“There is French blood in your veins,” he said abruptly.
“Yes—a little.”
“So. I thought there must be. You reminded me—it was odd, the way you laid aside your coat—reminded me of a Frenchman who lodged here for one night. He was like you, too, in build and face. He was a spy, if you please—one of the French Emperor’s secret police. I was new at the work then, but still I suspected there was something wrong about him. I took his boots—a pretext of mending them. I locked him in. He got out of that window, if you please, without his boots. He followed me, and learnt much that he was not meant to know. I have since heard it from others. He did the Emperor a great service—that man. He saved his life, I think, from assassination in Danzig. And he did me an ill turn—but it was my own carelessness. I thought to make a thaler by lodging him, and he was tricking me all the while.”
“What was his name?” asked D’Arragon.
“Oh—I forgot the name he gave. It was a false one. He was disguised as a common soldier—and he was in reality an officer of the staff. But I know the name of the officer to whom he wrote his report of his night’s lodging here—his colleague in the secret police, it would seem.”
“Ah!” said D’Arragon, busying himself with his haversack.
“It was De Casimir—a Polish name. And in the last two days I have heard of him. He has accepted the Emperor’s amnesty. He has married a beautiful woman, and is living like a prince at Krakow. All this since the siege of Danzig began. In time of war there is no moment to lose, eh?”
“And the other? He who slept in this room. Has he passed through Königsberg again?”
“No, that he has not. If he had, I should have seen him. You can believe me, I wanted to see him. I was at my place on the bridge all the time—while the French occupied Königsberg—when the last of them hurried away a month ago with the Cossacks close behind. No. I should have seen him, and known him. He is not on this side of the Niemen, that fine young gentleman. Now, what can I do to help you tomorrow?”
“You can help me on the way to Vilna,” answered D’Arragon.
“You will never get there.”
“I will try,” said the sailor.
XXVII
A Flash of Memory
Nothing can cover his high fame but Heaven,
No pyramids set off his memories,
But the eternal substance of his greatness
To which I leave him.
“Why I will not let you go out into the streets?” said Barlasch one February morning, stamping the snow from his boots. “Why I will not let you go out into the streets?”
He turned and followed Désirée towards the kitchen, after having carefully bolted the heavy oaken door which had been strengthened as if to resist a siege. Désirée’s face had that clear pallor which marks an indoor life; but Barlasch, weather-beaten, scorched and wrinkled, showed no sign of having endured a month’s siege in an overcrowded city.
“I will tell you why I will not let you go into the streets. Because they are not fit for any woman to go into—because if you walked from here to the Rathhaus you would see sights that would come back to you in your sleep, and wake you from it, when you are an old woman. Do you know what they do with their dead? They throw them outside their doors—with nothing to cover their starved nakedness—as Lisa put her ashes in the street every morning. And the cart goes round, as the dustman’s cart used to go in times of peace, and, like the dustman’s cart, it drops part of its load, and the dust that blows round it is the infection of typhus. That is why you cannot go into the streets.”
He unbuttoned his fur coat and displayed a smart new uniform; for Rapp had put his miserable army into new clothes, with which many of the Danzig warehouses had been filled by Napoleon’s order at the beginning of the war.
“There,” he said, laying a small parcel on the table, “there is my daily ration. Two ounces of horse, one ounce of salt beef, the same as yesterday. One does not know how long we shall be treated so generously. Let us keep the beef—we may come to want some day.”
And giving a hoarse laugh, he lifted a board in the floor, beneath which he hoarded his stores.
“Will you cook your déjeuner yourself,” asked Désirée. “I have something else for my father.”
“And what have you?” asked Barlasch curtly; “you are not keeping anything hidden from me?”
“No,” answered Désirée, with a laugh at the sternness of his face, “I will give him a piece of the ham which was left over from last night.”
“Left over?” echoed Barlasch, going close to her and looking up into her face, for she was two inches taller than he. “Left over? Then you did not eat your supper last night?”
“Neither did you eat yours, for it is there under the floor.”
Barlasch turned away with a gesture of despair. He sat down in the high armchair that stood on the hearth, and tapped on the floor with one foot in pessimistic thought.
“Ah! the women, the women,” he muttered, looking into the smouldering fire. “Lies—all lies. You said that your supper was very nice,” he shouted at her over his shoulder.
“So it was,” answered she gaily, “so it is still.”
Barlasch did not rise to her lighter humour. He sat in reflection for some minutes. Then his thoughts took their usual form of a muttered aside.
“It is a case of compromise. Always like that. The good God had to compromise with the first woman he created almost at once. And men
