“Not there to-night,” said the man, holding
up a thick forefinger and shaking it sideways.
“Then where?”
“Nowhere to-night,” was the answer.
“He has come—you know that?”
“Yes,” answered Sebastian slowly, “for
I saw him.”
“He is at supper now with Rapp and the others.
The town is full of his people. His spies are
everywhere. There are two in the Weissen Ross’l
who pretend to be Bavarians. See! There
is another—just there.”
He pointed the thick forefinger down the Portchaisengasse
where it widens to meet the Langgasse, where the last
remains of daylight, reflected to and fro between
the houses, found freer play than in the narrow alley
where they stood.
Sebastian looked in the direction indicated.
An officer was walking away from them. A quick
observer would have noticed that his spurs made no
noise, and that he carried his sword instead of allowing
it to clatter after him. It was not clear whence
he had come. It must have been from a doorway
nearly opposite to the Weissen Ross’l.
“I know that man,” said Sebastian.
“So do I,” was the reply. “It
is Colonel de Casimir.”
With a little nod the fat man went out again into
the Portchaisengasse in the direction of the inn,
as if he were keeping watch there.
Chacun ne comprend que
ce qu’il trouve en soi.
Nearly two years had passed since the death of Queen
Luisa of Prussia. And she from her grave yet
spake to her people—as sixty years later
she was destined to speak to another King of Prussia,
who said a prayer by her tomb before departing on a
journey that was to end in Fontainebleau with an imperial
crown and the reckoning for all time of the seven
years of woe that followed Tilsit and killed a queen.
Two years earlier than that, in 1808, while Luisa
yet lived, a few scientists and professors of Konigsberg
had formed a sort of Union— vague enough
and visionary—to encourage virtue and discipline
and patriotism. And now, in 1812, four years
later, the memory of Luisa still lingered in those
narrow streets that run by the banks of the Pregel
beneath the great castle of Konigsberg, while the Tugendbund,
like a seed that has been crushed beneath an iron heel,
had spread its roots underground.
From Dantzig, the commercial, to Konigsberg, the kingly
and the learned, the tide of war rolled steadily onwards.
It is a tide that carries before it a certain flotsam
of quick and active men, keen-eyed, restless, rising—men
who speak with a sharp authority and pay from a bottomless
purse. The arrival of Napoleon in Dantzig swept
the first of the tide on to Konigsberg.
Already every house was full. The high-gabled
warehouses on the riverside could not be used for
barracks, for they too had been crammed from floor
to roof with stores and arms. So the soldiers
slept where they could. They bivouacked in the
timber-yards by the riverside. The country-women
found the Neuer Markt transformed into a camp when
they brought their baskets in the early morning, but
they met with eager buyers, who haggled laughingly
in half a dozen different tongues. There was
no lack of money, however.
