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Barlasch of the Guard

by Henry Seton Merriman · English · Gutenberg #8158 · 438,325 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Barlasch of the Guard

Author: Henry Seton Merriman


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8158]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8158

Credits: Produced by Les Bowler, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BARLASCH OF THE GUARD ***




Produced by Les Bowler








BARLASCH OF THE GUARD


By Henry Seton Merriman




     “And they that have not heard shall understand”




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

     I.       ALL ON A SUMMER'S DAY
     II.      A CAMPAIGNER
     III.     FATE
     IV.      THE CLOUDED MOON
     V.       THE WEISSEN ROSS'L
     VI.      THE SHOEMAKER OF KONIGSBERG
     VII.     THE WAY OF LOVE
     VIII.    A VISITATION
     IX.      THE GOLDEN GUESS
     X.       IN DEEP WATER
     XI.      THE WAVE MOVES ON
     XII.     FROM BORODINO
     XIII.    IN THE DAY OF REJOICING
     XIV.     MOSCOW
     XV.      THE GOAL
     XVI.     THE FIRST OF THE EBB
     XVII.    A FORLORN HOPE
     XVIII.   MISSING
     XIX.     KOWNO
     XX.      DESIREE'S CHOICE
     XXI.     ON THE WARSAW ROAD
     XXII.    THROUGH THE SHOALS
     XXIII.   AGAINST THE STREAM
     XXIV.    MATHILDE CHOOSES
     XXV.     A DESPATCH
     XXVI.    ON THE BRIDGE
     XXVII.   A FLASH OF MEMORY
     XXVIII.  VILNA
     XXIX.    THE BARGAIN
     XXX.     THE FULFILMENT




CHAPTER I. ALL ON A SUMMER'S DAY.



     Il faut devoir lever les yeux pour regarder ce qu'on aime.

A few children had congregated on the steps of the Marienkirche at
Dantzig, because the door stood open. The verger, old Peter Koch--on
week days a locksmith--had told them that nothing was going to happen;
had been indiscreet enough to bid them go away. So they stayed, for they
were little girls.

A wedding was in point of fact in progress within the towering walls of
the Marienkirche--a cathedral built of red brick in the great days of
the Hanseatic League.

“Who is it?” asked a stout fishwife, stepping over the threshold to
whisper to Peter Koch.

“It is the younger daughter of Antoine Sebastian,” replied the verger,
indicating with a nod of his head the house on the left-hand side of the
Frauengasse where Sebastian lived. There was a wealth of meaning in the
nod. For Peter Koch lived round the corner in the Kleine Schmiedegasse,
and of course--well, it is only neighbourly to take an interest in those
who drink milk from the same cow and buy wood from the same Jew.

The fishwife looked thoughtfully down the Frauengasse where every house
has a different gable, and none of less than three floors within the
pitch of the roof. She singled out No. 36, which has a carved stone
balustrade to its broad verandah and a railing of wrought-iron on either
side of the steps descending from the verandah to the street.

“They teach dancing?” she inquired.

And Koch nodded again, taking snuff.

“And he--the father?”

“He scrapes a fiddle,” replied the verger, examining the lady's basket
of fish in a non-committing and final way. For a locksmith is almost
as confidential an adviser as a notary. The Dantzigers, moreover, are a
thrifty race and keep their money in a safe place; a habit which was to
cost many of them their lives before the coming of another June.

The marriage service was a long one and not exhilarating. Through the
open door came no sound of organ or choir, but the deep and monotonous
drawl of one voice. There had been no ringing of bells. The north
countries, with the exception of Russia, require more than the ringing
of bells or the waving of flags to warm their hearts. They celebrate
their festivities with good meat and wine consumed decently behind
closed doors.

Dantzig was in fact under a cloud. No larger than a man's hand,
this cloud had risen in Corsica forty-three years earlier. It had
overshadowed France. Its gloom had spread to Italy, Austria, Spain; had
penetrated so far north as Sweden; was now hanging sullen over Dantzig,
the greatest of the Hanseatic towns, the Free City. For a Dantziger
had never needed to say that he was a Pole or a Prussian, a Swede or a
subject of the Czar. He was a Dantziger. Which is tantamount to having
for a postal address a single name that is marked on the map.

Napoleon had garrisoned the Free City with French troops some years
earlier, to the sullen astonishment of the citizens. And Prussia had not
objected for a very obvious reason. Within the last fourteen months the
garrison had been greatly augmented. The clouds seemed to be gathering
over this prosperous city of the north, where, however, men continued to
eat and drink, to marry and to be given in marriage as in another city
of the plain.

Peter Koch replaced his snuff-stained handkerchief in the pocket of his
rusty cassock and stood aside. He murmured a few conventional words
of blessing, hard on the heels of stronger exhortations to the waiting
children. And Desiree Sebastian came out into the sunlight--Desiree
Sebastian no more.

That she was destined for the sunlight was clearly written on her face
and in her gay, kind blue eyes. She was tall and straight and slim,
as are English and Polish and Danish girls, and none other in all the
world. But the colouring of her face and hair was more pronounced than
in the fairness of Anglo-Saxon youth. For her hair had a golden tinge in
it, and her skin was of that startlingly milky whiteness which is only
found in those who live round the frozen waters. Her eyes, too, were of
a clearer blue--like the blue of a summer sky over the Baltic sea. The
rosy colour was in her cheeks, her eyes were laughing. This was a bride
who had no misgivings.

On seeing such a happy face returning from the altar the observer might
have concluded that the bride had assuredly attained her desire; that
she had secured a title; that the pre-nuptial settlement had been safely
signed and sealed.

But Desiree had none of these things. It was nearly a hundred years ago.

Her husband must have whispered some laughing comment on Koch, or
another appeal to her quick sense of the humorous, for she looked into
his changing face and gave a low, girlish laugh of amusement as they
descended the steps together into the brilliant sunlight.

Charles Darragon wore one of the countless uniforms that enlivened the
outward world in the great days of the greatest captain that history has
seen. He was unmistakably French--unmistakably a French gentleman, as
rare in 1812 as he is to-day. To judge from his small head and clean-cut
features, fine and mobile; from his graceful carriage and slight limbs,
this man was one of the many bearing names that begin with the fourth
letter of the alphabet since the Terror only.

He was merely a lieutenant in a regiment of Alsatian recruits; but that
went for nothing in the days of the Empire. Three kings in Europe had
begun no farther up the ladder.

The Frauengasse is a short street, made narrow by the terrace that each
house throws outward from its face, each seeking to gain a few inches
on its neighbour. It runs from the Marienkirche to the Frauenthor, and
remains to-day as it was built three hundred years ago.

Desiree nodded and laughed to the children, who interested her. She was
quite simple and womanly, as some women, it is to be hoped, may succeed
in continuing until the end of time. She was always pleased to see
children; was glad, it seemed, that they should have congregated on the
steps to watch her pass. Charles, with a faint and unconscious reflex of
that grand manner which had brought his father to the guillotine, felt
in his pocket for money, and found none.

He jerked his hand out with widespread fingers, in a gesture indicative
of familiarity with the nakedness of the land.

“I have nothing, little citizens,” he said with a mock gravity; “nothing
but my blessing.”

And he made a gay gesture with his left hand over their heads, not the
act of benediction, but of peppering, which made them all laugh. The
bride and bridegroom passing on joined in the laughter with hearts as
light and voices scarcely less youthful.

The Frauengasse is intersected by the Pfaffengasse at right angles,
through which narrow and straight street passes much of the traffic
towards the Langenmarkt, the centre of the town. As the little bridal
procession reached the corner of this street, it halted at the approach
of some mounted troops. There was nothing unusual in this sight in the
streets of Dantzig, which were accustomed now to the clatter of the
Saxon cavalry.

But at the sight of the first troopers Charles Darragon threw up his
head with a little exclamation of surprise.

Desiree looked at him and then turned to follow the direction of his
gaze.

“What are these?” she murmured. For the uniforms were new and
unfamiliar.

“Cavalry of the Old Guard,” replied her husband, and as he spoke he
caught his breath.

The horsemen vanished into the continuation of the Pfaffengasse, and
immediately behind them came a travelling carriage, swung on high
wheels, three times the size of a Dantzig drosky, white with dust.
It had small square windows. As Desiree drew back in obedience to a
movement of her husband's arm, she saw a face for an instant--pale and
set--with eyes that seemed to look at everything and yet at something
beyond.

“Who was it? He looked at you, Charles,” said Desiree.

“It is the Emperor,” answered Darragon. His face was white. His eyes
were dull, like the eyes of one who has seen a vision and is not yet
back to earth.

Desiree turned to those behind her.

“It is the Emperor,” she said, with an odd ring in her voice which none
had ever heard before. Then she stood looking after the carriage.

Her father, who was at her elbow--tall, white-haired, with an
aquiline, inscrutable face--stood in a like attitude, looking down the
Pfaffengasse. His hand was raised before his face with outspread fingers
which seemed rigid in that gesture, as if lifted hastily to screen his
face and hide it.

“Did he see me?” he asked in a low voice which only Desiree heard.

She glanced at him, and her eyes, which were clear as a cloudless sky,
were suddenly shadowed by a suspicion quick and poignant.

“He seemed to see everything, but he only looked at Charles,” she
answered. For a moment they all stood in the sunshine looking towards
the Langenmarkt where the tower of the Rathhaus rose above the high
roofs. The dust raised by the horses' feet and the carriage wheels
slowly settled on their bridal clothes.

It was Desiree who at length made a movement to continue their way
towards her father's house.

“Well,” she said with a slight laugh, “he was not bidden to my wedding,
but he has come all the same.”

Others laughed as they followed her. For a bride at the church-door, or
a judge on the bench, or a criminal on the scaffold-steps, need make but
a very small joke to cause merriment. Laughter is often nothing but the
froth of tears.

There were faces suddenly bleached in the little group of
wedding-guests, and none were whiter than the handsome features of
Mathilde Sebastian, Desiree's elder sister, who looked angry, had
frowned at the children, and seemed to find this simple wedding too
bourgeois for her taste. She carried her head with an air that told the
world not to expect that she should ever be content to marry in such
a humble style, and walk from the church in satin slippers like any
daughter of a burgher.

This, at all events, was what old Koch the locksmith must have read in
her beautiful, discontented face.

“Ah! ah!” he muttered to the bolts as he shot them. “But it is not the
lightest hearts that quit the church in a carriage.”

So simple were the arrangements that bride and bridegroom and
wedding-guests had to wait in the street while the servant unlocked
the front door of No. 36 with a great key hurriedly extracted from her
apron-pocket.

There was no unusual stir in the street. The windows of one or two of
the houses had been decorated with flowers. These were the houses of
friends. Others were silent and still behind their lace curtains, where
there doubtless lurked peeping and criticizing eyes--the house of a
neighbour.

The wedding-guests were few in number. Only one of them had a
distinguished air, and he, like the bridegroom, wore the uniform of
France. He was a small man, somewhat brusque in attitude, as became
a soldier of Italy and Egypt. But he had a pleasant smile and that
affability of manner which many learnt in the first years of the great
Republic. He and Mathilde Sebastian never looked at each other: either
an understanding or a misunderstanding.

The host, Antoine Sebastian, played his part well enough when he
remembered that he had a part to play. He listened with a kind attention
to the story of a very old lady, who it seemed had been married herself,
but it was so long ago that the human interest of it all was lost in a
pottle of petty detail which was all she could recall. Before the story
was half finished, Sebastian's attention had strayed elsewhere, though
his spare figure remained in its attitude of attention and polite
forbearance. His mind had, it would seem, a trick of thus wandering away
and leaving his body rigid in the last attitude that it had dictated.

Sebastian did not notice that the door was open and all the guests were
waiting for him to lead the way.

“Now, old dreamer,” whispered Desiree, with a quick pinch on his arm,
“take the Grafin upstairs to the drawing-room and give her wine. You are
to drink our healths, remember.”

“Is there wine?” he asked with a vague smile. “Where has it come from?”

“Like other good things, my father-in-law,” replied Charles with his
easy laugh, “it comes from France.”

They spoke together thus in confidence, in the language of that same
sunny land. But when Sebastian turned again to the old lady, still
recalling the details of that other wedding, he addressed her in German,
offering his arm with a sudden stiffness of gesture which he seemed to
put on with the change of tongue.

They passed up the low time-worn steps arm-in-arm, and beneath the high
carved doorway, whereon some pious Hanseatic merchant had inscribed
his belief that if God be in the house there is no need of a watchman,
emphasizing his creed by bolts and locks of enormous strength, and bars
to every window.

The servant in her Samland Sunday dress, having shaken her fist at the
children, closed the door behind the last guest, and, so far as the
Frauengasse was concerned, the exciting incident was over. From the open
window came only the murmur of quiet voices, the clink of glasses at the
drinking of a toast, or a laugh in the clear voice of the bride herself.
For Desiree persisted in her optimistic view of these proceedings,
though her husband scarcely helped her now at all, and seemed a
different man since the passage through the Pfaffengasse of that dusty
travelling carriage which had played the part of the stormy petrel from
end to end of Europe.



CHAPTER II. A CAMPAIGNER.



     Not what I am, but what I Do, is my Kingdom.

Desiree had made all her own wedding-clothes. “Her poor little
marriage-basket,” she called it. She had even made the cake which was
now cut with some ceremony by her father.

“I tremble,” she exclaimed aloud, “to think what it may be like in the
middle.”

And Mathilde was the only person there who did not smile at the
unconscious admission. The cake was still under discussion, and the
Grafin had just admitted that it was almost as good as that other cake
which had been consumed in the days of Frederick the Great, when the
servant called Desiree from the room.

“It is a soldier,” she said in a whisper at the head of the stairs. “He
has a paper in his hand. I know what that means. He is quartered on us.”

Desiree hurried downstairs. In the entrance-hall, a broad-built little
man stood awaiting her. He was stout and red, with hair all ragged at
the temples, almost white. His eyes were lost behind shaggy eyebrows.
His face was made broader by little whiskers stopping short at the level
of his ear. He had a snuff-blown complexion, and in the wrinkles of his
face the dust of a dozen campaigns seemed to have accumulated.

“Barlasch,” he said curtly, holding out a long strip of blue paper. “Of
the Guard. Once a sergeant. Italy, Egypt, the Danube.”

He frowned at Desiree while she read the paper in the dim light that
filtered through the twisted bars of the fanlight above the door.

Then he turned to the servant who stood, comely and breathless, looking
him up and down.

“Papa Barlasch,” he added for her edification, and he drew down his left
eyebrow with a jerk, so that it almost touched his cheek. His right
eye, grey and piercing, returned her astonished gaze with a fierce
steadfastness.

“Does this mean that you are quartered upon us?” asked Desiree without
seeking to hide her disgust. She spoke in her own tongue.

“French?” said the soldier, looking at her. “Good. Yes. I am quartered
here. Thirty-six, Frauengasse. Sebastian; musician. You are lucky to get
me. I always give satisfaction--ha!”

He gave a curt laugh in one syllable only. His left arm was curved
round a bundle of wood bound together by a red pocket-handkerchief not
innocent of snuff. He held out this bundle to Desiree, as Solomon may
have held out some great gift to the Queen of Sheba to smooth the first
doubtful steps of friendship.

Desiree accepted the gift and stood in her wedding-dress holding the
bundle of wood against her breast. Then a gleam of the one grey eye that
was visible conveyed to her the fact that this walnut-faced warrior was
smiling. She laughed gaily.

“It is well,” said Barlasch. “We are friends. You are lucky to get me.
You may not think so now. Would this woman like me to speak to her in
Polish or German?”

“Do you speak so many languages?”

He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his arms as far as his many
burdens allowed. For he was hung round with a hundred parcels and
packages.

“The Old Guard,” he said, “can always make itself understood.”

He rubbed his hands together with the air of a brisk man ready for any
sort of work.

“Now, where shall I sleep?” he asked. “One is not particular, you
understand. A few minutes and one is at home--perhaps peeling the
potatoes. It is only a civilian who is ashamed of using his knife on a
potato. Papa Barlasch, they call me.”

Without awaiting an invitation he went forward towards the kitchen. He
seemed to know the house by instinct. His progress was accompanied by
a clatter of utensils like that which heralds the coming of a carrier's
cart.

At the kitchen door he stopped and sniffed loudly. There certainly was
a slight odour of burning fat. Papa Barlasch turned and shook an
admonitory finger at the servant, but he said nothing. He looked round
at the highly polished utensils, at the table and floor both alike
scrubbed clean by a vigorous northern arm. And he was kind enough to nod
approval.

“On a campaign,” he said to no one in particular, “a little bit of
horse thrust into the cinders on the end of a bayonet--but in times of
peace...”

He broke off and made a gesture towards the saucepans which indicated
quite clearly that he was between campaigns--inclined to good living.

“I am a rude fork,” he jerked to Desiree over his shoulder in the
dialect of the Cotes du Nord.

“How long will you be here?” asked Desiree, who was eminently practical.
A billet was a misfortune which Charles Darragon had hitherto succeeded
in warding off. He had some small influence as an officer of the
head-quarters' staff.

Barlasch held up a reproving hand. The question, he seemed to think, was
not quite delicate.

“I pay my own,” he said. “Give and take--that is my motto. When you have
nothing to give... offer a smile.”

With a gesture he indicated the bundle of firewood which Desiree still
absent-mindedly carried against her white dress. He turned and opened a
cupboard low down on the floor at the left-hand side of the fireplace.
He seemed to know by an instinct usually possessed by charwomen and
other domesticated persons of experience where the firewood was kept.
Lisa gave a little exclamation of surprise at his impertinence and his
perspicacity. He took the firewood, unknotted his handkerchief, and
threw his offering into the cupboard. Then he turned and perceived for
the first time that Desiree had a bright ribbon at her waist and on her
shoulders; that a thin chain of gold was round her throat and that there
were flowers at her breast.

“A fete?” he inquired curtly.

“My marriage fete,” she answered. “I was married half an hour ago.”

He looked at her beneath his grizzled brows. His face was only capable
of producing one expression--a shaggy weather-beaten fierceness. But,
like a dog which can express more than many human beings, by a hundred
instinctive gestures he could, it seemed, dispense with words on
occasion and get on quite as well without them. He clearly disapproved
of Desiree's marriage, and drew her attention to the fact that she was
no more than a schoolgirl with an inconsequent brain, and little limbs
too slight to fight a successful battle in a world full of cruelty and
danger.

Then he made a gesture half of apology as if recognizing that it was no
business of his, and turned away thoughtfully.

“I had troubles of that sort myself,” he explained, putting together the
embers on the hearth with the point of a twisted, rusty bayonet,
“but that was long ago. Well, I can drink your health all the same,
mademoiselle.”

He turned to Lisa with a friendly nod and put out his tongue, in the
manner of the people, to indicate that his lips were dry.

Desiree had always been the housekeeper. It was to her that Lisa
naturally turned in her extremity at the invasion of her kitchen by Papa
Barlasch. And when that warrior had been supplied with beer it was with
Desiree, in an agitated whisper in the great dark dining-room with its
gloomy old pictures and heavy carving, that she took counsel as to where
he should be quartered.

The object of their solicitude himself interrupted their hurried
consultation by opening the door and putting his shaggy head round the
corner of it.

“It is not worth while to consult long about it,” he said. “There is a
little room behind the kitchen, that opens into the yard. It is full of
boxes. But we can move them--a little straw--and there!”

With a gesture he described a condition of domestic peace and comfort
which far exceeded his humble requirements.

“The blackbeetles and I are old friends,” he concluded cheerfully.

“There are no blackbeetles in the house, monsieur,” said Desiree,
hesitating to accept his proposal.

“Then I shall resign myself to my solitude,” he answered. “It is quiet.
I shall not hear the patron touching on his violin. It is that which
occupies his leisure, is it not?”

“Yes,” answered Desiree, still considering the question.

“I too am a musician,” said Papa Barlasch, turning towards the kitchen
again. “I played a drum at Marengo.”

And as he led the way to the little room in the yard at the back of the
kitchen, he expressed by a shake of the head a fellow-feeling for the
gentleman upstairs, whose acquaintance he had not yet made, who occupied
his leisure by touching the violin.

They stood together in the small apartment which Barlasch, with the
promptitude of an experienced conqueror, had set apart for his own
accommodation.

“Those trunks,” he observed casually, “were made in France”--a mental
note which he happened to make aloud, as some do for better remembrance.
“This solid girl and I will soon move them. And you, mademoiselle, go
back to your wedding.”

“The good God be merciful to you,” he added under his breath when
Desiree had gone.

She laughed as she mounted the stairs, a slim white figure amid the
heavy woodwork long since blackened by time. The stairs made no sound
beneath her light step. How many weary feet had climbed them since they
were built! For the Dantzigers have been a people of sorrow, torn by
wars, starved by siege, tossed from one conqueror to another from the
beginning until now.

