The darkness of the night was over the city as Walter Clarges went forth; a darkness that was almost weird and unearthly in that gloomy street--far down at the other end of which could be seen the lurid flames of the braziers burning. A weird and ghastly blending of sullen flames, of gloaming and of night, through which no living creature passed and in which one dead woman lay huddled up against the kerb, neglected, unheeded. And, from above, the southern stars looked down from their sapphire vault, they twinkling as clear and white as though the city slumbered peacefully beneath them and all was well with it.
Meditating upon whom the unhappy man might be who had asked for him while adding that he knew him, that he desired to see him ere he died, Walter went on to where the braziers flared; went on, yet with his thoughts also occupied with many other things besides this dying galley slave. He went on with his heart beating with happiness.
He had found her--his life! his soul! the woman of his heart! Found her! Found her alive! Thank God! Now--now--so soon as any vessel could be discovered that would take them away from this stricken spot--no matter though he paid half of his newly-inherited fortune to obtain the use of it--now, they would be happy and always together. He would bear her to England--his peace was made with the Government, henceforth he was a subject of the new dynasty. He had paid that much for the right to retrieve his wife if she should be still alive; there, in England, health should come back to her body, beauty to her face. In the pure, cool breezes of the northern home which had been that of the Westovers for so long, she would gain strength, recover fast. When he entered George's throne-room to personally testify his adherence to a House which, for years, he and his had opposed with all their power, one thing should at least be beyond denial. All should acknowledge that the woman who leant upon his arm was fair enough to excuse a thousand apostacies and that the determination to save the life of one so beautiful as she, and this beautiful one his wife, justified him in what he had done.
The braziers still burned and flared fiercely as he drew near them; through the night air the aromatic odours of pine and thyme, of vinegar and pitch, were diffused: around those braziers the sufferers lay--some dead, some dying.
Asking his way to the Flower Market, and being directed thereto, Walter went on until at last he reached the place; a little open Square surrounded on all sides by tall, grey houses, from the windows of which no light from candle or taper gleamed forth. Like all others in the stricken city these houses were deserted, the inhabitants either having fled or, if remaining, being dead within their own walls.
But there was light in the close, stuffy Square itself. Placed on the lumber of the stalls around the open market were pots and pans of burning disinfectants that cast flickering shadows upon everything near them; upon, too, a little group of persons gathered in the middle of the spot where once the Provence roses and the great luscious-scented lilies of the south, and the crimson fuchsias, had been sold in handfuls by the flower-girls. Now, in their place, there lay a man dying, Not in agony, as many had died who had been stricken by the pest, but, instead calmly, insensibly.
A man old and grizzly; yet, looking, perhaps, older than he actually was; white as marble, his lips grey, and, upon his chin and cheeks, a white rim of unshaven beard of three or four days' growth. By his side stood a monk muttering prayers and heedless as to whether the plague struck him or not; at his other side knelt the dark woman who had directed Walter to where he should find his wife--the woman whom he had thought cold and dead of heart, yet whom he now knew to have been Laure's friend and comforter. She was engaged in moistening the dying man's lips with spirits, and in wiping the dank dews of death from off his face, as Walter drew near.
"God bless you," he said, touching her brown hand with his as he came to her side. "God bless you. She has told me; I know all. God bless you."
Yet, even as he spoke to her, he wondered why she drew her hand hurriedly away from his, and why, in the flicker of the flames around, her dark eyes seemed to cast an almost baleful glance at him.
"My son," the monk said, gazing at the stranger while thinking, perhaps, how good it was to see one so strong and healthy-looking amidst all the surrounding disease. "My son, is it you for whom he waits? But now, ten minutes past, he was sensible and averred he could not die until he saw him for whom he looked. Knowing him to be here, in Marseilles. Is it you?"
"It is I, holy father," Walter answered. "Yet, how should he know me? Let me come nearer and observe him." He passed thereupon to the front of the dying man, so that thus he might regard his face, while heeding however, the monk's injunction not to put his own face too near the other's, and to envelope his nostrils and mouth with a cloth which he handed him. Then, this done--Walter remembering his new-found wife at the moment, and how he must preserve his life for her sake--he bent over a little nearer and gazed at the livid features beneath him.
At first he did not know the man. How should he? The now bristling face had, when he last saw it, been ever scrupulously shaved; upon the head, where now was only close-cropped grey hair, there had been a tye-wig of irreproachable neatness; dark clothes of the best material and cut had been the adornment of this dying man who, to-night, lay prostrate in the hideous garments of the galleys. How should he know him! Hardly might he have known his own father had he met him thus similarly transformed.
Then, suddenly, the man opened his eyes--and he recognised him!
"Merciful God!" he exclaimed. "It is Vandecque."
"Vandecque!" a voice hissed close to his ear, a voice he would scarcely have recognised as that of the southern woman, he had not seen her lips move. "Vandecque! the betrayer of Laure! Heaven destroy him!" while, as she spoke, her hand stole to her breast, opening her dress as it did so.
