“But you must go—you must go!” she said, quickly. She glanced at the great clock upon the wall. She had only ten minutes in which to make him understand. He was an eminently sensible person. There were gleams of gray in his closely cut hair.
“You must not think that we are alarmists. If there is any family in the world who knows what it is to live peaceably, happily—quite gayly—” she broke off with a light laugh, “on a volcano—it is the Bukatys. We have all been brought up to it. Martin and I looked out of our nursery window on April 8, 1861, and saw what was done on that day. My father was in the streets. And ever since we have been accustomed to unsettled times.”
“I know,” said Cartoner, “what it is to be a Bukaty.” And he smiled slowly as she looked at him with gray, fearless eyes. Then suddenly her manner, in a flash, was different.
“Then you will go?” she pleaded, softly, persuasively. And when he turned away his eyes from hers, as if he did not care to meet them, she glanced again, hurriedly, at the clock. There is a cunning bred of hatred, and there is another cunning, much deeper. “Say you will go!”
And, sternly economical of words, he shook his head.
“I do not think you understand,” she went on, changing her manner and her ground again. And to each attack he could only oppose his own stolid, dumb form of defence. “You do not understand what a danger to us your presence here is. It is needless to tell you all this,” with a gesture she indicated the well-ordered railway station, the hundred marks of a high state of civilization, “is skin deep. That things in Poland are not at all what they seem. And, of course, we are implicated. We live from day to day in uncertainty. And my father is such an old man; he has had such a hopeless struggle all his life. You have only to look at his face—”
“I know,” admitted Cartoner.
“It would be very hard if anything should happen to him now, after he has gone through so much. And Martin, who is so young in mind, and so happy and reckless! He would be such an easy prey for a political foe. That is why I ask you to go.”
“Yes, I know,” answered Cartoner, who, like many people reputed clever, was quite a simple person.
“Besides,” said Wanda, with that logic which men, not having the wit to follow it, call no logic at all, “you can do no good here, if all your care and attention are required for the preservation of your life. Why have they refused your recall? It is so stupid.”