Desiree excused herself for her absence and frankly gave the cause. She
was disposed to make light of the incident. It was natural to her to be
optimistic. Both she and Mathilde made a practice of withholding from
their father's knowledge the smaller worries of daily life which sour so
many women and make them whine on platforms to be given the larger woes.

She was glad to note that her father did not attach much importance
to the arrival of Papa Barlasch; though Mathilde found opportunity to
convey her displeasure at the news by a movement of the eyebrows.

Antoine Sebastian had applied himself seriously now to his role of host,
so rarely played in the Frauengasse. He was courteous and quick to see
a want or a possible desire of any one of his guests. It was part of his
sense of hospitality to dismiss all personal matters, and especially a
personal trouble, from public attention.

“They will attend to him in the kitchen, no doubt,” he said with that
grand air which the dancing academy tried to imitate.

Charles hardly noted what Desiree said. So sunny a nature as his might
have been expected to make light of a minor trouble, more especially the
minor trouble of another. He was unusually thoughtful. Some event of the
morning had, it would appear, given him pause on his primrose path. He
glanced more than once over his shoulder towards the window, which stood
open. He seemed at times to listen.

Suddenly he rose and went to the window. His action caused a brief
silence, and all heard the clatter of a horse's feet and the quick
rattle of a sword against spur and buckle.

After a glance he came back into the room.

“Excuse me,” he said, with a bow towards Mathilde. “It is, I think, a
messenger for me.”

And he hurried downstairs. He did not return at once, and soon the
conversation became general again.

“You,” said the Grafin, touching Desiree's arm with her fan, “you, who
are now his wife, must be dying to know what has called him away. Do not
consider the 'convenances,' my child.”

Desiree, thus admonished, followed Charles. She had not been aware of
this consuming curiosity until it was suggested to her.

She found Charles standing at the open door. He thrust a letter into his
pocket as she approached him, and turned towards her the face that
she had seen for a moment when he drew her back at the corner of the
Pfaffengasse to allow the Emperor's carriage to pass on its way. It
was the white, half-stupefied face of one who has for an instant seen a
vision of things not earthly.

“I have been sent for by the... I am wanted at head-quarters,” he said
vaguely. “I shall not be long...”

He took his shako, looked at her with an odd attempt to simulate
cheerfulness, kissed her fingers and hurried out into the street.



CHAPTER III. FATE.


     We pass; the path that each man trod
     Is dim; or will be dim, with weeds.

When Desiree turned towards the stairs, she met the guests descending.
They were taking their leave as they came down, hurriedly, like persons
conscious of having outstayed their welcome.

Mathilde listened coldly to the conventional excuses. So few people
recognize the simple fact that they need never apologize for going away.
Sebastian stood at the head of the stairs bowing in his most Germanic
manner. The urbane host, with a charm entirely French, who had dispensed
a simple hospitality so easily and gracefully a few minutes earlier,
seemed to have disappeared behind a pale and formal mask.

Desiree was glad to see them go. There was a sense of uneasiness, a
vague unrest in the air. There was something amiss. The wedding party
had been a failure. All had gone well and merrily up to a certain
point--at the corner of the Pfaffengasse, when the dusty travelling
carriage passed across their path. From that moment there had been a
change. A shadow seemed to have fallen across the sunny nature of the
proceedings; for never had bride and bridegroom set forth together with
lighter hearts than those carried by Charles and Desiree Darragon down
the steps of the Marienkirche.

During its progress across the whole width of Germany, the carriage
had left unrest behind it. Men had travelled night and day to stand
sleepless by the roadside and see it pass. Whole cities had been kept
astir till morning by the mere rumour that its flying wheels would be
heard in the streets before dawn. Hatred and adoration, fear and that
dread tightening of the heart-strings which is caused by the shadow of
the superhuman, had sprung into being at the mere sound of its approach.

When therefore it passed across the Frauengasse, throwing its dust upon
Desiree's wedding-dress, it was only fulfilling a mission. When it
broke in upon the lives of these few persons seeking dimly for their
happiness--as the heathen grope for an unknown God--and threw down
carefully constructed plans, swept aside the strongest will and crushed
the stoutest heart, it was only working out its destiny. The dust
sprinkled on Desiree's hair had fallen on the faces of thousands
of dead. The unrest that entered into the quiet little house on the
left-hand side of the Frauengasse had made its way across a thousand
thresholds, of Arab tent and imperial palace alike. The lives of
millions were affected by it, the secret hopes of thousands were
undermined by it. It disturbed the sleep of half the world, and made men
old before their time.

“More troops must have arrived,” said Desiree, already busying herself
to set the house in order, “since they have been forced to billet this
man with us. And now they have sent for Charles, though he is really on
leave of absence.”

She glanced at the clock.

“I hope he will not be late. The chaise is to come at four o'clock.
There is still time for me to help you.”

Mathilde made no answer. Their father stood near the window. He was
looking out with thoughtful eyes. His face was drawn downwards by a
hundred fine wrinkles. It was the face of one brooding over a sorrow
or a vengeance. There was something in his whole being suggestive of a
bygone prosperity. This was a lean man who had once been well-seeming.

“No!” said Desiree gaily, “we were a dull company. We need not disguise
it. It all came from that man crossing our path in his dusty carriage.”

“He is on his way to Russia,” Sebastian said jerkily. “God spare me to
see him return!”

Desiree and Mathilde exchanged a glance of uneasiness. It seemed that
their father was subject to certain humours which they had reason to
dread. Desiree left her occupation and went to him, linking her arm in
his and standing beside him.

“Do not let us think of disagreeable things to-day,” she said. “God will
spare you much longer than that, you depressing old wedding-guest!”

He patted her hand which rested on his arm and looked down at her with
eyes softened by affection. But her fair hair, rather tumbled, which met
his glance must have awakened some memory that made his face a marble
mask again.

“Yes,” he said grimly, “but I am an old man and he is a young one. And I
want to see him dead before I die.”

“I will not have you think such bloodthirsty thoughts on my
wedding-day,” said Desiree. “See, there is Charles returning already,
and he has not been absent ten minutes. He has some one with him--who is
it? Papa... Mathilde, look! Who is it coming back with Charles in such a
hurry?”

Mathilde, who was setting the room in order, glanced through the lace
curtains.

“I do not know,” she answered indifferently. “Just an ordinary man.”

Desiree had turned away from the window as if to go downstairs and meet
her husband. She paused and looked back again over her shoulder towards
the street.

“Is it?” she said rather oddly. “I do not know--I--”

And she stood with the incompleted sentence on her lips waiting
irresolutely for Charles to come upstairs.

In a moment he burst into the room with all his usual exuberance and
high spirit.

“Picture to yourselves!” he cried, standing in the doorway with his arms
extended before him. “I was hurrying to head-quarters when I ran into
the embrace of my dear Louis--my cousin. I have told you a hundred times
that he is brother and father and everything to me. I am so glad that he
should come to-day of all days.”

He turned towards the stairs with a gesture of welcome, still with
his two arms outheld, as if inviting the man, who came rather slowly
upstairs, to come to his embrace and to the embrace of those who were
now his relations.

“There was a little suspicion of sadness--I do not know what it was--at
the table; but now it is all gone. All is well now that this unexpected
guest has come. This dear Louis.”

He went to the landing as he spoke, and returned bringing by the arm a
man taller than himself and darker, with a still brown face and steady
eyes set close together. He had a lean look of good breeding.

“This dear Louis!” repeated Charles. “My only relative in all the world.
My cousin, Louis d'Arragon. But he, par exemple, spells his name in two
words.”

The man bowed gravely--a comprehensive bow; but he looked at Desiree.

“This is my father-in-law,” continued Charles breathlessly. “Monsieur
Antoine Sebastian, and Desiree and Mathilde--my wife, my dear
Louis--your cousin, Desiree.”

He had turned again to Louis and shook him by the shoulders in the
fulness of his joy. He had not distinguished between Mathilde and
Desiree, and it was towards Mathilde that D'Arragon looked with a polite
and rather formal repetition of his bow.

“It is I... I am Desiree,” said the younger sister, coming forward with
a slow gesture of shyness.

D'Arragon took her hand.

“I have been happy,” he said, “in the moment of my arrival.”

Then he turned to Mathilde and bowed over the hand she held out to him.
Sebastian had come forward with a sudden return of his gracious and
rather old-world manner. He did not offer to shake hands, but bowed.

“A son of Louis d'Arragon who was fortunate enough to escape to
England?” he inquired with a courteous gesture.

“The only son,” replied the new-comer.

“I am honoured to make the acquaintance of Monsieur le Marquis,” said
Antoine Sebastian slowly.

“Oh, you must not call me that,” replied D'Arragon with a short laugh.
“I am an English sailor--that is all.”

“And now, my dear Louis, I leave you,” broke in Charles, who had rather
impatiently awaited the end of these formalities. “A brief half-hour and
I am with you again. You will stay here till I return.”

He turned, nodded gaily to Desiree and ran downstairs.

Through the open windows they heard his quick, light footfall as he
hurried up the Frauengasse. Something made them silent, listening to it.

It was not difficult to see that D'Arragon was a sailor. Not only had he
the brown face of those who live in the open, but he had the attentive
air of one whose waking moments are a watch.

“You look at one as if one were the horizon,” Desiree said to him
long afterwards. But it was at this moment in the drawing-room in the
Frauengasse that the comparison formed itself in her mind.

His face was rather narrow, with a square chin and straight lips. He was
not quick in speech like Charles, but seemed to think before he spoke,
with the result that he often appeared to be about to say something, and
was interrupted before the words had been uttered.

“Unless my memory is a bad one, your mother was an Englishwoman,
monsieur,” said Sebastian, “which would account for your being in the
English service.”

“Not entirely,” answered d'Arragon, “though my mother was indeed English
and died--in a French prison. But it was from a sense of gratitude that
my father placed me in the English service--and I have never regretted
it, monsieur.”

“Your father received kindnesses at English hands, after his escape,
like many others.”

“Yes, and he was too old to repay them by doing the country any service
himself. He would have done it if he could--”

D'Arragon paused, looking steadily at the tall old man who listened to
him with averted eyes.

“My father was one of those,” he said at length, “who did not think that
in fighting for Bonaparte one was necessarily fighting for France.”

Sebastian held up a warning hand.

“In England--” he corrected, “in England one may think such things. But
not in France, and still less in Dantzig.”

“If one is an Englishman,” replied D'Arragon with a smile, “one may
think them where one likes, and say them when one is disposed. It is one
of the privileges of the nation, monsieur.”

He made the statement lightly, seeing the humour of it with a
cosmopolitan understanding, without any suggestion of the boastfulness
of youth. Desiree noticed that his hair was turning grey at the temples.

“I did not know,” he said, turning to her, “that Charles was in Dantzig,
much less that he was celebrating so happy an occasion. We ran against
each other by accident in the street. It was a lucky accident that
allowed me to make your acquaintance so soon after you have become his
wife.”

“It scarcely seems possible that it should be an accident,” said
Desiree. “It must have been the work of fate--if fate has time to think
of such an insignificant person as myself and so small an event as my
marriage in these days.”

“Fate,” put in Mathilde in her composed voice and manner, “has come to
Dantzig to-day.”

“Ah!”

“Yes. You are the second unexpected arrival this afternoon.”

D'Arragon turned and looked at Mathilde. His manner, always grave and
attentive, was that of a reader who has found an interesting book on a
dusty shelf.

“Has the Emperor come?” he asked.

Mathilde nodded.

“I thought I saw something in Charles's face,” he said reflectively,
looking back through the open door towards the stairs where Charles had
nodded farewell to them. “So the Emperor is here, in Dantzig?”

He turned towards Sebastian, who stood with a stony face.

“Which means war,” he said.

“It always means war,” replied Sebastian in a tired voice. “Is he again
going to prove himself stronger than any?”

“Some day he will make a mistake,” said D'Arragon cheerfully. “And then
will come the day of reckoning.”

“Ah!” said Sebastian, with a shake of the head that seemed to indicate
an account so one-sided that none could ever liquidate it. “You are
young, monsieur. You are full of hope.”

“I am not young--I am thirty-one--but I am, as you say, full of hope. I
look to that day, Monsieur Sebastian.”

“And in the mean time?” suggested the man who seemed but a shadow of
someone standing apart and far away from the affairs of daily life.

“In the mean time one must play one's part,” returned D'Arragon, with
his almost inaudible laugh, “whatever it may be.”

There was no foreboding in his voice; no second meaning in the words. He
was open and simple and practical, like the life he led.

“Then you have a part to play, too,” said Desiree, thinking of Charles,
who had been called away at such an inopportune moment, and had gone
without complaint. “It is the penalty we pay for living in one of the
less dull periods of history. He touches your life too.”

“He touches every one's life, mademoiselle. That is what makes him so
great a man. Yes. I have a little part to play. I am like one of the
unseen supernumeraries who has to see that a door is open to allow the
great actors to make an effective entree. I am lent to Russia for the
war that is coming. It is a little part. I have to keep open one small
portion of the line of communication between England and St. Petersburg,
so that news may pass to and fro.”

He glanced towards Mathilde as he spoke. She was listening with an
odd eagerness which he noted, as he noted everything, methodically and
surely. He remembered it afterwards.

“That will not be easy, with Denmark friendly to France,” said
Sebastian, “and every Prussian port closed to you.”

“But Sweden will help. She is not friendly to France.”

Sebastian laughed, and made a gesture with his white and elegant hand,
of contempt and ridicule.

“And, bon Dieu! what a friendship it is,” he exclaimed, “that is based
on the fear of being taken for an enemy.”

“It is a friendship that waits its time, monsieur,” said D'Arragon
taking up his hat.

“Then you have a ship, monsieur, here in the Baltic?” asked Mathilde
with more haste than was characteristic of her usual utterance.

“A very small one, mademoiselle,” he answered. “So small that I could
turn her round here in the Frauengasse.”

“But she is fast?”

“The fastest in the Baltic, mademoiselle,” he answered. “And that is why
I must take my leave--with the news you have told me.”

He shook hands as he spoke, and bowed to Sebastian, whose generation was
content with the more formal salutation. Desiree went to the door, and
led the way downstairs.

“We have but one servant,” she said, “who is busy.”

On the doorstep he paused for a moment. And Desiree seemed to expect him
to do so.

“Charles and I have always been like brothers--you will remember that
always, will you not?”

“Yes,” she answered with her gay nod. “I will remember.”

“Then good-bye, mademoiselle.”

“Madame,” she corrected lightly.

“Madame, my cousin,” he said, and departed smiling.

Desiree went slowly upstairs again.



CHAPTER IV. THE CLOUDED MOON.



  Quand on se mefie on se trompe, quand on ne se mefie pas, on est
trompe.

Charles Darragon had come to Dantzig a year earlier. He was a
lieutenant in an infantry regiment, and he was twenty-five. Many of his
contemporaries were colonels in these days of quick promotion, when men
lived at such a rate that few of them lived long. But Charles was too
easy-going to envy any man.

When he arrived he knew no one in Dantzig, had few friends in the army
of occupation. In six months he possessed acquaintances in every street,
and was on terms of easy familiarity with all his fellow-officers.

“If the army of occupation had more officers like young Darragon,” a
town councillor had grimly said to Rapp, “the Dantzigers would soon be
resigned to your presence.”

It seemed that Charles had the gift of popularity. He was open and
hearty, hail-fellow-well-met with the new-comers, who were numerous
enough at this time, quick to understand the quiet men, ready to make
merry with the gay. Regarding himself, he was quite open and frank.

“I am a poor devil of a lieutenant,” he said, “that is all.”

Reserve is fatal to popularity, yet friendship cannot exist without
it. Charles had, it seemed, nothing to hide, and was indifferent to the
secrets of others. It is such people who receive many confidences.

“But it must go no farther...” a hundred men had said to him.

“My friend, by to-morrow I shall have forgotten all about it,” he
invariably replied, which men remembered afterwards and were glad.

A certain sort of friendship seemed to exist between Charles Darragon
and Colonel de Casimir--not without patronage on one side and a slightly
constraining sense of obligation on the other. It was de Casimir who
had introduced Charles to Mathilde Sebastian at a formal reception at
General Rapp's. Charles, of course, fell in love with Mathilde, and out
again after half-an-hour's conversation. There was something cold and
calculating about Mathilde which held him at arm's length with as much
efficacy as the strictest duenna. Indeed, there are some maidens who
require no better chaperon for their hearts than their own heads.

A few days after this introduction Charles met Mathilde and Desiree in
the Langgasse, and he fell in love with Desiree. He went about for
a whole week seeking opportunity to tell her without delay what had
happened to him. The opportunity presented itself before long; for
one morning he saw her walking quickly towards the Kuh-brucke with her
skates swinging from her wrist. It was a sunny, still, winter morning,
such as temperate countries never know. Desiree's eyes were bright
with youth and happiness. The cold air had slightly emphasized the rosy
colour of her cheeks.

Charles caught his breath at the sight of her, though she did not happen
to perceive him. He called a sleigh and drove to the barracks for his
own skates. Then to the Kuh-brucke, where a reach of the Mottlau was
cleared and kept in order for skating. He overpaid the sleigh-driver and
laughed aloud at the man's boorish surprise. There was no one so happy
as Charles Darragon in all the world. He was going to tell Desiree that
he loved her.

At first Desiree was surprised, as was only natural. For she had
not thought again of the pleasant young officer introduced to her by
Mathilde. They had not even commented on him after he had made his gay
bow and gone.

She had of course thought of these things in the abstract when her
busy mind had nothing more material and immediate to consider. She had
probably arranged how some abstract person should some day tell her of
his love and how she should make reply. But she had never imagined the
incident as it actually happened. She had never pictured a youth in a
gay uniform looking down at her with ardent eyes as he skated by her
side through the crisp still air, while the ice sang a high clear song
beneath their feet in accompaniment to his hurried laughing words of
protestation. He seemed to touch life lightly and to anticipate nothing
but happiness. In truth, it was difficult to be tragic on such a
morning.

These were the heedless days of the beginning of the century, when men
not only threw away their lives, but played ducks-and-drakes with their
chances of happiness in a manner quite incomprehensible to the careful
method of human thought to-day. Charles Darragon lived only in the
present moment. He was in love with her. Desiree must marry him.

It was quite different from what she had anticipated. She had looked
forward to such a moment with a secret misgiving. The abstract person
of her thoughts had always inspired her with a painful shyness and an
indefinite, breathless fear. But the lover who was here now in the flesh
by her side inspired none of these feelings. On the contrary, she felt
easy and natural and quite at home with him. There was nothing alarming
about his flushed face and laughing eyes. She was not at all afraid of
him. She even felt in some vague way older than he, though he had just
told her that he was twenty-five, and four years her senior.

She accepted the violets which he had hurriedly bought for her as he
came through the Langenmarkt, but she would not say that she loved him,
because she did not. She was in most ways quite a matter-of-fact person,
and she was of an honest mind. She said she would think about it. She
did not love him now--she knew that. She could not say that she would
not learn to love him some day, but there seemed no likelihood of it at
present. Then he would shoot himself! He would certainly shoot himself
unless she learnt to love him! And she asked “When?” and they both
laughed. They changed the subject, but after a time they came back to
it; which is the worst of love--one always comes back to it.

Then suddenly he began to assume an air of proprietorship, and burst
into a hundred explanations of what fears he felt for her; for her
happiness and welfare. Her father was absent-minded and heedless. He
was not a fit guardian for her. Was she not the prettiest girl in all
Dantzig--in all the world? Her sister was not fond enough of her to care
for her properly. He announced his intention of seeing her father the
next day. Everything should be done in order. Not a word must be hinted
by the most watchful neighbour against the perfect propriety of their
betrothal.

Desiree laughed and said that he was progressing rather rapidly. She had
only her instinct to guide her through these troubled waters; which was
much better than experience. Experience in a woman is tantamount to a
previous conviction against a prisoner.

Charles was grave, however; a rare tribute. He was in love for the
first time, which often makes men quite honest for a brief period--even
unselfish. Of course, some men are honest and unselfish all their lives;
which perhaps means that they remain in love--for the first time--all
their lives. They are rare, of course. But the sort of woman with whom
it is possible to remain in love all through a lifetime is rarer.

So Charles waylaid Antoine Sebastian the next day as he went out of the
Frauenthor for his walk in the morning sun by the side of the frozen
Mottlau. He was better received than he had any reason to expect.

“I am only a lieutenant,” he said, “but in these days, monsieur, you
know--there are possibilities.”

He laughed gaily as he waved his gloves in the direction of Russia,
across the river. But Sebastian's face clouded, and Charles, who was
quick and sympathetic, abandoned that point in his argument almost
before the words were out of his lips.

“I have a little money,” he said, “in addition to my pay. I assure you,
monsieur, I am not of mean birth.”

“You are an orphan?” said Sebastian curtly.

“Yes.”

“Of the... Terror?”

“Yes; I--well, one does not make much of one's parentage in these rough
times--monsieur.”

“Your father's name was Charles--like your own?”

“Yes.”

“The second son?”

