In a little house in Sofia lives the widow of Stambuloff, once the most brilliant and beautiful woman in Sofia, now a withered crone who continues to live on for a cherished purpose. Her most treasured possession is the withered hand of a dead man; the hand of Stambuloff, the Bismarck of the Balkans. The woman and the dead hand wait Christian burial until the day when vengeance shall have been exacted from his murderer, Ferdinand, Czar of Bulgaria.

The evidence that fixes the moral guilt for the murder upon Ferdinand is unassailable. It was not adduced after the crime, but months before it took place. In an interview published at the beginning of 1895, the victim told the Cologne Gazette from his own mouth the manner and the very place of his death. For months beforehand the Svoboda, the Sofiote organ of the Stambulovists, had warned the Government what would take place, and declared that when it happened the moral guilt would lie upon the Prince and his Ministers.

On the day after the murder, the paper accused the Prince of the moral guilt of the crime in unmistakable words that still ring through Europe when the death of Stambuloff is recalled.

“Who are the murderers of Stambuloff?” the Svoboda asked. “Who took the life of such a man as Bulgaria will never see again? Who lifted the yataghan against him?

“They are officially unknown, but all Bulgaria knows them. For the last seven months we have repeatedly and openly declared that the Government was keeping the assassins of Beltcheff and Vulkovitch to murder Stambuloff. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Natchevitch, has given some of these men posts under Government, and daily receives them in his house.

“Whoever struck the blow, the moral murderers are the Prince and his Government, who refused to allow Stambuloff to leave Sofia, and so gave an opportunity to their assassins.

“The blood of Bulgaria’s finest patriot cries aloud for vengeance. Two days ago the official journal, the Mir, called upon its friends to tear the flesh from the bones of M. Stambuloff. Its orders have been executed.”

Stambuloff was murdered in July, 1895. At the beginning of that year the following remarkable interview with him was published by the Cologne Gazette:

“I cannot help thinking that something serious is in the air. Everything takes time. I hear from my friends that things have reached a head. If I must fall, my friends will not desert my wife and my children. I do not grudge my enemies that triumph.

“In influential circles care will be taken that telegrams are sent from all Bulgaria denouncing the murderers, but expressing in the liveliest terms the satisfaction of ‘the people’ at being freed for ever from ‘the tyrant’ and ‘the adulterer.’

“When the attempt on my life—to which Beltcheff fell a victim—was being planned, all Sofia knew of it. The Chief of Police and his people remained in blissful ignorance. To-day, too, numbers of people are aware of the impending attempt on my life, and my friends—and friends I have, thank God, everywhere—are more shrewd than the police.

“I cannot give you names, but my information is to be trusted. The former Chief of Police, Ilija Lukanoff, a man of honour and great ability, who is very sincerely devoted to me, and who has even to-day very extensive connexions with home circles, came to me yesterday. He was quite excited, this grave, reserved man.

“He wished to go to the Prince, and acquaint him with everything. ‘Ilija,’ I said to him, ‘it would be the stupidest thing that you could do. Don’t you see that the murderers have the strongest support?’

“We know for an absolute fact that in Netschuinar, a suburb of Sofia, there is a band which is being drilled in the use of arms. We know that these people—Beltcheff’s murderers are among them—have taken an oath to murder me.

“The gang of which I have been speaking consists of Rosareff, Hala, Arnaut, Tufektschieff, and some others. Tufektschieff has been sentenced at Constantinople to fifteen years’ hard labour for the murder of Vulkovitch. Nevertheless he goes about here in safety.

“Velikoff and the other culprits are now at the head of affairs. Stoiloff is nowhere obeyed. Why therefore should not the ‘tyrant,’ the ‘vampire,’ the ‘adulterer’ be assassinated?”

After the appearance of that interview the British agent at Sofia made a determined attempt to obtain from Ferdinand permission for Stambuloff to leave Sofia. He was not successful. All surrounding Ferdinand knew that he laid his plans to be out of Sofia when the blow should fall, and that he would send his sympathy, rejected by the widow, from Carlsbad.

