Rescuing the Czar | Page 5

walked slowly toward the gate. Finally, when they were about ten feet from where I stood concealed behind one of the massive palms, the man raised his head from the page and, looking earnestly into the woman's eyes, exclaimed in a skeptical tone: '_Il n'aurait jamais cru le fait si ces messieurs n'avaient pu lui jurer L'avoir vu!... Tout ce que j'ai prédit!... Les faux nobles,--les plagiaires_!' which means in English, "He couldn't have believed the thing unless these gentlemen had sworn they witnessed it!... All that I predicted!... The sham nobles!... the stealing authors!" The comment set me thinking.
"Who is he? I asked myself. Inside of five minutes I had heard him speak in English, in Russian and in French! I am certain that he is not a Frenchman,--although his accent would have proclaimed him a native of the Avenue des Champs Elysées. He had a Danish countenance, the eyes of English Royalty and the forehead of an early Christian martyr.
"No one I have talked to on the island seems certain of his identity. Some take the view that he is a retired millionaire, judging from the refined simplicity of his family and the strict guard the Government has furnished to protect his undisturbed retirement. Others hint that he may be, possibly, some very high dignitary, judging from the almost Royal homage that some people in the city pay to his person and family.
"The only reliable information I got about him was that he arrived upon the island aboard a man-o'-war accompanied by one of the richest tea merchants in the Empire. He declines all membership in any of the clubs, apparently satisfied to spend the time among his orchids and the lovely white-robed debutantes I saw blooming in that fascinating garden.
"Naturally I was very curious about the identity of this secluded family. But the only information given out about them by the chivalrous tea merchant or the Government officials is simply, 'Oh, the family have friends in India and are living in retirement.'"
One would be very bold to say, after reading the foregoing, that the personages described were the same people who had been driven out of the Winter Palace upon the ebb-tide of their Imperial splendor a few months before. Yet a long and somewhat intimate interest in the underground diplomacy of the world will lead one thus engaged to piece together stray bits of gossip that come from different sources to check up the information that some others may possess. In this way will the letter of an American who was held incommunicado at Geneva by the Swiss Government in the latter part of 1919, be found exceedingly persuasive in the process of reconstructing the tragic comedy which struts around the vacant Russian throne. The American was en route to Turkestan under proper credentials from the United States; yet there were certain powerful combinations sufficiently interested in his mission to cause his imprisonment for a time sufficiently lengthy to enable their emissaries to precede him beyond the Caspian, where other secret combinations were incubating that American foreign traders would have given much to understand.
It was during this period of restraint that the American, whose name we will call Fox, wrote to a friend in the United States: "You have often heard me speak of my brother who was in Turkestan when the Russian Revolution burst upon the world. He is now resting in Tasmania after going through one of the most remarkable experiences ever given to an ordinary tea merchant intrusted with some secrets of the greatest land monopoly in the world. You may call it a fairy tale; and if you did not know me as a business man of ordinary sense, I should hesitate to intimate that Nicholas R---- and all the family are quite well, I thank you, not a million miles distant from my brother."
Fox had learned from his experience at Geneva that governments are sometimes cajoled by diplomatic pressure to do undreamed-of things. The dispatch of an expeditionary force to Siberia by the United States without a declaration of war against the Revolutionists struck him as an instance of this kind, and he knew his correspondent to be sufficiently versed in the underground politics of Europe to look for a connection between some member of that expedition and the subject mentioned in the two foregoing letters. This connection was innocently revealed by a newspaper report from a Western city concerning a wounded soldier who had recently returned to an American Army hospital. The particular name being given, it was easy enough for Fox's correspondent to meet the soldier on some errand of mercy and to obtain the revelations that are hereinafter made.
The soldier was a young commissioned officer who was having an artificial jaw supplied to replace the one shot off