“A son of Louis d’Arragon who was fortunate enough to escape to England?” he inquired with a courteous gesture.
“The only son,” replied the newcomer.
“I am honoured to make the acquaintance of Monsieur le Marquis,” said Antoine Sebastian slowly.
“Oh, you must not call me that,” replied D’Arragon with a short laugh. “I am an English sailor—that is all.”
“And now, my dear Louis, I leave you,” broke in Charles, who had rather impatiently awaited the end of these formalities. “A brief half-hour and I am with you again. You will stay here till I return.”
He turned, nodded gaily to Désirée and ran downstairs.
Through the open windows they heard his quick, light footfall as he hurried up the Frauengasse. Something made them silent, listening to it.
It was not difficult to see that D’Arragon was a sailor. Not only had he the brown face of those who live in the open, but he had the attentive air of one whose waking moments are a watch.
“You look at one as if one were the horizon,” Désirée said to him long afterwards. But it was at this moment in the drawing-room in the Frauengasse that the comparison formed itself in her mind.
His face was rather narrow, with a square chin and straight lips. He was not quick in speech like Charles, but seemed to think before he spoke, with the result that he often appeared to be about to say something, and was interrupted before the words had been uttered.
“Unless my memory is a bad one, your mother was an Englishwoman, monsieur,” said Sebastian, “which would account for your being in the English service.”
“Not entirely,” answered d’Arragon, “though my mother was indeed English and died—in a French prison. But it was from a sense of gratitude that my father placed me in the English service—and I have never regretted it, monsieur.”
“Your father received kindnesses at English hands, after his escape, like many others.”
“Yes, and he was too old to repay them by doing the country any service himself. He would have done it if he could—”
D’Arragon paused, looking steadily at the tall old man who listened to him with averted eyes.
“My father was one of those,” he said at length, “who did not think that in fighting for Bonaparte one was necessarily fighting for France.”
Sebastian held up a warning hand.
“In England—” he corrected, “in England one may think such things. But not in France, and still less in Danzig.”
“If one is an Englishman,” replied D’Arragon with a smile, “one may think them where one likes, and say them when one is disposed. It is one of the privileges of the nation, monsieur.”
He made the statement lightly, seeing the humour of it with a cosmopolitan understanding, without any suggestion of the boastfulness of youth. Désirée noticed that his hair was turning grey at the temples.
“I did not know,” he said, turning to her, “that Charles was in Danzig, much less that he was celebrating so happy an occasion. We ran against each other by accident in the street. It was a lucky accident that allowed me to make your acquaintance so soon after you have become his wife.”
“It scarcely seems possible that it should be an accident,” said Désirée. “It must have been the work of fate—if fate has time to think of such an insignificant person as myself and so small an event as my marriage in these days.”
“Fate,” put in Mathilde in her composed voice and manner, “has come to Danzig today.”
“Ah!”
“Yes. You are the second unexpected arrival this afternoon.”
D’Arragon turned and looked at Mathilde. His manner, always grave and attentive, was that of a reader who has found an interesting book on a dusty shelf.
“Has the Emperor come?” he asked.
Mathilde nodded.
“I thought I saw something in Charles’s face,” he said reflectively, looking back through the open door towards the stairs where Charles had nodded farewell to them. “So the Emperor is here, in Danzig?”
He turned towards Sebastian, who stood with a stony face.
“Which means war,” he said.
“It always means war,” replied Sebastian in a tired voice. “Is he again going to prove himself stronger than any?”
“Some day he will make a mistake,” said D’Arragon cheerfully. “And then will come the day of reckoning.”
“Ah!” said Sebastian, with a shake of the head that seemed to indicate an account so one-sided that none could ever liquidate it. “You are young, monsieur. You are full of hope.”
“I am not young—I am thirty-one—but I am, as you say, full of hope. I look to that day, Monsieur Sebastian.”
“And in the meantime?” suggested the man who seemed but a shadow of someone standing apart and far away from the affairs of daily life.
“In the meantime one must play one’s part,” returned D’Arragon, with his almost inaudible laugh, “whatever it may be.”
There was no foreboding in his voice; no second meaning in the words. He was open and simple and practical, like the life he led.
“Then you have a part to play, too,” said Désirée, thinking of Charles, who had been called away at such an inopportune moment, and had gone without complaint. “It is the penalty we pay for living in one of the less dull periods of history. He touches your life too.”
“He touches everyone’s life, mademoiselle. That is what makes him so great a man. Yes. I have a little part to play. I am like one of the unseen supernumeraries who has to see that a door is open to allow the great actors to make an effective entrée. I am lent to Russia for the war that is coming. It is a little part. I have to keep open one small portion of the line of communication between England and St. Petersburg, so that news may pass to and fro.”
He glanced towards Mathilde as he spoke. She was listening with an odd eagerness which he noted, as he noted everything, methodically and surely. He remembered it afterwards.
“That
