It could hardly be the case that he honestly thought this moment might be so described. But he gave the letter to Mathilde with a gesture of grim triumph. Perhaps he was thinking of the cellar in the Palace on the Petrovka at Moscow, and the treasure which he had found there.
“It is from the Colonel de Casimir,” he said, “a clever man,” he added, turning confidentially to Sebastian, and holding his attention by an upraised hand. “Oh!... a clever man.”
Mathilde, her face all flushed, tore open the envelope, while Barlasch, breathing on his fingers, watched with twinkling eye and busy lips.
The letter was a long one. Colonel de Casimir was an adept at explanation. There was, no doubt, much to explain. Mathilde read the letter carefully. It was the first she had ever had—a love-letter in its guise—with explanations in it. Love and explanation in the same breath. Assuredly De Casimir was a daring lover.
“He says that Dantzig will be taken by storm,” she said at length, “and that the Cossacks will spare no one.”
“Does it signify,” inquired Sebastian in his smoothest voice, “what Colonel de Casimir may say?”
His grand manner had come back to him. He made a gesture with his hand almost suggestive of a ruffle at the wrist, and clearly insulting to Colonel de Casimir.
“He urges us to quit the city before it is too late,” continued Mathilde, in her measured voice, and awaited her father's reply. He took snuff with a cold smile.
“You will not do so?” she asked. And by way of reply, Sebastian laughed as he dusted the snuff from his coat with his pocket-handkerchief.
“He asks me to go to Cracow with the Grafin, and marry him,” said Mathilde finally. And Sebastian only shrugged his shoulders. The suggestion was beneath contempt.