“If that fox should send a wreath, do not let it enter the house,” moaned Stambuloff on his bed of agony. They were his dying words. His right hand, slashed off by his vile butchers, remains, as I have said, unburied to this day. For twenty years the Lesser Czar has walked under the shadow of that dead hand; has walked so warily that the horrid death for which his enemies destine him has not yet overtaken him.

For Ferdinand had taken his precautions long ere he had his enemy done to death by hired braves. He knew he was going to a land where the knife played an important part in affairs of State. “In our future dominions,” wrote the Count de Grenoud, who accompanied him on this journey in disguise to Bulgaria to assume the purple, “people are assassinating each other. I wonder if we shall reach Bulgaria safe and sound?”

It was a consideration which affected Ferdinand powerfully while on the journey; so powerfully that he shook with fright at his first greeting by his future subjects. But he had already taken elaborate precautions against a death with the idea of which he was already familiar.

His interest in chain armour, displayed whenever any fine specimen was brought under his notice, was not merely the enthusiasm of the antiquarian. For years he wore a suit of it under his clothing; for all I know, he wears it still. His craft has not so far failed him that he has become careless of his life.

The apartment at the palace at Sofia which he calls mon fumoir (my den) has walls of steel and a door that can be hermetically fastened by a spring operated from the writing desk. A series of secret signals, known only to the trusted men who surround him, ensures that this door shall only be opened to the men who are safe; or, rather, to the men with whom Ferdinand is safe.

The shadow of the dead pursues him to Euxinograd, where the most elaborate precautions are taken throughout the neighbourhood whenever a royal visit is in progress. He is a haunted man even in his hunting quarters at the monastery of Rilo, where the whole district is policed by the monks in anticipation of the arrival of the kingly sportsman.

His travels abroad are marvels of precaution. Ask the Scotland Yard men, whose duty it is to look after foreign potentates in this country, who is the fussiest and most timid man they ever encountered, and an unanimous vote will be cast for the Czar of Shoddy. In Paris he and his suite are even more solicitous; their precautions, as I have once before related, spoiled the pleasure of a Grand Prix crowd at Longchamps, when the Czar of Bulgaria condescended to visit that former scene of gaiety and gambling.

In Austria he is little better, and in Germany he is more fidgetty than ever. But it is when he has visited Russia that his precautions become portentous to the very degree of the ludicrous. He fancies, this scion of the Bourbons, that the conspirators will call in the aid of science and slay him with microbes. The very word disease makes him blench and fly for safety.

Thus on the journey from Sofia to Petrograd, in 1909, he was informed that the Grand Duke Nicholas had been deputed to meet and welcome him, but would be compelled to see less of him than he would like, because his nephew was down with scarlet fever, and although uncle and nephew were not residing together, the Grand Duke visited him regularly.

Ferdinand meditated anxiously over this ominous message, and then requested as a great favour that some other Grand Duke, further removed from the infectious ills to which even royalties are subject, should meet him; whereupon the Grand Duke Constantine was appointed. Then the Czar of Bulgaria was tranquillized, and everything went smoothly for a time.

But after a day or two spent in the Russian capital Ferdinand was shocked to learn that, whereas the nephew of the Grand Duke Nicholas was suffering from scarlet fever in another house, the Grand Duke Constantine’s own children, who lived with him under the same roof, were suffering from genuine diphtheria, which everybody knows is far more malignant.

In the course of the next day Ferdinand was suffering from an imaginary pain in the throat, and made such a fuss about it that the whole Russian Court was convulsed with merriment. He sought the first excuse for returning to Sofia, and only breathed freely when safe again under the care of his trusted Court physician.

Ferdinand ought to be inured to threats of assassination, for not a week passes but he gets threatening letters by the post. But the receipt of a bottle labelled “typhus bacilli” never fails to make him livid with fear. The sight of men cleaning off from the palace walls drawings of himself suffering hideous deaths—Ferdinand is easy to draw, and it is a favourite students’ amusement—always sets him chattering with rage.

But there are traits in his character which overrule this fear of assassination, strong as it is within him, and cause him to hang on to his threatened throne, though he does so in fear and trembling. What those characteristics are will presently be made plain; meanwhile, it will be well to consider what country it is that he rules, where the leading statesman can predict successfully the manner and place of his own assassination without causing any surprise.