“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 Danzig,” 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.”
“Désirée 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.”
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 Danzig.
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 Côtes 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 shirtsleeves.
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 Désirée, 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.
“Aï, aï, aï,” he said, imitating with his two hands the galloping of a horse. “The Russians,” he explained confidentially.
“Has there been a battle?” asked Désirée.
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—aï, aï, 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 goodbye to the Frauengasse. We have been friends. I told you we should be. It is goodbye 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 Danzig 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
