Barlasch of the Guard Part 38

He unb.u.t.toned his fur coat and displayed a smart new uniform; for Rapp had put his miserable army into new clothes, with which many of the Dantzig warehouses had been filled by Napoleon's order at the beginning of the war.

"There," he said, laying a small parcel on the table, "there is my daily ration. Two ounces of horse, one ounce of salt beef, the same as yesterday. One does not know how long we shall be treated so generously.

Let us keep the beef--we may come to want some day."

And giving a hoa.r.s.e laugh, he lifted a board in the floor, beneath which he h.o.a.rded his stores.

"Will you cook your dejeuner yourself," asked Desiree. "I have something else for my father."

"And what have you?" asked Barlasch curtly; "you are not keeping anything hidden from me?"

"No," answered Desiree, with a laugh at the sternness of his face, "I will give him a piece of the ham which was left over from last night."

"Left over?" echoed Barlasch, going close to her and looking up into her face, for she was two inches taller than he. "Left over? Then you did not eat your supper last night?"

"Neither did you eat yours, for it is there under the floor."

Barlasch turned away with a gesture of despair. He sat down in the high armchair that stood on the hearth, and tapped on the floor with one foot in pessimistic thought.

"Ah! the women, the women," he muttered, looking into the smouldering fire. "Lies--all lies. You said that your supper was very nice," he shouted at her over his shoulder.

"So it was," answered she gaily, "so it is still."

Barlasch did not rise to her lighter humour. He sat in reflection for some minutes. Then his thoughts took their usual form of a muttered aside.

"It is a case of compromise. Always like that. The good G.o.d had to compromise with the first woman he created almost at once. And men have done it ever since--and have never had the best of it. See here," he said aloud, turning to Desiree, "I will make a bargain with you. I will eat my last night's supper here at this table, now, if you will eat yours."

"Agreed."

"Are you hungry?" asked Barlasch, when the scanty meal was set out before him.

"Yes."

"So am I."

He laughed quite gaily now, and the meal was not without a certain air of festivity, though it consisted of nothing better than two ounces of horse and half an ounce of ham eaten in company of that rye-bread made with one-third part of straw which Rapp allowed the citizens to buy.

For Rapp had first tamed his army, and was now taming the Dantzigers.

He had effected discipline in his own camp by getting his regiments into shape, by establishing hospitals (which were immediately filled), and by protecting the citizens from the depredations of the starving fugitives who had been poured pell-mell into the town.

Then he turned his attention to the Dantzigers, who were openly or secretly opposed to him. He seized their churches and turned them into stores; their schools he used for hospitals, their monasteries for barracks. He broke into their cellars, and took the wine for the sick.

Their storehouses he placed under the strictest guard, and no man could claim possession of his own goods.

"We are," he said in effect, with that grim Alsatian humour which the Prussians were slow to understand; "we are one united family in a narrow house, and it is I who keep the storeroom key."

Barlasch had proved to be no false prophet. His secret store escaped the vigilance of the picket, whom he himself conducted to the cellars in the Frauenga.s.se. Although he was sparing enough, he could always provide Desiree with anything for which she expressed a wish, and even forestalled those which she left unspoken. In return he looked for absolute obedience, and after their frugal breakfast he took her to task for depriving herself of such food as they could afford.

"See you," he said, "a siege is a question of the stomach. It is not the Russians we have to fight; for they will not fight. They sit outside and wait for us to die of cold, of starvation, of typhus. And we are obliging them at the rate of two hundred a day. Yes, each day Rapp is relieved of the responsibility of two hundred mouths that drop open and require nothing more. Be greedy--eat all you have, and hope for release to-morrow, and you die. Be sparing--starve yourself from parsimony or for the love of some one who will eat your share and forget to thank you, and you will die of typhus. Be careful, and patient, and selfish--eat a little, take what exercise you can, cook your food carefully with salt, and you will live. I was in a siege thirty years before you were born, and I am alive yet, after many others. Obey me and we will get through the siege of Dantzig, which is only just beginning."

Then suddenly he gave way to anger, and banged his hand down on the table.

"But, sacred name of thunder, do not make me believe you have eaten when you have not," he shouted. "Never do that."

Carried away by the importance of this question, he said many things which cannot be set before the eyes of a generation sensitive to plainness of speech, and only tolerant of it in suggestions of impropriety.

"And the patron," he ended abruptly, "how is he?"

