"You will come back from Mittau convinced of that, my boy. The wise course is to join yourself to events, and let them draw your chariot. My dislikers say I have temporized with fate. It is true I am not so righteous as to smell to heaven. But two or three facts have been deeply impressed on me. There is nothing more aggressive than the virtue of an ugly, untempted woman; or the determination of a young man to set every wrong thing in the world right. He cannot wait, and take mellow interest in what goes on around him, but must leap into the ring. You could live here with me indefinitely, while the nation has Bonaparte, like the measles. When the disease has run its course—we may be able to bring evidence which will make it unnecessary for the Count of Provence to hasten here that France may have a king."
"I want to see my sister, monsieur."
"And lose her and your own cause forever."
But he helped me to hire a strong traveling chaise, and stock it with such comforts as it would bear. He also turned my property over to me, recommending that I should not take it into Russia. Half the jewels, at least, I considered the property of the princess in Mittau; but his precaution influenced me to leave three bags of coin in Doctor Chantry's care; for Doctor Chantry was the soul of thrift with his own; and to send Skenedonk with the jewel-case to the marquis' bank. The cautious Oneida took counsel of himself and hid it in the chaise. He told me when we were three days out.
It is as true that you are driven to do some things as that you can never entirely free yourself from any life you have lived. That sunny existence in the Faubourg St. Germain, the morning and evening talks with a man who bound me to him as no other man has since bound me, were too dear to leave even briefly without wrenching pain. I dreamed nightly of robbers and disaster, of being ignominiously thrust out of Mittau, of seeing a woman whose face was a blur and who moved backward from me when I called her my sister; of troops marching across and trampling me into the earth as straw. I groaned in spirit. Yet to Mittau I was spurred by the kind of force that seems to press from unseen distances, and is as fatal as temperament.
When I paid my last visit at De Chaumont's hotel, and said I was going into the country, Eagle looked concerned, as a De Ferrier should; but she did not turn her head to follow my departure. The game of man and woman was in its most blindfold state between us.
There was one, however, who watched me out of sight. The marquis was more agitated than I liked to see him. He took snuff with a constant click of the lid.
The hills of Champagne, green with vines, and white as with an underlay of chalk, rose behind us. We crossed the frontier, and German hills took their places, with a castle topping each. I was at the time of life when interest stretches eagerly toward every object; and though this journey cannot be set down in a story as long as mine, the novelty—even the risks, mischances and wearinesses of continual post travel, come back like an invigorating breath of salt water.
The usual route carried us eastward to Cracow, the old capital of Poland, scattered in ruined grandeur within its brick walls. Beyond it I remember a stronghold of the Middle Ages called the fortress of Landskron.
The peasants of this country, men in shirts and drawers of coarse linen, and women with braided hair hanging down under linen veils, stopped their carts as soon as a post-carriage rushed into sight, and bent almost to the earth. At post-houses the servants abased themselves to take me by the heel. In no other country was the spirit of man so broken. Poles of high birth are called the Frenchmen of the north, and we saw fair men and women in sumptuous polonaises and long robes who appeared luxurious in their traveling carriages. But stillness and solitude brooded on the land. From Cracow to Warsaw wide reaches of forest darkened the level. Any open circle was belted around the horizon with woods, pines, firs, beech, birch, and small oaks. Few cattle fed on the pastures, and stunted crops of grain ripened in the melancholy light.