Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/299

 CHAPTER XXVIII

THE NAME OF THE ENGLISHMAN

ENTIRELY and helplessly I had fallen into the hands of the tyrant of the Czar.

His own personal interest would be to consign me to a living tomb in that grim fortress of Kajana, the horrors of which were unspeakable. I had seen enough during my inspection of the Russian prisons as a journalist to know that there, in strangled Finland, I should not be treated with the same consideration or humanity as in Petersburg or Warsaw. The Governor-General consigned me to Kajana as a "political," which was synonymous with a sentence of death in those damp, dark oubliettes beneath the water-dungeons every whit as awful as those of the Paris Bastille.

We faced each other, and I looked straight into his grey bony face, and answered in a tone of defiance —

"You are Governor-General, it is true, but you will, I think, reflect before you consign me, an Englishman, to prison without trial. I know full well that the English are hated by Russia, yet I assure you that in London we entertain no love for your nation or its methods."