The chain gangs--the men a mile ahead of the women--marched but slowly on their way; indeed, it was impossible that they should progress very fast. Some, as has been said, especially among the female prisoners, had never been accustomed to walking at all; others, amongst both women and men, soon became footsore. The months passed in the dungeons of the prisons, with their bodies chained by the neck to the beam behind them, had given their feet but little opportunity of exercise, that only being obtainable which they got from stamping on the ground to drive out the cold they suffered from during the winter period. No wonder that all became footsore ere a fiftieth part of their toilsome journey was covered.
Yet they went on; they had to go on. Marseilles was, to be exact, 356 miles from Paris by road, and they were timed to do the distance in thirty days; must do it according to the contract made by the Government with the owners of the ships which were to transport the "colonists," the "emigrants," to New France. Thirty days for 356 miles.
About twelve miles a day! Not much that for pedestrians, for hardy walkers, for people used to journeying on foot day by day. A thing to be accomplished easily, and easily to be surpassed, by the countless pedlars who swarmed over the face of France; by itinerant monks, by wandering ballad-singers, strolling players and troops of showmen; yet not easy for women or men who, even if they had ever walked at all, were now quite out of practice; who, also, were ill-fed and, in many cases, were sick and ailing. Yet they had to do it. It must be done.
Each morning, therefore, they set forth again on their route, no matter whether the sun was beating down fiercely on their heads--they being protected only by hats which they had been allowed to plait from the prison straw, in anticipation of the forthcoming journey--or whether the rain was falling in torrents. Each night they lay down wherever the chain halted, which it generally did near some village or hamlet, partly because there the colonists might be allowed to lie and sleep beneath the shelter of barns and outhouses, but more particularly because, thereby, the guards and the galley sergeants and mounted gendarmes could find drinking shops andpantswherein they might rest and refresh themselves. And, gradually, as they went on and on along the great southern road, through Montargis and Cosne, and by Nevers, and on to Moulins and Montmarault, their numbers became a little diminished nightly. Women dropped by the wayside, or, rather, amidst the dust and mud of the high road; it was useless to place them in the carts and carry them further; therefore they were left beneath the hedges and the sparse bushes that bordered the route--left with their coarse prison petticoat thrown over their dead faces to save them from the flies--left there for the villagers to bury when they were found. And, because the women passed along behind the men, they saw--they could not help but see!--unless they were blinded by staggering for league after league through heat and dust, that, with the chain of men, the same thing had happened. Their bodies--some of their bodies--were also to be seen lying beneath the hedges and the bushes, but with no protecting rag over their faces.
Yet, still, those who were not dead went on and on, stumbling, falling, being dragged up by the companion manacled to them, or by the guards (kind in some cases, brutal in others) on and on, like women walking in their sleep; their lids half closed over their glistening, fever-lit eyes, their senses telling them they were suffering, even as the dumb brutes' senses tell them that they are suffering. But no more!
Shackled to the dark handsome woman of the south who had espoused the writer who hated Rome and her customs, was Laure, alive still, though praying that every day might be her last. That she would have ever reached Clermont, to which they were by now arrived, had it not been for this woman, was doubtful. For she, brought up by Vandecque in all the luxury he could afford--partly from love of her, partly because she was a saleable article that, carefully cherished, might fetch a large price--was no more fitted to walk day by day a distance of from ten to fifteen miles than she was fitted to sleep on the ground in barns and outhouses, or to exist on bread and water and anything else which her comrade could procure by stealing or begging from the compassionate landlords of those inns where sometimes the chain halted.
Yet she had done it, she had survived, she was alive; she could feel the cool mountain air of the Dômes sweep down upon and revive her. She was still alive.
