“I took him away and now return him,” said the sailor coming forward. Desiree had always known that it was Louis, but Mathilde gave a little start at the sound of the neat clipping French in the mouth of an educated Frenchman so rarely heard in Dantzig—so rarely heard in all broad France to-day.
“Yes—that is true,” answered Sebastian, turning to him with a sudden change of manner. There was that in voice and attitude which his hearers had never noted before, although Charles had often evoked something approaching it. It seemed to indicate that, of all the people with whom they had seen their father hold intercourse, Louis d'Arragon was the only man who stood upon equality with him.
“That is true—and at great risk to yourself,” he said, not assigning, however, so great an importance to personal danger as men do in these careful days. As he spoke, he took Louis by the arm and by a gesture invited him to precede him upstairs with a suggestion of camaraderie somewhat startling in one usually so cold and formal as Antoine Sebastian, the dancing-master of the Frauengasse.
“I was writing to Charles,” said Desiree to D'Arragon, when they reached the drawing-room, and, crossing to her own table, she set the papers in order there. These consisted of a number of letters from her husband, read and re-read, it would appear. And the answer to them, a clean sheet of paper bearing only the date and address, lay beneath her hand.
“The courier leaves this evening,” she said, with a queer ring of anxiety in her voice, as if she feared that for some reason or another she ran the risk of failing to despatch her letter. She glanced at the clock, and stood, pen in hand, thinking of what she should write.
“May I enclose a line?” asked Louis. “It is not wise, perhaps, for me to address to him a letter—since I am on the other side. It is a small matter of a heritage which he and I divide. I have placed some money in a Dantzig bank for him. He may require it when he returns.”
“Then you do not correspond with Charles?” said Mathilde, clearing a space for him on the larger table, and setting before him ink and pens and paper.
“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said, glancing at her with that light of interest in his dark eyes which she had ignited once before by a question on the only occasion that they had met. He seemed to detect that she was more interested in him than her indifferent manner would appear to indicate. “No, I am a bad correspondent. If Charles and I, in our present circumstances, were to write to each other it could only lead to intrigue, for which I have no taste and Charles no capacity.”
“You seem to hint that Charles might have such a taste then,” she said, with her quiet smile, as she moved away leaving him to write.
“Charles has probably found out by this time,” he answered with the bluntness which he claimed as a prerogative of his calling and nation, “that a soldier of Napoleon's who intrigues will make a better career than one who merely fights.”