“Yes, monsieur. Did you know him?”

“One remembers a name here and there,” answered Sebastian, in his stiff
manner, looking straight in front of him.

“There was a tone in your voice--,” began Charles, and, again perceiving
that he was on a false scent, broke off abruptly. “If love can make
mademoiselle happy--,” he said; and a gesture of his right hand seemed
to indicate that his passion was beyond the measure of words.

So Charles Darragon was permitted to pay his addresses to Desiree in the
somewhat formal manner of a day which, upon careful consideration,
will be found to have been no more foolish than the present. He made no
inquiries respecting Desiree's parentage. It was Desiree he wanted, and
that was all. They understood the arts of love and war in the great days
of the Empire.

The rest was easy enough, and the gods were kind. Charles had even
succeeded in getting a month's leave of absence. They were to spend
their honeymoon at Zoppot, a little fishing-village hidden in the pines
by the Baltic shore, only eight miles from Dantzig, where the Vistula
loses itself at last in the salt water.

All these arrangements had been made, as Desiree had prepared her
trousseau, with a zest and gaiety which all were invited to enjoy. It is
said that love is an egoist. Charles and Desiree had no desire to keep
their happiness to themselves, but wore it, as it were, upon their
sleeves.

The attitude of the Frauengasse towards Desiree's wedding was only
characteristic of the period. Every house in Dantzig looked askance upon
its neighbour at this time. Each roof covered a number of contending
interests.

Some were for the French, and some for the conqueror's unwilling ally,
William of Prussia. The names above the shops were German and Polish.
There are to-day Scotch names also, here as elsewhere on the Baltic
shores. When the serfs were liberated it was necessary to find surnames
for these free men--these Pauls-the-son-of-Paul; and the nobles of
Esthonia and Lithuania were reading Sir Walter Scott at the time.

The burghers of Dantzig (“They must be made to pay, these rich
Dantzigers,” wrote Napoleon to Rapp) trembled for their wealth, and
stood aghast by their empty counting-houses; for their gods had been
cast down; commerce was at a standstill. There were many, therefore,
who hated the French, and cherished a secret love of those bluff British
captains--so like themselves in build, and thought, and slowness of
speech--who would thrash their wooden brigs through the shallow seas,
despite decrees and threats and sloops-of-war, so long as they could lay
them alongside the granaries of the Vistula. Lately the very tolls had
been collected by a French customs service, and the wholesale smuggling,
to which even Governor Rapp--that long-headed Alsatian--had closed his
eyes, was at an end.

Again, the Poles who looked on Dantzig as the seaport of that great
kingdom of Eastern Europe which was and is no more, had been assured
that France would set up again the throne of the Jagellons and the
Sobieskis. There was a Poniatowski high in the Emperor's service and
esteem. The Poles were for France.

The Jew, hurrying along close by the wall--always in the shadow--traded
with all and trusted none. Who could tell what thoughts were hidden
beneath the ragged fur cap--what revenge awaited its consummation in the
heart crushed by oppression and contempt?

Besides these civilians there were many who had a military air within
their civil garb. For the pendulum of war had swung right across from
Cadiz to Dantzig, and swept northwards in its wake the merchants of
death, the men who live by feeding soldiers and rifling the dead.

All these were in the streets, rubbing shoulders with the gay epaulettes
of the Saxons, the Badeners, the Wurtembergers, the Westphalians, and
the Hessians, who had been poured into Dantzig by Napoleon during the
months when he had continued to exchange courteous and affectionate
letters with Alexander of Russia. For more than a year the broad-faced
Bavarians (who have borne the brunt of every war in Central Europe) had
been peaceably quartered in the town. Half a dozen different tongues
were daily heard in this city of the plain, and no man knew who might
be his friend and who his enemy. For some who were allies to-day were
commanded by their kings to slay each other to-morrow.

In the wine-cellars and the humbler beer-shops, in the great houses of
the councillors, and behind the snowy lace curtains of the Frauengasse
and the Portchaisengasse a thousand slow Northerners spoke of these
things and kept them in their hearts. A hundred secret societies passed
from mouth to mouth instruction, warning, encouragement. Germany has
always been the home of the secret society. Northern Europe gave birth
to those countless associations which have proved stronger than
kings and surer than a throne. The Hanseatic League, the first of the
commercial unions which were destined to build up the greatest empire of
the world, lived longest in Dantzig.

The Tugendbund, men whispered, was not dead but sleeping. Napoleon, who
had crushed it once, was watching for its revival; had a whole army of
his matchless secret police ready for it. And the Tugendbund had had its
centre in Dantzig.

Perhaps, in the Rathskeller itself--one of the largest wine stores in
the world, where tables and chairs are set beneath the arches of the
Exchange, a vast cave under the streets--perhaps here the Tugendbund
still encouraged men to be virtuous and self-denying for no other or
higher purpose than the overthrow of the Scourge of Europe. Here the
richer citizens have met from time immemorial to drink with solemnity
and a decent leisure the wines sent hither in their own ships from the
Rhine, from Greece and the Crimea, from Bordeaux and Burgundy, from
the Champagne and Tokay. This is not only the Rathskeller, but the real
Rathhaus, where the Dantzigers have taken counsel over their afternoon
wine from generation to generation, whence have been issued to all the
world those decrees of probity and a commercial uprightness between
buyer and seller, debtor and creditor, master and man, which reached to
every corner of the commercial world. And now it was whispered that
the latter-day Dantzigers--the sons of those who formed the Hanseatic
League: mostly fat men with large faces and shrewd, calculating eyes;
high foreheads; good solid men, who knew the world, and how to make
their way in it; withal, good judges of a wine and great drinkers, like
that William the Silent, who braved and met and conquered the European
scourge of mediaeval times--it was whispered that these were reviving
the Tugendbund.

Amid such contending interests, and in a free city so near to several
frontiers, men came and went without attracting undesired attention.
Each party suspected a new-comer of belonging to the other.

“He scrapes a fiddle,” Koch had explained to the inquiring fishwife. And
perhaps he knew no more than this of Antoine Sebastian. Sebastian was
poor. All the Frauengasse knew that. But the Frauengasse itself was
poor, and no man in Dantzig was so foolish at this time as to admit that
he had possessions.

This was, moreover, not the day of display or snobbery. The king of
snobs, Louis XVI., had died to some purpose, for a wave of manliness had
swept across human thought at the beginning of the century. The world
has rarely been the poorer for the demise of a Bourbon.

The Frauengasse knew that Antoine Sebastian played the fiddle to gain
his daily bread, while his two daughters taught dancing for that same
safest and most satisfactory of all motives.

“But he holds his head so high!” once observed the stout and
matter-of-fact daughter of a Councillor. “Why has he that grand manner?”

“Because he is a dancing-master,” replied Desiree with a grave
assurance. “He does it so that you may copy him. Chin up. Oh! how fat
you are.”

Desiree herself was slim enough and as yet only half grown. She did not
dance so well as Mathilde, who moved through a quadrille with the air of
a duchess, and threw into a polonaise or mazurka a quiet grace which was
the envy and despair of her pupils. Mathilde was patient with the slow
and heavy of foot, while Desiree told them bluntly that they were fat.
Nevertheless, they were afraid of Mathilde, and only laughed at Desiree
when she rushed angrily at them, and, seizing them by the arms, danced
them round the room with the energy of despair.

Sebastian, who had an oddly judicial air, such as men acquire who are
in authority, held the balance evenly between the sisters, and
smiled apologetically over his fiddle towards the victim of Desiree's
impetuosity.

“Yes,” he would reply to watching mothers, who tried to lead him to say
that their daughter was the best dancer in the school: “Yes, Mathilde
puts it into their heads, and Desiree shakes it down to their feet.”

In all matters of the household Desiree played a similar part. She was
up early and still astir after nine o'clock at night, when the other
houses in the Frauengasse were quiet, if there were work to do.

“It is because she has no method,” said Mathilde, who had herself a
well-ordered mind, and that quickness which never needs to hurry.



CHAPTER V. THE WEISSEN ROSS'L.



     The moth will singe her wings, and singed return,
     Her love of light quenching her fear of pain.

There are quite a number of people who get through life without
realizing their own insignificance. Ninety-nine out of a hundred persons
signify nothing, and the hundredth is usually so absorbed in the message
which he has been sent into the world to deliver that he loses sight of
the messenger altogether.

By a merciful dispensation of Providence we are permitted to bustle
about in our immediate little circle like the ant, running hither and
thither with all the sublime conceit of that insect. We pick up, as he
does, a burden which on close inspection will be found to be absolutely
valueless, something that somebody else has thrown away. We hoist it
over obstructions while there is usually a short way round; we fret and
sweat and fume. Then we drop the burden and rush off at a tangent to
pick up another. We write letters to our friends explaining to them what
we are about. We even indite diaries to be read by goodness knows whom,
explaining to ourselves what we have been doing. Sometimes we find
something that really looks valuable, and rush to our particular
ant-heap with it while our neighbours pause and watch us. But they
really do not care; and if the rumour of our discovery reach so far as
the next ant-heap, the bustlers there are almost indifferent, though a
few may feel a passing pang of jealousy. They may perhaps remember our
name, and will soon forget what we discovered--which is Fame. While we
are falling over each other to attain this, and dying to tell each other
what it feels like when we have it, or think we have it, let us pause
for a moment and think of an ant--who kept a diary.

Desiree did not keep a diary. Her life was too busy for ink. She had had
to work for her daily bread, which is better than riches. Her life had
been full of occupation from morning till night, and God had given her
sleep from night till morning. It is better to work for others than to
think for them. Some day the world will learn to have a greater respect
for the workers than for the thinkers, who are idle, wordy persons,
frequently thinking wrong.

Desiree remembered the siege and the occupation of Dantzig by French
troops. She was at school in the Jopengasse when the Treaty of
Tilsit--that peace which was nothing but a pause--was concluded. She
had seen Luisa of Prussia, the good Queen who baffled Napoleon. Her
childhood had passed away in the roar of siege-guns. Her girlhood, in
the Frauengasse, had been marked by the various woes of Prussia, by each
successive step in the development of Napoleon's ambition. There were
no bogey-men in the night-nursery at the beginning of the century. One
Aaron's rod of a bogey had swallowed all the rest, and children buried
their sobs in the pillow for fear of Napoleon. There were no ghosts in
the dark corners of the stairs when Desiree, candle in hand, went to bed
at eight o'clock, half an hour before Mathilde. The shadows on the wall
were the shadows of soldiers--the wind roaring in the chimney was
like the sound of distant cannon. When the timid glanced over their
shoulders, the apparition they looked for was that of a little man in a
cocked hat and a long grey coat.

This was not an age in which the individual life was highly valued. Men
were great to-day and gone to-morrow. Women were of small account. It
was the day of deeds and not of words.

Desiree had never been oppressed by a sense of her own importance, which
oppression leaves its mark on many a woman's face in these times. She
had not, it would seem, expected much from life; and when much was
given to her she received it without misgivings. She was young and
light-hearted, and she lived in a reckless age.

She was not surprised when Charles failed to return. The chaise that was
to carry them to Zoppot stood in the Frauengasse on the shady side of
the street in the heat of the afternoon for more than an hour. Then she
ran out and told the driver to go back to his stables.

“One cannot go for a honeymoon alone,” she explained airily to her
father, who was peevish and restless, standing by the window with the
air of one who expects without knowing what to expect. “It is, at all
events, quite clear that there is nothing for me to do but wait.”

She made light of it, and laughed at her father's grave face. Mathilde
said nothing, but her silence seemed to suggest that this was no more
than she had foretold, or at all events foreseen. She was too proud or
too generous to put her thoughts into words. For pride and generosity
are often confounded. There are many who give because they are too proud
to withhold.

Desiree got her needlework and sat by the open window awaiting Charles.
She could hear the continuous clatter of carts on the quay, and the
voices of the men working in the great granaries across the river.

The whole city seemed to be astir, and men hurried to and fro in even
the quiet Frauengasse, while the clatter of cavalry and the heavy rumble
of gun carriages could be heard over the roofs from the direction of the
Langenmarkt. There was a sense of hurry in the dusty air. The Emperor
had arrived, and the magic of his name lifted men out of themselves. It
seemed nothing extraordinary to Desiree that her life should be taken up
by this whirlwind, and carried on she knew not whither.

At dinner-time Charles had not returned. Antoine Sebastian dined at
half-past four, in the manner of Northern Europe; but his daughters
provided his table with the lighter meats of France, which he preferred
to the German cuisine. Sebastian's dinner was an event in the day,
though he ate sparingly enough, and found a mental rather than a
physical pleasure in the ceremonious sequence of courses.

It was now too late to think of going to Zoppot. After dinner Mathilde
and Desiree prepared the rooms which had been destined for the
occupation of the married pair after the honeymoon.

“We shall have to omit Zoppot, that is all,” said Desiree cheerfully,
and fell to unpacking the bridal clothes which had been so merrily laid
in the trunks.

At half-past six a soldier brought a hurried note from Charles.

“I cannot return to-night, as I am about to start for Konigsberg,” he
wrote. “It is a commission which I could not refuse if I wished to. You,
I know, would have me go and do my duty.”

There was more which Desiree did not read aloud. Charles had always
found it easy enough to tell Desiree how much he loved her, and was
gaily indifferent to the ears of others. But she seemed to be restrained
by some feeling which had found birth in her heart during her wedding
day. She said nothing of Charles's protestations of love.

“Decidedly,” she said, folding the letter, and placing it in her
work-basket, “Fate is interfering in our affairs to-day.”

She turned to her work again without further complaint, almost with
a sense of relief. Mathilde, whose steady grey eyes saw everything,
penetrating every thought, glanced at her with a suddenly aroused
interest. Desiree herself was half surprised at the philosophy with
which she met this fresh misfortune.

Antoine Sebastian had never acquired the habit of drinking tea in the
evening, which had found favour in these northern countries bordering
on Russia. Instead, he usually went out at this time to one of the many
wine-rooms or Bier Halles in the town to drink a slow and meditative
glass of beer with such friends as he had made in Dantzig. For he was a
lonely man, whose face was quite familiar to many who looked for a bow
or a friendly salutation in vain.

If he went to the Rathskeller it was on the invitation of a friend; for
he could not afford to pay the vintage of that cellar, though he drank
the wine with the slow mouthing of a connoisseur when he had it.

More often than not he took a walk first, passing out of the Frauenthor
on to the quay, where he turned to left or right and made his way back
through one or other of the town gates, by devious narrow streets
to that which is still called the Portchaisengasse though chairs and
carriers have long ceased to pass along it. Here, on the northern
side of the street is an old inn, “Zum weissen Ross'l,” with a broken,
ill-carved head of a white horse above the door. Across the face of the
house is written, in old German letters, an invitation:

                    Gruss Gott.  Tritt ein!
                    Bring Gluck herein.

But few seemed to accept it. Even a hundred years ago the White Horse
was behind the times, and fashion sought the wider streets.

Antoine Sebastian was perhaps ashamed of frequenting so humble a house
of entertainment, where for a groschen he could have a glass of beer.
He seemed to make his way through the narrower streets for some purpose,
changing his route from day to day, and hurrying across the wider
thoroughfares with the air of one desirous to attract but little
attention. He was not alone in the quiet streets, for there were many
in Dantzig at this time who from wealth had fallen to want. Many
counting-houses once noisy with prosperity were now closed and silent.
For five years the prosperous Dantzig had lain crushed beneath the iron
heel of the conqueror.

It would seem that Sebastian had only waited for the explanation of
Charles's most ill-timed absence to carry out his usual programme. The
clock in the tower of the Rathhaus had barely struck seven when he took
his hat and cloak from the peg near the dining-room door. He was so
absorbed that he did not perceive Papa Barlasch seated just within the
open door of the kitchen. But Barlasch saw him, and scratched his head
at the sight.

The northern evenings are chill even in June, and Sebastian fumbled with
his cloak. It would appear that he was little used to helping himself in
such matters. Barlasch came out of the kitchen when Sebastian's back
was turned and helped him to put the flowing cloak straight upon his
shoulders.

“Thank you, Lisa, thank you,” said Sebastian in German, without looking
round. By accident Barlasch had performed one of Lisa's duties, and
the master of the house was too deeply engaged in thought to notice
any difference in the handling or to perceive the smell of snuff that
heralded the approach of Papa Barlasch. Sebastian took his hat and went
out closing the door behind him, and leaving Barlasch, who had followed
him to the door, standing rather stupidly on the mat.

“Absent-minded--the citizen,” muttered Barlasch, returning to the
kitchen, where he resumed his seat on a chair by the open door. He
scratched his head and appeared to lapse into thought. But his brain was
slow as were his movements. He had been drinking to the health of the
bride. He thumped himself on the brow with his closed fist.

“Sacred-name-of-a-thunderstorm,” he said. “Where have I seen that face
before?”

Sebastian went out by the Frauenthor to the quay. Although it was dusk,
the granaries were still at work. The river was full of craft and the
roadway choked by rows and rows of carts, all of one pattern, too big
and too heavy for roads that are laid across a marsh.

He turned to the right, but found his way blocked at the corner of the
Langenmarkt, where the road narrows to pass under the Grunes Thor. Here
the idlers of the evening hour were collected in a crowd, peering over
each other's shoulders towards the roadway and the bridge. Sebastian
was a tall man, and had no need to stand on tip-toe in order to see the
straight rows of bayonets swinging past, and the line of shakos rising
and falling in unison with the beat of a thousand feet on the hollow
woodwork of the drawbridge.

The troops had been passing out of the city all the afternoon on the
road to Elbing and Konigsberg.

“It is the same,” said a man standing near to Sebastian, “at the Hohes
Thor, where they are marching out by the road leading to Konigsberg by
way of Dessau.”

“It is farther than Konigsberg that they are going,” was the significant
answer of a white-haired veteran who had probably been at Eylau, for he
had a crushed look.

“But war is not declared,” said the first speaker.

“Does that matter?”

And both turned towards Sebastian with the challenging air that invites
opinion or calls for admiration of uncommon shrewdness. He was better
clad than they. He must know more than they did. But Sebastian looked
over their heads and did not seem to have heard their conversation.

He turned back and went another way, by side streets and the little
narrow alleys that nearly always encircle a cathedral, and are still
to be found on all sides of the Marienkirche. At last he came to the
Portchaisengasse, which was quiet enough in the twilight, though he
could hear the tramp of soldiers along the Langgasse and the rumble of
the guns.

There were only two lamps in the Portchaisengasse, swinging on
wrought-iron gibbets at each end of the street. These were not yet
alight, though the day was fading fast, and the western light could
scarcely find its way between the high gables which hung over the road
and seemed to lean confidentially towards each other.

Sebastian was going towards the door of the Weissen Ross'l when some
one came out of the hostelry, as if he had been awaiting him within the
porch.

The new-comer, who was a fat man with baggy cheeks and odd, light blue
eyes--the eyes of an enthusiast, one would say--passed Sebastian, making
a little gesture which at once recommended silence, and bade him turn
and follow. At the entrance to a little alley leading down towards
the Marienkirche the fat man awaited Sebastian, whose pace had not
quickened, nor had his walk lost any of its dignity.

“Not there to-night,” said the man, holding up a thick forefinger and
shaking it sideways.

“Then where?”

“Nowhere to-night,” was the answer. “He has come--you know that?”

“Yes,” answered Sebastian slowly, “for I saw him.”

“He is at supper now with Rapp and the others. The town is full of his
people. His spies are everywhere. There are two in the Weissen Ross'l
who pretend to be Bavarians. See! There is another--just there.”

He pointed the thick forefinger down the Portchaisengasse where it
widens to meet the Langgasse, where the last remains of daylight,
reflected to and fro between the houses, found freer play than in the
narrow alley where they stood.

Sebastian looked in the direction indicated. An officer was walking away
from them. A quick observer would have noticed that his spurs made no
noise, and that he carried his sword instead of allowing it to clatter
after him. It was not clear whence he had come. It must have been from a
doorway nearly opposite to the Weissen Ross'l.

“I know that man,” said Sebastian.

“So do I,” was the reply. “It is Colonel de Casimir.”

With a little nod the fat man went out again into the Portchaisengasse
in the direction of the inn, as if he were keeping watch there.



CHAPTER VI. THE SHOEMAKER OF KONIGSBERG.



     Chacun ne comprend que ce qu'il trouve en soi.

Nearly two years had passed since the death of Queen Luisa of Prussia.
And she from her grave yet spake to her people--as sixty years later she
was destined to speak to another King of Prussia, who said a prayer by
her tomb before departing on a journey that was to end in Fontainebleau
with an imperial crown and the reckoning for all time of the seven years
of woe that followed Tilsit and killed a queen.

Two years earlier than that, in 1808, while Luisa yet lived, a
few scientists and professors of Konigsberg had formed a sort of
Union--vague enough and visionary--to encourage virtue and discipline
and patriotism. And now, in 1812, four years later, the memory of Luisa
still lingered in those narrow streets that run by the banks of the
Pregel beneath the great castle of Konigsberg, while the Tugendbund,
like a seed that has been crushed beneath an iron heel, had spread its
roots underground.