It seemed to her as if a miracle alone could have kept her so; a miracle that had for its instrument the woman Marion Lascelles (Lascelles being the name of the man the latter had espoused, but from whom she would be separated until they stood free in Louisiana). For Marion, however vile her past had been, or whatever crimes she might have steeped her hands in, was, at least, an angel of mercy to Laure, though at first she had not been so. Instead, indeed, she, in her great, masterful strength, which neither dungeon nor starvation had been able to subdue, had strode fiercely along the baked roads which led, as she muttered to herself, to the sea-coast first, and then to freedom, though a freedom thousands of miles away. And, as she so strode, she dragged at the chain which fastened Laure to her, until once, in doing so, she brought down on her the eye of the officer, or guard, who rode near.
"What ails her?" he asked, guiding his horse up close to them, while Marion saw his hand tighten on the whip he held as though about to administer a blow. "What ails her? Does she want a taste of this?" and he shook it before their eyes. The fellows in charge of the chain gangs were indeed officers, but, since none but the most brutal, or those who had risen from the lowest ranks, would condescend to accept this employment, to which they were regularly appointed for periods, their savageness was not extraordinary.
"Nay," replied Marion; "it is my fault. I am too rough with her. And you can see that she is a gentlewoman, delicately bred. If," and her black eyes flashed at him, "you are a man, strike not one as helpless as she is."
"Oh! as for that," the fellow answered, "there are no delicately-bred ones here. Sentenced convicts all, while you are in our hands. Yet, since you are the best-looking women in the gang--I love both fair and dark myself!--I will not beat her this time. But there must be no lagging; the transports sail under three weeks from now if the wind is fair. We must be there--at Marseilles."
"She shall not lag," Marion replied. "If she fails I will carry her."
"God bless you," Laure said to her that night, as, still chained to each other, they lay down together in a shelter for sheep outside Issoire, since the dreary march was now almost half compassed though many leagues had still to be accomplished. "God bless you, you are a true woman." Then she put out her hand and touched the dark one of the woman at her side, and called her "sister."
With this began their friendship; with it began, too, a revolution in the hot, fiery blood that coursed through the veins of Marion Lascelles. She scarcely knew at first what crime the woman next to her had been condemned for, though she had caught something of what the chaplain of the prison had said to the fellow who desired to marry Laure; but one thing she did know, namely that, besides herself, this was an innocent, suffering creature. And this weakling had called her "sister"; had prayed God to bless her--to bless her! "When," she mused, "when, if ever, had such a prayer gone up to heaven for her; when, when?" Not, she thought, since she was a simple, innocent child, roaming about the sandy, sunburnt beach of Hérault with her hand in her mother's--a fisherman's widow, now years since dead. And from that day she was no longer the fierce companion, but instead, the protector of Laure, striving always to give the latter some portion of her own sparse allowance of food; stealing bits of meat out of thepots-au-feuif the chance ever came her way, sharing all with her; walking with her arm round her waist, while Laure's head reclined on her shoulders.
"I shall die," the latter said more than once, "I shall die ere we reach Marseilles. Oh! Marion, let them not leave me by the wayside."
"Bah!" Marion answered, "you shall not die. I will fight death for you, wrestle with him, hold you back from him. You have to live."
"For what?" the other would ask. "For what?" and her soft eyes would look so sad that Marion, still unregenerate, would swear a fierce southern oath to herself, while she folded Laure to her bosom and strained her to it with her strong arms. "For what?" Marion would repeat. "Why, for freedom, first; for justice. That poor imbecile marching ahead of us" (she was referring to her newly-espoused husband) "has it seems the gift of writing, at least, since it has brought him to this pass. We will tell him your history" (for Marion knew it all now): "then he shall put it into words, and so, somehow, it shall have its effect. In this new land to which we go there must be a governor, or vice-regent, or someone in power. He will surely help you, especially after he has seen you! And there are two other reasons why you should live."
"I do not know them," Laure faltered.
"You love your husband?"
"Ah!" the other gasped.
"You love him, I say. My God! do I not know what love is!" and she smote her breast as she spoke. "You love him. You have told me all. You loved him; you came to love him on the day you married him, the day he saved you from that--that animal!"
"He is dead!" Laure wailed. "He is dead!"
