"Well," acknowledged the prince, "there might have been a man behind every one of the curtains and I would not have thought to suspect it. This service alone, Mr. Derrington, is worth all the pay you will draw from Russia."
"Yes," I replied, "for I believe that the spy will confess to me that he was sent there with orders to murder the czar."
"My God! And even now there may be others of the same sort in the palace."
"No; I hardly think that. The nihilists would not be likely to send more than one at a time on such a dangerous errand."
Morét confessed to me the following day, and I speedily was convinced that my suppositions concerning him were correct. He had not had the brutal courage to carry out his orders; and already he had received several warnings from his compatriots that if another week passed without his accomplishment of the design, his own life would pay the forfeit. He was in that room awaiting my arrival when he heard me approaching with the prince, and had concealed himself behind the curtain without any definite purpose other than to hear all that he could.
It is hardly necessary, and there is not space, for me to go into the details of my subsequent talks with Morét. Suffice it to say that the information I gleaned in that way, proved of inestimable value to my work. From it I learned the names of all the leading nihilists of St. Petersburg and Moscow, their meeting places, their passwords, and several of their ciphers. Concerning their plans for the future, beyond those in which he was personally engaged, Morét knew almost nothing; but he did put me in the way of finding out nearly all that I wished to know. Nor is it necessary that I should describe my subsequent interviews with the emperor. My plans were adopted almost without a correction--and most of those I suggested myself--so that by the time I had been an inmate of the palace for a week, the reorganization of the Fraternity of Silence was well under way, and ere a month had passed it was an established fact.
There was one point upon which Morét stubbornly refused to talk, and that was concerning the woman who had led him into the difficulty, and who, he confessed, was the brains and the real head of the society. I questioned him very closely and so decided in my own mind that she was prominent at the capital; but at the last he positively refused to answer any further questions concerning her, saying that he would rather go to Siberia and have done with it at once, than to betray her. I desisted, therefore, believing that ultimately he would denounce her to me without knowing that he had done so, and events proved that I was right although they also demonstrated that it would have been much better for all concerned had he trusted me implicitly in the beginning.