From Dantzig, the commercial, to Konigsberg, the kingly and the learned,
the tide of war rolled steadily onwards. It is a tide that carries
before it a certain flotsam of quick and active men, keen-eyed,
restless, rising--men who speak with a sharp authority and pay from a
bottomless purse. The arrival of Napoleon in Dantzig swept the first of
the tide on to Konigsberg.

Already every house was full. The high-gabled warehouses on the
riverside could not be used for barracks, for they too had been crammed
from floor to roof with stores and arms. So the soldiers slept where
they could. They bivouacked in the timber-yards by the riverside. The
country-women found the Neuer Markt transformed into a camp when they
brought their baskets in the early morning, but they met with eager
buyers, who haggled laughingly in half a dozen different tongues. There
was no lack of money, however.

Cartloads of it were on the road.

The Neuer Markt in Konigsberg is a square, of which the lower side is a
quay on the Pregel. The river is narrow here. Across it the country is
open. The houses surrounding the quadrangle are all alike--two-storied
buildings with dormer windows in the roof. There are trees in front. In
front of that which is now Number Thirteen, at the right-hand corner,
facing west, sideways to the river, the trees grow quite close to the
windows, so that an active man or a boy might without great risk leap
from the eaves below the dormer window into the topmost branches of the
linden, which here grows strong and tough, as it surely should do in the
fatherland.

A young soldier, seeking lodgings, who happened to knock at the door of
Number Thirteen less than thirty hours after the arrival of Napoleon at
Dantzig, looked upward through the shady boughs, and noted their growth
with the light of interest in his eye. It would almost seem that the
house had been described to him as that one in the Neuer Markt against
which the lindens grew. For he had walked all round the square between
the trees and houses before knocking at this door, which bore no number
then, as it does to-day.

His tired horse had followed him meditatively, and now stood with
drooping head in the shade. The man himself wore a dark uniform, white
with dust. His hair was dusty and rather lank. He was not a very tidy
soldier.

He stood looking at the sign which swung from the doorpost, a relic
of the Polish days. It bore the painted semblance of a boot. For in
Poland--a frontier country, as in frontier cities where many tongues are
heard--it is the custom to paint a picture rather than write a word. So
that every house bears the sign of its inmate's craft, legible alike to
Lithuanian or Ruthenian, Swede or Cossack of the Don.

He knocked again, and at last the door was opened by a thickly-built
man, who looked, not at his face, but at his boots. As these wanted no
repair he half closed the door again and looked at the newcomer's face.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“A lodging.”

The door was almost closed, when the soldier made an odd and, as it
would seem, tentative gesture with his left hand. All the fingers were
clenched, and with his extended thumb he scratched his chin slowly from
side to side.

“I have no lodging to let,” said the bootmaker. But he did not shut the
door.

“I can pay,” said the other, with his thumb still at his chin. He had
quick, blue eyes beneath the shaggy hair that wanted cutting. “I am very
tired--it is only for one night.”

“Who are you?” asked the bootmaker.

The soldier was a dull and slow man. He leant against the doorpost with
tired gestures before replying.

“Sergeant in a Schleswig regiment, in charge of spare horses.”

“And you have come far?”

“From Dantzig without a halt.”

The shoemaker looked him up and down with a doubting eye, as if there
were something about him that was not quite clear and above-board. The
dust and fatigue were, however, unmistakable.

“Who sent you to me, anyway?” he grumbled.

“Oh, I do not know,” was the half-impatient answer; “the man I lodged
with in Dantzig or another, I forget. It was Koch the locksmith in the
Schmiedegasse. See, I have money. I tell you it is for one night. Say
yes or no. I want to get to bed and to sleep.”

“How much do you pay?”

“A thaler--if you like. Among friends, one is willing to pay.”

After a short minute of hesitation the shoemaker opened the door wider
and came out.

“And there will be another thaler for the horse, which I shall have
to take to the stable of the wood-merchant at the corner. Go into the
workshop and sit down till I come.”

He stood in the doorway and watched the soldier seat himself wearily on
a bench in the workshop among the ancient boots, past repair, one would
think, and lean his head against the wall.

He was half asleep already, and the bootmaker, who was lame, shrugged
his shoulders as he led away the tired horse, with a gesture half of
pity, half of doubting suspicion. Had it suggested itself to his mind,
and had it been within the power of one so halt and heavy-footed to turn
back noiselessly, he would have found his visitor wide-awake enough,
hurriedly opening every drawer and peering under the twine and needles,
lifting every bale of leather, shaking out the very boots awaiting
repair.

When the dweller in Number Thirteen returned, the soldier was asleep,
and had to be shaken before he would open his eyes.

“Will you eat before you go to bed?” asked the bootmaker not unkindly.

“I ate as I came along the street,” was the reply. “No, I will go to
bed. What time is it?”

“It is only seven o'clock--but no matter.”

“No, it is no matter. To-morrow I must be astir by five.”

“Good,” said the shoemaker. “But you will get your money's worth. The
bed is a good one. It is my son's. He is away, and I am alone in the
house.”

He led the way upstairs as he spoke, going heavily one step at a time,
so that the whole house seemed to shake beneath his tread. The room was
that attic in the roof which has a dormer window overhanging the linden
tree. It was small and not too clean; for Konigsberg was once a Polish
city, and is not far from the Russian frontier.

The soldier hardly noticed his surroundings, but sat down instantly,
with the abandonment of a shepherd's dog at the day's end.

“I will put a stitch in your boots for you while you sleep,” said the
host casually. “The thread is rotten, I can see. Look here--and here!”

He stooped, and with a quick turn of the awl which he carried in his
belt he snapped the sewing at the join of the leg and the upper leather,
bringing the frayed ends of the thread out to view.

Without answering, the soldier looked round for the boot-jack, lacking
which, no German or Polish bedroom is complete.

When the bootmaker had gone, carrying the boots under his arm, the
soldier, left to himself, made a grimace at the closed door. Without
boots he was a prisoner in the house. He could hear his host at work
already, downstairs in the shop, of which the door opened to the stairs
and allowed passage to that smell of leather which breeds Radical
convictions.

The regular “tap-tap” of the cobbler's hammer continued for an hour
until dusk, and all the while the soldier lay dressed on his bed. Soon
after, a creaking of the stairs told of the surreptitious approach of
the unwilling host. He listened outside, and even tried the door, but
found it bolted. The soldier, open-eyed on the bed, snored aloud. At the
sound of the key on the outside of the door he made a grimace again. His
features were very mobile, for Schleswig.

He heard the bootmaker descend the stairs again almost noiselessly,
and, rising from the bed, he took his station at the window. All the
Langgasse would seem to be eating-houses. The basement, which has a
separate door, gives forth odours of simple Pomeranian meats, and every
other house bears to this day the curt but comforting inscription, “Here
one eats.” It was only to be supposed that the bootmaker at the end of
his day would repair for supper to some special haunt near by.

But the smell of cooking mingling with that of leather told that he was
preparing his own evening meal. He was, it seemed, an unsociable man,
who had but a son beneath his roof, and mostly lived alone.

Seated near the window, where the sunset light yet lingered, the
Schleswiger opened his haversack, which was well supplied, and finding
paper, pens and ink, fell to writing with one eye watchful of the window
and both ears listening for any movement in the room below.

He wrote easily with a running pen, and sometimes he smiled as he wrote.
More than once he paused and looked across the Neuer Markt above the
trees and the roofs, towards the western sky, with a sudden grave
wistfulness. He was thinking of some one in the west. It was assuredly
not of war that this soldier wrote. Then, again, his attention would be
attracted to some passer in the street below. He only gave half of his
attention to his letter. He was, it seemed, a man who as yet touched
life lightly; for he was quite young. But, nevertheless, his pen, urged
by only half a mind that had all the energy of spring, flew over the
paper. Sowing is so much easier than reaping.

Suddenly he threw his pen aside and moved quickly to the window which
stood open. The shoemaker had gone out, closing the door softly behind
him.

It was to be expected that he would turn to the left, upwards towards
the town and the Langgasse, but it was in the direction of the river
that his footsteps died away. There was no outlet on that side except by
boat.

It was almost dark now, and the trees growing close to the window
obscured the view. So eager was the lodger to follow the movements of
his landlord that he crept in stocking-feet out on to the roof. By lying
on his face below the window he could just distinguish the shadowy form
of a lame man by the river edge. He was moving to and fro, unchaining a
boat moored to the steps, which are more used in winter when the Pregel
is a frozen roadway than in summer. There was no one else in the Neuer
Markt, for it was the supper hour.

Out in the middle of the river a few ships were moored: high-prowed,
square-sterned vessels of a Dutch build trading in the Frische Haaf and
in the Baltic.

The soldier saw the boat steal out towards them. There was no other boat
at the steps or in sight. He stood up on the edge of the roof, and after
carefully measuring his distance, with quick eyes aglow with excitement,
he leapt lightly across the leafy space into the topmost boughs, where
he alighted in a forked branch almost without sound.

At dawn the next morning, while the shoemaker still slept, the soldier
was astir again. He shivered as he rose, and went to the window, where
his clothes were hanging from a rafter. The water was still dripping
from them. Wrapt in a blanket he sat down by the open window to write
while the morning air should dry his clothes.

That which he wrote was a long report--sheet after sheet closely
written. And in the middle of his work he broke off to read again the
letter that he had written the night before. With a quick, impulsive
gesture he kissed the name it bore. Then he turned to his work again.

The sun was up before he folded the papers together. By way of a
postscript he wrote a brief letter.

“DEAR C.--I have been fortunate, as you will see from the enclosed
report. His Majesty cannot again say that I have been neglectful. I was
quite right. It is Sebastian and only Sebastian that we need fear. Here
they are clumsy conspirators compared to him. I have been in the river
half the night listening at the open stern-window of a Reval pink to
every word they said. His Majesty can safely come to Konigsberg. Indeed,
he is better out of Dantzig. For the whole country is riddled with that
which they call patriotism, and we treason. But I can only repeat what
his Majesty disbelieved the day before yesterday--that the heart of the
ill is Dantzig, and the venom of it Sebastian. Who he really is and
what he is about you must find out how you can. I go forward to-day to
Gumbinnen. The enclosed letter to its address, I beg of you, if only in
acknowledgment of all that I have sacrificed.”

The letter was unsigned, and bore the date, “Dawn, June 10.” This and
the report, and that other letter (carefully sealed with a wafer)
which did not deal with war or its alarms, were all placed in one large
envelope. He did not seal it, however, but sat thinking while the sun
began to shine on the opposite houses. Then he withdrew the open letter,
and added a postscript to it:

“If an attempt were made on N.'s life--I should say Sebastian. If
Prussia were to play us false suddenly, and cut us off from France--I
should say nothing else than Sebastian. He is more dangerous than a
fanatic; for he is too clever to be one.”

The writer shivered and laughed in sheer amusement at his own misery
as he drew on his wet clothes. The shoemaker was already astir, and
presently knocked at his door.

“Yes, yes,” the soldier cried, “I am astir.”

And as his host rattled the door he opened it. He had unrolled his long
cavalry cloak, and wore it over his wet clothes.

“You never told me your name,” said the shoemaker. A suspicious man is
always more suspicious at the beginning of the day.

“My name,” answered the other carelessly. “Oh! my name is Max Brunner.”



CHAPTER VII. THE WAY OF LOVE.



   Celui qui souffle le feu s'expose a etre brule par les
etincelles.

It was said that Colonel de Casimir--that guest whose presence
and uniform lent an air of distinction to the quiet wedding in the
Frauengasse--was a Pole from Cracow. Men also whispered that he was in
the confidence of the Emperor. But this must only have been a manner of
speaking. For no man was ever admitted fully into the thoughts of that
superhuman mind.

De Casimir was left behind in Dantzig when the army moved forward.

“There will be a great battle,” he said, “somewhere near Vilna--and I
shall miss it.”

Indeed, every man was striving to get to the front. He who, himself, had
given a new meaning to human ambition seemed able to inspire not only
Frenchmen but soldiers of every nationality with fire from his own
consuming flame.

“Yes! madame,” said de Casimir; for it was to Desiree that he spoke,
“and your husband is more fortunate than I. He is sure of a staff
appointment. He will be among the first. It will soon be over. To-morrow
war is to be declared.”

They were in the street--not far from the Frauengasse, whence Desiree,
always practical, was hurrying towards the market-place. De Casimir had
seemed idle until he perceived her.

Desiree made a little movement of horror at the announcement. She did
not know that the fighting had already begun.

“Ah!” cried de Casimir with a reassuring smile. “You must be of good
cheer. There will be no war at all. I tell you that in confidence.
Russia will be paralyzed. I was going towards the Frauengasse when I
perceived you; to pay my respects to your father, to say a word to you.
Come--you are smiling again. That is right. You were so grave, madame,
as you hurried along with your eyes looking far away. You must not think
of Charles, if the thoughts make you look as you looked then.”

His manner was kind and confidential and easy--inviting in response that
which the confidential always expect, a return in kind. It is either
hit or miss with such people; and de Casimir missed. He saw Desiree draw
back. She was young, and of that clear fairness of skin which seems to
let the thoughts out through the face so that any can read them. That
which her face expressed at that moment was a clear and definite refusal
to confide anything whatsoever in this little dark man who stood in
front of her, looking into her eyes with a deferential and sympathetic
glance.

“I know for certain,” he said, “that Charles was well two days ago, and
that he is highly thought of in high quarters. I can tell you that, at
all events.”

“Thank you,” said Desiree. She had nothing against de Casimir. She had
only seen him once or twice, and she knew him to be Charles's friend,
and in some sense his patron. For de Casimir held a high position in
Dantzig. She was quite ready to like him since Charles liked him; but
she intended to do so at her own range. It is always the woman who
measures the distance.

Desiree made a little movement as if to continue on her way; and de
Casimir instantly stood aside, with a bow.

“Shall I find your father at home?” he asked.

“I think so. He was at home when I left,” she answered, responding to
his salute with a friendly nod.

De Casimir watched her go and stood for a moment in reflection, as if
going over in his mind that which had passed between them.

“I must try the other one,” he said to himself as he turned down the
Pfaffengasse. He continued his way at a leisurely pace. At the corner of
the Frauengasse he lingered in the shadow of the linden trees, and while
so doing saw Antoine Sebastian quit the door of No. 36, going in
the opposite direction towards the river, and pass out through the
Frauenthor on to the quay.

He made a little gesture of annoyance on being told by the servant that
Sebastian was out. After a moment's reflection, he seemed to make up his
mind to ignore the conventionalities.

“It is merely,” he said in his friendly and confidential manner to the
servant, in perfect German, “that I have news from Monsieur Darragon,
the husband of Mademoiselle Desiree. Madame is out--you say. Well, then,
what is to be done?”

He had a most charming, grave manner of asking advice which few could
resist.

The servant nodded at him with a twinkle of understanding in her eye.

“There is Fraulein Mathilde.”

“But... well, ask her if she will do me the honour of speaking to me for
an instant. I leave it to you....”

“But come in,” protested the servant. “Come upstairs. She will see you;
why not?”

And she led the way upstairs. Papa Barlasch, sitting just within the
kitchen door, where he sat all day doing nothing, glanced upwards
through his overhanging eyebrows at the clink of spurs and the clatter
of de Casimir's sword against the banisters. He had the air of a
watchdog.

Mathilde was not in the drawing-room, and the servant left the visitor
there alone, saying that she would seek her mistress. There were one or
two books on the tables. One table was rather untidy; it was Desiree's.
A writing-desk stood in the corner of the room. It was locked--and the
lock was a good one. De Casimir was an observant man. He had time
to make this observation, and to see that there were no letters in
Desiree's work-basket; to note the titles of the books and the absence
of name on the flyleaf, and was looking out of the window when the door
opened and Mathilde came in.

This was a day when women were treated with a great show of deference,
while in reality they had but little voice in the world's affairs. De
Casimir's bow was deeper and more elaborate than would be considered
polite to-day. On standing erect he quickly suppressed a glance of
surprise.

Mathilde must have expected him. She was dressed in white, and her hair
was tied with a bright ribbon. In her cheeks, usually so pale, was a
little touch of colour. It may have been because Desiree was not near,
but de Casimir had never known until this moment how pretty Mathilde
really was. There was something in her eyes, too, which gripped his
attention. He remembered that at the wedding he had never seen her eyes.
They had always been averted. But now they met his with a troubling
directness.

De Casimir had a gallant manner. All women commanded his eager
respect, which they could assess at such value as their fancy painted,
remembering that it is for the woman to measure the distance. On the few
occasions of previous encounters, de Casimir had been empresse in his
manner towards Mathilde. As he looked at her, his quick mind ran back to
former meetings. He had no recollection of having actually made love to
her.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “for a soldier--in time of war--the conventions
may, perhaps, be slightly relaxed. I was told that you were alone--that
your father is out, and yet I persisted--”

He spread out his hands and laughed appealingly, begging her, it
would seem, to help him out of the social difficulty in which he found
himself.

“My father will be sorry--” she began.

“That is hardly the question,” he interrupted; “I was thinking of your
displeasure. But I have an excuse, I assure you. I only ask a moment to
tell you that I have heard from Konigsberg that Charles Darragon is in
good health there, and is moving forward with the advance-guard to the
frontier.”

“You are kind to come so soon,” answered Mathilde, and there was an odd
note of disappointment in her voice. De Casimir must have heard it, for
he glanced at her again with a gleam of surprise in his eyes.

“That is my excuse, Mademoiselle,” he said with a tentative emphasis, as
if he were feeling his way. He was an opportunist with all the quickness
of one who must live by his wits among others existing on the same
uncertain fare. He saw her flush, and again he hesitated as a wayfarer
may hesitate when he finds an easy road where he had expected to climb a
hill. What was the meaning of it? he seemed to ask himself.

“Charles does not interest you so much as he interests your sister?” he
suggested.

“He has never interested me much,” she replied indifferently. She did
not ask him to sit down. It would not have been etiquette in an age
when women were by some odd misjudgment considered incapable of managing
their own hearts.

“Is that because he is in love, Mademoiselle?” inquired de Casimir with
a guarded laugh.

“Perhaps so.”

She did not look at him. De Casimir had not missed this time. His air
of candid confidence had met with a quick response. He laughed again and
moved towards the door. Mathilde stood motionless, and although she said
no word, nor by any gesture bade him stay, he stopped on the threshold
and turned again towards her.

“It was my conscience,” he said, looking at her over his shoulder, “that
bade me go.”

Her face and her averted eyes asked why, but her straight lips were
silent.

“Because I cannot claim to be more interesting than Charles Darragon,”
 he hazarded. “And you, Mademoiselle, confess that you have no tolerance
for a man who is in love.”

“I have no tolerance for a man who is weakened by love. He should be
strengthened and hardened by it.”

“To--?”

“To do a man's work in the world,” said Mathilde coldly.

De Casimir was standing by the open door. He closed it with his foot.
He was professedly a man alert for the chance of a moment, which he
was content to grasp without pausing to look ahead. Should there be
difficulties yet unperceived, these in turn might present an opportunity
to be seized by the quick-witted.

“Then you would admit, Mademoiselle,” he said gravely, “that there may
be good in a love that fights continually against ambition, and--does
not prevail.”

Mathilde did not answer at once. There was an odd suggestion of
antagonism in their attitude towards each other--not irreconcilable, the
poets tell us, with love--but this is assuredly not the Love that comes
from Heaven and will go back there to live through eternity.

“Yes,” said she at length.

“Such is my love for you,” he said, his quick instinct telling him that
with Mathilde few words were best.

He only spoke the thoughts of his age; for ambition was the ruling
passion in men's hearts at this time. All who served the Great
Adventurer gave it the first place in their consideration, and de
Casimir only aped his betters. Though oddly enough the only two of
all the great leaders who were to emerge still greater from the coming
war--Ney and Eugene--thought otherwise on these matters.

“I mean to be great and rich, Mademoiselle,” he added after a pause. “I
have risked my life for that purpose half a dozen times.”

Mathilde stood looking across the room towards the window. He could
only see her profile and the straight line of her lips. She too was the
product of a generation in which men rose to dazzling heights without
the aid of women.

“I should not have troubled you with these details, Mademoiselle,” he
said, watching her. His instinct was very keen, for not one woman in
a thousand, even in those days, would have admitted that love was a
detail. “I should not have mentioned it--had you not given me your
views--so strangely in harmony with my own.”

Whatever his nationality, his voice was that of a Pole--rich, musical,
and expressive. He could have made, one would have thought, a very
different sort of love had he wished, or had he been sincere. But he was
an opportunist. This was the sort of love that Mathilde wanted.

He came a step nearer to her and stood resting on his sword--a lean hard
man who had seen much war.

“Until you opened my eyes,” he said, “I did not know, or did not care to
know, that love, far from being a drag on ambition, may be a help.”