"I doubt it. Men do not die easily." Possibly, here, too, she was speaking from experience. "I doubt it. More like, those animals, Desparre and your uncle, caused him to be arrested and thrown into prison; remember, they may have encountered him on their road to you. He may be--who knows?--in the chain that is now on its road to Brest or Dunkirk."
Laure wrung her hands and shook her head at this, while Marion continued:--
"Or suppose Desparre lied to you; suppose they had not encountered him at all. Suppose, I say, he came back to you that night, the next morning, and found you gone; with none to tell where--you say yourself that no servant appeared on the scene ere the exempts dragged you away. Suppose he came back. What then?"
"I do not know; I cannot think."
"I can. He will find out what has become of you, follow you.Mon Dieu!" as a sudden thought flashed into her mind. "Did he not tell you he meant himself to emigrate to Louisiana, the very place to which we go. Courage; courage; courage."
"Oh!" Laure gasped, "if--if I dared to hope that."
"Dared to hope! There is nothing else to be supposed but that. He will be there. Surely, surely, Laure, you will meet your husband in this colony, big as they say it is. All will be well."
"Nay," she said, "nay. It will never be well. He married me to save me from Desparre; he had ceased to love me. Yet--yet, if I could see him once again, only once, I would tell him----"
"What?"
"That I surrendered; that I had come to love him. Yet of what avail would that? He will be a gentleman planter; I--I a released convict, a woman earning her bread by labour. Also, he knows--that--I have no origin."
"He knew it before he married you. And, knowing it, be sure he loved you." And Marion Lascelles, whether she believed the comforting hopes she had endeavoured to raise in the other's breast, or whether she had only uttered them in the desire to put fresh strength into her sad heart, would hear no word of doubt.
But still the chains went on, the men a mile ahead, the women following behind. But ever on, and with the journey growing still more toilsome to these poor creatures worn by this time to skeletons; more toilsome because they were passing through Haute Loire and Ardèche now and the mountains were all around them, and had to be climbed by their bleeding, festering feet. Ascents that had to be made which lasted for hours, followed by descents as wearying to their aching limbs.
In truth, it might have seemed to any who had observed that chain of women that it was a small army of dead women which was passing through the land. An army of dead women who had been burnt black and become mummified, whose bony frames were enveloped in prison garments, foul--even for such things--from rain and the mud they had slept in and the white powdery dust that had blown on to them. Dead women, who, when they halted, fell prostrate and gasping to the earth, or reclined against rocks and trees rigidly, with staring, glassy eyes--eyes that stared, indeed, but saw nothing. Women, in fact, to whose lips the guards and the sergeants of the prisons--themselves burnt black, though not worn to skin and bone by constant walking, since they had their horses and the carts--were forced to hold cups of water, as otherwise the prisoners must have died of thirst, not being able to fetch or lift them for themselves. But still--with now half their number left behind dead, amongst which were two of the women whose children had been taken from them--they went on. Down by where the Rhone swept and swirled; past Beaucaire and Tarascon, past Orgon and Lambèse; past Aix, sacred twenty years before to the slaughter, and the murder, and the mock trials of many Protestants still toiling at the galleys, hopeless and heartbroken. On, on, on, until, beneath a lurid evening sky, the eyes of the guards--but not the sightless eyes of the women--discerned a great city lying upon the shores of a limpid, waveless sea.
Marseilles! It was there before them, before the eyes of those men on horseback and in the carts, only--what was happening, what was doing in it? That, they could not understand.
For, beneath that lurid and gleaming sky, which had succeeded to an awful thunderstorm that had passed over the unhappy chain gang an hour before and drenched them afresh, as they had been drenched so many times in their long march, they saw fires blazing from pinnacles and towers, as well as upon the city walls. They knew, too, that similar fires must be blazing in the streets and market-places and great open spaces--they knew it by another fierce red light that rose up and mingled with the red flames and flecks which the sun cast upon the purple, storm-charged clouds.
"What is it?" a mounted gendarme whispered to a comrade. "What! Can the storm, the lightning, have set the city in flames? Yet, surely not in twenty places at once!"
