“I am sure of it. I have already been told so,” said the cobbler. “Have you a lodging in Konigsberg? No? Then you can lodge in my house.”
Without awaiting a reply, which he seemed to consider a foregone conclusion, he limped down the Kohl Markt towards the steps leading to the river, which in winter is a thoroughfare.
“I live in the Neuer Markt,” he said breathlessly, as he laboured onwards. “I have waited for you three days on that bridge. Where have you been all this time?”
“Avoiding the French,” replied D'Arragon curtly. Respecting his own affairs he was reticent, as commanders and other lonely men must always be. They walked side by side on the dusty and trodden ice without further speech. At the steps from the river to Neuer Markt, D'Arragon gave the lame man his hand, and glanced a second time at the fingers which clasped his own. They had not been born to toil, but had had it thrust upon them.
They crossed the Neuer Markt together, and went into that house where the linden grows so close as to obscure the windows. And the lodging offered to Louis was the room in which Charles Darragon had slept in his wet clothes six months earlier. So small is the world in which we live, and so narrow are the circles drawn by Fate around human existence and endeavour.
The cobbler having shown his visitor the room, and pointed out its advantages, was turning to go when D'Arragon, who was laying aside his fur coat, seemed to catch his attention, and he paused on the threshold.
“There is French blood in your veins,” he said abruptly.
“Yes—a little.”
“So. I thought there must be. You reminded me—it was odd, the way you laid aside your coat—reminded me of a Frenchman who lodged here for one night. He was like you, too, in build and face. He was a spy, if you please—one of the French Emperor's secret police. I was new at the work then, but still I suspected there was something wrong about him. I took his boots—a pretext of mending them. I locked him in. He got out of that window, if you please, without his boots. He followed me, and learnt much that he was not meant to know. I have since heard it from others. He did the Emperor a great service—that man. He saved his life, I think, from assassination in Dantzig. And he did me an ill turn—but it was my own carelessness. I thought to make a thaler by lodging him, and he was tricking me all the while.”
“What was his name?” asked D'Arragon.