Mathilde made a little movement towards him which she instantly
repressed. The heart is quicker, but the head nearly always has the last
word.

“Mademoiselle,” he said--and no doubt he saw the movement and the
restraint--“will you help me now at the beginning of the war, and listen
to me again at the end of it--if I succeed?”

After all, he was modest in his demands.

“Will you help me? Together, Mademoiselle--to what height may we not
rise in these days?”

There was a ring of sincerity in his voice, and her eyes answered it.

“How can I help you?” she asked in a doubting voice.

“Oh, it is a small matter,” was the reply. “But it is one in which the
Emperor is personally interested. Such things have a special attraction
for him. The human interest never fails to hold his attention. If I do
well, he will know it and remember me. It is a question, Mademoiselle,
of secret societies. You know that Prussia is riddled with them.”

Mathilde did not answer. He studied her face, which was clean cut and
hard like a marble bust--a good face to hide a secret.

“It is my duty to watch here in Dantzig and to report to the Emperor.
In serving myself I could also perhaps serve a friend, one who might
otherwise run into danger--who may be in danger while you and I stand
here. For the Emperor strikes hard and quickly. I speak of your father,
Mademoiselle--and of the Tugendbund.”

Still he could not see from the pale profile whether Mathilde knew
anything at all.

“And if I procure information for you?” asked she at length, in a quiet
and collected voice.

“You will help me to attain a position such as I could ask--even you--to
share with me. And you would do your father no harm. You would even
render him a service. For all the secret societies in Germany will not
stop Napoleon. It is only God who can stop him now, Mademoiselle. All
men who attempt it will only be crushed beneath the wheels. I might save
your father.”

But Mathilde did not seem to be thinking of her father.

“I am hampered by poverty,” de Casimir said, changing his ground. “In
the old days it did not matter. But now, in the Empire, one must be
rich. I shall be rich--at the end of this campaign.”

Again his voice was sincere, and again her eyes responded. He made a
step forward, and gently taking her hand, he raised it to his lips.

“You will help me!” he said, and, turning abruptly on his heel, he left
her.

De Casimir's quarters were in the Langenmarkt. On returning to them, he
took from his despatch-case a letter which he turned over thoughtfully
in his hand. It was addressed to Desiree, and sealed carefully with a
wafer.

“She may as well have it,” he said. “It will be as well that she should
be occupied with her own affairs.”



CHAPTER VIII. A VISITATION.



     Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so.

Whenever Papa Barlasch caught sight of his unwilling host's face, he
turned his own aside with a despairing upward nod. Once or twice, during
the early days of his occupation of the room behind the kitchen in the
Frauengasse, he smote himself sharply on the brow, as if calling upon
his brain to make an effort. But afterwards he seemed to resign himself
to this lapse of memory, and the upward despairing nod gradually lost
intensity until at last he brought himself to pass Antoine Sebastian in
the narrow passage with no more emphatic notice than a scowl.

“You and I,” he said to Desiree, “are the friends. The others--”

And his gesture seemed to permit the others to go hang if they so
desired. The army had gone forward, leaving Dantzig in that idle
restlessness which holds those who, finding themselves in a house of
sickness, are not permitted entry to the darkened chamber, but must
await the crisis elsewhere.

There were some busy enough in the commerce that must exist between a
huge army and its base, in the forwarding of war material and stores, in
accommodating the sick and sending out in return those who were to
fill the gaps. But the Dantzigers themselves had nothing to do. Their
prosperous trade was paralyzed. Those who had aught to sell had sold it.
The high-seas and the high-roads were alike blocked by the French. And
rumour, ever busy among those that wait, ran to and fro in the town.

The Emperor of Russia had been taken prisoner. Napoleon had been
checked at the passage of the Niemen. There had been a great battle at
Gumbinnen, and the French were in full retreat. Vilna had capitulated to
Murat, and the war was at an end. A hundred authentic despatches of the
morning were the subject of contemptuous laughter at the supper-table.

Lisa heard these tales in the market-place, and told Desiree, who,
as often as not, translated them to Barlasch. But he only held up his
wrinkled forefinger and shook it slowly from side to side.

“Woman's chatter!” he said. “What is the German for 'magpie'?”

And on being told the word, he repeated it gravely to Lisa. For he had
not only fulfilled his promise of settling down in the house, but had
assumed therein a distinct and clearly defined position. He was the
counsellor, and from his chair just within the kitchen he gave forth
judgment.

“And you,” he said to Desiree one morning, when household affairs had
taken her to the kitchen, “you are troubled this morning. You have had a
letter from your husband?”

“Yes--and he is in good health.”

“Ah!”

Barlasch glared at her beneath his brows, looking her up and down,
noting her quick movements, which had the uncertainty of youth.

“And now that he is gone,” he said, “and that there is war, you are
going to employ yourself by falling in love with him, when you had all
the time before, and did not take advantage of it.”

Desiree laughed at him and made no other answer. While she spoke to Lisa
he sat and watched them.

“It would be like a woman to do such a thing,” he pursued. “They are
so inconvenient--women. They get married for fun, and then one fine
Thursday they find they have missed all the fun, like one who comes late
to the theatre--when the music is over.”

He went to the table and examined the morning marketing, which Lisa
had laid out in preparation for dinner. Of some of her purchases he
approved, but he laughed aloud at a lettuce which had no heart, and at
such a buyer.

Then Desiree attracted his scrutiny again.

“Yes,” he said, half to himself, “I see it. You are in love. Just
Heaven, I know! I have had them in love with me.... Barlasch.”

“That must have been a long time ago,” answered Desiree with her gay
laugh, only giving him half her attention.

“Yes, it was a century ago. But they were the same then as they are now,
as they always will be--inconvenient. They waited, however, till they
were grown up!”

And with his ever-ready accusing finger he drew Desiree's attention to
her own slimness. They were left alone for a minute while Lisa answered
a knock at the door, during which time Barlasch sat in grim silence.

“It is a letter,” said Lisa, returning. “A sailor brought it.”

“Another?” said Barlasch, with a gesture of despair.

“Can you give me news of Charles?” Desiree read, in a writing that was
unknown to her. “I shall wait a reply until midnight on board the
Elsa, lying off the Krahn-Thor.” The letter bore the signature, “Louis
d'Arragon.” Desiree turned slowly and went upstairs, carrying it folded
small in her closed hand.

She was alone in the house, for Mathilde was out and her father had not
yet returned from his evening walk. She stood at the head of the stairs,
where the last of the daylight filtered through the barred window, and
read the letter again. Then she turned and gave a slight start to see
Barlasch at the foot of the stairs beckoning to her. He made no attempt
to come up, but stood on the mat like a dog that has been forbidden the
upper rooms.

“Is it about your father?” he asked, in a hoarse whisper.

“No!”

He made a gesture commanding secrecy and silence. Then he went to close
the kitchen door and returned on tip-toe.

“It is,” he explained, “that they are talking of him in the cafes. There
are many to be arrested to-morrow. They say the patron is one of them,
and employs himself in plotting. That his name is not Sebastian at all.
That he is a Frenchman who escaped the guillotine. What do I know? It is
the gossip of the cafes. But I tell it you because we are friends, you
and I. And some day I may want you to do something for me. One thinks
of one's self, eh? It is good to make friends. For some day one may want
them. That is why I do it. I think of myself. An old soldier. Of the
Guard.”

With many gestures of tremendous import, and a face all wrinkled and
twisted with mystery, he returned to the kitchen.

Mathilde was not to return until late. She had gone to the house of the
old Grafin whose reminiscences had been a fruitful topic at Desiree's
wedding. After dining there she and the Grafin were to go together to
a farewell reception given by the Governor. For Rapp was bound for the
frontier with the rest, and was to go to the war as first aide-de-camp
to the Emperor.

Mathilde could not be back until ten o'clock. She, who was so quick and
quiet, had been much occupied in social observances lately, and had made
fast friends with the Grafin during the last few days, constantly going
to see her.

Desiree knew that what Barlasch had repeated as the gossip of the cafes
was in part, if not wholly, true. She and Mathilde had long known that
any mention of France had the instant effect of turning their father
into a man of stone. It was the skeleton in this quiet house that sat at
table with its inmates, a shadowy fourth tying their tongues. The rattle
of its bones seemed to paralyze Sebastian's mind, and at any moment he
would fall into a dumb and stricken apathy which terrified those about
him. At such times it seemed that one thought in his mind had swallowed
all the rest, so that he heard without understanding and saw without
perceiving.

He was in such a humour when he came back to dinner. He passed Desiree
on the stairs without speaking and went to his room to change his
clothes, for he never relaxed his formal habits. At the dinner-table he
glanced at her as a dog, knowing that he is ill, may be seen to glance
with a secret air at his master, wondering whether he is detected.

Desiree had always hoped that her father would speak to her when this
humour was upon him and tell her the meaning of it. Perhaps it would
come to-night, when they were alone. There was an unspoken sympathy
existing between them in which Mathilde took no share, which had even
shut out Charles as out of a room where there was no light, into which
Desiree and her father went at times and stood hand-in-hand without
speaking.

They dined in silence, while Lisa hurried about her duties, oppressed by
a sense of unknown fear. After dinner they went to the drawing-room as
usual. It had been a dull day, with great clouds creeping up from the
West. The evening fell early, and the lamps were already alight. Desiree
looked to the wicks with the eye of experience when she entered the
room. Then she went to the window. Lisa did not always draw the curtains
effectually. She glanced down into the street, and turned suddenly on
her heel, facing her father.

“They are there,” she said. For she had seen shadowy forms lurking
beneath the trees of the Frauengasse. The street was ill-lighted, but
she knew the shadows of the trees.

“How many?” asked Sebastian, in a dull voice.

She glanced at him quickly--at his still, frozen face and quiescent
hands. He was not going to rise to the occasion, as he sometimes did
even from his deepest apathy. She must do alone anything that was to be
accomplished to-night.

The house, like many in the Frauengasse, had been built by a careful
Hanseatic merchant, whose warehouse was his own cellar half sunk beneath
the level of the street. The door of the warehouse was immediately under
the front door, down a few steps below the street, while a few more
steps, broad and footworn, led up to the stone veranda and the level of
the lower dwelling-rooms. A guard placed in the street could thus watch
both doors without moving.

There was a third door, giving exit from the little room where Barlasch
slept to the small yard where he had placed those trunks which were made
in France.

Desiree had no time to think. She came of a race of women of a brighter
intelligence than any women in the world. She took her father by the
arm and hastened downstairs. Barlasch was at his post within the kitchen
door. His eyes shone suddenly as he saw her face. It was said of Papa
Barlasch that he was a gay man in battle, laughing and making a hundred
jests, but at other times lugubrious. Desiree saw him smile for the
first time, in the dim light of the passage.

“They are there in the street,” he said; “I have seen them. I thought
you would come to Barlasch. They all do--the women. In here. Leave him
to me. When they ring the bell, receive them yourself--with smiles. They
are only men. Let them search the house if they want to. Tell them he
has gone to the reception with Mademoiselle.”

As he spoke the bell rang just above his head. He looked up at it and
laughed.

“Ah, ah!” he said, “the fanfare begins.”

He drew Sebastian within and closed the door of his little room. Lisa
had already gone to answer the bell. When she opened the door three
men stepped quickly over the threshold, and one of them, thrusting her
aside, closed the door and turned the key. Desiree, in her white evening
dress, on the bottom step, just beneath the lamp that hung from the
ceiling, made them pause and look at each other. Then one of the three
came towards her, hat in hand.

“Our duty, Fraulein,” he said awkwardly. “We are but obeying orders. A
mere formality. It will all be explained, no doubt, if the householder,
Antoine Sebastian, will put on his hat and come with us.”

“His hat is not there, as you see,” answered Desiree. “You must seek him
elsewhere.”

The man shook his head with a knowing smile. “We must seek him in
this house,” he said. “We will make it as easy for you as we can,
Fraulein--if you make it easy for us.”

As he spoke he produced a candle from his pocket, and encouraged the
broken wick with his finger-nail.

“It will make it pleasanter for all,” said Desiree cheerfully, “if you
will accept a candlestick.”

The man glanced at her. He was a heavy man, with little suspicious eyes
set close together. He seemed to be concluding that she had outwitted
him--that Sebastian was not in the house.

“Where are the cellar-stairs?” he asked. “I warn you, Fraulein, it is
useless to conceal your father. We shall, of course, find him.”

Desiree pointed to the door next to that giving entry to the kitchen. It
was bolted and locked. Desiree found the key for them. She not only gave
them every facility, but was anxious that they should be as quick as
possible. They did not linger in the cellar, which, though vast, was
empty; and when they returned, Desiree, who was waiting for them, led
the way upstairs.

They were rather abashed by her silence. They would have preferred
protestations and argument. Discussion always belittles. The smile
recommended by Papa Barlasch, lurking at the corner of her lips, made
them feel foolish. She was so slight and young and helpless, that a sort
of shame rendered them clumsy.

They felt more at home in the kitchen when they arrived there, and the
sight of Lisa, sturdy and defiant, reminded them of the authority upon
which Desiree had somehow cast a mystic contempt.

“There is a door there,” said the heavy official, with a brusque return
of his early manner. “Come, what is that door?”

“That is a little room.”

“Then open it.”

“I cannot,” returned Lisa. “It is locked.”

“Aha!” said the man, with a laugh of much meaning. “On the inside, eh?”

He went to it, and banged on it with his fist.

“Come,” he shouted, “open it and be done.”

There was a short silence, during which those in the kitchen listened
breathlessly. A shuffling sound inside the door made the officer of the
law turn and beckon to his two men to come closer.

Then, after some fumbling, as of one in the dark, the door was unlocked
and slowly opened.

Papa Barlasch stood in a very primitive night-apparel within the door.
He had not done things by halves, for he was an old campaigner, and knew
that a thing half done is better left undone in times of war. He noted
the presence of Desiree and Lisa, but was not ashamed. The reason of it
was soon apparent. For Papa Barlasch was drunk, and the smell of drink
came out of his apartment in a warm wave.

“It is the soldier billeted in the house,” explained Lisa, with a
half-hysterical laugh.

Then Barlasch harangued them in the language of intoxication. If he had
not spared Desiree's feelings, he spared her ears less now; for he was
an ignorant man, who had lived through a brutal period in the world's
history the roughest life a man can lead. Two of the men held him
with difficulty against the wall, while the third hastily searched the
room--where, indeed, no one could well be concealed.

Then they quitted the house, followed by the polyglot curses of
Barlasch, who was now endeavouring to find his bayonet amidst his
chaotic possessions.



CHAPTER IX. THE GOLDEN GUESS.



                              The golden guess
     Is morning star to the full round of truth.

Barlasch was never more sober in his life than when he emerged a minute
later from his room, while Lisa was still feverishly bolting the door.
He had not wasted much time at his toilet. In his flannel shirt, his
arms bare to the elbow, knotted and muscular, he looked like some rude
son of toil.

“One thinks of one's self,” he hastened to explain to Desiree, fearing
that she might ascribe some other motive to his action. “Some day the
patron may be in power again, and then he will remember a poor soldier.
It is good to think of the future.”

He shook his head pessimistically at Lisa as belonging to a sex liable
to error: instanced in this case by bolting the door too eagerly.

“Now,” he said, turning to Desiree again, “have you any in Dantzig to
help you?”

“Yes,” she answered rather slowly.

“Then send for him.”

“I cannot do that.”

“Then go for him yourself,” snapped Barlasch impatiently.

He looked at her fiercely beneath his shaggy eyebrows.

“It is no use to be afraid,” he said; “you are afraid--I see it in your
face. And it is never any use. Before they hammered on that door there,
my legs shook. For I am easily afraid--I. But it is never any use. And
when one opens the door, it goes.”

He looked at her with a puzzled frown, seeking in vain, it may have
been, the ordinary symptoms of fear. She was hesitating but not afraid.
There ran blood in her veins which will for all time be associated by
history with a gay and indomitable courage.

“Come,” he said sharply; “there is nothing else to do.”

“I will go,” said Desiree, at length, deciding suddenly to do the one
thing that is left to a woman once or twice in her life--to go to the
one man and trust him.

“By the back way,” said Barlasch, helping her with the cloak that Lisa
had brought, and pulling the hood forward over her face with a jerk.
“Ah, I know that way. The patron is hiding in the yard. An old soldier
looks to the retreat--though the Emperor has saved us that, so far.
Come, I will help you over the wall, for the door is rusted.”

The way, which Barlasch had perceived, led through the room at the back
of the kitchen to a yard, and thence through a door not opened by the
present occupiers of the old house, into a very labyrinth of narrow
alleys running downward to the river and round the tall houses that
stand against the cathedral walls.

The wall was taller than Barlasch, but he ran at it like a cat,
and Desiree standing below could see the black outline of his limbs
crouching on the top. He stooped down, and grasping her hands, lifted
her by the sheer strength of one arm, balanced her for an instant on the
wall, and then lowered her on the outer side.

“Run,” he whispered.

She knew the way, and although the night was dark, and these narrow
alleys between high walls had no lamps, Desiree lost no time. The
Krahn-Thor is quite near to the Frauengasse. Indeed, the whole
of Dantzig occupied but a small space between the rivers in those
straitened days. The town was quieter than it had been for months, and
Desiree passed unmolested through the narrow streets. She made her way
to the quay, passing through the low gateway known as the door of the
Holy Ghost, and here found people still astir. For the commerce that
thrives on a northern river is paralyzed all the winter, and feverishly
active when the ice has gone.

“The Elsa,” replied a woman, who had been selling bread all day on the
quay, and was now packing up her stall, “you ask for the Elsa. There is
such a ship, I know. But how can I say which she is? See, they lie right
across the river like a bridge. Besides, it is late, and sailors are
rough men.”

Desiree hurried on. Louis d'Arragon had said that the ship was lying
near to the Krahn-Thor, of which the great hooded roof loomed darkly
against the stars above her. She was looking about her when a man came
forward with the hesitating step of one who has been told to wait the
arrival of some one unknown to him.

“The Elsa,” she said to him; “which ship is it?”

“Come along with me, Mademoiselle,” the man replied; “though I was not
told to look for a woman.”

He spoke in English, which Desiree hardly understood; for she had never
heard it from English lips, and looked for the first time on one of that
race upon which all the world waited now for salvation. For the
English, of all the nations, were the only men who from the first had
consistently defied Napoleon.

The sailor led the way towards the river. As he passed the lamp burning
dimly above some steps, Desiree saw that he was little more than a boy.
He turned and offered her his hand with a shy laugh, and together they
stood at the bottom of the steps with the water lapping at their feet.

“Have you a letter,” he said, “or will you come on board?”

Then perceiving that she did not understand, he repeated the question in
German.

“I will come on board,” she answered.

The Elsa was lying in the middle of the river, and the boat into which
Desiree stepped shot across the water without sound of oars. The sailor
was paddling it noiselessly at the stern. Desiree was not unused to
boats, and when they came alongside the Elsa she climbed on board
without help.

“This way,” said the sailor, leading her towards the deckhouse where
a light burned dimly behind red curtains. He knocked at the door and
opened it without awaiting a reply. In the little cabin two men sat at a
table, and one of them was Louis d'Arragon dressed in the rough clothes
of a merchant seaman. He seemed to recognize Desiree at once, though she
still stood without the door, in the darkness.

“You?” he said in surprise. “I did not expect you, madame. You want me?”

“Yes,” answered Desiree, stepping over the combing. Louis's companion,
who was also a sailor, coarsely clad, rose and, awkwardly taking off his
cap, hurried to the door, murmuring some vague apology. It is not always
the roughest men who have the worst manners towards women.

He closed the door behind him, leaving Desiree and Louis looking at each
other by the light of an oil lamp that flickered and gave forth a greasy
smell. The little cabin was smoke-ridden, and smelt of ancient tar. It
was no bigger than the table in the drawing-room in the Frauengasse,
across which he had bowed to her in farewell a few days earlier, little
knowing when and where they were to meet again. For fate can always turn
a surprise better than the human fancy.

Behind the curtain, the window stood open, and the high, clear song of
the wind through the rigging filled the little cabin with a continuous
minor note of warning which must have been part of his life; for he must
have heard it, as all sailors do, sleeping or waking, night and day.

He was probably so accustomed to it that he never heeded it. But it
filled Desiree's ears, and whenever she heard it in after-life, in
memory this moment came again to her, and she looked back to it, as a
traveller may look back to a milestone at a cross-road, and wonder where
his journey might have ended had he taken another turning.

“My father,” she said quickly, “is in danger. There is no one else in
Dantzig to whom we can turn, and--”

She paused. What was she going to add? She hesitated, and then was
silent. There was no reason why she should have elected to come to him.
At all events she gave none.

“I am glad I was in Dantzig when it happened,” he said, turning to take
up his cap, which was of rough dark fur, such as seamen wear even in
summer at night in the Northern seas.

“Come,” he added, “you can tell me as we go ashore.”

