It was Charles at last.
“The doctor says these have been dead two months,”
volunteered the first bearer, over his shoulder.
“I am glad you have found him,” said the
officer, signing to the men to go on with their burden.
“It is better to know—is it not?”
“Yes,” answered Louis slowly. “It
is better to know.”
And something in his voice made the Russian officer
turn and watch him as he went away.
Like plants in mines
which never saw the sun,
But dream of him and
guess where he may be,
And do their best to
climb and get to him.
“Oh yes,” Barlasch was saying, “it
is easier to die—it is that that you are
thinking—it is easier to die.”
Desiree did not answer. She was sitting in the
little kitchen at the back of the house in the Frauengasse.
For they had no firing now, and were burning the
furniture. Her father had been buried a week.
The siege was drawn closer than ever. There
was nothing to eat, nothing to do, no one to talk
to. For Sebastian’s political friends
did not dare to come near his house. Desiree
was alone in this hopeless world with Barlasch, who
was on duty now in one of the trenches near the river.
He went out in the morning, and only returned at
night. He had just come in, and she could see
by the light of the single candle that his face was
grey and haggard, with deep lines drawn downwards
from eyes to chin. Desiree’s own face
had lost all its roundness and the bloom of her northern
girlhood.
Barlasch glanced at her, and bit his lip. He
had brought nothing with him. At one time he
had always managed to bring something to the house
every day—a chicken, or a turnip, or a few
carrots. But to-night there was nothing.
And he was tired out. He did not sit down,
however, but stood breathing on his fingers and rubbing
them together to restore circulation. He pushed
the candle farther forward on the table, so that it
cast a better light upon her face.
“Yes,” he said, “it is often so.
I, who speak to you, have seen it so a dozen times
in my life. When it is easier to sit down and
die. Bah! That is a fine thing to do—a
brave thing—to sit down and die.”
“I am not going to do it, so do not make that
mistake,” said Desiree, with a laugh that had
no mirth in it.
“But you would like to. Listen.
It is not what you feel that matters; it is what you
do. Remember that.”
There was an unusual vigour in his voice. Of
late, since the death of Sebastian, Barlasch seemed
to have fallen victim to the settled apathy which
lives within a prison wall and broods over a besieged
city. It is a sort of silent mourning worn by
the soul for a lost liberty. Dantzig had soon
succumbed to it, for the citizens had not even the
satisfaction of being quite sure that they were deserving
of the world’s sympathy. It soon spread
to the soldiers who were defending a Prussian city
for a French Emperor who seemed to have forgotten
them.
