Barlasch of the Guard Part 36

"But we are friends--" protested Sebastian, with a bow. As if in confirmation of the statement, he held out his beer-mug, and Barlasch touched it with the rim of his own before drinking. Sebastian's att.i.tude, his bow, his manner of drinking, were those of the Court; Barlasch was distinctly of the camp. But these were strange days, and all society had been turned topsy-turvy by one man.

"Then," said Barlasch, licking his lips, "let us understand one another.

You say there will be no siege. I say you are wrong. You think that the Dantzigers will rise in answer to the Emperor Alexander's proclamations, and turn the French out. I say the Dantzigers' stomachs are too big. I say that Rapp will hold Dantzig, and that the Russians will not take it by storm, because they are too weak. There will be a siege, and a long one. Are you and Mademoiselle and I going to sit it out in the Frauenga.s.se together?"

"We shall be honoured to have you as our guest," answered Sebastian, with that levity which went before the Revolution, and was never understood of the people.

Barlasch did not understand it. He glanced doubtfully at his companion, and sipped his beer.

"Then I will begin to-night."

"Begin what, my friend?"

Barlasch waved aside all petty detail.

"My preparations. I go out about ten o'clock--after you are in. I will take the key of the front door, and let myself in when I come back.

I shall make two journeys. Under the kitchen floor is a large hollow s.p.a.ce. I fill that with bags of corn."

"But where will you get the corn, my friend?"

"I know where to get it--corn and other things. Salt I have already--enough for a year. Other things I can get for three months."

"But we have no money to pay for them."

"Bah!"

"You mean you will steal them," suggested Sebastian, not without a ring of contempt in his mincing voice.

"A soldier never steals," answered Barlasch, carelessly announcing a great truth.

Sebastian laughed. It was obvious that his mind, absorbed in great thought, heeded small things not at all. His companion pushed his fur cap to the back of his head, and ruffled his hair forward.

"That is not all," he said at length. He looked round the vast room, which was almost deserted. The stout waitress was polis.h.i.+ng pewter mugs at the bar. "You say you have already had answers to those letters. It is a great organization--your secret society--whatever it is called. It delivers letters all over Prussia--eh? and Poland perhaps--or farther still."

Sebastian shrugged one shoulder, and made no answer for some time.

"I have already told you," he said impatiently, at length, "to forget the incident; you were paid."

By way of reply, the old soldier laboriously emptied his pockets, searching the most remote of them for small copper coins. He counted slowly and carefully until he had made up a thaler.

"But it is not my turn to be paid this time. It is I who pay."

He held out his hand with a pound weight of base metal in it, but Sebastian refused the money with a sudden a.s.sumption of his cold and scornful manner, oddly out of keeping with his humble surroundings.

"As between friends--" suggested Barlasch, and, on receiving a more decided negative, returned the coins to his pocket, not without satisfaction.

"I want your friends to pa.s.s on a letter for me--I am willing to pay,"

he said in a whisper. "A letter to Captain Louis d'Arragon--it concerns the happiness of Mademoiselle Desiree. Do not shake your head. Think before you refuse. The letter will be an open one--six words or so--telling the Captain that his cousin, Mademoiselle's husband, is not in Dantzig, and cannot now return here since the last of the rearguard entered the city this morning."

Sebastian seemed to be considering the matter, and Barlasch was quick to combat possible objections.

"The Captain went to Konigsberg. He is there now. Your friends can easily find him, and give him the letter. It is of great importance to Mademoiselle. The Captain is not looking for Monsieur Charles Darragon, because he thinks that he is here in Dantzig. Colonel de Casimir a.s.sured him that Mademoiselle would find him here. Where is he--that Monsieur Charles--I wonder? It is of great importance to Mademoiselle. The Captain would perhaps continue his search."

"Where is your letter?" asked Sebastian.

By way of reply, Barlasch laid on the table a sheet of paper.

"You must write it," he said. "My hand is injured. I write not badly, you understand. But this evening I do not feel that my hand is well enough."

So, with the sticky, thick ink of the Weissen Ross'l, Sebastian wrote the letter, and Barlasch, forgetting his scholarly acquirements, took the pen and made a mark beneath his own name written at the foot of it.

Then he went out, and left Sebastian to pay for the beer.

CHAPTER XXVI. ON THE BRIDGE.

They that are above Have ends in everything.

A lame man was standing on the bridge that crosses the Neuer Pregel from the Kant Stra.s.se--which is the centre of the city of Konigsberg--to the island known as the Kneiphof. This bridge is called the Kramer Brucke, and may be described as the heart of the town. From it on either hand diverge the narrow streets that run along the river bank, busy with commerce, crowded with the narrow sleighs that carry wood from the Pregel up into the town.

The wider streets--such as the Kant Stra.s.se, running downhill from the royal castle to the river, and the Kneiphof'sche Langga.s.se, leading southward to the Brandenburg gate and the great world--must needs make use of the Kramer Brucke. Here, it may be said, every man in the town must sooner or later pa.s.s in the execution of his daily business, whether he go about it on foot or in a sleigh with a pair of horses.

Here the idler and those grave professors from the University, which was still mourning the death of the aged Kant, nearly always pa.s.sed in their thoughtful and conscientious promenades.

Here this lame man, a cobbler by trade, plying his quiet calling in a house in the Neuer Markt, where the lime-trees grow close to the upper windows, had patiently kept watch for three days. He was, like many lame men, of an abnormal width and weight. He had a large, square, dogged face, which seemed to promise that he would wait there till the crack of doom rather than abandon a quest.

It was very cold--mid-winter within a few miles of the frozen Baltic on the very verge of Russia, at that point where old Europe stretches a long arm out into the unknown. The cobbler was wrapped in a sheepskin coat, which stood out all round him with the stiffness of wood, so that he seemed to be living inside a box. To keep himself warm he occasionally limped across from end to end of the bridge, but never went farther. At times he leant his arms on the stone wall at the Kant Stra.s.se end of the bridge, and looked down into the Lower Fish Market, where women from Pillau and the Baltic sh.o.r.es--mere bundles of clothes--stood over their baskets of fish frozen hard like sticks. It was a silent market. One cannot haggle long when a minute's exposure to the air will give a frost-bite to the end of the nose. The would-be purchaser can scarcely make an effective bargain through a fringe of icicles that rattle against his lips if he open them.

The Pregel had been frozen for three months, with only the one temporary thaw in November which cost Napoleon so many thousands at his broken bridge across the Beresina. Though no water had flowed beneath this bridge, many strange feet had pa.s.sed across it.

It had vibrated beneath Napoleon's heavy carriage, under the lumbering guns that Macdonald took northward to blockade Riga. Within the last few weeks it had given pa.s.sage to the last of the retreating army, a mere handful of heartsick fugitives. Macdonald with his staff had been ignominiously driven across it by the Cossacks who followed hard after them, the great marshal still wild with rage at the defection of Yorck and the Prussian contingent.

And now the Cossacks on their spare and ill-tempered horses pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ser-by. He who has his eyes on the ground pa.s.ses 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 Konigsberg. 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.