Barlasch of the Guard | Page 8

him dead before I die."
"I will not have you think such bloodthirsty thoughts on my wedding-
day," said Desiree. "See, there is Charles returning already, and he has
not been absent ten minutes. He has some one with him--who is it?
Papa . . . Mathilde, look! Who is it coming back with Charles in such a
hurry?"

Mathilde, who was setting the room in order, glanced through the lace
curtains.
"I do not know," she answered indifferently. "Just an ordinary man."
Desiree had turned away from the window as if to go downstairs and
meet her husband. She paused and looked back again over her shoulder
towards the street.
"Is it?" she said rather oddly. "I do not know--I--"
And she stood with the incompleted sentence on her lips waiting
irresolutely for Charles to come upstairs.
In a moment he burst into the room with all his usual exuberance and
high spirit.
"Picture to yourselves!" he cried, standing in the doorway with his arms
extended before him. "I was hurrying to head-quarters when I ran into
the embrace of my dear Louis--my cousin. I have told you a hundred
times that he is brother and father and everything to me. I am so glad
that he should come to-day of all days."
He turned towards the stairs with a gesture of welcome, still with his
two arms outheld, as if inviting the man, who came rather slowly
upstairs, to come to his embrace and to the embrace of those who were
now his relations.
"There was a little suspicion of sadness--I do not know what it was- -at
the table; but now it is all gone. All is well now that this unexpected
guest has come. This dear Louis."
He went to the landing as he spoke, and returned bringing by the arm a
man taller than himself and darker, with a still brown face and steady
eyes set close together. He had a lean look of good breeding.
"This dear Louis!" repeated Charles. "My only relative in all the world.
My cousin, Louis d'Arragon. But he, par exemple, spells his name in

two words."
The man bowed gravely--a comprehensive bow; but he looked at
Desiree.
"This is my father-in-law," continued Charles breathlessly. "Monsieur
Antoine Sebastian, and Desiree and Mathilde--my wife, my dear
Louis--your cousin, Desiree."
He had turned again to Louis and shook him by the shoulders in the
fulness of his joy. He had not distinguished between Mathilde and
Desiree, and it was towards Mathilde that D'Arragon looked with a
polite and rather formal repetition of his bow.
"It is I . . . I am Desiree," said the younger sister, coming forward with
a slow gesture of shyness.
D'Arragon took her hand.
"I have been happy," he said, "in the moment of my arrival."
Then he turned to Mathilde and bowed over the hand she held out to
him. Sebastian had come forward with a sudden return of his gracious
and rather old-world manner. He did not offer to shake hands, but
bowed.
"A son of Louis d'Arragon who was fortunate enough to escape to
England?" he inquired with a courteous gesture.
"The only son," replied the new-comer.
"I am honoured to make the acquaintance of Monsieur le Marquis,"
said Antoine Sebastian slowly.
"Oh, you must not call me that," replied D'Arragon with a short laugh.
"I am an English sailor--that is all."
"And now, my dear Louis, I leave you," broke in Charles, who had
rather impatiently awaited the end of these formalities. "A brief

half-hour and I am with you again. You will stay here till I return."
He turned, nodded gaily to Desiree and ran downstairs.
Through the open windows they heard his quick, light footfall as he
hurried up the Frauengasse. Something made them silent, listening to it.
It was not difficult to see that D'Arragon was a sailor. Not only had he
the brown face of those who live in the open, but he had the attentive
air of one whose waking moments are a watch.
"You look at one as if one were the horizon," Desiree said to him long
afterwards. But it was at this moment in the drawing-room in the
Frauengasse that the comparison formed itself in her mind.
His face was rather narrow, with a square chin and straight lips. He was
not quick in speech like Charles, but seemed to think before he spoke,
with the result that he often appeared to be about to say something, and
was interrupted before the words had been uttered.
"Unless my memory is a bad one, your mother was an Englishwoman,
monsieur," said Sebastian, "which would account for your being in the
English service."
"Not entirely," answered d'Arragon, "though my mother was indeed
English and died--in a French prison. But it