“Then you will not give me half an hour’s time to arrange my business affairs with my book-keeper, and to give him my orders?” he asked the policemen, who wanted to drag him forward.
“No, not a minute,” they said. “We have received stringent orders to take you at once to the general, and if you should refuse to follow us willingly, to iron you and remove you forcibly.”
“You see I offer no resistance whatever,” said Palm, contemptuously. “Let us go. Bertram, pray look after my wife—she has fainted. Remember me to her and to my children. Farewell!”
The two young men made no reply; their tears choked their voices. But when Palm had disappeared, they rushed into the sitting-room to assist the unhappy young wife.
She was lying on the floor, pale, rigid, and resembling a lily broken by the storm. Her eyes were half opened and dim; the long braids of her beautiful light-colored hair, which she had just been engaged in arranging when the gens d’armes entered, fell down dishevelled and like curling snakes on her face and shoulders, from which the small, transparent, gauze handkerchief had been removed. Her features, always so lovely and gentle, bore now an expression of anger and horror, which they had assumed when she fainted on hearing the French policemen tell her husband that they had come to arrest him, and that he must follow them.
They succeeded only after long efforts in bringing her back to consciousness. But she was not restored to life by the salts which her servant-girl rubbed on her forehead, nor by the imploring words of the book-keeper, but by the scalding tears of her little girls which melted and warmed her frozen blood again.
She raised herself with a deep sigh, and her wild, frightened glances wandered about the room, and fixed themselves searchingly on every form which she beheld in it. When she had satisfied her-self that he was not among them, he whom her glances had sought for so anxiously, she clasped her children with a loud cry of horror in her arms and pressing them convulsively against her bosom, sobbed piteously.
But she did not long give way to her grief and despair. She dried her tears hastily and rose.
“It is no time now for weeping and lamenting,” she said, drawing a deep breath; “I shall have time enough for that afterward, now I must act and see whether I cannot assist him. Do you know whither they have taken him?”
“To the headquarters of Colomb, the French general, who is stationed in this city,” said the book-keeper.