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.