And now the Cossacks on their spare and ill-tempered horses passed to and fro, wild men under an untamed leader whose heart was hardened to stone by bereavement. The cobbler looked at them with a countenance of wood. It was hard to say whether he preferred them to the French, or was indifferent to one as to the other. He looked at their boots with professional disdain. For all men must look at the world from their own standpoint and consider mankind in the light of their own interests. Thus those who live on the greed or the vanity, or batten on the charity of their neighbour, learn to watch the lips.
The cobbler, by reason of looking at the lower end of men, attracted little attention from the passerby. He who has his eyes on the ground passes unheeded. For the surest way of awakening interest is to appear interested. It would seem that this cobbler was waiting for a pair of boots not made in Königsberg. And on the third day his expressionless black eyes lighted on feet not shod in Poland, or France, or Germany, nor yet in square-toed Russia.
The owner of these far-travelled boots was a lightly-built dark-faced man, with eyes quietly ubiquitous. He caught the interested glance of the cobbler, and turned to look at him again with the uneasiness that is bred of war. The cobbler instantly hobbled towards him.
“Will you help a poor man?” he said.
“Why should I?” was the answer, with one hand already half out of its thick glove. “You are not hungry; you have never been starved in your life.”
The German was quick enough, but it was not quite the Prussian German.
The cobbler looked at the speaker slowly.
“An Englishman?” he asked.
And the other nodded.
“Come this way.”
The cobbler hobbled towards the Kneiphöf, where the streets are quiet, and the Englishman followed him. At the corner of the Kohl Markt he turned and looked, not at the man, but at his boots.
“You are a sailor?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I was told to look for an English sailor—Louis d’Arragon.”
“Then you have found me,” was the reply.
Still the cobbler hesitated.
“How am I to know it?” he asked suspiciously.
“Can you read?” asked D’Arragon. “I can prove who I am—if I want to. But I am not sure that I want to.”
“Oh! it is only a letter—of no importance. Some private business of your own. It comes from Danzig—written by one whose name begins with B.”
“Barlasch,” suggested D’Arragon quietly, as he took from his pocket a paper which he unfolded and held beneath the eyes of the cobbler. It was a passport written in three languages. If the man could read, he was not anxious to boast of an accomplishment so far above his station; but he glanced at the paper, not without a practised skill, to seize the essential parts of it.
“Yes, that is the name,” he said, searching in his pockets. “The letter is an open one. Here it is.”
In passing the letter, the man made a scarcely perceptible movement of the hand which might have been a signal.
“No,” said D’Arragon, “I do not belong to the Tugendbund or to any other secret society. We have need of no such associations in my country.”
The cobbler laughed, not without embarrassment.
“You have a quick eye,” he said. “It is a great country, England. I have seen the river full of English ships before Napoleon chased you off the seas.”
D’Arragon smiled as he unfolded the letter.
“He has not done it yet,” he said, with that spirit which enables mariners of the Anglo-Saxon race to be amused when there is a talk of supremacy on the high seas. He read the letter carefully, and his face hardened.
“I was instructed,” said the cobbler, “to give you the letter, and at the same time to inform you that any assistance or facilities you may require will be forthcoming; besides …” he broke off and pointed with his thick, leather-stained finger, “that writing is not the writing of him who signs.”
“He who signs cannot write at all.”
“That writing,” went on the cobbler, “is a passport in any German state. He who carries a letter written in that hand can live and travel free anywhere from here to the Rhine or the Danube.”
“Then I am lucky in possessing a powerful friend,” said D’Arragon, “for I know who wrote this letter. I think I may say he is a friend of mine.”
“I am sure of it. I have already been told so,” said the cobbler. “Have you a lodging in Königsberg? No? Then you can lodge in my house.”
Without awaiting a reply, which he seemed to consider a foregone conclusion, he limped down the Kohl Markt towards the steps leading to the river, which in winter is a thoroughfare.
“I live in the Neuer Markt,” he said breathlessly, as he laboured onwards. “I have waited for you three days on that bridge. Where have you been all this time?”
“Avoiding the French,” replied D’Arragon curtly. Respecting his own affairs he was reticent, as commanders and other lonely men must always be. They walked side by side on the dusty and trodden ice without further speech. At the steps from the river to Neuer Markt, D’Arragon gave the lame man his hand, and glanced a second time at the fingers which clasped his own. They had not been born to toil, but had had it thrust upon them.
They crossed the Neuer Markt together, and went into that house where the linden grows so close as to obscure the windows. And the lodging offered to Louis was the room in which Charles Darragon had slept in his wet clothes six months earlier. So small is the world in which we live, and so narrow are the circles drawn by Fate around human existence and endeavour.
The cobbler having shown his visitor the room, and pointed out its advantages, was turning to go
