“I’ll tell you if you let us come in.”
“I can’t hinder you. It is an order, all doors must be left open.”
Still, he made way, though ungraciously. The refugees found themselves in a spacious kitchen, a comfortable and cleanly place, Dutch in its colourings and generally spick and span aspect. A comely woman of middle age, and a plump, good-looking girl about as old as Irene, were seated on an oak bench beneath a window. They were clinging to each other, and had evidently listened fearfully to the brief conversation without.
The only signs of disorder in the room were supplied by a quantity of empty wine-bottles, drinking-mugs, soiled plates, and cutlery, spread on a broad table. Irene sank into one of half-a-dozen chairs which had apparently been used by the feasters.
Joos chuckled. His laugh had an ugly sound. “Pity you weren’t twenty minutes sooner,” he guffawed. “You’d have had company, pleasant company, visitors from across the frontier.”
“I, too, have crossed the frontier,” said Irene, a wan smile lending pathos to her beauty. “I travelled with Germans from Berlin. If I saw a German now I think I should die.”
At that, Madame Joos rose. “Calm thyself, Henri,” she said. “These people are friends.”
“Maybe,” retorted her husband. He turned on Dalroy with surprising energy, seeing that he was some twenty years older than his wife. “You say that you came with Maertz,” he went on. “Where is he? He has been absent four days.”
By this time Dalroy thought he had taken the measure of his man. No matter what the outcome to himself personally, Miss Beresford must be helped. She could go no farther without food and rest. He risked everything on the spin of a coin. “We are English,” he said, speaking very slowly and distinctly, so that each syllable should penetrate the combined brains of the Joos family. “We were only trying to leave Germany, meaning harm to none, but were arrested as spies at Aix-la-Chapelle. We escaped by a ruse. I knocked a man silly, and took some of his clothes. Then we happened on Maertz at a corner of Franz Strasse, and persuaded him to give us a lift. We jogged along all right until we reached the cross-roads beyond the hill there,” and he pointed in the direction of the wood. “A German officer refused to allow us to pass, but a motor transport knocked the wagon over, and this lady and I were thrown into a field. We got away in the confusion, and made for a cowshed lying well back from the road and on the slope of the hill. At that point my friend fainted, luckily for herself, because, when I examined the shed, I found the corpse of an old woman there. She had evidently been about to milk a black-and-white cow when she was bayoneted by a German soldier——”
He was interrupted by a choking sob from Madame Joos, who leaned a hand on the table for support. In pose and features she would have served as a model for Hans Memling’s “portrait” of Saint Elizabeth, which in happier days used to adorn the hospital at Bruges. “The Widow Jaquinot,” she gasped.