“What do you want?  You haven’t started for the Orel yet?”

“Monsieur, I am going, but I will be very grateful if you will take these things yourself to — to Natacha.”  He showed him, still with despairing mien, the two ikons from Mount Athos, and Rouletabille took them from him, thrust them in his pocket, and hurried on, crying, “I understand.”

Outside, Rouletabille tried to get hold of himself, to recover his coolness a little.  Was it possible that he had made a mortal error?  Alas, alas, how could he doubt it now!  The arsenate of soda continued.  He made, a superhuman effort to ward off the horror of that, even momentarily — the death of innocent Michael Nikolaievitch - and to think of nothing except the immediate consequences, which must be carefully considered if he wished to avoid some new catastrophe.  Ah, the assassin was not discouraged.  And that time, what a piece of work he had tried!  What a hecatomb if he had succeeded!  The general, Matrena Petrovna, Natacha and Rouletabille himself (who almost regretted, so far as he was concerned, that it had not succeeded) — and Koupriane!  Koupriane, who should have been there for luncheon.  What a bag for the Nihilists!  That was it, that was it.  Rouletabille understood now why they had not hesitated to poison everybody at once:  Koupriane was among them.

Michael Nikolaievitch would have been avenged!

The attempt had failed this time, but what might they not expect now!  From the moment he believed Michael Nikolaievitch no longer guilty, as he had imagined, Rouletabille fell into a bottomless abyss.

Where should he go?  After a few moments he made the circuit of the Rotunda, which serves as the market for this quarter and is the finest ornament of Aptiekarski-Pereoulok.  He made the circuit without knowing it, without stopping for anything, without seeing or understanding anything.  As a broken-winded horse makes its way in the treadmill, so he walked around with the thought that he also was lost in a treadmill that led him nowhere.  Rouletabille was no longer Rouletabille.

XIII

THE LIVING BOMBS

At random — because now he could only act at random — he returned to the datcha.  Great disorder reigned there.  The guard had been doubled.  The general’s friends, summoned by Trebassof, surrounded the two poisoned sufferers and filled the house with their bustling devotion and their protestations of affection.  However, an insignificant doctor from the common quarter of the Vasili-Ostrow, brought by the police, reassured everybody.  The police had not found the general’s household physician at home, but promised the immediate arrival of two specialists, whom they had found instead.  In the meantime they had picked up on the way this little doctor, who was gay and talkative as a magpie.  He had enough to do looking after Matrena Petrovna, who had been so sick that her husband, Feodor Feodorovitch, still trembled, “for the first time in his life,” as the excellent Ivan Petrovitch said.