had him! He saw himself living in abject terror in some obscure
hamlet in Spain or Italy; till some fine morning they found him
dead too, with a knife in his breast – like Mr Verloc. He sighed
deeply. He dared not move. And Mrs Verloc waited in silence the
good pleasure of her saviour, deriving comfort from his reflective
silence.
Suddenly he spoke up in an almost natural voice. His reflections
had come to an end.
“Let’s get out, or we will lose the train.”
“Where are we going to, Tom?” she asked timidly. Mrs Verloc was no
longer a free woman.
“Let’s get to Paris first, the best way we can. . . . Go out first,
and see if the way’s clear.”
She obeyed. Her voice came subdued through the cautiously opened
door.
“It’s all right.”
Ossipon came out. Notwithstanding his endeavours to be gentle, the
cracked bell clattered behind the closed door in the empty shop, as
if trying in vain to warn the reposing Mr Verloc of the final
departure of his wife – accompanied by his friend.
In the hansom, they presently picked up, the robust anarchist
became explanatory. He was still awfully pale, with eyes that
seemed to have sunk a whole half-inch into his tense face. But he
seemed to have thought of everything with extraordinary method.
“When we arrive,” he discoursed in a queer, monotonous tone, “you
must go into the station ahead of me, as if we did not know each
other. I will take the tickets, and slip in yours into your hand
as I pass you. Then you will go into the first-class ladies’
waiting-room, and sit there till ten minutes before the train
starts. Then you come out. I will be outside. You go in first on
the platform, as if you did not know me. There may be eyes
watching there that know what’s what. Alone you are only a woman
going off by train. I am known. With me, you may be guessed at as
Mrs Verloc running away. Do you understand, my dear?” he added,
with an effort.
“Yes,” said Mrs Verloc, sitting there against him in the hansom all
rigid with the dread of the gallows and the fear of death. “Yes,
Tom.” And she added to herself, like an awful refrain: “The drop
given was fourteen feet.”
Ossipon, not looking at her, and with a face like a fresh plaster
cast of himself after a wasting illness, said: “By-the-by, I ought
to have the money for the tickets now.”
Mrs Verloc, undoing some hooks of her bodice, while she went on
staring ahead beyond the splashboard, handed over to him the new
pigskin pocket-book. He received it without a word, and seemed to
plunge it deep somewhere into his very breast. Then he slapped his
coat on the outside.
All this was done without the exchange of a single glance; they
were like two people looking out for the first sight of a desired
goal. It was not till the hansom swung round a corner and towards
the bridge that Ossipon opened his lips again.
“Do you know how much money there is in that thing?” he asked, as
if addressing slowly some hobgoblin sitting between the ears of the
horse.
“No,” said Mrs Verloc. “He gave it to me. I didn’t count. I
thought nothing of it at the time. Afterwards – ”
She moved her right hand a little. It was so expressive that
little movement of that right hand which had struck the deadly blow
into a man’s heart less than an hour before that Ossipon could not
repress a shudder. He exaggerated it then purposely, and muttered:
“I am cold. I got chilled through.”
Mrs Verloc looked straight ahead at the perspective of her escape.
Now and then, like a sable streamer blown across a road, the words
“The drop given was fourteen feet” got in the way of her tense
stare. Through her black veil the whites of her big eyes gleamed
lustrously like the eyes of a masked woman.
Ossipon’s rigidity had something business-like, a queer official
expression. He was heard again all of a sudden, as though he had