When it was sealed and addressed he called his orderly to take it to the officer to whose duty it fell to make up the courier for Germany. But he received no reply. The man had joined his comrades in the busier quarters of the city. Charles went to the head of the stairs and called again, with no better success. The house was comparatively modern, built on the familiar lines of a Parisian hotel, with a wide stair descending to an entrance archway where carriages passed through into a courtyard.
Descending the stairs, Charles found that even the sentry had absented himself from his duty. His musket, leant against the post of the stone doorway, indicated that he was not far. Listening in the silence of that great house, Charles heard someone at work with hammer and chisel in the courtyard. He went there, and found the sentry kneeling at a low door, endeavouring to break it open. The man had not been idle; from a piece of rope slung across his back half a dozen clocks were suspended. They rattled together like the wares of a travelling tinsmith at every movement of his arms.
“What are you doing there, my friend?” asked Charles.
The man held up one finger over his shoulder without looking round, and shook it from side to side, as not desiring to be interrupted.
“The cellar,” he answered, “always the cellar. It is human nature. We get it from the animals.”
He glanced round as he worked, and, perceiving that he had been addressing an officer, he scrambled to his feet with a grumbled curse. He was an old man, baked by the sun. The wrinkles in his face were filled with dust. Since quitting the banks of the Vistula no opportunity for ablution seemed to have presented itself to him. He stood at attention, his lips working over sunken gums.
“I want you to take this letter,” said Charles, “to the officer on service at headquarters, and ask him to include it in his courier. It is, as you see, a private letter—to my wife at Danzig.”
The man looked at it, and grumbled something inaudible. He took it in his hand and turned it over with the slow manner of the illiterate.
XV
The Goal
God writes straight on crooked lines.
Charles, having given his letter to the sentry with the order to take it to its immediate destination, turned towards the stairs again. In those days an order was given in a different tone to that which servitude demands in later times.
He returned to his room on the first floor without even waiting to make sure that he would be obeyed. He had scarcely seated himself when, after a fumbling knock, the sentry opened the door and followed him into the room, still holding the letter in his hand.
“Mon capitaine,” he said with a certain calmness of manner as from an old soldier to a young one, “a word—that is all. This letter,” he turned it in his hand as he spoke, and looking at Charles beneath scowling brows, awaited an explanation. “Did you pick it up?”
“No—I wrote it.”
“Good. I …” he paused, and tapped himself on the chest so that there could be no mistake; there was a rattling sound behind him suggestive of ironware. Indeed, he was hung about with other things than clocks, and seemed to be of opinion that if a soldier sets value upon any object he must attach it to his person. “I, Barlasch of the Guard—Marengo, the Danube, Egypt—picked up after Borodino a letter like it. I cannot read very quickly—indeed—Bah! the old Guard needs no pens and paper—but that letter I picked up was just like this.”
“Was it addressed like that to Madame Désirée Darragon?”
“So a comrade told me. It is you, her husband?”
“Yes,” answered Charles, “since you ask; I am her husband.”
“Ah!” replied Barlasch darkly, and his limbs and features settled themselves into a patient waiting.
“Well,” asked Charles, “what are you waiting for?”
“Whatever you may think proper, mon capitaine, for I gave the letter to the surgeon who promised that it should be forwarded to its address.”
Charles laughingly sought his purse. But there was nothing in it, so he looked round the room.
“Here, add this to your collection,” and he took a small French clock from the writing-table, a pretty, gilded toy from Paris.
“Thank you, mon capitaine.”
Barlasch, with shaking fingers, unknotted the rope around his shoulders. As he was doing so one of the clocks on his back began to strike. He paused, and stood looking gravely at his superior officer. Another clock took up the tale and a third, while Barlasch sternly stood at attention.
“Four o’clock,” he said to himself, “and I, who have not yet breakfasted—”
With a grunt and a salute he turned towards the door which stood open. Someone was coming up the stairs rather slowly, his spurs clinking, his scabbard clashing against the gilded banisters. Papa Barlasch stood aside at attention, and Colonel de Casimir came into the room with a gay word of greeting. Barlasch went out, but he did not close the door. It is to be presumed that he stood without, where he might have overheard all that they said to each other for quite a long time, until it was almost the half-hour when the clocks would strike again. But de Casimir, perceiving that the door was open, closed it quietly from within, and Barlasch, shut out on the wide landing, made a grimace at the massive woodwork before turning to descend the stairs.
It was the middle of September, and the days were shortening. The dusk of evening had already closed over the city when de Casimir and Charles at length came downstairs. No one had troubled to open the shutters of such rooms as were not required; and these were many. For Moscow was even at that day a great city, though less spacious and more fantastic
