Barlasch of the Guard

by Henry Seton Merriman

The Petrovka is a long street of great houses, and was now deserted. The pillagers were nervous and ill at ease, as men must always be in the presence of something they do not understand. The most experienced of them—and there were some famous robbers in Murat's vanguard—had never seen an empty city abandoned all standing, as the Russians had abandoned Moscow. They felt apprehensive of the unknown. Even the least imaginative of them looked askance at the tall houses, at the open doors of the empty churches, and they kept together for company's sake.

Charles's rooms were in the Momonoff Palace, where even the youngest lieutenant had vast apartments assigned to him. It was in one of these—a lady's boudoir, where his dust-covered baggage had been thrown down carelessly by his orderly on a blue satin sofa—that he sat down to write to Desiree.

His emotions had been stirred by all that he had passed through—by the first sight of Moscow, by the passage beneath the Gate of the Redeemer, where every man must uncover and only Napoleon dared to wear a hat; by the bewildering sense of triumph and the knowledge that he was taking part in one of the epochs of man's history on this earth. The emotions lie very near together, so that laughter being aroused must also touch on tears, and hatred being kindled warms the heart to love.

And, here in this unknown woman's room, with the very pen that she had thrown aside, Charles, who wrote and spoke his love with such facility, wrote to Desiree a love-letter such as he had never written before.

When it was sealed and addressed he called his orderly to take it to the officer to whose duty it fell to make up the courier for Germany. But he received no reply. The man had joined his comrades in the busier quarters of the city. Charles went to the head of the stairs and called again, with no better success. The house was comparatively modern, built on the familiar lines of a Parisian hotel, with a wide stair descending to an entrance archway where carriages passed through into a courtyard.

Descending the stairs, Charles found that even the sentry had absented himself from his duty. His musket, leant against the post of the stone doorway, indicated that he was not far. Listening in the silence of that great house, Charles heard some one at work with hammer and chisel in the courtyard. He went there, and found the sentry kneeling at a low door, endeavouring to break it open. The man had not been idle; from a piece of rope slung across his back half a dozen clocks were suspended. They rattled together like the wares of a travelling tinsmith at every movement of his arms.

“What are you doing there, my friend?” asked Charles.

The man held up one finger over his shoulder without looking round, and shook it from side to side, as not desiring to be interrupted.

“The cellar,” he answered, “always the cellar. It is human nature. We get it from the animals.”

He glanced round as he worked, and, perceiving that he had been addressing an officer, he scrambled to his feet with a grumbled curse. He was an old man, baked by the sun. The wrinkles in his face were filled with dust. Since quitting the banks of the Vistula no opportunity for ablution seemed to have presented itself to him. He stood at attention, his lips working over sunken gums.