“That is not all,” he said at length. He looked round the vast room, which was almost deserted. The stout waitress was polishing pewter mugs at the bar. “You say you have already had answers to those letters. It is a great organization—your secret society—whatever it is called. It delivers letters all over Prussia—eh? and Poland perhaps—or farther still.”
Sebastian shrugged one shoulder, and made no answer for some time.
“I have already told you,” he said impatiently, at length, “to forget the incident; you were paid.”
By way of reply, the old soldier laboriously emptied his pockets, searching the most remote of them for small copper coins. He counted slowly and carefully until he had made up a thaler.
“But it is not my turn to be paid this time. It is I who pay.”
He held out his hand with a pound weight of base metal in it, but Sebastian refused the money with a sudden assumption of his cold and scornful manner, oddly out of keeping with his humble surroundings.
“As between friends—” suggested Barlasch, and, on receiving a more decided negative, returned the coins to his pocket, not without satisfaction.
“I want your friends to pass on a letter for me—I am willing to pay,” he said in a whisper. “A letter to Captain Louis d’Arragon—it concerns the happiness of Mademoiselle Désirée. Do not shake your head. Think before you refuse. The letter will be an open one—six words or so—telling the Captain that his cousin, Mademoiselle’s husband, is not in Danzig, and cannot now return here since the last of the rearguard entered the city this morning.”
Sebastian seemed to be considering the matter, and Barlasch was quick to combat possible objections.
“The Captain went to Königsberg. He is there now. Your friends can easily find him, and give him the letter. It is of great importance to Mademoiselle. The Captain is not looking for Monsieur Charles Darragon, because he thinks that he is here in Danzig. Colonel de Casimir assured him that Mademoiselle would find him here. Where is he—that Monsieur Charles—I wonder? It is of great importance to Mademoiselle. The Captain would perhaps continue his search.”
“Where is your letter?” asked Sebastian.
By way of reply, Barlasch laid on the table a sheet of paper.
“You must write it,” he said. “My hand is injured. I write not badly, you understand. But this evening I do not feel that my hand is well enough.”
So, with the sticky, thick ink of the Weissen Röss’l, Sebastian wrote the letter, and Barlasch, forgetting his scholarly acquirements, took the pen and made a mark beneath his own name written at the foot of it.
Then he went out, and left Sebastian to pay for the beer.
XXVI
On the Bridge
They that are above
Have ends in everything.
A lame man was standing on the bridge that crosses the Neuer Pregel from the Kant Strasse—which is the centre of the city of Königsberg—to the island known as the Kneiphöf. This bridge is called the Krämer Brücke, and may be described as the heart of the town. From it on either hand diverge the narrow streets that run along the river bank, busy with commerce, crowded with the narrow sleighs that carry wood from the Pregel up into the town.
The wider streets—such as the Kant Strasse, running downhill from the royal castle to the river, and the Kneiphöf’sche Langgasse, leading southward to the Brandenburg gate and the great world—must needs make use of the Krämer Brücke. Here, it may be said, every man in the town must sooner or later pass in the execution of his daily business, whether he go about it on foot or in a sleigh with a pair of horses. Here the idler and those grave professors from the University, which was still mourning the death of the aged Kant, nearly always passed in their thoughtful and conscientious promenades.
Here this lame man, a cobbler by trade, plying his quiet calling in a house in the Neuer Markt, where the lime-trees grow close to the upper windows, had patiently kept watch for three days. He was, like many lame men, of an abnormal width and weight. He had a large, square, dogged face, which seemed to promise that he would wait there till the crack of doom rather than abandon a quest.
It was very cold—midwinter within a few miles of the frozen Baltic on the very verge of Russia, at that point where old Europe stretches a long arm out into the unknown. The cobbler was wrapped in a sheepskin coat, which stood out all round him with the stiffness of wood, so that he seemed to be living inside a box. To keep himself warm he occasionally limped across from end to end of the bridge, but never went farther. At times he leant his arms on the stone wall at the Kant Strasse end of the bridge, and looked down into the Lower Fish Market, where women from Pillau and the Baltic shores—mere bundles of clothes—stood over their baskets of fish frozen hard like sticks. It was a silent market. One cannot haggle long when a minute’s exposure to the air will give a frostbite to the end of the nose. The would-be purchaser can scarcely make an effective bargain through a fringe of icicles that rattle against his lips if he open them.
The Pregel had been frozen for three months, with only the one temporary thaw in November which cost Napoleon so many thousands at his broken bridge across the Bérésina. Though no water had flowed beneath this bridge, many strange feet had passed across it.
It had vibrated beneath Napoleon’s heavy carriage, under the lumbering guns that Macdonald took northward to blockade Riga. Within the last few weeks it had given passage to the last of the retreating army, a mere handful of heartsick fugitives. Macdonald with his staff had been ignominiously driven across it by the Cossacks who
