XXIV
Mathilde Chooses
But strong is fate, O Love,
Who makes, who mars, who ends.
Désirée was telling Mathilde the brief news of her futile journey, when a knock at the front door made them turn from the stairs where they were standing. It was Sebastian’s knock. His hours had been less regular of late. He came and went without explanation.
When he had freed his throat from his furs, and laid aside his gloves, he glanced hastily at Désirée, who had kissed him without speaking.
“And your husband?” he asked curtly.
“It was not he whom we found at Thorn,” she answered. There was something in her father’s voice—in his quick, sidelong glance at her—that caught her attention. He had changed lately. From a man of dreams he had been transformed into a man of action. It is customary to designate a man of action as a hard man. Custom is the brick wall against which feeble minds come to a standstill and hinder the progress of the world. Sebastian had been softened by action, through which his mental energy had found an outlet. But tonight he was his old self again—hard, scornful, incomprehensible.
“I have heard nothing of him,” said Désirée.
Sebastian was stamping the snow from his boots.
“But I have,” he said, without looking up.
Désirée said nothing. She knew that the secret she had guarded so carefully—the secret kept by herself and Louis—was hers no longer. In the silence of the next moments she could hear Barlasch breathing on his fingers, within the kitchen doorway just behind her. Mathilde made a little movement. She was on the stairs, and she moved nearer to the balustrade and held to it breathlessly. For Charles Darragon’s secret was De Casimir’s too.
“These two gentlemen,” said Sebastian slowly, “were in the secret service of Napoleon. They are hardly likely to return to Danzig.”
“Why not?” asked Mathilde.
“They dare not.”
“I think the Emperor will be able to protect his officers,” said Mathilde.
“But not his spies,” replied Sebastian coldly.
“Since they wore his uniform, they cannot be blamed for doing their duty. They are brave enough. They would hardly avoid returning to Danzig because—because they have outwitted the Tugendbund.”
Mathilde’s face was colourless with anger, and her quiet eyes flashed. She had been surprised into this sudden advocacy, and an advocate who displays temper is always a dangerous ally. Sebastian glanced at her sharply. She was usually so self-controlled that her flashing eyes and quick breath betrayed her.
“What do you know of the Tugendbund?” he asked.
But she would not answer, merely shrugging her shoulders and closing her thin lips with a snap.
“It is not only in Danzig,” said Sebastian, “that they are unsafe. It is anywhere where the Tugendbund can reach them.”
He turned sharply to Désirée. His wits, cleared by action, told him that her silence meant that she, at all events, had not been surprised. She had, therefore, known already the part played by De Casimir and Charles, in Danzig, before the war.
“And you,” he said, “you have nothing to say for your husband.”
“He may have been misled,” she said mechanically, in the manner of one making a prepared speech or meeting a foreseen emergency. It had been foreseen by Louis d’Arragon. The speech had been, unconsciously, prepared by him.
“You mean, by Colonel de Casimir,” suggested Mathilde, who had recovered her usual quiet. And Désirée did not deny her meaning. Sebastian looked from one to the other. It was the irony of Fate that had married one of his daughters to Charles Darragon, and affianced the other to De Casimir. His own secret, so well kept, had turned in his hand like a concealed weapon.
They were all startled by Barlasch, who spoke from the kitchen door, where he had been standing unobserved or forgotten. He came forward to the light of the lamp hanging overhead.
“That reminds me …” he said a second time, and having secured their attention, he instituted a search in the many pockets of his nondescript clothing. He still wore a dirty handkerchief bound over one eye. It served to release him from duty in the trenches or work on the frozen fortifications. By this simple device, coupled with half a dozen bandages in various parts of his person, where a frostbite or a wound gave excuse, he passed as one of the twenty-five thousand sick and wounded who encumbered Danzig at this time, and were already dying at the rate of fifty a day.
“A letter …” he said, still searching with his maimed hand. “You mentioned the name of the Colonel de Casimir. It was that which recalled to my mind …” He paused, and produced a letter carefully sealed. He turned it over, glancing at the seals with a reproving jerk of the head, which conveyed as clearly as words a shameless confession that he had been frustrated by them … “this letter. I was told to give it you, without fail, at the right moment.”
It could hardly be the case that he honestly thought this moment might be so described. But he gave the letter to Mathilde with a gesture of grim triumph. Perhaps he was thinking of the cellar in the Palace on the Petrovka at Moscow, and the treasure which he had found there.
“It is from the Colonel de Casimir,” he said, “a clever man,” he added, turning confidentially to Sebastian, and holding his attention by an upraised hand. “Oh! … a clever man.”
Mathilde, her face all flushed, tore open the envelope, while Barlasch, breathing on his fingers, watched with twinkling eye and busy lips.
The letter was a long one. Colonel de Casimir was an adept at explanation. There was, no doubt, much to explain. Mathilde read the letter carefully. It was the first she had ever had—a love-letter in its guise—with explanations in it. Love and explanation in the same breath. Assuredly De Casimir was a daring lover.
“He says that Danzig will be taken by storm,” she said at length, “and that the Cossacks will