"Nay, nay," the other muttered, his eyes shaded by his hands as he glanced down to where those flaming lights were illuminating all the heavens with their glare as the night grew on, and the fires burnt more fiercely. "Nay; they burn fuel for some reason, they ignite it themselves."
"What! What! What! For what reasons?"
"God knows," muttered the gendarme, becoming pious under this awe-inspiring thing which he did not understand. "They did it once before," the other whispered. "Once! nay, oftener. My grandam was a Marseillaise. I have heard her tell the tale. They feared the pest."
"The pest--my God! Ere we left Paris people whispered that it had broken out in the Levant. The Levant! Marseilles trades much there. What if--if----" he stammered, turning white with fear and apprehension.
"What if," said his comrade, taking him up, "it should be here!"
Two months before the chain-gangs set out for Marseilles from the Prison of St. Martin des Champs, namely at the end of March, Walter Clarges descended from a hackney coach outside the house in which he had lived in the Rue de la Dauphine, and entered its roomy hall, or passage. Then, taking a key from his pocket, he was about to open the door of his own suite of apartments on the right of the hall, when he saw that, attached to the door, was a great padlock which fastened a chain into two staples fixed in the outer and inner framework. He saw, too, something else. A spider's web that had been spun above the chain itself by the insect, which, at the present moment, was reposing in its self-made house.
For a moment, seeing this, he stood there pondering while looking down upon the creature in its web--accepting, acknowledging, the sign of desolation which this thing gave--then, ever so gently, he shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that might have brought the tears to the eyes of any woman--nay, of any man--who had observed him.
"Scarce," he muttered, "could I have expected aught else. After so long. After so long." Then, turning away, he went to the back of the long hall where, opening a small door, he called down some stairs to the woman who had been the housekeeper three months before--at the time when he brought Laure to his rooms.
Presently, after answering him from where she was, she appeared, her sleeves turned up and her hands wet, as though fresh from some simple household work, and, seeing him, exclaimed--
"In truth! It is Monsieur Clarges. Returned--at last! Monsieur has been away long. Perhaps to his own land. No matter. Now he is back. Yet--yet----" she said, looking up at him in the gleaming light of the spring sun: "Monsieur has not been well. He is white--oh, so white! Evidently not well."
"I have been close to death for months. At death's door. In the hospital of the Trinity. No matter for that. Instead, tell me where the lady is whom I left here on--on--the night I brought her. When did she cease to occupy these rooms; when depart? As I see she must have done by this." And he indicated with his finger the spider in its web. "Also, what message, what letter has she left for me?"
For answer the woman glanced into his face with wide-open eyes--eyes full of astonishment, surprise. Then she said:
"Monsieur asks strange questions. Letters! Messages! From her?"
"From her. Surely she did not go away and leave none behind."
"But--but----" the other stammered, she being appalled by the look in his eyes; "beyond doubt she went with Monsieur. Upon that night. I have ever thought so. I----"
"She went away upon that night!" he said, his voice deep and low. "Upon that night?"
"Why, yes, Monsieur," the woman replied. "Why, yes." And now she found her natural garrulity; she began to tell her tale, such as it was. "I have always thought that, after Monsieur had given his orders as to Madame's occupation of the rooms, he and the lady had changed their minds and had decided to go away together. Especially since a compatriot of Monsieur's called a few days later and said that Madame was Monsieur's wife--that--that--the marriage had taken place on the morning of that day."
"My compatriot told you that?"
"He told me so. As well as that he himself had assisted at the wedding. Therefore, I felt no surprise at the absence of Monsieur and Madame."
"What?" asked Walter Clarges, still in the low deep voice that was owing, perhaps, to the thrust through the lungs he had received in the Rue des Saints Apostoliques three months ago, perhaps to the tidings he was now gleaning--"what happened on that night? How did she go away? Surely, surely, you must have known she did not go with me."
"Alas!" the woman answered. "I knew nothing; saw nothing. I knew not when she went, and deemed for certain that Monsieur had returned for her. That he had taken her away with him."