But they did not speak while the sailor sculled the boat to the steps.
On the quay they would probably pass unnoticed, for there were many
strange sailors at this time in Dantzig, and Louis d'Arragon might
easily be mistaken for one of the French seamen who had brought stores
by sea from Bordeaux and Brest and Cherbourg.

“Now tell me,” he said, as they walked side by side; and in voluble
French, Desiree launched into her story. It was rather incoherent, by
reason, perhaps, of its frankness.

“Stop--stop,” he interrupted gravely, “who is Barlasch?”

Louis walked rather slowly in his stiff sea-boots at her side, and she
instinctively spoke less rapidly as she explained the part that Barlasch
had played.

“And you trust him?”

“Of course,” she answered.

“But why?”

“Oh, you are so matter-of-fact,” she exclaimed; “I do not know. Because
he is trustworthy, I suppose.”

She continued the story, but suddenly stopped and looked up at him under
the shadow of her hood.

“You are silent,” she said. “Do you know something about my father of
which I am ignorant? Is that it?”

“No,” he answered, “I am trying to follow--that is all. You leave so
much to my imagination.”

“But I have no time to explain things,” she protested. “Every moment
is of value. I will explain all those things some other time. At this
moment all I can think of is my father and the danger he is in. If it
had not been for Barlasch, he would have been in prison by now. And as
it is, the danger is only half averted. For he, himself, is so little
help. All must be done for him. He will do nothing for himself while
this humour is upon him; you understand?”

“Partly,” he answered slowly.

“Oh!” she exclaimed half-impatiently, “one sees that you are an
Englishman.”

And she found time, even in her hurry, to laugh. For she was young
enough to float buoyant upon that sea of hope which ebbs in the course
of years and leaves men stranded on the hard facts of life.

“You forget,” he said in self-defence.

“I forget what?”

“That a week ago I had never seen Dantzig, or your father, or your
sister, or the Frauengasse. A week ago I did not know that there was
anybody called Sebastian in the world--and did not care.”

“Yes,” she admitted thoughtfully, “I had forgotten that.”

And they walked on in silence, a long way, till they came to the Gate of
the Holy Ghost.

“But you can help him to escape?” she said at length, as if following
the course of her own thoughts.

“Yes,” he answered, and that was all.

They passed through the smaller streets in silence, and Desiree led the
way into a narrow alley running between the street of the Holy Ghost and
the Frauengasse.

“There is the wall to be climbed,” she said; but, as she spoke, the door
giving exit to the alley was cautiously opened by Barlasch.

“A little oil,” he whispered, “and it was soon done.”

The yard was dark within, for there might be watchers at any of the
windows above them in the pointed gables that made patterns against the
star-lit sky.

“All is well,” said Barlasch; “those sons of dogs have not returned, and
the patron is waiting in the kitchen, cloaked and ready for a journey.
He has collected himself--the patron.”

He led the way through his own room, which was dark, save for a shaft
of lamp-light coming from the kitchen. He looked back keenly at Louis
d'Arragon.

“Salut!” he growled, scowling at his boots. “A sailor,” he muttered
after a pause. “Good. She has her wits at the top of the basket--that
child.”

Desiree was throwing back her hood and looking at her father with a
reassuring smile.

“I have brought Monsieur d'Arragon,” she said, “to help us.”

For Sebastian has not recognized the new-comer. He now bowed in his
stiff way, and began a formal apology, which D'Arragon cut short with a
quick gesture.

“It is the least I could do,” he said, “in the absence of Charles. Have
you money?”

“Yes--a little.”

“You will require money and a few clothes. I can get you a passage to
Riga or to Helsingborg to-night. From there you can communicate with
your daughter. Events will follow each other rapidly. One never knows
what a week may bring forth in time of war. It may be safe for you to
return soon. Come, monsieur, we must go.”

Sebastian made a gesture with his outspread arms, half of protestation,
half of acquiescence. It was plain that he had no sympathy with these
modern, hurried methods of meeting the emergencies of daily life. A
valise, packed and strapped, lay on the table. D'Arragon weighed it in
his hand, and then lifted it to his shoulder.

“Come, monsieur,” he repeated leading the way through Barlasch's room to
the yard. “And you,” he added, addressing himself to that soldier, “shut
the door behind us.”

With another gesture of protest Sebastian gathered his cloak round him
and followed. D'Arragon had taken Desiree so literally at her word
that he allowed her father no time for hesitation, nor a moment to say
farewell.

She was alone in the kitchen before she had realized that they were
going. In a minute Barlasch returned. She could hear him setting in
order the room which had been hurriedly disorganized in order to open
the door leading to the yard, where her father had concealed himself. He
was muttering to himself as he lifted the furniture.

Coming back into the kitchen, he found Desiree standing where he had
left her. Glancing at her, he scratched his grey head in a plebeian way,
and gave a little laugh.

“Yes,” he said, pointing to the spot where D'Arragon had stood. “That
was a man, that you fetched to help us--a man. It makes a difference
when such as that goes out of the room--eh?”

He busied himself in the kitchen, setting in order that which remained
of the mise en scene of his violent reception of the secret police.
Suddenly he turned in his emphatic manner, and threw out his rugged
forefinger to hold her attention.

“If there had been some like that in Paris, there would have been no
Revolution. Za-za, za-za!” he concluded, imitating effectively the
buzz of many voices in an assembly. “Words and not deeds,” Barlasch
protested. Whereas to-night, he clearly showed by two gestures, they had
met a man of deeds.



CHAPTER X. IN DEEP WATER.



     Le coeur humain est un abime qui trompe tous les calculs.

It is to be presumed that Colonel de Casimir met friends at the
reception given by Governor Rapp in the great rooms of the Rathhaus.
For there were many Poles present, and not a few officers of other
nationalities.

The army indeed that set forth to conquer Russia was not a
French-speaking army. Less than half of the regiments were of that
nationality, while Italians, Bavarians, Saxons, Wurtembergers,
Westphalians, Prussians, Swiss, and Portuguese went gaily forward on the
great venture. There were soldiers from the numerous petty states of the
German Confederation which acknowledged Napoleon as their protector,
for the good reason that they could not protect themselves against him.
Finally, there were those Poles who had fought in Spain for Napoleon,
hoping that in return he would some day set the ancient kingdom upon its
feet among the nations. Already the whisperers pointed to Davoust as the
future king of the new Poland.

Many present at the farewell reception of the Governor carried a sword,
though they were the merest civilians, plotting, counter-plotting,
and whispering a hundred rumours. Perhaps Rapp himself, speaking bluff
French with a German accent, was as honest as any man in the room,
though he lacked the polish of the Parisian and had not the subtlety of
the Pole. Rapp was not a shining light in these brilliant circles. He
was a Governor not for peace, but for war. His day was yet to come.

Such men as de Casimir shrugged their supple shoulders at his simple
talk. They spoke of him half-contemptuously as of one who had had a
thousand chances and had never taken them. He was not even rich, and he
had handled great sums of money. He was only a General, and he had slept
in the Emperor's tent--had had access to him in every humour. He might
do the same again in the coming campaign. He was worth cultivating. De
Casimir and his like were full of smiles which in no wise deceived the
shrewd Alsatian.

Mathilde Sebastian was among the ladies to whom these brilliant warriors
paid their uncouth compliments. Perhaps de Casimir was aware that her
measuring eyes followed him wherever he went. He knew, at all events,
that he could hold his own amid these adventurers, many of whom had
risen from the ranks; while others, from remote northern States, had
birth but no manners at all. He was easy and gay, carrying lightly that
subtle air of distinction which is vouchsafed to many Poles.

“Here to-day, Mademoiselle, and gone to-morrow,” he said. “All these
eager soldiers. And who can tell which of us may return?”

If he had expected Mathilde to flinch at this reminder of his calling,
he was disappointed. Her eyes were hard and bright. She had had so few
chances of moving amidst this splendour, of seeing close at hand the
greatness which Napoleon shed around him as the sun its rays. She was
carried away by the spirit of the age. Anything was better, she felt,
than obscurity.

“And who can tell,” whispered de Casimir with a careless and confident
laugh, “which of us shall come back rich and great?”

This brought the glance from her dark eyes for which his own lay
waiting. She was certainly beautiful, and wore the difficult dress of
that day with assurance and grace. She possessed something which the
German ladies about her lacked; something which many suddenly lack when
a Frenchwoman is near.

His manner, half respectful, half triumphant, betrayed an understanding
to which he did not refer in words. She had bestowed some favour upon
him--had acceded to some request. He hoped for more. He had overstepped
some barrier. She, who should have measured the distance, had allowed
him to come too close. The barriers of love are one-sided; there is no
climbing back.

“A hundred envious eyes are watching me,” he said in an undertone as he
passed on; “I dare not stay longer. I am on duty to-night.”

She bowed and watched him go. She was, it would seem, aware of that
fallen barrier. She had done nothing, had permitted nothing from
weakness. There was no weakness at all perhaps in Mathilde Sebastian.
She had the quiet manner of a skilled card-player with folded cards laid
face down upon the table, who knows what is in her hand and is waiting
for the foe to lead.

De Casimir did not see her again. In such a throng it would have been
difficult to find her had he so desired. But, as he had told her, he was
on duty to-night. There were to be a hundred arrests before dawn. Many
who were laughing and talking with the French officers to-night were
already in the grasp of Napoleon's secret police, and would drive
straight from the door of the Rathhaus to the town prison or to the old
Watch-house in the Portchaisengasse. Others, moving through the great
rooms with a high head, were already condemned out of their own bureaux
and escritoires now being rifled by the Emperor's spies.

The Emperor himself had given the order, before quitting Dantzig to take
command of the maddest and greatest enterprise conceived by the mind
of man. There was nothing above the reach of his mind, it seemed, and
nothing too low for him to bend down and touch. Every detail had been
considered by himself. He was like a man who, having an open wound on
his back, attends to it hurriedly before showing an undaunted face to
the enemy.

His inexorable finger had come down on the name of Antoine Sebastian,
figuring on all the secret reports--first in many.

“Who is this man?” he asked, and none could answer.

He had gone to the frontier without awaiting the solution to the
question. Such was his method now. He had so much to do that he could
but skim the surface of his task. For the human mind, though it be
colossal, can only work within certain limits. The greatest orator in
the world can only move his immediate hearers. Those beyond the inner
circle catch a word here and there, and imagination supplies the rest or
improves upon it. But those in the farthest gallery hear nothing and see
a little man gesticulating.

De Casimir was not entrusted with the execution of the Emperor's orders.
As a member of General Rapp's staff, resident in Dantzig since the
city's occupation by the French, he had been called upon to make
exhaustive reports upon the feeling of the burghers. There were many
doubtful cases. De Casimir did not pretend to be better than his
fellows. To some he had sold the benefit of the doubt. Some had paid
willingly enough for their warning. Others had put off the payment; for
there were many Jews, then as now, in Dantzig; slow payers requiring
something stronger than a threat to make them disburse.

De Casimir therefore quitted the Rathhaus among the first to go, and
walked through the busy streets to his rooms in the Langenmarkt,
where he not only lived but had a small office to which orderlies and
aides-de-camp came by day or night. Two sentries kept guard on the
pavement. Since the spring, this office had been one of the busiest
military posts in Dantzig. Its doors were open at all hours, and in
truth many of de Casimir's assistants preferred to transact their
business in the dark.

There might be some recalcitrant debtor driven by stress of circumstance
to clear his conscience to-night. It would be as well, de Casimir
thought, to be at one's post. Nor was he mistaken. Though it was only
ten o'clock, two men were awaiting his return, and, their business
despatched, de Casimir deemed it wise to send away his assistants.
Immediately after they had gone a woman came. She was half distracted
with fear, and the tears ran down her pallid cheeks. But she dried them
at the mention of de Casimir's price, and fell to abusing him.

“If your husband is innocent, there is all the more reason why he should
be grateful to me for warning him,” he said, with a smile. And at last
the lady paid and went away.

The town clocks had struck eleven before another footstep on the
pavement made de Casimir raise his head. He did not actually expect any
one, but a certain surreptitiousness in the approach of this visitor,
and the low knock on the door, made him suspect that this was grist for
his mill.

He opened the door and, seeing that it was a woman, stepped back. When
she had entered, he closed the door while she stood watching him in the
dark passage, beneath the shadow of her hood. Knowing the value of such
small details, he locked the door rather ostentatiously and dropped the
key into his pocket.

“And now, madame,” he said reassuringly, as he followed his visitor into
the room where a shaded lamp lighted his writing-table. She threw back
her hood, and it was Mathilde! The surprise on de Casimir's face was
genuine enough. Romance could not have brought about this visit, nor
love be its motive.

“Something has happened,” he said, looking at her doubtfully.

“Where is my father?” was the reply.

“Unless there has been some mistake,” he answered glibly, “he is at home
in bed.”

She smiled contemptuously into his innocent face.

“There has been a mistake,” she said; “they came to arrest him
to-night.”

De Casimir made a gesture of anger and seemed to be mentally assigning a
punishment to some blunderer.

“And?” he asked, without looking at her.

“And he escaped.”

“For the moment?”

“No; he has left Dantzig.”

Something in her voice--the cold note of warning--made him glance
uneasily at her. This was not a woman to be deceived, and yet she was
womanly enough to fear deception and to resent her own fears, visiting
her anger on any who aroused them. In the flash of an eye he understood
her, and forestalled the words that were upon her lips.

“And I promised that he should come to no harm--I know that,” he said
quickly. “At first I thought that it must have been a blunder, but on
reflection I am sure that it is not. It is the Emperor. He must have
given the order for the arrest himself, behind my back. That is his way.
He trusts no one. He deceives those nearest to him. I made out the list
of those to be arrested to-night, and your father's name was not on it.
Do you believe me? Mademoiselle, do you believe me?”

It was only natural in such a man to look for disbelief. The air he
breathed was infected by suspicion. No deception was too small for the
great man whom he served. Mathilde made no answer.

“You came here to accuse me of having deceived you,” he said rather
anxiously. “Is that it?”

She nodded without meeting his eyes. It was not the truth. She had
come to hear his defence, hoping against hope that she might be able to
believe him.

“Mathilde,” he asked slowly, “do you believe me?”

He came a step nearer, looking down at her averted face, which was oddly
white. Then suddenly she turned, without a sound, without lifting her
eyes--and was in his arms. It seemed that she had done it against her
will, and it took him by surprise. He had thought that she was trying
to attract his love because she believed in his capability to make his
fortune like so many soldiers of France; that she was only playing a
woman's subtle game. And, after all, she was like the rest--a little
cleverer, a little colder--but, like the rest.

While his arms were still round her, his quick mind leapt forward to the
future, wondering already to what end this would lead them. For a moment
he was taken aback. He was over the last of those barriers which are so
easy from the outside and unclimbable from within. She had thrust into
his hands a power greater than, for the moment, he knew how to wield. It
was characteristic of him to think first whither it would lead him, and
next how he could turn it to good account.

Some instinct told him that this was a different love from any that he
had met before. The same instinct made him understand that it was crying
aloud to be convinced; and, oddly enough, he had told her the truth.

“See,” he said, “here is a copy of the list, and your father's name is
not on it. See, here is Napoleon's letter, expressing satisfaction with
my work here and in Konigsberg, where I have been served by an agent
of my own choosing. Many have climbed to a throne with less than that
letter for their first step. See...!” he opened another drawer. It was
full of money.

“See, again!” he said with a low laugh, and from an iron chest he
took two or three bags which fell upon the table with the discreet
unmistakable chink of gold. “That is the Emperor's. He trusts me, you
see. These bags are mine. They are to be sent back to France before I
follow the army to Russia. What I have told you is true, you see.”

It was an odd way of wooing, but this man rarely made a mistake. There
are many women who, like Mathilde Sebastian, are readier to love success
than console failure.

“See,” he said, after a moment's hesitation, opening another drawer
in his writing-table, “before I went away I had intended to ask you to
remember me.”

As he spoke he drew a jewel-case from under some papers, and slowly
opened it. He had others like it in the drawer; for emergencies.

“But I never hoped,” he went on, “to have an opportunity of seeing you
thus alone--to ask you never to forget me. You permit me?”

He clasped the diamonds round her throat, and they glittered on the
poor, cheap dress, which was the best she had. She looked down at them
with a catching breath, and for an instant the glitter was reflected in
her eyes.

She had come asking for reassurance, and he gave her diamonds; which
is an old tale told over and over again. For in human love we have to
accept not what we want, but what is given to us.

“No one in Dantzig,” he said, “is so glad to hear that your father has
escaped as I am.”

And, with the glitter still lurking in her dark-grey eyes, she believed
him. He drew her cloak round her, and gently brought her hood over her
hair.

“I must take you home,” he said tenderly, “without delay. And as we go
through the streets you must tell me how it happened, and how you were
able to come to me.”

“Desiree was not asleep,” she answered; “she was waiting for me to
return, and told me at once. Then she went to bed, and I waited until
she was asleep. It was she who managed the escape.”

De Casimir, who was locking the drawers of his writing-table, glanced up
sharply.

“Ah! but not alone?”

“No--not alone. I will tell you as we go through the streets.”



CHAPTER XI. THE WAVE MOVES ON.



     La meme fermete qui sert a resister a l'amour sert aussi a le
rendre violent et durable.

It is only in war that the unexpected admittedly happens. In love and
other domestic calamities there is always a relative who knew it all the
time.

The news that Napoleon was in Vilna, hastily evacuated by the Russians
in full retreat, came as a surprise and not to all as a pleasant one, in
Dantzig.

It was Papa Barlasch who brought the tidings to the Frauengasse, one
hot afternoon in July. He returned before his usual hour, and sent Lisa
upstairs, with a message given in dumb show and interpreted by her into
matter-of-fact German, that he must see the young ladies without delay.
Far back in the great days of the monarchy, Papa Barlasch must have
been a little child in a peasant's hut on those Cotes du Nord where
they breed a race of Frenchmen startlingly similar to the hereditary foe
across the Channel, where to this day the men kick off their sabots at
the door and hold that an honest labourer has no business under a roof
except in stocking-feet and shirt-sleeves.

Barlasch had never yet been upstairs in the Sebastians' house, and
deemed it only respectful to the ladies to take off his boots on
the mat, and prowl to the kitchen in coarse blue woollen stockings,
carefully darned by himself, under the scornful immediate eye of Lisa.

He was in the kitchen when Mathilde and Desiree, in obedience to his
command, came downstairs. The floor in one corner of the room was
littered with his belongings; for he never used the table. “He takes
up no more room than a cat,” Lisa once said of him. “I never fall over
him.”

“She leaves her greasy plates here and there,” explained Barlasch in
return. “One must think of one's self and one's uniform.”

He was in his stocking-feet with unbuttoned tunic when the two girls
came to him.

“Ai, ai, ai,” he said, imitating with his two hands the galloping of a
horse. “The Russians,” he explained confidentially.

“Has there been a battle?” asked Desiree.

And Barlasch answered “Pooh!” not without contempt for the female
understanding.

“Then what is it?” she inquired. “You must remember we are not
soldiers--we do not understand those manoeuvres--ai, ai, like that.”

And she copied his gesture beneath his scowling contempt.

“It is Vilna,” he said. “That is what it is. Then it will be Smolensk,
and then Moscow. Ah, ah! That little man!”

He turned and took up his haversack.

“And I--I have my route. It is good-bye to the Frauengasse. We have been
friends. I told you we should be. It is good-bye to these ladies--and to
that Lisa. Look at her!”

He pointed with his curved and derisive finger into Lisa's eyes. And in
truth the tears were there. Lisa was in heart and person that which
is comprehensively called motherly. She saw perhaps some pathos in the
sight of this rugged man--worn by travel, bent with hardship and many
wounds, past his work--shouldering his haversack and trudging off to the
war.

“The wave moves on,” he said, making a gesture, and a sound illustrating
that watery progress. “And Dantzig will soon be forgotten. You will be
left in peace--but we go on to--” He paused and shrugged his shoulders
while attending to a strap. “India or the devil,” he concluded.

“Colonel Casimir has gone,” he added in what he took to be an aside to
Mathilde. Which made her wonder for a moment. “I saw him depart with his
staff soon after daybreak. And the Emperor has forgotten Dantzig. It is
safe enough for the patron now. You can write him a letter to tell him
so. Tell him that I said it was safe for him to return quietly here, and
live in the Frauengasse--I, Barlasch.”

He was ready now, and, buttoning his tunic, he fixed the straps across
his chest, looking from one to the other of the three women watching
him, not without some appreciation of an audience. Then he turned to
Desiree, who had always been his friend, with whom he now considered
that he had the soldier's bond of a peril passed through together.

“The Emperor has forgotten Dantzig,” he repeated, “and those against
whom he had a grudge. But he has also forgotten those who are in prison.
It is not good to be forgotten in prison. Tell the patron that--to put
it in his pipe and smoke it. Some day he may remember an old soldier.
Ah, one thinks of one's self.”

