Barlasch of the Guard | Page 3

replied her husband, and as he spoke he caught his breath.
The horsemen vanished into the continuation of the Pfaffengasse, and immediately behind them came a travelling carriage, swung on high wheels, three times the size of a Dantzig drosky, white with dust. It had small square windows. As Desiree drew back in obedience to a movement of her husband's arm, she saw a face for an instant--pale and set--with eyes that seemed to look at everything and yet at something beyond.
"Who was it? He looked at you, Charles," said Desiree.
"It is the Emperor," answered Darragon. His face was white. His eyes were dull, like the eyes of one who has seen a vision and is not yet back to earth.
Desiree turned to those behind her.
"It is the Emperor," she said, with an odd ring in her voice which none had ever heard before. Then she stood looking after the carriage.
Her father, who was at her elbow--tall, white-haired, with an aquiline, inscrutable face--stood in a like attitude, looking down the Pfaffengasse. His hand was raised before his face with outspread fingers which seemed rigid in that gesture, as if lifted hastily to screen his face and hide it.
"Did he see me?" he asked in a low voice which only Desiree heard.
She glanced at him, and her eyes, which were clear as a cloudless sky, were suddenly shadowed by a suspicion quick and poignant.
"He seemed to see everything, but he only looked at Charles," she answered. For a moment they all stood in the sunshine looking towards the Langenmarkt where the tower of the Rathhaus rose above the high roofs. The dust raised by the horses' feet and the carriage wheels slowly settled on their bridal clothes.
It was Desiree who at length made a movement to continue their way towards her father's house.
"Well," she said with a slight laugh, "he was not bidden to my wedding, but he has come all the same."
Others laughed as they followed her. For a bride at the church- door, or a judge on the bench, or a criminal on the scaffold-steps, need make but a very small joke to cause merriment. Laughter is often nothing but the froth of tears.
There were faces suddenly bleached in the little group of wedding- guests, and none were whiter than the handsome features of Mathilde Sebastian, Desiree's elder sister, who looked angry, had frowned at the children, and seemed to find this simple wedding too bourgeois for her taste. She carried her head with an air that told the world not to expect that she should ever be content to marry in such a humble style, and walk from the church in satin slippers like any daughter of a burgher.
This, at all events, was what old Koch the locksmith must have read in her beautiful, discontented face.
"Ah! ah!" he muttered to the bolts as he shot them. "But it is not the lightest hearts that quit the church in a carriage."
So simple were the arrangements that bride and bridegroom and wedding-guests had to wait in the street while the servant unlocked the front door of No. 36 with a great key hurriedly extracted from her apron-pocket.
There was no unusual stir in the street. The windows of one or two of the houses had been decorated with flowers. These were the houses of friends. Others were silent and still behind their lace curtains, where there doubtless lurked peeping and criticizing eyes- -the house of a neighbour.
The wedding-guests were few in number. Only one of them had a distinguished air, and he, like the bridegroom, wore the uniform of France. He was a small man, somewhat brusque in attitude, as became a soldier of Italy and Egypt. But he had a pleasant smile and that affability of manner which many learnt in the first years of the great Republic. He and Mathilde Sebastian never looked at each other: either an understanding or a misunderstanding.
The host, Antoine Sebastian, played his part well enough when he remembered that he had a part to play. He listened with a kind attention to the story of a very old lady, who it seemed had been married herself, but it was so long ago that the human interest of it all was lost in a pottle of petty detail which was all she could recall. Before the story was half finished, Sebastian's attention had strayed elsewhere, though his spare figure remained in its attitude of attention and polite forbearance. His mind had, it would seem, a trick of thus wandering away and leaving his body rigid in the last attitude that it had dictated.
Sebastian did not notice that the door was open and all the guests were waiting for him to lead the way.
"Now, old dreamer," whispered Desiree, with a quick pinch on his arm, "take the