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.