Wanda was gay and light-hearted to the end. There was French blood in her veins—that gay, good blood which stained the streets of Paris a hundred years ago, and raised a standard of courage against adversity for all the world to imitate so long as history shall exist.
Cartoner turned once in his saddle and saw her standing in the sunlight waving him a farewell, with her eyes smiling and her lips hard pressed. Then he rode on, with that small, small hope to help him through his solitary wanderings which he knew to be identical with the hope of Poland, for which the time was not yet ripe. He was the watcher who sees most of the game, and knew that the time might never ripen till years after Wanda and he had gone hence and were no more seen.
XXIX
IN A BY-WAY
There are few roads in Poland. Sooner or later, Cartoner must needs join the great highway that enters Warsaw from the west, passing by the gates of the cemetery.
Deulin, no doubt, knew this, for Cartoner found him, riding leisurely away from the city, just beyond the cemetery. The Frenchman sat his horse with a straight leg and arm which made Cartoner think of those days ten years earlier, to which Deulin seldom referred, when this white-haired dandy was a cavalry soldier, engaged in the painful business of killing Germans.
Deulin did not think it necessary to refer to the object of Cartoner's ride. Neither did he mention the fact that he knew that this was not the direct way to St. Petersburg.
“I hired a horse and rode out to meet you,” he said, gayly—he was singularly gay this morning, and there was a light in his eye—“to intercept you. Kosmaroff is back in Warsaw. I saw him in the streets—and he saw me. I think that man is the god in the machine. He is not a nonentity. I wonder who he is. There is blood there, my friend.”
He turned his horse as he spoke, and rode back towards the city with Cartoner.