“It was not the Captain?” he asked.
And Desiree shook her head. Louis was standing
near the door giving orders to the landlady of the
inn—a kindly Pomeranian, clean and slow—for
Desiree’s comfort till the next morning.
Barlasch went close to Desiree, and, nudging her arm
with exaggerated cunning, whispered—
“Who was it?”
“Colonel de Casimir.”
“With the two carriages and the treasure from
Moscow?” asked Barlasch, watching Louis out
of the corner of one eye, to make sure that he did
not hear. It did not matter whether he heard
or not, but Barlasch came of a peasant stock that
always speaks of money in a whisper. And when
Desiree nodded, he cut short the conversation.
The hostess came forward to tell Desiree that her
room was ready, kindly suggesting that the “gnadiges
Fraulein” must need sleep and rest. Desiree
knew that Louis would go on to Konigsberg at once.
She wondered whether she should ever see him again—long
afterwards, perhaps, when all this would seem like
a dream. Barlasch, breathing noisily on his
frost-bitten fingers, was watching them. Desiree
shook hands with Louis in an odd silence, and, turning
on her heel, followed the woman out of the room without
looking back.
Wo viel Licht ist, ist
starker Schatten.
In the mean time the last of the Great Army had reached
the Niemen, that narrow winding river in its ditch-like
bed sunk below the level of the tableland, to which
six months earlier the greatest captain this world
has ever seen rode alone, and, coming back to his
officers, said—
“Here we cross.”
Four hundred thousand men had crossed—a
bare eighty thousand lived to pass the bridge again.
Twelve hundred cannons had been left behind, nearly
a thousand in the hands of the enemy, and the remainder
buried or thrown into those dull rivers whose slow
waters flow over them to this day. One hundred
and twenty-five thousand officers and men had been
killed in battle, another hundred thousand had perished
by cold and disaster at the Beresina or other rivers
where panic seized the fugitives.
Forty-eight generals had been captured by the Russians,
three thousand officers, one hundred and ninety thousand
men, swallowed by the silent white Empire of the North
and no more seen.
As the retreat neared Vilna the cold had increased,
killing men as the first cold of an English winter
kills flies. And when the French quitted Vilna,
the Russians were glad enough to seek its shelter,
Kutusoff creeping in with forty thousand men, all that
remained to him of two hundred thousand. He could
not carry on the pursuit, but sent forward a handful
of Cossacks to harry the hare-brained few who called
themselves the rearguard. He was an old man,
nearly worn out, with only three months more to live—but
he had done his work.
