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 Königsberg. Indeed, he is better out of Danzig. 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 Danzig, 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 today 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 Désirée 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. Désirée 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 someone 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 Désirée of his respectful consideration, and wrote “Surgeon” after his name.
Désirée had read the explanation too late.
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 Désirée 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 Désirée 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 saltwater 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 Désirée, 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 Königsberg 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 Désirée 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
