I hadn’t the least intention of hurrying, but passed on without further parley, and reached the inn unhindered. Mishka had not yet returned, and I told the landlord a pedler was coming to see me, and he was to be brought up to my room at once.
As I closed the shutters I wondered if he would come, or if he’d give me the slip as he did in Westminster, but within half an hour Barzinsky brought him up. The landlord looked quite scared, his ear-locks were quivering with his agitation.
“Yossof is here, Excellency,” he announced, so he evidently knew my man.
I nodded and motioned him out of the room, for he hovered around as if he wanted to stay.
Yossof stood at the end of the room, in an attitude of humility, his gray head bowed, his dingy fur cap held in his skinny fingers; but his piercing dark eyes were fixed earnestly on my face, and, when Barzinsky was gone and the door was shut, he came forward and made his obeisance.
“I know the Excellency now, although the beard has changed him,” he said quietly. His speech was much more intelligible than it had been that time in Westminster. “I remember his goodness to me, a stranger in the land. May the God of our fathers bless him! But I knew not then that he also was one of us. Why have you not the new password, Excellency?”
“I have but now come hither from England at the peril of my life, and as yet I have met none whom I knew as one of us,” I answered evasively. “What is this new word? It is necessary that I should learn it,” I added, as he hesitated.
“I will tell you its meaning only,” he answered, watching me closely. “It means ‘in life and in death,’—but those are not the words.”
“Then I know them: à la vie et à la mort; is it not so?” I asked, remembering the moment he spoke the names by which Anne was known to others besides members of the League; for the police officer who had superintended the searching of my rooms at Petersburg, and later, young Mirakoff, had both mentioned one of them.
I had hit on the right words first time, and Yossof, evidently relieved, nodded, and repeated them after me, giving a queer inflection to the French.