"He is not very well," answered Desiree. Which answer did not satisfy Barlasch, who insisted on taking off his boots, and going upstairs to see Sebastian.

It was a mere nothing, the invalid said. Such food did not suit him.

"You have been accustomed to live well all your life," answered Barlasch, looking at him with the puzzled light of a baffled memory in his eye which always came when he looked at Desiree's father. "One must see what can be done."

And he went out forthwith to return after an hour and more with a chicken freshly killed. Desiree did not ask him where he had procured it. She had given up such inquiries, for Barlasch always confessed quite bluntly to theft, and she did not know whether to believe him or not.

But the change of diet had no beneficial effect, and the next day Desiree sent Barlasch to the house of the doctor whose practice lay in the Frauenga.s.se. He came and shook his head bluntly. For even an old doctor may be hardened at the end of his life by an orgy, as it were, of death.

"I could cure him," he said, "if there were no Russians outside the walls; if I could give him fresh milk and good brandy and strong soup."

But even Barlasch could not find milk in Dantzig. The brandy was forthcoming, and the fresh meat; the soup Desiree made with her own hands. Sebastian had not been the same man since the closing of the roads and the gradual death of his hopes that the Dantzigers would rise against the soldiers that thronged their streets. At one time it would have been easy to carry out such a movement, and to throw themselves and their city upon the mercy of the Russians. But Dantzig awoke to this possibility too late, when Rapp's iron hand had closed in upon it.

He knew his own strength so well that he treated with a contemptuous leniency such citizens as were convicted of communicating with the enemy.

Sebastian's friends seemed to have deserted him. Perhaps it was not discreet to be seen in the company of one who had come under Napoleon's displeasure. Some had quitted the city after hurriedly concealing their valuables in their gardens, behind the chimneys, beneath the floors, where it is to be supposed they still lie hidden. Others were among the weekly thousand or twelve hundred who were carted out by the Oliva Gate to be thrown into huge trenches, while the waiting Russians watched from their lines on the heights of Langfuhr.

It was true that news continued to filter in, and never quite ceased, all through the terrible twelve months that were to follow. More especially did news that was unfavourable to the French find its way into the beleaguered city. But it was not authentic news, and Sebastian gathered little comfort from the fact--not unknown to the whispering citizens--that Rapp himself had heard nothing from the outer world since the Elbing mail-cart had been turned back by the first of the Cossacks on the night of the seventh of January.

Perhaps Sebastian had that most fatal of maladies--to which nearly all men come at last--weariness of life.

"Why don't you fortify yourself, and laugh at fortune?" asked Barlasch, twenty years his senior, as he stood st.u.r.dily on his stocking-feet at the sick man's bedside.

"I take what my daughter gives me," protested Sebastian, half peevishly.

"But that does not suffice," answered the materialist. "It does not suffice to swallow evil fortune--one must digest it."

Sebastian made no answer. He was a quiet patient, and lay all day with wide-open, dreaming eyes. He seemed to be waiting for something. This, indeed, was his mental att.i.tude as presented to his neighbours, and perhaps to the few friends he possessed in Dantzig. He had waited through the years during which Desiree had grown to womanhood. He waited on doggedly through the first month of the siege, without enthusiasm, without comment--without hope, perhaps. He seemed to be waiting now to get better.

"He has made little or no progress," said the doctor, who could only give a pa.s.sing glance at his patients, for he was working day and night.

He had not time to beat about the bush, as his kind heart would have liked, for he had known Desiree all her life.

It was Shrove Tuesday, and the streets were full of revellers. The Neapolitans and other Southerners had made great preparations for the carnival, and the Governor had not denied them their annual licence.

They had built a high car in one of the entrance yards to the Marienkirche; and finding that the ancient arch would not allow the erection to pa.s.s out into the street, they had pulled down the pious handiwork of a bygone generation.

The shouts of these merrymakers could be dimly heard through the double windows, but Sebastian made no inquiry as to the meaning of the cry.

A sort of la.s.situde--the result of confinement within doors, of insufficient food, of waning hope--had come over Desiree. She listened heedlessly to the sounds in the streets through which the dead were pa.s.sing to the Oliva Gate, while the living danced by in their hideous travesty of rejoicing.

It was dusk when Barlasch came in.

"The streets," he said, "are full of fools, dressed as such."

Receiving no answer, he crossed the room to where Desiree sat, treading noiselessly, and stood in front of her, trying to see her averted face.

He stooped down and peered at her until she could no longer hide her tear-stained eyes.