Aladdin of London, or The Lodestar

The great gates of the prison yard rolled back to admit the carriage in which Alban had been driven from the hotel, and a cordon of straight-backed officials immediately surrounded it. Early as the hour was, the meanest servant whom Zaniloff commanded had work to do and well understood the urgency of his task. The night had been one long story of plot and counterplot; of Revolutionaries fleeing from street to street, Cossacks galloping upon their heels, houses awakened and doors beaten down, the screams and cries of women, the savage anger of men. And all this, not upon the famous avenues which knew little of the new émeute, but down in the narrow alleys of the old city where bulging gables hid the sight from a clear heaven of stars and the crazy eaves had husbanded the cries.

There had been a civil battle fought and many were the prisoners. Not a cell about that great yard but had not its batch of ragged, shivering wretches whose backs were still bloody, whose wounds were still unbound. The quadrangle itself served, as a Cossack jocularly remarked, for the overflow meeting. Here you might perceive many types of men-students, still defiant, sage lawyers given to the parley, ragged vermin of the slums gathering their rags close about their shoulders as though to protect them from the lash; timid apostles of the gospel of humanity cowering before human fiends--thus the yard and its environment. For Alban, however, the place might not have existed. His eyes knew nothing of this grim spectacle. He followed the Chief to the upper rooms, remembering only that Lois was here.

They passed down a gloomy corridor and entered a lofty room high up on the third floor of the station. Two spacious windows gave them a fine view of the yard below with all its gregarious misery. There was a table here covered by a green baize cloth, and an officer in uniform writing at it. He stood and saluted Zaniloff with a gravity fine to see. The Chief, in turn, nodded to him and drew a chair to the table. When he had found ink and paper he began the interrogation which should help his dossier.

"You are an Englishman and your age is"--he waited and turned to Alban.

"My age is just about twenty-one."

"You were born in England?"

"In London; I was born in London."

"And you now live?"

"With Mr. Richard Gessner at Hampstead."

So it went--interminable question and answer, of the most trivial kind. It seemed an age before they came to the vital issue.

"And what do you know of this crime which has been committed?"