And beneath his bushy brows he looked at her with a gleam of cunning.
He went to the door and, turning there, pointed the finger of scorn at
Lisa, stout and tearful. He gave a short laugh of a low-born contempt,
and departed without further parley.

On the doorstep he paused to put on his boots and button his gaiters,
stooping clumsily with a groan beneath his burden of haversack and kit.
Desiree, who had had time to go upstairs to her bedroom, ran after him
as he descended the steps. She had her purse in her hand, and she thrust
it into his, quickly and breathlessly.

“If you take it,” she said, “I shall know that we are friends.”

He took it ungraciously enough. It was a silken thing with two small
rings to keep the money in place, and he looked at it with a grimace,
weighing it in his hand. It was very light.

“Money,” he said. “No, thank you. To get drink with, and be degraded and
sent to prison. Not for me, madame. No, thank you. One thinks of one's
career.”

And with a gruff laugh of worldly wisdom he continued his way down
the worn steps, never looking back at her as she stood in the sunlight
watching him, with the purse in her hand.

So in his old age Papa Barlasch was borne forward to the war on that
human tide which flooded all Lithuania, and never ebbed again, but sank
into the barren ground, and was no more seen.

As the slow autumn approached, it became apparent that Dantzig no longer
interested the watchers. Vilna became the base of operations. Smolensk
fell, and, most wonderful of all, the Russians were retiring on Moscow.
Dantzig was no longer on the route. For a time it was of the world
forgotten, while, as Barlasch had predicted, free men continued at
liberty, though their names had an evil savour, while innocent persons
in prison were left to rot there.

Desiree continued to receive letters from her husband, full of love and
war. For a long time he lingered at Konigsberg, hoping every day to be
sent forward. Then he followed Murat across the Niemen, and wrote of
weary journeys over the rolling plains of Lithuania.

Towards the end of July he mentioned curtly the arrival of de Casimir at
head-quarters.

“With him came a courier,” wrote Charles, “bringing your dead letter. I
don't believe you love me as I love you. At all events, you do not seem
to tell me that you do so often as I want to tell you. Tell me what you
do and think every moment of the day....” And so on. Charles seemed
to write as easily as he talked, and had no difficulty in setting forth
his feelings. “The courier is in the saddle,” he concluded. “De Casimir
tells me that I must finish. Write and tell me everything. How is
Mathilde? And your father? Is he in good health? How does he pass his
day? Does he still go out in the evening to his cafe?”

This seemed to be an afterthought, suggested perhaps by conversation
passing in the room in which he sat.

The other exile, writing from Stockholm, was briefer in his
communications.

“I am well,” wrote Antoine Sebastian, “and hope to arrive soon after you
receive this. Felix Meyer, the notary, has instructions to furnish you
with money for household expenses.”

It would appear that Sebastian possessed other friends in Dantzig, who
had kept him advised of all that passed in the city.

For neither Mathilde nor Desiree had obeyed Barlasch's blunt order to
write to their father. They did not know whither he had fled, neither
had they received any communication giving an address or a hint as to
his future movements. It would appear that the same direct and laconic
mind which had carried out his escape deemed it wiser that those left
behind should be in no position to furnish information.

In fairness to Barlasch, Desiree had made little of that soldier's part
in Sebastian's evasion, and Mathilde displayed small interest in such
details. She rather fastened, however, upon the assistance rendered by
Louis d'Arragon.

“Why did he do it?” she asked.

“Oh, because I asked him,” was the reply.

“And why did you ask him?”

“Who else was there to ask?” returned Desiree, which was indeed
unanswerable.

Perhaps the question had been suggested to her by de Casimir, who, on
learning that Louis d'Arragon had helped her father to slip through the
Emperor's fingers, had asked the same in his own characteristic way.

“What could he hope to gain by doing it?” he had inquired as he
walked by Mathilde's side, along the Pfaffengasse. And he made other
interrogations respecting D'Arragon which Mathilde was no more able to
satisfy, as he accompanied her to the Frauengasse.

Since that time the dancing-lessons had been resumed to the music of a
hired fiddler, and Desiree had once more taken up her household task of
making both ends meet. She approached the difficulties as impetuously
as ever, and danced the stout pupils round the room with undiminished
energy.

“It seems no good at all, your being married,” said one of these
breathlessly, while Desiree laughingly attended to her dishevelled hair.

“Why not?”

“Because you still make your own dresses and teach dancing,” replied
the pupil, with a quick sigh at the thought of some smart bursch in the
Prussian contingent.

“Ah, but Charles will return a colonel, and I shall bow to you in a
silk dress from a chaise and pair--come, left foot first. You are not so
tired as you think you are.”

For those that are busy, time flies quickly enough. And there is nothing
more absorbing than keeping the wolf from the door, else assuredly the
hungry thousands would find time to arise and rend the overfed few.

August succeeded a hot July and brought with it Sebastian's curt letter.
Sebastian himself--that shadowy father--returned to his home a few
hours later. He was not alone, for a heavier step followed his into the
passage, and Desiree, always quick to hear and see and act, coming to
the head of the stairs, perceived her father looking upwards towards
her, while his companion in rough sailor's clothes turned to lay aside
the valise he had carried on his shoulder.

Mathilde was close behind Desiree, and Sebastian kissed his daughters
with that cold repression of manner which always suggested a strenuous
past in which the emotions had been relinquished for ever as an
indulgence unfit for a stern and hard-bitten age.

“I took him away and now return him,” said the sailor coming forward.
Desiree had always known that it was Louis, but Mathilde gave a little
start at the sound of the neat clipping French in the mouth of an
educated Frenchman so rarely heard in Dantzig--so rarely heard in all
broad France to-day.

“Yes--that is true,” answered Sebastian, turning to him with a sudden
change of manner. There was that in voice and attitude which his hearers
had never noted before, although Charles had often evoked something
approaching it. It seemed to indicate that, of all the people with whom
they had seen their father hold intercourse, Louis d'Arragon was the
only man who stood upon equality with him.

“That is true--and at great risk to yourself,” he said, not assigning,
however, so great an importance to personal danger as men do in these
careful days. As he spoke, he took Louis by the arm and by a gesture
invited him to precede him upstairs with a suggestion of camaraderie
somewhat startling in one usually so cold and formal as Antoine
Sebastian, the dancing-master of the Frauengasse.

“I was writing to Charles,” said Desiree to D'Arragon, when they reached
the drawing-room, and, crossing to her own table, she set the papers in
order there. These consisted of a number of letters from her husband,
read and re-read, it would appear. And the answer to them, a clean sheet
of paper bearing only the date and address, lay beneath her hand.

“The courier leaves this evening,” she said, with a queer ring of
anxiety in her voice, as if she feared that for some reason or another
she ran the risk of failing to despatch her letter. She glanced at the
clock, and stood, pen in hand, thinking of what she should write.

“May I enclose a line?” asked Louis. “It is not wise, perhaps, for me
to address to him a letter--since I am on the other side. It is a small
matter of a heritage which he and I divide. I have placed some money in
a Dantzig bank for him. He may require it when he returns.”

“Then you do not correspond with Charles?” said Mathilde, clearing a
space for him on the larger table, and setting before him ink and pens
and paper.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said, glancing at her with that light
of interest in his dark eyes which she had ignited once before by a
question on the only occasion that they had met. He seemed to detect
that she was more interested in him than her indifferent manner would
appear to indicate. “No, I am a bad correspondent. If Charles and I,
in our present circumstances, were to write to each other it could only
lead to intrigue, for which I have no taste and Charles no capacity.”

“You seem to hint that Charles might have such a taste then,” she said,
with her quiet smile, as she moved away leaving him to write.

“Charles has probably found out by this time,” he answered with the
bluntness which he claimed as a prerogative of his calling and nation,
“that a soldier of Napoleon's who intrigues will make a better career
than one who merely fights.”

He took up his pen and wrote with the absorption of one who has but
little time and knows exactly what to say. By chance he glanced towards
Desiree, who sat at her own table near the window. She was stroking
her cheek with the feather of her pen, looking with puzzled eyes at the
blank paper before her. Each time D'Arragon dipped his pen he glanced at
her, watching her. And Mathilde, with her needlework, watched them both.



CHAPTER XII. FROM BORODINO.



     However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.

War is the gambling of kings. Napoleon, the arch-gambler, from that
Southern sea where men, lacking cards or dice and the money to buy
either, will yet play a game of chance with the ten fingers that God
gave them for another purpose--Napoleon had dealt a hand with every
monarch in Europe before he met for the second time that Northern
adversary of cool blood who knew the waiting game.

It is only where the stakes are small that the leisurely players, idly
fingering the fallen cards, return in fancy to certain points--to this
trick trumped or that chance missed, playing the game over again. But
when the result is great it overshadows the game, and all men's thoughts
fly to speculation on the future. How will the loser meet his loss? What
use will the winner make of his gain?

The results of the Russian campaign were so stupendous to history that
the historians of the day, in their bewilderment, sought rather to
preserve these than the details of the war. Thus the student of to-day,
in piecing together an impression of bygone times, will inevitably find
portions of his picture missing. As a matter of fact, no one can say for
certain whether Alexander gently led Napoleon onward to Moscow or was
himself driven thither in confusion by the conqueror.

Perhaps each merely pushed on from day to day, as men who are not
Emperors must needs do in the stress of life. It is only in calm weather
that the eye is able to discern things afar off and make ready; but in
a storm the horizon is dimmed by cloud and spray. All Europe was so
obscured at this time. And even Emperors, being only men, could look no
farther than the immediate and urgent danger of the moment.

Napoleon's generals were scarcely social lights. Ney, the hero of the
retreat, the bravest of the brave, was a rough man who ate horseflesh
without troubling to cook it. Rapp, whose dogged defence of an abandoned
city is without compare in the story of war, had the manners and the
mind of a peasant. These gentlemen dealt more in deeds than in words.
They had not much to say for themselves.

As for the Russians, Russia remains at this time the one European
country unhampered and unharassed by a cheap press--the one country
where prominent men have a quiet tongue. A hundred years ago Russians
did great deeds, and the rest was silence. Neither Kutusoff nor
Alexander ever stated clearly whether the retreat to Moscow was
intentional or unavoidable; and these are the only men who knew. Perhaps
Napoleon knew; at all events, he thought he did, or pretended to
think it long afterwards at St. Helena, for Napoleon the Great was a
consummate liar.

Be that as it may, the Russians retreated, and the French advanced
farther and farther from their base. It was a great army--the greatest
ever seen. For Napoleon had eight monarchs serving with the eagles;
generals innumerable, many of them immortal--Davoust, the greatest
strategist; Prince Eugene, the incomparable lieutenant; Ney, the
fearless; four hundred thousand men. And they carried with them only
twenty days' provision.

They had marched from the Vistula, full of shipping, across the Pregel,
loaded with stores, to the Niemen, where there was no navigation.
Dantzig, behind them--that Gibraltar of the North--was stored with
provision enough for the whole army. But there was no transport; for the
roads of Lithuania were unsuitable for the heavy carts provided.

The country across the Niemen could scarce sustain its own sparse
population, and had nothing to spare for an invading army. This had once
been Poland, and was now inimical to Russia; but Russia did not care,
and the friendship of Lithuania was like many human friendships which we
make sacrifices to preserve--not worth having.

All the while the Russians retreated, and, stranger still, the French
followed them, eking out their twenty days' provision.

“I will make them fight a big battle, and beat them,” said Napoleon;
“and then the Emperor will sue for peace.”

But Barclay de Tolly continued to run away from that great battle. Then
came the news that Barclay had been deposed; that Kutusoff was coming
from the South to take command. It was true enough; and Barclay
cheerfully served in a subordinate position to the new chief. September
brought great hopes of a battle, for Kutusoff seemed to retreat with
less despatch, like a man choosing his ground--Kutusoff, that master of
the waiting game.

Early in September Murat, the impetuous leader of the pursuit,
complained to Nansouty that a cavalry charge had not been pushed home.

“The horses have no patriotism,” replied Nansouty. “The men will fight
on empty stomachs, but not the horses.”

An ominous reply at the beginning of a campaign, while communications
were still open.

At last, within a few days' march of Moscow, Kutusoff made a stand. At
last the great battle was imminent, after a hundred false alarms,
after many disappointed hopes. The country had been flat hitherto. The
Borodino, running in a wider valley than many of these rivers, which are
merely great ditches, seemed to offer possibilities of defence. It was
the only hope for Moscow.

“At last,” wrote Charles to Desiree on September 6, “we are to have a
great battle. There has been much fighting the last few days, but I have
seen none of it. We are only eighty miles from Moscow. If there is a
great battle to-morrow we shall see Moscow in less than a week. For
we shall win. I have now found out from one who is near him that
the Emperor saw and remembered me the day he passed us in the
Frauengasse--our wedding-day, dearest. Nobody is too insignificant for
him to know. He thought that my marriage to you (for he knows that you
are French) would militate against the work I had been given to do in
Dantzig, so he gave orders for me to be sent at once to Konigsberg and
to continue the work there. De Casimir tells me that the Emperor is
pleased with me. De Casimir is the best friend I have; I am sure of
that. It is said that under the walls of Moscow the Emperor will dictate
his terms to Alexander. Every one wonders that Alexander of Russia did
not make proposals of peace when Vilna and Smolensk fell. In a week we
may be at Moscow. In a month I may be back at Dantzig, Desiree....”

And the rest would have been for Desiree's eyes alone, had it ever been
penned. For next in sacredness to heaven-inspired words are mere human
love letters; and those who read the love-letters of another commit a
sacrilege. But Charles never finished the letter, for the dawn surprised
him where he wrote in a shed by the miserable Kalugha, a streamlet
running to the Moskwa. And it was the dawn of September 7, 1812.

“There is the sun of Austerlitz,” said Napoleon to those who were near
him when it arose. But it was not. It was the sun of Borodino. And
before it set the great battle desired by the French had been fought,
and eight French generals lay dead, while thirty more were wounded.
Murat, Davoust, Ney, Junot, Prince Eugene, Napoleon himself--all were
there; and all fought to finish a war which from the first had been
disliked. The French claimed it as a victory; but they gained nothing by
it, and they lost forty thousand killed and wounded.

During the night the Russians evacuated the position which they had
held, and lost, and retaken. They retreated towards Moscow, but Napoleon
was hardly ready to pursue.

These things, however, are history, and those who wish to know of them
may read them in another volume. While to the many orderly persons who
would wish to see everything in its place and the history-books on the
top shelf to be taken down and read on a future day (which will never
come), to such the explanation is due that this battle of Borodino is
here touched upon because it changed the current of some lives with
which we have to deal.

For battles and revolutions and historical events of any sort are the
jagged instruments with which Fate rough-hews our lives, leaving us to
shape them as we will. In other days, no doubt, men rough-hewed, while
Fate shaped. But as civilization advances men will wax so tender, so
careful of the individual, that they will never cut and slash, but move
softly, very tolerant, very easy-going, seeking the compromise that
brings peace and breeds a small and timid race of men.

Into such lives Fate comes crashing like a woodman with his axe, leaving
us to smooth the edges of the gaping wound and smile, and say that we
are not hurt; to pare away the knots and broken stumps; and hope that
our neighbour, concealing such himself, will have the decency to pretend
not to see.

Thus the battle of Borodino crashed into the lives of Desiree and
Mathilde, and their father, living quietly on the sunny side of the
Frauengasse in Dantzig. Antoine Sebastian was the first to hear the
news. He had, it seemed, special facilities for learning news at the
Weissen Ross'l, whither he went again now in the evening.

“There has been a great battle,” he said, with so much more than his
usual self-restraint that Desiree and Mathilde exchanged a glance of
anxiety. “A man coming this evening from Dirschau saw and spoke with
the Imperial couriers on their way to Berlin and Paris. It was a great
victory, quite near to Moscow. But the loss on both sides has been
terrible.”

He paused and glanced at Desiree. It was his creed that good blood
should show an example of self-restraint and a certain steadfast,
indifferent courage.

“Not so much among the French,” he said, “as among the Bavarians and
Italians. It is an odd way of showing patriotism, to gain victories for
the conqueror. One hoped--” he paused and made a gesture with his right
hand, scarcely indicative of a staunch hope, “that the man's star might
be setting, but it would appear to be still in the ascendant. Charles,”
 he added, as an afterthought, “would be on the staff. No doubt he only
saw the fighting from a distance.”

Desiree, from whose face the colour had faded, nodded cheerfully enough.

“Oh yes,” she answered, “I have no doubt he is safe. He has good
fortune.”

For she was an apt pupil, and had already learnt that the world only
wishes to leave us in undisputed possession of our anxieties or sorrows,
however ready it may be to come forward and take a hand in good fortune.

“But there is no definite news,” said Mathilde, hardly looking up from
the needlework at which her fingers were so deft and industrious.

“No.”

“No news of Charles, I mean,” she continued, “or of any of our friends.
Of Monsieur de Casimir, for instance?”

“No. As for Colonel de Casimir,” returned Sebastian thoughtfully,
“he, like Charles, holds some staff appointment of which one does not
understand the scope. He is without doubt uninjured.”

Mathilde glanced at her father not without suspicion. His grand manner
might easily be at times a screen. One never knows how much is perceived
by those who look down from a high place.

The town was quiet enough all that night. Sebastian must have heard the
news from some unofficial source, for none other seemed to know it. But
at daybreak the church bells, so rarely used in Dantzig for rejoicing,
awoke the burghers to the fact that the Emperor bade them make merry.
Napoleon gave great heed to such matters. In the churches of Lithuania
and farther on in Russia he had commanded the popes to pray for him at
their altars instead of for the Czar.

When Desiree came downstairs, she found a packet awaiting her. The
courier had come in during the night. This was more than a letter.
A number of papers had been folded in a handkerchief and bound with
string. The address was written on a piece of white leather cut from
the uniform of one who had fallen at Borodino, and had no more need of
sabretasche or trapping.

     “Madame Desiree Darragon--nee Sebastian,
                 Frauengasse 36,
                    Dantzig.”

Desiree's heart stood still; for the writing was unknown to her. As she
cut the network of string, she thought that Charles was dead. When the
enclosed papers fell upon the table, she was sure of it; for they were
all in his writing. She did not pick and choose as one would who has
leisure and no very strong excitement, but took up the first paper and
read:

“Dear C.--I have been fortunate, as you will see from the enclosed
report. His Majesty cannot again say that I have been neglectful. I was
quite right. It is Sebastian and only Sebastian that we need fear. Here,
they are clumsy conspirators compared to him. I have been in the river
half the night, listening at the open stern window of a Reval pink to
every word they said. His Majesty can safely come to Konigsberg. Indeed,
he is better out of Dantzig. For the whole country is riddled with that
which they call patriotism, and we, treason. But I can only repeat what
His Majesty disbelieved the day before yesterday--that the heart of the
ill is Dantzig, and the venom of it Sebastian. Who he really is and
what he is about, you must find out how you can. I go forward to-day to
Gumbinnen. The enclosed letter to its address--I beg of you--if only in
acknowledgment of all that I have sacrificed.”

The letter was unsigned, but the writing was the writing of Charles
Darragon, and Desiree knew what he had sacrificed--what he could never
recover.

There were two or three more letters addressed to “Dear C.,” bearing no
signature, and yet written by Charles. Desiree read them carefully with
a sort of numb attention which photographed them permanently on her
memory like writing that is carved in stone upon a wall. There must be
some explanation in one of them. Who had sent them to her? Was Charles
dead?

At last she came to a sealed envelope addressed to herself by Charles.
Some other hand had copied the address from it in identical terms on
the piece of white leather. She opened and read it. It was the letter
written to her by Charles on the bank of the Kalugha river on the eve of
Borodino, and left unfinished by him. He must be dead. She prayed that
he might be.

She was alone in the room, having come down early, as was her wont, to
prepare breakfast. She heard Lisa talking with some one at the door--a
messenger, no doubt, to say that Charles was dead.

One letter still remained unread. It was in a different writing--the
writing on the white leather.

“Madame,” it read, “The enclosed papers were found on the field by one
of my orderlies. One of them being addressed to you, furnishes a clue
to their owner, who must have dropped them in the hurry of the advance.
Should Captain Charles Darragon be your husband, I have the pleasure to
inform you that he was seen alive and well at the end of the day.”
 The writer assured Desiree of his respectful consideration, and wrote
“Surgeon” after his name.

Desiree had read the explanation too late.



CHAPTER XIII. IN THE DAY OF REJOICING.



     Truth, though it crush me.

The door of the room stood open, and the sound of a step in the passage
made Desiree glance up, as she hastily put together the papers found on
the battlefield of Borodino.

Louis d'Arragon was coming into the room, and for an instant, before his
expression changed, she saw all the fatigue that he must have endured
during the night; all that he must have risked. His face was usually
still and quiet; a combination of that contemplative calm which
characterises seafaring faces, and the clean-cut immobility of a racial
type developed by hereditary duties of self-restraint and command.

