"Here is the datcha, anyway. In the name of heaven, tell your driver to stop the horses here. If the "doctors" are already there it is we who shall have killed the general."
"You are right."
Koupriane moderated his excitement and that of his driver and horses, and the carriage stopped noiselessly, not far from the datcha. Ermolai came toward them.
"Priemkof?" faltered Koupriane.
"He has gone again, Excellency."
"How-gone again?"
"Yes, but he has brought the doctors."
Koupriane crushed Rouletabille"s wrist. The doctors were there!
"Madame Treba.s.sof is better," continued Ermolai, who understood nothing of their emotion. "The general is going to meet them and take them to his wife himself."
"Where are they?"
"They are waiting in the drawing-room."
"Oh, Excellency, keep cool, keep cool, and all is not lost," implored the reporter.
Rouletabille and Koupriane slipped carefully into the garden. Ermolai followed them.
"There?" inquired Koupriane.
"There," Ermolai replied.
From the corner where they were, and looking through the veranda, they could see the "doctors" as they waited.
They were seated in chairs side by side, in a corner of the drawing-room from where they could see every-thing in the room and a part of the garden, which they faced, and could hear everything. A window of the first-floor was open above their heads, so that they could hear any noise from there. They could not be surprised from any side, and they held every door in view. They were talking softly and tranquilly, looking straight before them. They appeared young. One had a pleasant face, pale but smiling, with rather long, curly hair; the other was more angular, with haughty bearing and grave face, an eagle nose and gla.s.ses. Both wore long black coats b.u.t.toned over their calm chests.
Koupriane and the reporter, followed by Ermolai, advanced with the greatest precaution across the lawn. Screened by the wooden steps leading to the veranda and by the vine-clad bal.u.s.trade, they got near enough to hear them. Koupriane gave eager ear to the words of these two young men, who might have been so rich in the many years of life that naturally belonged to them, and who were about to die so horrible a death in destroying all about them. They spoke of what time it was, of the softness of the night and the beauty of the sky; they spoke of the shadows under the birch-trees, of the gulf shining in the late evening"s fading golden light, of the river"s freshness and the sweetness of springtime in the North. That is what they talked about. Koupriane murmured, "The a.s.sa.s.sins!"
Now it was necessary to decide on action, and that necessity was horrible. A false movement, an awkwardness, and the "doctors" would be warned, and everything lost. They must have the bombs under their coats; there were certainly at least two "living bombs." Their chests, as they breathed, must heave to and fro and their hearts beat against an impending explosion.
Above on the bedroom floor, they heard the rapid arranging of the room, steps on the floor and a confusion of voices; shadows pa.s.sed across the window-s.p.a.ce. Koupriane rapidly interrogated Ermolai and learned that all the general"s friends were there. The two doctors had arrived only a couple of minutes before the Prefect of Police and the reporter. The little doctor of Va.s.sili-Ostrow had already gone, saying there was nothing more for him to do when two such celebrated specialists had arrived. However, in spite of their celebrity, no one had ever heard the names they gave. Koupriane believed the little doctor was an accomplice. The most necessary thing was to warn those in the room above. There was immediate danger that someone would come downstairs to find the doctors and take them to the general, or that the general would come down himself to meet them. Evidently that was what they were waiting for. They wished to die in his arms, to make sure that this time he did not escape them! Koupriane directed Ermolai to go into the veranda and speak in a commonplace way to them at the threshold of the drawing-room door, saying that he would go upstairs and see if he might now escort them to Madame Treba.s.sof"s room. Once in the room above, he could warn the others not to do anything but wait for Koupriane; then Ermolai was to come down and say to the men, "In just a moment, if you please."
Ermolai crept back as far as the lodge, and then came quite normally up the path, letting the gravel crunch under his countrified footsteps. He was an intelligent man, and grasped with extraordinary coolness the importance of the plan of campaign. Easily and naturally he mounted the veranda steps, paused at the threshold of the drawing-room, made the remark he had been told to make, and went upstairs. Koupriane and Rouletabille now watched the bedroom windows. The flitting shadows there suddenly became motionless. All moving about ceased; no more steps were heard, nothing. And that sudden silence made the two "doctors" raise their faces toward the ceiling. Then they exchanged an aroused glance. This change in the manner of things above was dangerous. Koupriane muttered, "The idiots!" It was such a blow for those upstairs to learn they walked over a mine ready to explode that it evidently had paralyzed their limbs. Happily Ermolai came down almost immediately and said to the "doctors" in his very best domestic manner:
"Just a second, messieurs, if you please."
He did it still with utter naturalness. And he returned to the ledge before he rejoined Koupriane and Rouletabille by way of the lawn. Rouletabille, entirely cool, quite master of himself, as calm now as Koupriane was nervous, said to the Prefect of Police:
"We must act now, and quickly. They are commencing to be suspicious. Have you a plan?"
"Here is all I can see," said Koupriane. "Have the general come down by the narrow servants" stairway, and slip out of the house from the window of Natacha"s sitting-room, with the aid of a twisted sheet. Matrena Petrovna will come to speak to them during this time; that will keep them patient until the general is out of danger. As soon as Matrena has withdrawn into the garden, I will call my men, who will shoot them from a distance."
"And the house itself? And the general"s friends?"
"Let them try to get away, too, by the servants" stairway and jump from the window after the general. We must try something. Say that I have them at the muzzle of my revolver."
"Your plan won"t work," said Rouletabille, "unless the door of Natacha"s sitting-room that opens on the drawing-room is closed."
"It is. I can see from here."
"And unless the door of the little pa.s.sage-way before that staircase that opens into the drawing-room is closed also, and you cannot see it from here."
"That door is open," said Ermolai.
Koupriane swore. But he recovered himself promptly.
