Henry Seton Merriman – The Complete Collection

Chapter 2

The wedding-guests were few in number. Only one of them had a distinguished air, and he, like the bridegroom, wore the uniform of France. He was a small man, somewhat brusque in attitude, as became a soldier of Italy and Egypt. But he had a pleasant smile and that affability of manner which many learnt in the first years of the great Republic. He and Mathilde Sebastian never looked at each other: either an understanding or a misunderstanding.

The host, Antoine Sebastian, played his part well enough when he remembered that he had a part to play. He listened with a kind attention to the story of a very old lady, who it seemed had been married herself, but it was so long ago that the human interest of it all was lost in a pottle of petty detail which was all she could recall. Before the story was half finished, Sebastian's attention had strayed elsewhere, though his spare figure remained in its attitude of attention and polite forbearance. His mind had, it would seem, a trick of thus wandering away and leaving his body rigid in the last attitude that it had dictated.

Sebastian did not notice that the door was open and all the guests were waiting for him to lead the way.

"Now, old dreamer," whispered Desiree, with a quick pinch on his arm, "take the Grafin upstairs to the drawing-room and give her wine. You are to drink our healths, remember."

"Is there wine?" he asked with a vague smile. "Where has it come from?"

"Like other good things, my father-in-law," replied Charles with his easy laugh, "it comes from France."

They spoke together thus in confidence, in the language of that same sunny land. But when Sebastian turned again to the old lady, still recalling the details of that other wedding, he addressed her in German, offering his arm with a sudden stiffness of gesture which he seemed to put on with the change of tongue.

They passed up the low time-worn steps arm-in-arm, and beneath the high carved doorway, whereon some pious Hanseatic merchant had inscribed his belief that if God be in the house there is no need of a watchman, emphasizing his creed by bolts and locks of enormous strength, and bars to every window.

The servant in her Samland Sunday dress, having shaken her fist at the children, closed the door behind the last guest, and, so far as the Frauengasse was concerned, the exciting incident was over. From the open window came only the murmur of quiet voices, the clink of glasses at the drinking of a toast, or a laugh in the clear voice of the bride herself. For Desiree persisted in her optimistic view of these proceedings, though her husband scarcely helped her now at all, and seemed a different man since the passage through the Pfaffengasse of that dusty travelling carriage which had played the part of the stormy petrel from end to end of Europe.

CHAPTER II.

A CAMPAIGNER.

Not what I am, but what I Do, is my Kingdom.

Desiree had made all her own wedding-clothes. "Her poor little marriage-basket," she called it. She had even made the cake which was now cut with some ceremony by her father.

"I tremble," she exclaimed aloud, "to think what it may be like in the middle."

And Mathilde was the only person there who did not smile at the unconscious admission. The cake was still under discussion, and the Grafin had just admitted that it was almost as good as that other cake which had been consumed in the days of Frederick the Great, when the servant called Desiree from the room.

"It is a soldier," she said in a whisper at the head of the stairs. "He has a paper in his hand. I know what that means. He is quartered on us."

Desiree hurried downstairs. In the entrance-hall, a broad-built little man stood awaiting her. He was stout and red, with hair all ragged at the temples, almost white. His eyes were lost behind shaggy eyebrows. His face was made broader by little whiskers stopping short at the level of his ear. He had a snuff-blown complexion, and in the wrinkles of his face the dust of a dozen campaigns seemed to have accumulated.

"Barlasch," he said curtly, holding out a long strip of blue paper. "Of the Guard. Once a sergeant. Italy, Egypt, the Danube."

He frowned at Desiree while she read the paper in the dim light that filtered through the twisted bars of the fanlight above the door.

Then he turned to the servant who stood, comely and breathless, looking him up and down.

"Papa Barlasch," he added for her edification, and he drew down his left eyebrow with a jerk, so that it almost touched his cheek. His right eye, grey and piercing, returned her astonished gaze with a fierce steadfastness.

"Does this mean that you are quartered upon us?" asked Desiree without seeking to hide her disgust. She spoke in her own tongue.

"French?" said the soldier, looking at her. "Good. Yes. I am quartered here. Thirty-six, Frauengasse. Sebastian; musician. You are lucky to get me. I always give satisfaction--ha!"

He gave a curt laugh in one syllable only. His left arm was curved round a bundle of wood bound together by a red pocket-handkerchief not innocent of snuff. He held out this bundle to Desiree, as Solomon may have held out some great gift to the Queen of Sheba to smooth the first doubtful steps of friendship.

Desiree accepted the gift and stood in her wedding-dress holding the bundle of wood against her breast. Then a gleam of the one grey eye that was visible conveyed to her the fact that this walnut-faced warrior was smiling. She laughed gaily.

"It is well," said Barlasch. "We are friends. You are lucky to get me. You may not think so now. Would this woman like me to speak to her in Polish or German?"

