Nothing can cover his high fame but Heaven,
No pyramids set off his memories,
But the eternal substance of his greatness
To which I leave him.
“Why I will not let you go out into the streets?” said Barlasch one February morning, stamping the snow from his boots. “Why I will not let you go out into the streets?”
He turned and followed Desiree towards the kitchen, after having carefully bolted the heavy oaken door which had been strengthened as if to resist a siege. Desiree's face had that clear pallor which marks an indoor life; but Barlasch, weather-beaten, scorched and wrinkled, showed no sign of having endured a month's siege in an overcrowded city.
“I will tell you why I will not let you go into the streets. Because they are not fit for any woman to go into—because if you walked from here to the Rathhaus you would see sights that would come back to you in your sleep, and wake you from it, when you are an old woman. Do you know what they do with their dead? They throw them outside their doors—with nothing to cover their starved nakedness—as Lisa put her ashes in the street every morning. And the cart goes round, as the dustman's cart used to go in times of peace, and, like the dustman's cart, it drops part of its load, and the dust that blows round it is the infection of typhus. That is why you cannot go into the streets.”
He unbuttoned 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 hoarse laugh, he lifted a board in the floor, beneath which he hoarded 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.”