"Be still," he said sternly; "be still. What! Is not the heaven you have invoked about to punish him? Let go whatever your hand holds."
Yet, as he spoke, he recognised how great and strong had been this woman's love for Laure when it could prompt her even now, at the man's last hour, to desire to slay him.
Then Vandecque began to mutter; his eyes being fixed upon Walter with the dull and filmy look which the dying ever have.
"I," he whispered, "I--loved her. The little child--that--that--wound itself around my heart. She had been--wronged--by those of his--that devil's own order. I would have made her prosperous--rich--one of that order. A patrician instead of an outcast. I loved her. You thwarted me. Therefore I helped him--to--slay you, as I thought."
He closed his eyes now and those around him thought that he was gone, while the monk began the prayers for the dying. Yet, in a moment, he spoke again.
"Save her--save--her. If she still lives."
"She lives," Walter said. "She is saved. By the woman at your side."
"All--is--therefore--well." Vandecque gasped. "All--all. And--listen--listen. You spared that monster--Desparre--last night. Fool! Yet--I was there to--finish the work."
"To finish the work! You! You slew him! He is dead!"
"Ay. Dead! Dead! And--" writhing as he spoke and with his agony upon him, his last moment at hand. His lips were white now, not grey; his eyelids were but two slits through which the glazed eyes peered. "Dead--andburied!" Then the monk's voice alone uprose, reciting the prayers for a passing soul.
* * * * * *
The Mediterranean sparkling beneath the warm sun of the early autumn sky; the blue waves lapping gently the sides of a French bilander which, with all sail set on both her masts, is running swiftly before a northern breeze past Cape de Gata towards Gibraltar. A northern breeze with a touch of the west in it, that comes cool and fresh from off the Sierra Nevada mountains and brings life and health and strength in its breath. Towards Gibraltar the vessel goes on, its course to be set later due north for the tumbling Bay, and then, at last, to England--to happiness and content.
To obtain that bilander, to find seamen fit to work it, and to assure the owner of his payment when once she should reach our shores (a payment of a thousand louis d'ors being made for the voyage!) had been no easy task for Walter Clarges, who now took his title openly; yet, at last, it had been done. In Marseilles it was impossible; there was no sailor to be discovered fit and strong enough to do so much as to haul upon a halliard, while, in Toulon it was no better; but, at last, at Istres in the mouth of the Rhone, to which they proceeded in an open boat, the ship had been found and their escape from all the tainted neighbourhood around assured. They were free! Free of the poisoned South, free at last.
And now Lord Westover walked the deck of the rolling, pitching craft, saying a word here and there to the rough sailor from Aude, who was the master; another, now and again, to the dark-eyed woman who sat by the taffrail beneath the swing of the after-sheet; and going next to a cabin upon the deck and peering in through the window while speaking to his wife within.
At first it had been hard to persuade that dark-eyed woman to accompany them, to induce her to throw in her lot with theirs and bid farewell to the land in which she had sinned and suffered. For she was, indeed, almost distraught at the thought that never more would she struggle and toil for the woman she had come to love so dearly; that, henceforth, no sacrifice on her part was needed.
"Go back to her," she said to Walter after Vandecque had breathed his last, while, since there was nothing else that could be done in a place so encumbered with the dead as Marseilles was, they had left the dead man lying where he died. "Go back to her. She needs you now. Not me. Return to her," and, as she spoke, she cast herself down near the market place as though about to sleep there.
"And you--Marion?" Walter said softly. "You! What of you? You will come with me?"
"She wants me no longer. She has you."
"She needs you ever. You must never part. What shall become of her without you; what will your life be in the future if you have no longer her to tend and care for?"
"My life! My life!" she cried with an upward glance at him from where she had thrown herself down. "What matters that! Every wreck is broken to pieces at last. So shall I be."
Yet still he pleaded, repeating all that Laure had that day said of her and telling of how she had declared that she could never go away unless Marion came too; and, finally, he won. He won so far that, at last, she consented to return to Laure, even though it were but to say farewell to her and then go forth into oblivion for ever.
Yet now she was in the bilander with them, on her way to England to pass the rest of her life in peace. How could she have refused--how!--when the girl wept tears of joy in her arms and murmured that, since she had her husband and Marion by her side, she asked for nothing else? And so the ship went on and on, bearing those in her to freedom and to peace. To a peace and contentment that Laure had never dreamed could come to her again; to a happiness which once Walter Clarges had never dared to hope should at last be his.
Footnote 1: This street served as the Bourse of the period.
Footnote 2: "Archers" were servants of the Provost Marshals and of a position between gendarmes and policemen, but in the service of the prisons. "Exempts" were a kind of Sheriff's officer.
Footnote 3: A slang name for the scaffold.
Footnote 4: The total number of deaths in Provence was finally estimated to be 148,000. Aix and Toulon suffered the worst after Marseilles.