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The son of Madame would be loved forever, for her sake, so the Excellency need not fear for that, and Madame's brother was there, and would see all was well. Then Paul asked Dmitry if his lady had been aware that he had been ill in Venice.
Dmitry and two Italian footmen waited, and everything was done with the greatest state. A regal magnificence was in the lady's air and mien. She spoke of the splendours of Venice's past, and let Paul feel the atmosphere of that subtle time of passion and life. Of here a love-scene, and there a murder.
But fortune favoured him they did not know. No excitement of the wildest day's hunting had ever made his pulses bound like this! Dmitry had arranged everything. Paul was a young English secretary to Madame, who had much writing to do. And in any case it is not the affair of respectable foreign hotels to pry into their clients' relationship when a large suite has been engaged.
But at last, when she saw that Paul indeed slept deeply, she rose stealthily and crept from the place back to the room, the gloomy vast room within, where she summoned Dmitry, and ordered the man she had called Vasili the night before into her presence.
He made several more injections of the same colourless liquid. The night passed slowly. Trirodov lay on the sofa without taking his clothes off. He slept badly, tormented by oppressive dreams. He awoke several times. Dmitry Matov lay in the next room on the floor. The liquid, injected into his blood, acted strangely. The body contracted in proper proportion, and wasted very quickly.
Every year since he was a little fellow six years old he had come to Verdayne Place for the summer; at first, accompanied by his nurse, Anna, and a silver-haired servant, curiously named Dmitry. Later the nurse had ceased to be a necessity, and the old servant had been replaced by Vasili, a younger, but no less devoted attendant.
This search in Dmitry Leonoff's house was also a misunderstanding, and in the dominions of the Czar misunderstandings are of frequent occurrence.
But the whole thing seemed so absurd, he did not think it of much consequence. "Of course I'll take it to please you, Dmitry," he said, "though I wish you would tell me why." However, Dmitry escaped from the room without further words, his finger upon his lips. The lady was looking more exquisitely white than usual; she wore soft pale mauve, and appeared in Paul's eyes a thing of joy.
"Don't fire! Don't shoot!" cried a voice we knew well, the voice of Dmitry Nolenki, chief of the secret police. "One of them is Verbitzsky!" he cried to his men. "The conspirator I've been after for four months. A hundred roubles for him who first seizes him! He must be taken alive!" That offer, I suppose, was what pushed them to such eagerness that they all soon felt themselves at our mercy.
Dmitry advanced, and now Paul saw that he carried something in his hand. He bowed low with his usual courtly respect. Then he stammered a little as he began to speak. The substance of his sentence, Paul gathered, was that the Excellency would not be inconveniencing himself too much, he hoped, if he would consent to carry this pistol.
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