Barlasch of the Guard Part 37

"An Englishman?" he asked.

And the other nodded.

"Come this way."

The cobbler hobbled towards the Kneiphof, where the streets are quiet, and the Englishman followed him. At the corner of the Kohl Markt he turned and looked, not at the man, but at his boots.

"You are a sailor?" he said.

"Yes."

"I was told to look for an English sailor--Louis d'Arragon."

"Then you have found me," was the reply.

Still the cobbler hesitated.

"How am I to know it?" he asked suspiciously.

"Can you read?" asked D'Arragon. "I can prove who I am--if I want to.

But I am not sure that I want to."

"Oh! it is only a letter--of no importance. Some private business of your own. It comes from Dantzig--written by one whose name begins with 'B.'"

"Barlasch," suggested D'Arragon quietly, as he took from his pocket a paper which he unfolded and held beneath the eyes of the cobbler. It was a pa.s.sport written in three languages. If the man could read, he was not anxious to boast of an accomplishment so far above his station; but he glanced at the paper, not without a practised skill, to seize the essential parts of it.

"Yes, that is the name," he said, searching in his pockets. "The letter is an open one. Here it is."

In pa.s.sing the letter, the man made a scarcely perceptible movement of the hand which might have been a signal.

"No," said D'Arragon, "I do not belong to the Tugendbund or to any other secret society. We have need of no such a.s.sociations in my country."

The cobbler laughed, not without embarra.s.sment.

"You have a quick eye," he said. "It is a great country, England. I have seen the river full of English s.h.i.+ps before Napoleon chased you off the seas."

D'Arragon smiled as he unfolded the letter.

"He has not done it yet," he said, with that spirit which enables mariners of the Anglo-Saxon race to be amused when there is a talk of supremacy on the high seas. He read the letter carefully, and his face hardened.

"I was instructed," said the cobbler, "to give you the letter, and at the same time to inform you that any a.s.sistance or facilities you may require will be forth-coming; besides..." he broke off and pointed with his thick, leather-stained finger, "that writing is not the writing of him who signs."

"He who signs cannot write at all."

"That writing," went on the cobbler, "is a pa.s.sport in any German state.

He who carries a letter written in that hand can live and travel free anywhere from here to the Rhine or the Danube."

"Then I am lucky in possessing a powerful friend," said D'Arragon, "for I know who wrote this letter. I think I may say he is a friend of mine."

"I am sure of it. I have already been told so," said the cobbler. "Have you a lodging in Konigsberg? No? Then you can lodge in my house."

Without awaiting a reply, which he seemed to consider a foregone conclusion, he limped down the Kohl Markt towards the steps leading to the river, which in winter is a thoroughfare.

"I live in the Neuer Markt," he said breathlessly, as he laboured onwards. "I have waited for you three days on that bridge. Where have you been all this time?"

"Avoiding the French," replied D'Arragon curtly. Respecting his own affairs he was reticent, as commanders and other lonely men must always be. They walked side by side on the dusty and trodden ice without further speech. At the steps from the river to Neuer Markt, D'Arragon gave the lame man his hand, and glanced a second time at the fingers which clasped his own. They had not been born to toil, but had had it thrust upon them.

They crossed the Neuer Markt together, and went into that house where the linden grows so close as to obscure the windows. And the lodging offered to Louis was the room in which Charles Darragon had slept in his wet clothes six months earlier. So small is the world in which we live, and so narrow are the circles drawn by Fate around human existence and endeavour.

The cobbler having shown his visitor the room, and pointed out its advantages, was turning to go when D'Arragon, who was laying aside his fur coat, seemed to catch his attention, and he paused on the threshold.

"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 a.s.sa.s.sination in Dantzig. 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 Cracow. All this since the siege of Dantzig began. In time of war there is no moment to lose, eh?"

"And the other? He who slept in this room. Has he pa.s.sed through Konigsberg 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 Konigsberg--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 to-morrow?"

"You can help me on the way to Vilna," answered D'Arragon.

"You will never get there."

"I will try," said the sailor.

CHAPTER 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 Desiree towards the kitchen, after having carefully bolted the heavy oaken door which had been strengthened as if to resist a siege. Desiree'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."