of exercise, towards morning the deathly chill of the place began to make him shiver.
Time stood still. It was a place of eternal night where months might pass without its occupant ever being aware that the sun he once had known had passed across the sky. The stomach of the prisoner was his only clock, and but for the lack of craving in his, Roger would have thought that several days had passed, before at last, he caught faint footfalls coming down the corridor.
The footfalls grew louder; they halted, and the heavy door grated open. By the dim light of a lantern Roger saw the head-gaoler and another. The senior called to him and he stumbled from his cell. They took him through endless vaulted corridors again, up several flights of stone steps to the blessed daylight once more, and showed him into a room where an oldish man, dressed in a handsome uniform, was seated behind a desk.
To Roger's amazement this obviously important person not only offered him a chair, but proceeded to apologise to him for the unpleasant hours that he had passed since his arrival. Apparently, unless special instructions were received to the contrary, all new prisoners were put in one of the lower dungeons for their first night, in order that they might form some impression of what a month of such confinement would be like; and thus be persuaded of the folly of bringing such a penalty upon themselves by attempting to escape.
The elderly officer introduced himself as Colonel Tschevaridef; then told Roger with bluff heartiness that he was very pleased to see him, would endeavour to make him as comfortable as possible, and hoped that his stay in the fortress would be a long one. So did Roger, providing it was not in the dungeon—as even a lengthy imprisonment seemed better than the short shrift he had been envisaging for himself since four o'clock the previous afternoon—but all the same he thought the greeting a little queer.
However, it soon emerged that the old soldier was the Governor of the fortress, and he admitted quite frankly that the amount of his income depended on the number and quality of the prisoners in his keeping. He received so much a day for each and the higher their rank the higher the rate he was paid. He was responsible for feeding them out of the money, and the more he got for them
the better they fared. Roger, ranking as a Major-General, would be classed as of the second grade, at two roubles a day, 'and feed almost as well as if he were eating at the Governor's table. The Colonel concluded this reference to his organisation by remarking that he prided himself on giving all grades of his prisoners better fare than was the case in other fortresses, and that when Roger was released he would be doing both him and any friend of his who might be a prisoner elsewhere a good service by urging them to use such influence as they might have to get themselves transferred to Schlusselburg.
The idea of a prison-governor canvassing for captives made Roger smile for the first time in seventeen hours, and he said quickly: "I only pray that I may have the opportunity to do so, Sir; but I may be hard put to it to escape being executed on this charge of murder."
"So you are charged with killing someone, eh?" the Governor raised a white eyebrow. "That is a pity, since it may be the cause of my losing you in a day or two; but otherwise it is no affair of mine. A magistrate will visit your cell to question you on that. In the meantime your treatment will be no different to that of other prisoners of your grade, and I have received no order that you are not to be allowed visitors." With a grin which showed several decayed teeth he added: "A young man of such handsome parts, as yourself, General, will no doubt know a number of pretty women who will be delighted to solace you during your captivity."
Roger grinned amiably back at the old rascal and said: "At the moment, Sir, I am more concerned with the question of my defence;
and I should be deeply grateful if you would send a message to the French Ambassador, asking him to come and see me."
The Governor promised to do so, then summoned the warders and told them to take Roger to cell twenty-four. When he reached it he found it to be a spacious room with a heavily-barred window giving a view of the lake. It was furnished with an old, but fairly comfortable-looking bed, an oak chest, a wash-basin and commode, an elbow-chair and two others, and a stout table on which there were pens, sand and an inkhorn. The head-warder told him that on payment he could have extra wine, brandy, paper, books and other small luxuries brought in; then he was left to his still far from sanguine reflections.
But not for long. Five minutes later one of the warders returned to show in a dark hatchet-faced little man in a wig much too big for him, and a lanky fellow carrying a portfolio. They proved to be the magistrate and his clerk; but, when Roger said that he was not prepared to answer any questions until he had seen his Ambassador, they withdrew.
It now occurred to him that it was many hours since he had eaten, and that he was very hungry; but evidently his gaolers had not been unmindful of the fact that he had not had any breakfast, for soon after the Magistrate's departure, one of them brought him some cold meat, an apple-turnover and a jug of beer.
He was still eating when the door opened again, and, to his surprise and delight Dr. Drenke was shown in. After his first day or two in St. Petersburg Roger had not seen very much of the middle-aged German diplomat, but they sometimes passed one another on the stairs and had remained on a friendly footing. In his misery of the previous night he had not once thought of the Doctor, but now he welcomed him with open arms, as he was the one person to whom he could talk with complete frankness about the Yagerhorn affair, as it was unnecessary to conceal from him the part that Natalia Andreovna had played in it.
"Well, my poor Chevalier," said the Doctor, when he was seated. "I am much relieved to see that you appear to be in your right mind, for I doubted finding you so. What in the world possessed you to murder Count Yagerhorn in so barbarous a manner, and then throw the unfortunate little Zaria downstairs?"
