Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/123

Rh "Need you tell me that? Oh, great Heaven! I would give every penny I've left for a passport."

She quivered, as with an electric shock, from her head to her feet. "A passport," she repeated, and turned red and white.

Her tone and her manner struck him. "What do you mean?" he exclaimed.

"I was thinking."

"Thinking? Thinking what? There is not a moment to lose."

"But, Floris—"

"Do you mean anything or do you not? If your father comes home, and knows, and finds me here, all is lost."

"He is gone into Haarlem for the day."

"Within an hour or two I must be on the road to the south. You will never see me again."

She gazed at him with burning eyes. In sooth, he looked utterly unfit to encounter the hardships of a Russian campaign.

"It means death," he repeated. "It means death."

"Listen to me," she began. "On my father's secretaire lies a paper. I was to give it to the Englishman who has been here negotiating about that exchange of prisoners—the fishermen. Father expressly told me all about it before leaving this morning. It is the Englishman's passport."

He stopped in front of her, suddenly calm. "Get it me," he said.

"But the risk? You speak as if it were the easiest thing in the world."

"It is not an easy thing. It is very difficult. But anything is better than certain and horrible death."

"The Englishman is probably not at all like you."

"I shall make myself like the Englishman."

"If you are discovered—"

He stamped his foot. Already he was half outside the door. She followed him across the garden and into her father's private room. He ran up to the bureau and snatched the folded paper off it. She looked over his shoulder.

"Dark hair," she read. "Whiskers."

He interrupted her. "All that matters nothing," he said. "The height tallies. Leave the rest to me."

"There is a woman also," she persisted. "It says, 'with his wife.

For a moment he faltered. "I must arrange that," he answered, presently. "I will say she was ill and I had to leave her behind."

She caught up the words like an echo. "Yes," she said. "You had to leave her behind."

He had hidden the precious paper in his breast pocket. "I must get away before I meet my uncle," he cried.

"Yes. I must meet him," she answered.

He turned to her, but her face was impassive. "At least he will not kill you," he said. "They would kill me." He caught her to his breast and kissed her, and was gone.

She stepped to the window and watched him hurrying away.

Half an hour later he was in Haarlem, where he lived, his uncle's country house standing on the farther side of the Haarlem wood, some four miles up the road to Leyden. As far as Amsterdam he could travel with all publicity, and declare that he was going southwards, in obedience to the imperial order. His plan was to reach the capital in his own name, and then, under cover of the darkness, to slip on to the British vessel which he knew to be waiting for the man whose pass he had seized. This was, of course, a perilous undertaking—quite impracticable, should the harbor officials scent a cause, however faint, of suspicion. Once aboard, he trusted to the weightiest of arguments, gold, to make the captain immediately lift anchor.

After hurried preparations for his departure, he betook himself to the little house at the back of the Walloon church. He had been there so often; it seemed strange, as he walked along the familiar Haarlem streets, to think he was saying good-by to it all for many a day, possibly forever—almost certainly forever to Marguerite.

She looked up with a smile as he entered. "Fie, méchant," she said. "It is Tuesday. Thou didst promise for Saturday night."

"Marguerite," he replied, "I am called away to the arm in Russia. I must leave within an hour."

The girl turned white and red, and white again. "It were a splendid thing," she said, " if—"