He knew that there had been a battle, and, seeing the papers on the
table, his eyes asked her the inevitable question which his lips were
slow to put into words.

In reply Desiree shook her head. She looked at the papers in quick
thought. Then she withdrew from them the letter written to her by
Charles--and put the others together.

“You told me to send for you,” she said in a quiet, tired voice, “if I
wanted you. You have saved me the trouble.”

His eyes were hard with anxiety as he looked at her. She held the
letters towards him.

“By coming,” she added, with a glance at him which took in the dust,
and the stains of salt-water on his clothes, the fatigue he sought
to conceal by a rigid stillness, and the tension that was left by the
dangers he had passed through--daring all--to come.

Seeing that he looked doubtfully at the papers, she spoke again.

“One,” she said, “that one on the stained paper, is addressed to me. You
can read it--since I ask you.”

The letter told him, at all events, that Charles was not killed, and,
seeing his face clear as he read, she gave an odd, curt laugh.

“Read the others,” she said. “Oh! you need not hesitate. You need not be
so particular. Read one, the top one. One is enough.”

The windows stood open, and the morning breeze fluttering the curtains
brought in the gay sound of bells, the high clear bells of Hanseatic
days, rejoicing at Napoleon's new success--by order of Napoleon. A bee
sailed harmoniously into the room, made the circuit of it, and sought
the open again with a hum that faded drowsily into silence.

D'Arragon read the letter slowly from beginning to the unsigned end,
while Desiree, sitting at the table, upon which she leant one elbow,
resting her small square chin in the palm of her hand, watched him.

“Ah?” she exclaimed at length, with a ring of contempt in her voice, as
if at the thought of something unclean. “A spy! It is so easy for you to
keep still, and to hide all you feel.”

D'Arragon folded the letter slowly. It was the fatal letter written
in the upper room in the shoemaker's house in Konigsberg in the Neuer
Markt, where the linden trees grow close to the window. In it Charles
spoke lightly of the sacrifice he had made in leaving Desiree on his
wedding-day, to do the Emperor's bidding. It was indeed the greatest
sacrifice that man can make; for he had thrown away his honour.

“It may not be so easy as you think,” returned D'Arragon, looking
towards the door.

He had no time to say more; for Mathilde and her father were talking
together on the stairs as they came down. D'Arragon thrust the letters
into his pocket, the only indication he had time to give to Desiree of
the policy they must pursue. He stood facing the door, alert and quiet,
with only a moment in which to shape the course of more than one life.

“There is good news, Monsieur,” he said to Sebastian. “Though I did not
come to bring it.”

Sebastian pointed interrogatively to the open window, where the sound
of the bells seemed to emphasize the sunlight and the freshness of the
morning.

“No--not that,” returned D'Arragon. “It is a great victory, they tell
me; but it is hard to say whether such news would be good or bad. It was
of Charles that I spoke. He is safe--Madame has heard.”

He spoke rather slowly, and turned towards Desiree with a measured
gesture, not unlike Sebastian's habitual manner, and a quick glance to
satisfy himself that she had understood and was ready.

“Yes,” said Desiree, “he was safe and well after the battle, but he
gives no details; for the letter was actually written the day before.”

“With a mere word, added in postscriptum, to say that he was unhurt
at the end of the day,” suggested Sebastian, already drawing forward
a chair with a gesture full of hospitality, inviting D'Arragon to be
seated at the simple breakfast-table. But D'Arragon was looking at
Mathilde, who had gone rather hurriedly to the window, as if to breathe
the air. He had caught a glimpse of her face as she passed. It was hard
and set, quite colourless, with bright, sleepless eyes. D'Arragon was
a sailor. He had seen that look in rougher faces and sterner eyes, and
knew what it meant.

“No details?” asked Mathilde in a muffled voice, without looking round.

“No,” answered Desiree, who had noticed nothing. How much more clearly
we should understand what is going on around us if we had no secrets of
our own to defend!

In obedience to Sebastian's gesture, D'Arragon took a chair, and even
as he did so Mathilde came to the table, calm and mistress of herself
again, to pour out the coffee, and do the honours of the simple meal.
D'Arragon, besides having acquired the seamen's habit of adapting
himself unconsciously and unobtrusively to his surroundings, was of a
direct mind, lacking self-consciousness, and simplified by the pressure
of a strong and steady purpose. For men's minds are like the atmosphere,
which is always cleared by a steady breeze, while a changing wind
generates vapours, mist, uncertainty.

“And what news do you bring from the sea?” asked Sebastian. “Is your sky
there as overcast as ours in Dantzig?”

“No, Monsieur, our sky is clearing,” answered D'Arragon, eating with a
hearty appetite the fresh bread and butter set before him. “Since I
saw you, the treaties have been signed, as you doubtless know, between
Sweden and Russia and England.”

Nodding his head with silent emphasis, Sebastian gave it to be
understood that he knew that and more.

“It makes a great difference to us at sea in the Baltic,” said
D'Arragon. “We are no longer harassed night and day, like a dog,
hounded from end to end of a hostile street, not daring to look into any
doorway. The Russian ports and Swedish ports are open to us now.”

“One is glad to hear that your life is one of less hardship,” said
Sebastian gravely. “I.... who have tasted it.”

Desiree glanced at his lean, hard face. She rose, went out of the room,
and returned in a few minutes carrying a new loaf which she set on the
table before him with a short laugh, and something glistening in her
eyes that was not mirth.

But neither Desiree nor Mathilde joined in the conversation. They were
glad for their father to have a companion so sympathetic as to produce
a marked difference in his manner. For Sebastian was more at ease with
Louis d'Arragon than he was with Charles, though the latter had the tie
of a common fatherland, and spoke the same French that Sebastian spoke.
D'Arragon's French had the roundness always imparted to that language by
an English voice. It was perfect enough, but of an educated perfection.

The talk was of such matters as concerned men more than women; of armies
and war and treaties of peace. For all the world thought that Alexander
of Russia would be brought to his knees by the battle of Borodino. None
knew better how to turn a victory to account than he who claimed to be
victor now. “It does not suffice,” Napoleon wrote to his brother at this
time, “to gain a victory. You must learn to turn it to advantage.”

Save for the one reference to his life in the Baltic during the past two
months, D'Arragon said nothing of himself, of his patient, dogged work
carried on by day and by night in all weathers. Content to have escaped
with his life, he neither referred to, nor thought of, his part in the
negotiations which had resulted in the treaty just signed. For he had
been the link between Russia and England; the never-failing messenger
passing from one to the other with question and answer which were
destined to bear fruit at last in an understanding brought to perfection
in Paris, culminating at Elba.

Both were guarded in what they said of passing events, and both seemed
to doubt the truth of the reports now flying through the streets of
Dantzig. Even in the quiet Frauengasse all the citizens were out on
their terraces calling questions to those that passed by beneath the
trees. The itinerant tradesman, the milkman going his round, the vendors
of fruit from Langfuhr and the distant villages of the plain, lingered
at the doors to tell the servants the latest gossip of the market-place.
Even in this frontier city, full of spies, strangers spoke together in
the streets, and the sound of their voices, raised above the clang of
carillons, came in at the open window.

“At first a victory is always a great one,” said D'Arragon, looking
towards the window.

“It is so easy to ring a bell,” added Sebastian, with his rare smile.

He was quite himself this morning, and only once did the dull look
arrest his features into the stony stillness which his daughters knew.

“You are the only one of your name in Dantzig,” said D'Arragon, in the
course of question and answer as to the safe delivery of letters in time
of war.

“So far as I know, there is no other Sebastian,” replied he; and
Desiree, who had guessed the motive of the question, which must have
been in D'Arragon's mind from the beginning, was startled by the fulness
of the answer. It seemed to make reply to more than D'Arragon had asked.
It shattered the last faint hope that there might have been another
Sebastian of whom Charles had written.

“For myself,” said D'Arragon, changing the subject quickly, “I can
now make sure of receiving letters addressed to me in the care of the
English Consul at Riga, or the Consul at Stockholm, should you wish to
communicate with me, or should Madame find leisure to give me news of
her husband.”

“Desiree will no doubt take pleasure in keeping you advised of Charles's
progress. As for myself, I fear I am a bad correspondent. Perhaps not a
desirable one in these days,” said Sebastian, his face slowly clearing.
He waved the point aside with a gesture that looked out of place on a
hand lean and spare, emerging from a shabby brown sleeve without cuff or
ruffle.

“For I feel assured,” he went on, “that we shall continue to hear good
news of your cousin; not only that he is safe and well, but that he
makes progress in his profession. He will go far, I am sure.”

D'Arragon bowed his acknowledgment of this kind thought, and rose rather
hastily.

“My best chance of quitting the city unseen,” he said, “is to pass
through the gates with the market-people returning to the villages. To
do that, I must not delay.”

“The streets are so full,” replied Sebastian, glancing out of the
window, “that you will pass through them unnoticed. I see beneath the
trees, a neighbour, Koch the locksmith, who is perhaps waiting to give
me news. While you are saying farewell, I will go out and speak to him.
What he has to tell may interest you and your comrades at sea--may help
your escape from the city this morning.”

He took his hat as he spoke and went to the door. Mathilde, thirsting
for the news that seemed to hum in the streets like the sound of bees,
rose and followed him. Desiree and D'Arragon were left alone. She had
gone to the window, and, turning there, she looked back at him over her
shoulder, where he stood by the door watching her.

“So, you see,” she said, “there is no other Sebastian.”

D'Arragon made no reply. She came nearer to him, her blue eyes sombre
with contempt for the man she had married. Suddenly she pointed to the
chair which D'Arragon had just vacated.

“That is where he sat. He has eaten my father's salt a hundred times,”
 she said, with a short laugh. For whithersoever civilization may take
us, we must still go back to certain primaeval laws of justice between
man and man.

“You judge too hastily,” said D'Arragon; but she interrupted him with a
gesture of warning.

“I have not judged hastily,” she said. “You do not understand. You think
I judge from that letter. That is only a confirmation of something that
has been in my mind for a long time--ever since my wedding-day. I knew
when you came into the room upstairs on that day that you did not trust
Charles.”

“I--?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, standing squarely in front of him and looking
him in the eyes. “You did not trust him. You were not glad that I had
married him. I could see it in your face. I have never forgotten.”

D'Arragon turned away towards the window. Sebastian and Mathilde were
in the street below, in the shade of the trees, talking with the eager
neighbours.

“You would have stopped it if you could,” said Desiree; and he did not
deny it.

“It was some instinct,” he said at length. “Some passing misgiving.”

“For Charles?” she asked sharply.

And D'Arragon, looking out of the window, would not answer. She gave a
sudden laugh.

“One cannot compliment you on your politeness,” she said. “Was it for
Charles that you had misgivings?”

At last D'Arragon turned on his heel.

“Does it matter?” he asked. “Since I came too late.”

“That is true,” she said, after a pause. “You came too late; so it
doesn't matter. And the thing is done now, and I..., well, I suppose I
must do what others have done before me--I must make the best of it.”

“I will help you,” said D'Arragon slowly, almost carefully, “if I can.”

He was still avoiding her eyes, still looking out of the window.
Sebastian was coming up the steps.



CHAPTER XIV. MOSCOW.



     Nothing is so disappointing as failure--except success.

While the Dantzigers with grave faces discussed the news of Borodino
beneath the trees in the Frauengasse, Charles Darragon, white with dust,
rose in his stirrups to catch the first sight of the domes and cupolas
of Moscow.

It was a sunny morning, and the gold on the churches gleamed and
glittered in the shimmering heat like fairyland. Charles had ridden to
the summit of a hill and sat for a moment, as others had done, in
silent contemplation. Moscow at last! All around him men were shouting:
“Moscow! Moscow!” Grave, white-haired generals waved their shakos in the
air. Those at the summit of the hill called the others to come. Far down
in the valley, where the dust raised by thousands of feet hung in the
air like a mist, a faint sound like the roar of falling water could be
heard. It was the word “Moscow!” sweeping back to the rearmost ranks of
these starving men who had marched for two months beneath the glaring
sun, parched with dust, through a country that seemed to them a Sahara.
Every house they approached, they had found deserted. Every barn was
empty. The very crops ripening to harvest had been gathered in and
burnt. Near to the miserable farmhouses, a pile of ashes hardly cold
marked where the poor furniture had been tossed upon the fire kindled
with the year's harvest.

Everywhere it was the same. There are, as God created it, few countries
of a sadder aspect than that which spreads between the Moskwa and the
Vistula. But it has been decreed by the dim laws of Race that the ugly
countries shall be blessed with the greater love of their children,
while men born in a beautiful land seem readiest to emigrate from it and
make the best settlers in a new home. There is only one country in the
world with a ring-fence round it. If a Russian is driven from his home,
he will go to another part of Russia: there is always room.

Before the advance of the spoilers, chartered by their leader to
unlimited and open rapine--indeed, he had led them hither with that
understanding--the Prussians, peasant and noble alike, fled to the East.
A hundred times the advance guard, fully alive to the advantages of
their position, had raced to the gates of a chateau only to find, on
breaking open the doors, that it was empty--the furniture destroyed, the
stores burnt, the wine poured out.

So also in the peasants' huts. Some, more careful than the rest, had
pulled the thatch from the roof to burn it. There was no corn in this
the Egypt of their greedy hopes. And, lest they should bring the corn
with them, the spoilers found the mills everywhere wrecked.

It was something new to them. It was new to Napoleon, who had so
frequently been met halfway, who knew that men for greed will part
smilingly with half in order to save the residue. He knew that many,
rather than help a neighbour who is in danger by a robber, will join the
robber and share the spoil, crying out that force majeure was used to
them.

But, as every man must judge according to his lights, so must even the
greatest find himself in the dark at last. No man of the Latin race will
ever understand the Slav. And because the beginning is easy--because in
certain superficial tricks of speech and thought Paris and Petersburg
are not unlike--so much the more is the breach widened when necessity
digs deeper than the surface. For, to make the acquaintance of a
stranger who seems to be a counterpart of one's self in thought and
taste, is like the first hearing of a kindred language such as Dutch to
the English ear. At first it sounds like one's own tongue with a hundred
identical words, but on closer listening it will be found that the words
mean something else, and that the whole is incomprehensible and the more
difficult to acquire by the very reason of its resemblance.

Napoleon thought that the Russians would act as his enemies of the
Latin race had acted. He thought that like his own people they would be
over-confident, urging each other on to great deeds by loud words and a
hundred boasts. But the Russians lack self-confidence, are timid rather
than over-bold, dreamy rather than fiery. Only their women are glib of
speech. He thought that they would begin very brilliantly and end with a
compromise, heart-breaking at first and soon lived down.

“They are savages out here in the plains,” he said. “It is a barbaric
and stupid instinct that makes them destroy their own property for the
sake of hampering us. As we approach Moscow we shall find that the
more civilized inhabitants of the villages, enervated by an easy
life, rendered selfish by possession of wealth, will not abandon their
property, but will barter and sell to us and find themselves the victims
of our might.”

And the army believed him. For they always believed him. Faith can,
indeed, move mountains. It carried four hundred thousand men, without
provisions, through a barren land.

And now, in sight of the golden city, the army was still hungry. Nay! it
was ragged already. In three columns it converged on the doomed capital,
driving before it like a swarm of flies the Cossacks who harassed the
advance.

Here again, on the hill looking down into the smiling valley of the
Moskwa, the unexpected awaited the invaders. The city, shimmering in
the sunlight like the realization of some Arab's dream, was silent.
The Cossacks had disappeared. Except those around the Kremlin, towering
above the river, the city had no walls.

The army halted while aides-de-camp flew hither and thither on their
weary horses. Charles Darragon, sunburnt, dusty, hoarse with cheering,
was among the first. He looked right and left for de Casimir, but
could not see him. He had not seen his chief since Borodino, for he was
temporarily attached to the staff of Prince Eugene, who had lost heavily
at the Kalugha river.

It was usual for the army to halt before a beleaguered city and await
the advent in all humility of the vanquished. Commonly it was the mayor
of a town who came, followed by his councillors in their robes, to
explain that the army had abandoned the city, which now begged to throw
itself upon the mercy of the conqueror.

For this the army waited on that sunny September morning.

“He is putting on his robes,” they said gaily. “He is new to this work.”

But the mayor of Moscow disappointed them. At last the troops moved on
and camped for the night in a village under the Kremlin walls. It was
here that Charles received a note from de Casimir.

“I am slightly wounded,” wrote that officer, “but am following the army.
At Borodino my horse was killed under me, and I was thrown. While I
was insensible, I was robbed and lost what money I had, as well as my
despatch-case. In the latter was the letter you wrote to your wife. It
is lost, my friend; you must write another.”

Charles was tired. He would put off till to-morrow, he thought, and
write to Desiree from Moscow. As he lay, all dressed on the hard ground,
he fell to thinking of what he should write to Desiree to-morrow from
Moscow. The mere date and address of such a letter would make her love
him the more, he thought; for, like his leaders, he was dazed by a
surfeit of glory.

As he fell asleep smiling at these happy reflections, Desiree, far away
in Dantzig, was locking in her bureau the letter which had been lost
and found again; while, on the deck of his ship, lifting gently to the
tideway where the Vistula sweeps out into the Dantziger Bucht, Louis
d'Arragon stood fingering reflectively in his jacket-pocket the unread
papers which had fallen from the same despatch-case. For it is a very
small world in which to do wrong, though if a man do a little good in
his lifetime it is--heaven knows--soon mislaid and trodden under the
feet of the new-comers.

The next day it was definitely ascertained that the citizens of Moscow
had no communication to make to the conquering leaders. Soon after
daylight the army moved towards the city. The suburbs were deserted. The
houses stood with closed shutters and locked doors. Not so much as a dog
awaited the triumphant entry through the city gates.

Long streets without a living being from end to end met the eyes of
those daring organizers of triumphal entries who had been sent forward
to clear a path and range the respectful citizens on either hand. But
there were no citizens. There was not a single witness to this triumph
of the greatest army the world had seen, led across Europe by the first
captain in all history to conquer a virgin capital.

The various corps marched to their quarters in silence, with nervous
glances at the shuttered windows. Some, breaking rank, ventured into the
churches which stood open. The candles were lighted on the altars, they
reported to their comrades in a hushed voice when they returned, but
there was no one there.

Certain palaces were selected as head-quarters for the general officers
and the chiefs of various departments. As often as not a summons would
be answered and the door opened by an obsequious porter, who handed the
keys to the first-comer. But he spoke no French, and only cringed in
silence when addressed. Other doors were broken in.

It was like a play acted in dumb show on an immense stage. It was
disquieting and incomprehensible even to the oldest campaigner, while
the young fire-eaters, fresh from St. Cyr, were strangely depressed
by it. There was a smell of sour smoke in the air, a suggestion of
inevitable tragedy.

On the Krasnaya Ploschad--the great Red Square, which is the central
point of the old town--the soldiers were already buying and selling the
spoil wrested from the burning Exchange. It seemed that the citizens
before leaving had collected their merchandise in this building to burn
it. To the rank-and-file this meant nothing but an incomprehensible
stupidity. To the educated and the thoughtful it was another evidence
of that dumb and sullen capacity for infinite self-sacrifice which makes
Russians different from any other race, and which has yet to be reckoned
with in the history of the world. For it will tend to the greatest good
of the greatest number, and is a power for national aggrandisement quite
unattainable by any Latin people.

Charles, with the other officers of Prince Eugene's staff, was quartered
in a palace on the Petrovka--that wide street running from the Kremlin
northward to the boulevards and the parks. Going towards it he passed
through the bazaars and the merchants' quarters, where, like an army of
rag-pickers, the eager looters were silently hurrying from heap to heap.
Every warehouse had, it seemed, been ransacked and its contents thrown
out into the streets. The first-comers had hurried on, seeking something
more valuable, more portable, leaving the later arrivals to turn over
their garbage like dogs upon a dust-heap.

The Petrovka is a long street of great houses, and was now deserted.
The pillagers were nervous and ill at ease, as men must always be in the
presence of something they do not understand. The most experienced of
them--and there were some famous robbers in Murat's vanguard--had never
seen an empty city abandoned all standing, as the Russians had
abandoned Moscow. They felt apprehensive of the unknown. Even the least
imaginative of them looked askance at the tall houses, at the open doors
of the empty churches, and they kept together for company's sake.

Charles's rooms were in the Momonoff Palace, where even the youngest
lieutenant had vast apartments assigned to him. It was in one of
these--a lady's boudoir, where his dust-covered baggage had been thrown
down carelessly by his orderly on a blue satin sofa--that he sat down to
write to Desiree.

His emotions had been stirred by all that he had passed through--by the
first sight of Moscow, by the passage beneath the Gate of the Redeemer,
where every man must uncover and only Napoleon dared to wear a hat; by
the bewildering sense of triumph and the knowledge that he was taking
part in one of the epochs of man's history on this earth. The emotions
lie very near together, so that laughter being aroused must also touch
on tears, and hatred being kindled warms the heart to love.

A

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