Roger gaped at him, then exclaimed: " 'Tis the first I have heard of Zaria's mishap! As for the other matter I know nothing of what occurred after I left the house at ten o'clock on Tuesday night. I beg you to enlighten me."
" 'Tis soon told," the Doctor replied gravely. "At about half-past ten Ostermann came up from his basement to lock the street-door. At the bottom of the stairs he found Zaria lying in a crumpled heap, unconscious. Later, when she was taken to the hospital it was found that she had broken a leg and that her skull was fractured. Ostermann had seen you off on your fishing-expedition at ten o'clock, so he thought at first that a thief must have stolen into the house, and that Zaria had surprised him. He ran up to your sitting-room, and on seeing that nothing had been taken, hurried up to mine. I was there reading, and some twenty minutes before I had heard the sounds of a quarrel below me in your room; so we assumed that, having forgotten something you had returned for it, and catching Zaria in the act of making free with your property you had exercised your right to knock her senseless. We gave you the credit for not realising how seriously you had injured the poor girl, in fact that you thought she had only fainted; and supposed that being already late in your setting out you had jumped on your horse again and ridden away, believing that the sturdy little peasant would be fully recovered from her lesson by morning."
The Doctor paused a moment, then went on: "When Ostermann visited your apartment he took only a hurried look round and did not enter the bedroom. The following day he gave the usual notice to the police that you were absent, but they were quite satisfied by his explanation that you had gone fishing on Lake Ladoga, and would be back on Friday. When Friday morning came, since Zaria was in hospital with a broken leg and severe concussion, Ostermann felt that it was for him to tidy up your apartment against your return. On entering your bedroom he found Count Yagerhorn lying gagged and bound upon the bed. When he fetched the police, they said that the Count had died of suffocation."
"So that was the way of it," nodded Roger. Everything was plain to him now except the attack on Zaria; but, perhaps after all, Ostermann's first theory had been right, and she had been the victim of a thief. She should have been in the bedroom watching Yagerhorn, but if she had heard a noise in the sitting-room she would have come out to see who was there. She might have come upon the thief before he had had time to take anything, and the cries that the Doctor had heard were her efforts to rouse the house; but the thief had overcome her, thrown her down the stairs, and fearing that someone else might come on the scene, hurriedly made his escape. With Zaria suffering from concussion the wretched Count had been left to his fate, and died horribly in consequence.
"I should like to tell you the truth of the matter," Roger said, after a moment. "But only if I may rely on you regarding what I say as in the strictest confidence; for another person is involved in this."
"You may rely on my discretion, Chevalier," the Doctor bowed. "And you refer, I take it, to the Baroness Stroganof?"
Roger gave him a swift glance. "Is it generally known that 'twas she who preceded Yagerhorn to my apartment?"
The Doctor shook his head. "Nay, only that a woman of quality who often came to visit you, dined with you there before the Count's arrival. I guessed that it must be she from knowing of your association with her in the ship that brought us from Sweden, and from having more recently met her once or twice on the stairs."
"That relieves me mightily. For the sake of her reputation I have been at some pains to conceal her identity; so although Ostermann knows her well by sight I doubt if he knows her name. Her only part in this was giving the Count a rendezvous in my apartment; and that she did at my most earnest solicitation and without previous knowledge of what I meant to do to him. She left before myself and can have had no more idea than I of what befell him later. So you see what a terrible thing it would be if she were charged with me in having assisted at his murder?"
"I do not think there is any great fear of that, Chevalier, unless you deny that it was you who lolled him. The police of Petersburg are argus-eyed but very discreet. The odds are that they have known for a long time past about the Baroness's visits to you; but they will not drag her into this unless compelled to it. She has many powerful relatives, and moreover, the Empress does not like scandals in connection with her ladies, so they wil
l not stir up trouble for themselves unless it proves unavoidable."
"You mean that if I take full responsibility they will be satisfied with that; but should I protest my innocence they will then be forced to turn their attention to the Baroness in the hope of getting a statement from her that will convict me?"
"Exactly. The present assumption is that the lady who dined with you was an innocent party to the affair. 'Tis thought that the Count was also in love with her and having traced her to your rooms surprised you together. What followed is, therefore, put to your account. But why, in the name of reason, did you choose so barbarous a method of killing the wretched man?"
"I did not," Roger assured the Doctor, earnestly. Then he told him the whole story as he knew it.
When he had done the Doctor shook his head. "I willingly accept your word for it, Chevalier, that you had no intention of killing the Count; but that does not affect the fact that you are responsible for his death and will be held to account for it. And even if the Baroness came forward I do not see how anything that she could say would lessen your responsibility."
"I know it," agreed Roger. "So I am all the more anxious that her part in the matter should not become public. Would you be good enough to see her for me, and assure her that should she become involved it will be through no word of mine?"
The Doctor agreed to do so; and to Roger's further request, that little Zaria should be allowed to lack for nothing; then, with renewed expressions of friendship, he took his departure.
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