He still nourished a lingering belief in De Casimir’s word. Charles must have been left behind at Vilna to recover from his exhaustion. He would, undoubtedly, make his way westward as soon as possible. He might have got away to the South. Any one of these huddled human landmarks might be Charles Darragon.
Louis was essentially a thorough man. The sea is a mistress demanding a whole and concentrated attention—and concentration soon becomes a habit. Louis did not travel at night, for fear of passing Charles on the road, alive or dead. He knew his cousin better than any in the Frauengasse had learnt to know this gay and inconsequent Frenchman. A certain cunning lay behind the happy laugh—a great capacity was hidden by the careless manner. If ready wit could bring man through the dangers of the retreat, Charles had as good a chance of surviving as any.
Nevertheless, Louis rarely passed a dead man on the road, but drew up, and quitting his sleigh, turned over the body, which was almost invariably huddled with its back offered to the deadly, prevailing North wind. Against each this wind had piled a sloping bank of that fine snow which, even in the lightest breeze, drifts over the surface of the land like an ivory mist, waist high, and cakes the clothes. In a high wind it will rise twenty feet in the air, and blind any who try to face it.
As often as not a mere glance sufficed to show that this was not Charles, for few of the bodies were clad. Many had been stripped, while still living, by their half-frozen comrades. But sometimes Louis had to dust the snow from strange bearded faces before he could pass on with a quick sigh of relief.
Beyond Kowno, the country is thinly populated, and spreading pine-forests bound the horizon. The Cossacks—the wild men of Toula, who reaped the laurels of the rearguard fighting—were all along the road. D’Arragon frequently came upon a picket—as often as not the men were placidly sitting on a frozen corpse, as on a seat—and stopped to say a few words and gather news.
“You will find your friend at Vilna,” said one young officer, who had been attached to General Wilson’s staff, and had many stories to tell of the energetic and indefatigable English commissioner. “At Vilna we took twenty thousand prisoners—poor devils who came and asked us for food—and I don’t know how many officers. And if you see Wilson there, remember me to him. If Napoleon has need to hate one man more than another for this business, it is that firebrand, Wilson. Yes, you will assuredly find your cousin at Vilna among the prisoners. But you must not linger by the road, for they are being sent back to Moscow to rebuild that which they have caused to be destroyed.”
He laughed and waved his gloved hand as D’Arragon drove on.
After the broken land and low abrupt hills of Kowno, the country was flat again until the valley of the Vilia opened out. And here, almost within sight of Vilna, D’Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked the final degeneration of the Emperor’s army into a shapeless rabble hopelessly flying before an exhausted enemy.
Half on the road and half in the ditch were hundreds of carriages which had been hurriedly smashed up to provide firewood. Carts, still laden with the booty of Moscow, stood among the trees. Some of them contained small square boxes of silver coin, brought by Napoleon to pay his army and here abandoned. Silver coin was too heavy to carry. The rate of exchange had long been sixty francs in silver for a gold napoleon or a louis. The cloth coverings of the cushions had been torn off to shape into rough garments; the straw stuffing had been eaten by the horses.
Inside the carriages were—crouching on the floor—the frozen bodies of fugitives too badly wounded or too ill to attempt to walk. They had sat there till death came to them. Many were women. In one carriage four women, in silks and fine linen, were huddled together. Their furs had been dragged from them either before or after death.
Louis stopped at the bottom and looked back. De Casimir at all events had succeeded in surmounting this obstacle which had proved fatal to so many—the grave of so many hopes—God’s rubbish-heap, where gold and precious stones, silks and priceless furs, all that greedy men had schemed and striven and fought to get, fell from their hands at last.
Vilna lies all down a slope—a city built upon several hills—and the Vilia runs at the bottom. That Way of Sorrow, the Smolensk Road, runs eastward by the river bank, and here the rearguard held the Cossacks in check while Murat hastily decamped, after dark, westwards to Kowno. The King of Naples, to whom Napoleon gave the command of his broken army quite gaily—“à vous, Roi de Naples,” he is reported to have said, as he hurried to his carriage—Murat abandoned his sick and wounded; did not even warn the stragglers.
D’Arragon entered the city by the narrow gate known as the Town Gate, through which, as through that greater portal of Moscow, every man must pass bareheaded.
“The Emperor is here,” were the first words spoken to him by the officer on guard.
But the streets were quiet enough, and the winner in this great game of chance maintained the same unostentatious silence in victory as that which, in the hour of humiliation, had baffled Napoleon.
It was almost night, and D’Arragon had been travelling since daylight. He found a lodging, and,
