Barlasch of the Guard Part 3

"I will not have you think such bloodthirsty thoughts on my wedding-day," said Desiree. "See, there is Charles returning already, and he has not been absent ten minutes. He has some one with him--who is it? Papa... Mathilde, look! Who is it coming back with Charles in such a hurry?"

Mathilde, who was setting the room in order, glanced through the lace curtains.

"I do not know," she answered indifferently. "Just an ordinary man."

Desiree had turned away from the window as if to go downstairs and meet her husband. She paused and looked back again over her shoulder towards the street.

"Is it?" she said rather oddly. "I do not know--I--"

And she stood with the incompleted sentence on her lips waiting irresolutely for Charles to come upstairs.

In a moment he burst into the room with all his usual exuberance and high spirit.

"Picture to yourselves!" he cried, standing in the doorway with his arms extended before him. "I was hurrying to head-quarters when I ran into the embrace of my dear Louis--my cousin. I have told you a hundred times that he is brother and father and everything to me. I am so glad that he should come to-day of all days."

He turned towards the stairs with a gesture of welcome, still with his two arms outheld, as if inviting the man, who came rather slowly upstairs, to come to his embrace and to the embrace of those who were now his relations.

"There was a little suspicion of sadness--I do not know what it was--at the table; but now it is all gone. All is well now that this unexpected guest has come. This dear Louis."

He went to the landing as he spoke, and returned bringing by the arm a man taller than himself and darker, with a still brown face and steady eyes set close together. He had a lean look of good breeding.

"This dear Louis!" repeated Charles. "My only relative in all the world.

My cousin, Louis d'Arragon. But he, par exemple, spells his name in two words."

The man bowed gravely--a comprehensive bow; but he looked at Desiree.

"This is my father-in-law," continued Charles breathlessly. "Monsieur Antoine Sebastian, and Desiree and Mathilde--my wife, my dear Louis--your cousin, Desiree."

He had turned again to Louis and shook him by the shoulders in the fulness of his joy. He had not distinguished between Mathilde and Desiree, and it was towards Mathilde that D'Arragon looked with a polite and rather formal repet.i.tion of his bow.

"It is I... I am Desiree," said the younger sister, coming forward with a slow gesture of shyness.

D'Arragon took her hand.

"I have been happy," he said, "in the moment of my arrival."

Then he turned to Mathilde and bowed over the hand she held out to him.

Sebastian had come forward with a sudden return of his gracious and rather old-world manner. He did not offer to shake hands, but bowed.

"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 new-comer.

"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 Desiree and ran downstairs.

Through the open windows they heard his quick, light footfall as he hurried up the Frauenga.s.se. 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," Desiree said to him long afterwards. But it was at this moment in the drawing-room in the Frauenga.s.se 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 grat.i.tude 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 Dantzig."

"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. Desiree noticed that his hair was turning grey at the temples.

"I did not know," he said, turning to her, "that Charles was in Dantzig, 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 Desiree. "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 Dantzig to-day."

"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 Dantzig?"

He turned towards Sebastian, who stood with a stony face.