"Do you speak so many languages?"

He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his arms as far as his many burdens allowed. For he was hung round with a hundred parcels and packages.

"The Old Guard," he said, "can always make itself understood."

He rubbed his hands together with the air of a brisk man ready for any sort of work.

"Now, where shall I sleep?" he asked. "One is not particular, you understand. A few minutes and one is at home--perhaps peeling the potatoes. It is only a civilian who is ashamed of using his knife on a potato. Papa Barlasch, they call me."

Without awaiting an invitation he went forward towards the kitchen. He seemed to know the house by instinct. His progress was accompanied by a clatter of utensils like that which heralds the coming of a carrier's cart.

At the kitchen door he stopped and sniffed loudly. There certainly was a slight odour of burning fat. Papa Barlasch turned and shook an admonitory finger at the servant, but he said nothing. He looked round at the highly polished utensils, at the table and floor both alike scrubbed clean by a vigorous northern arm. And he was kind enough to nod approval.

"On a campaign," he said to no one in particular, "a little bit of horse thrust into the cinders on the end of a bayonet--but in times of peace . . ."

He broke off and made a gesture towards the saucepans which indicated quite clearly that he was between campaigns--inclined to good living.

"I am a rude fork," he jerked to Desiree over his shoulder in the dialect of the Cotes du Nord.

"How long will you be here?" asked Desiree, who was eminently practical. A billet was a misfortune which Charles Darragon had hitherto succeeded in warding off. He had some small influence as an officer of the head-quarters' staff.

Barlasch held up a reproving hand. The question, he seemed to think, was not quite delicate.

"I pay my own," he said. "Give and take--that is my motto. When you have nothing to give . . . offer a smile."

With a gesture he indicated the bundle of firewood which Desiree still absent-mindedly carried against her white dress. He turned and opened a cupboard low down on the floor at the left-hand side of the fireplace. He seemed to know by an instinct usually possessed by charwomen and other domesticated persons of experience where the firewood was kept. Lisa gave a little exclamation of surprise at his impertinence and his perspicacity. He took the firewood, unknotted his handkerchief, and threw his offering into the cupboard. Then he turned and perceived for the first time that Desiree had a bright ribbon at her waist and on her shoulders; that a thin chain of gold was round her throat and that there were flowers at her breast.

"A fete?" he inquired curtly.

"My marriage fete," she answered. "I was married half an hour ago."

He looked at her beneath his grizzled brows. His face was only capable of producing one expression--a shaggy weather-beaten fierceness. But, like a dog which can express more than many human beings, by a hundred instinctive gestures he could, it seemed, dispense with words on occasion and get on quite as well without them. He clearly disapproved of Desiree's marriage, and drew her attention to the fact that she was no more than a schoolgirl with an inconsequent brain, and little limbs too slight to fight a successful battle in a world full of cruelty and danger.

Then he made a gesture half of apology as if recognizing that it was no business of his, and turned away thoughtfully.

"I had troubles of that sort myself," he explained, putting together the embers on the hearth with the point of a twisted, rusty bayonet, "but that was long ago. Well, I can drink your health all the same, mademoiselle."

He turned to Lisa with a friendly nod and put out his tongue, in the manner of the people, to indicate that his lips were dry.

Desiree had always been the housekeeper. It was to her that Lisa naturally turned in her extremity at the invasion of her kitchen by Papa Barlasch. And when that warrior had been supplied with beer it was with Desiree, in an agitated whisper in the great dark dining- room with its gloomy old pictures and heavy carving, that she took counsel as to where he should be quartered.

The object of their solicitude himself interrupted their hurried consultation by opening the door and putting his shaggy head round the corner of it.

"It is not worth while to consult long about it," he said. "There is a little room behind the kitchen, that opens into the yard. It is full of boxes. But we can move them--a little straw--and there!"

With a gesture he described a condition of domestic peace and comfort which far exceeded his humble requirements.

"The blackbeetles and I are old friends," he concluded cheerfully.

"There are no blackbeetles in the house, monsieur," said Desiree, hesitating to accept his proposal.

"Then I shall resign myself to my solitude," he answered. "It is quiet. I shall not hear the patron touching on his violin. It is that which occupies his leisure, is it not?"

"Yes," answered Desiree, still considering the question.

"I too am a musician," said Papa Barlasch, turning towards the kitchen again. "I played a drum at Marengo."

And as he led the way to the little room in the yard at the back of the kitchen, he expressed by a shake of the head a fellow-feeling for the gentleman upstairs, whose acquaintance he had not yet made, who occupied his leisure by touching the violin.

They stood together in the small apartment which Barlasch, with the promptitude of an experienced conqueror, had set apart for his own accommodation.

"Those trunks," he observed casually, "were made in France"--a mental note which he happened to make aloud, as some do for better remembrance. "This solid girl and I will soon move them. And you, mademoiselle, go back to your wedding."