An expression I did not quite like came upon her face as she sent the children away, and then, speaking in English, said: “What is it? Why have you come again?”
I told her very briefly that everything pointed to Carl as the thief who had entered Michel Seguin’s house, and why I was interested to get the watch, if possible. “Do you think Carl has it?” I asked.
Her needle came unthreaded just then, and after biting the end of her thread several times and making several jabs at the eye of her needle, she took up the poor old coat, patched in many places, and replied: “I don’t think—I never know what he has, nor what he does except as I hear it. I’ll not deny that the police have been here after him, but they didn’t get him. He’s cute,” and she smiled in a proud kind of way at the boy’s cuteness in eluding the vigilance of the gendarmes.
“Do you see him often?” I asked, and she replied: “Yes, and no; if he is hard pressed he stays where they can’t find him. Late at night he comes in to see me.”
“Can you communicate with him when you wish to?” I asked next, and she replied: “Yes, we have ways and means—a kind of underground railroad such as your people used to have when you had a slavery not half as crushing as ours.”
“You are a nihilist,” I said, and instantly her face flamed up, then grew pale, as she replied: “Of course I am. Half of us are nihilists at heart. Not that we want to kill the czar. That’s murder. We want a freer government, like yours, where we dare call our souls our own and are not watched at every turn.”
We were getting away from the object of my visit, and I came back to it by saying: “Will you see Carl and ask him to bring you the watch? I don’t care for the silver; it is the watch I want. I let him go when I might have kept him till the gendarme came. I think there is enough good in him to do me this favor.”
“He may do it for you. He was very grateful. Paul Strigoff is a devil,” she said; then she added, suddenly: “You and Michel Seguin are great friends.”
“Marry him! Marry a Russian! Never!”