"Madame Treba.s.sof will close the door when she speaks to them."
"It"s impracticable," said the reporter. "That will arouse their suspicions more than ever. Leave it to me; I have a plan."
"What?"
"I have time to execute it, but not to tell you about it. They have already waited too long. I shall have to go upstairs, though. Ermolai will need to go with me, as with a friend of the family."
"I"ll go too."
"That would give the whole show away, if they saw you, the Prefect of Police."
"Why, no. If they see me-and they know I ought to be there-as soon as I show myself to them they will conclude I don"t know anything about it."
"You are wrong."
"It is my duty. I should be near the general to defend him until the last."
Rouletabille shrugged his shoulders before this dangerous heroism, but he did not stop to argue. He knew that his plan must succeed at once, or in five minutes at the latest there would be only ruins, the dead and the dying in the datcha des Iles.
Still he remained astonishingly calm. In principle he had admitted that he was going to die. The only hope of being saved which remained to them rested entirely upon their keeping perfectly cool and upon the patience of the living bombs. Would they still have three minutes" patience?
Ermolai went ahead of Koupriane and Rouletabille. At the moment they reached the foot of the veranda steps the servant said loudly, repeating his lesson:
"Oh, the general is waiting for you, Excellency. He told me to have you come to him at once. He is entirely well and Madame Treba.s.sof also."
When they were in the veranda, he added:
"She is to see also, at once, these gentlemen, who will be able to tell her there is no more danger."
And all three pa.s.sed while Koupriane and Rodetabille vaguely saluted the two conspirators in the drawing-room. It was a decisive moment. Recognizing Koupriane, the two Nihilists might well believe themselves discovered, as the reporter had said, and precipitate the catastrophe. However, Ermolai, Koupriane and Rouletabille climbed the stairs to the bedroom like automatons, not daring to look behind them, and expecting the end each instant. But neither stirred. Ermolai went down again, by Rouletabille"s order, normally, naturally, tranquilly. They went into Matrena Petrovna"s chamber. Everybody was there. It was a gathering of ghosts.
Here was what had happened above. That the "doctors" still remained below, that they had not been received instantly, in brief, that the catastrophe had been delayed up to now was due to Matrena Petrovna, whose watchful love, like a watch-dog, was always ready to scent danger. These two "doctors" whose names she did not know, who arrived so late, and the precipitate departure of the little doctor of Va.s.sili-Ostrow aroused her watchfulness. Before allowing them to come upstairs to the general she resolved to have a look at them herself downstairs. She arose from her bed for that; and now her presentiment was justified. When she saw Ermolai, sober and mysterious, enter with Koupriane"s message, she knew instinctively, before he spoke, that there were bombs in the house. When Ermolai did speak it was a blow for everybody. At first she, Matrena Perovna, had been a frightened, foolish figure in the big flowered dressing-gown belonging to Feodor that she had wrapped about her in her haste. When Ermolai left, the general, who knew she only trembled for him, tried to rea.s.sure her, and, in the midst of the frightened silence of all of them, said a few words recalling the failure of all the previous attempts. But she shook her head and trembled, shaking with fear for him, in agony at the thought that she could do nothing there above those living bombs but wait for them to burst. As to the friends, already their limbs were ruined, absolutely ruined, in very truth. For a moment they were quite incapable of moving. The jolly Councilor of Empire, Ivan Petrovitch, had no longer a lively tale to tell, and the abominable prospect of "this horrible mix-up" right at hand rendered him much less gay than in his best hours at Cubat"s place. And poor Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff was whiter than the snow that covers old Lithuania"s fields when the winter"s chase is on. Athanase Georgevitch himself was not brilliant, and his sanguine face had quite changed, as though he had difficulty in digesting his last masterpiece with knife and fork. But, in justice to them, that was the first instantaneous effect. No one could learn like that, all of a sudden, that they were about to die in an indiscriminate slaughter without the heart being stopped for a little. Ermolai"s words had turned these amiable loafers into waxen statues, but, little by little, their hearts commenced to beat again and each suggested some way of preventing the disaster-all of them sufficiently incoherent-while Matrena Petrovna invoked the Virgin and at the same time helped Feodor Feodorovitch adjust his sword and buckle his belt; for the general wished to die in uniform.
Athanase Georgevitch, his eyes sticking out of his head and his body bent as though he feared the Nihlists just below him might perceive his tall form-through the floor, no doubt-proposed that they should throw themselves out of the window, even at the cost of broken legs. The saddened Councilor of Empire declared that project simply idiotic, for as they fell they would be absolutely at the disposal of the Nihilists, who would be attracted by the noise and would make a handful of dust of them with a single gesture through the window. Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff, who couldn"t think of anything at all, blamed Koupriane and the rest of the police for not having devised something. Why hadn"t they already got rid of these Nihilists? After the frightened silence they had kept at first, now they all spoke at once, in low voices, hoa.r.s.e and rapid, with shortened breath, making wild movements of the arms and head, and walked here and there in the chamber quite without motive, but very softly on tiptoe, going to the windows, returning, listening at the doors, peering through the key-holes, exchanging absurd suggestions, full of the wildest imaginings. "If we should... if... if,"-everybody speaking and everybody making signs for the others to be quiet. "Lower! If they hear us, we are lost." And Koupriane, who did not come, and his police, who themselves had brought two a.s.sa.s.sins into the house, and were not able now to make them leave without having everybody jump! They were certainly lost. There was nothing left but to say their prayers. They turned to the general and Matrena Petrovna, who were wrapped in a close embrace. Feodor had taken the poor disheveled head of the good Matrena between his hands and pressed it upon his shoulders as he embraced her. He said, "Rest quietly against my heart, Matrena Petrovna. Nothing can happen to us except what G.o.d wills."