"You mean, then, that she went alone? Walked forth from this house alone. Leaving no word--no message. Has--never--since--sent--one. You mean that?"
"Monsieur, I know not what I mean. Oh! Monsieur, listen. That night was a night of horror. Awful things were being done outside. Monsieur knows. Hideous, heart-rending things! A neighbour of mine, Madame Prue, came in, rushed in in the evening, and said that the archers and exempts were seizing people in the streets who had committed no crimes, yet had been denounced by their neighbours as criminals. Her own son, she said, was abroad in the streets, and he was so wild, as well as hated by all in the quarter because he was a fighter and a brawler in his cups. She feared--she feared--she knew not what. That he might resist and become quarrelsome. Thereby, be lost and sent to the prisons--the galleys; even, some whispered, to foreign lands, exiled for ever. And she, Madame Prue, begged me to go with her, to assist in finding him--to--to----" and the woman paused to take breath.
"Go on," said Walter Clarges. "Go on. You went. When did you return?"
"Not for three hours. We could not find the son--he has never been found yet. God alone knows where he is. His mother is heartbroken. They say--they say there are hundreds in the prisons being transported to foreign lands--to----."
"You came not back for three hours! And the lady--my--my--wife?"
"Monsieur, she was gone. And I thought nought of it. The streets were in turbulence, shots were heard now and again; even houses, apartments entered. I deemed you had returned for her, dreading to leave her alone; that you had taken Madame away, dreading also to keep her in this quarter. That you had, perhaps, sought a better one, or the suburbs, and were enjoying--well! your honeymoon."
"My honeymoon," he whispered to himself. "My God!" Then he said aloud. "And there was no message? No letter left in the room? You are sure?"
"There was nothing. I entered the room meaning to offer Madame some supper--it was vacant. No sign of aught. The fire was gone out. The lamp was extinct. There was--nothing."
"Nothing!" Walter repeated. "Nothing! No sign of aught. Not a line of writing. No letter left then or come since."
"Oh," exclaimed the woman, "as for 'come since'--there are several----"
"And you have kept me thus in torture! Where are they? Where? Where? Doubtless one is from her?"
"I will go and fetch them. Since Monsieur has been away I have not opened the rooms. Not since I cleaned them during the first days of Monsieur's absence."
"Fetch them at once, I beseech you. Yet, ere you go, give me the key of this padlock. Let me enter the rooms. Bring the letters here at once."
The woman sped on her way to the back of the house, and, while she was gone, Walter applied the key to the padlock--brushing away the spider and its web as he did so--then turned the other key of the door and entered his sitting-room while he muttered, "She will have gone to England, as I wished her. She has written from there. All will be well. All. All. Yet why did she go so soon? Why leave this house the moment my back was turned?"
And, even as he remembered she had done this, he felt a pang at his heart.
Why! Why I Why had she acted thus? Why before seeing him again; before waiting for his return?
The rooms looked very lonely and desolate as he glanced around them, while throwing open the wooden shutters ere he did so--lonely and desolate as all rooms and houses invariably appear which have remained unused and shut up for some considerable space of time. And they seemed even more so than they would otherwise have done, because of her whom he had left sitting by what was now a cold and empty hearth. Where, he asked himself, where was she? Yet he would soon know--in an instant; he could hear the woman's pattens clattering up the bare cold steps of the stairs and along the hall--he would soon know.
She came in a moment later, one hand full of kindlings and paper to make a fire, the other grasping some letters--half a dozen--a dozen. And amongst them there must be one--more than one from her--he could see the English frank--also the red post-boy stamped in the corner. She had written.
He snatched as gently as might be the little parcel from the woman's hand, ran the letters rapidly through his own--and recognised in a moment that there were none, was not one, from her. Not one! Three were from his mother, another was in a woman's writing which he did not recognise, another from his compatriot, from him who had witnessed his marriage. But from her--nothing!
He let the servant lay and light the fire while he stood by looking down into the fast kindling flames and holding the letters in his hand listlessly, then, when she rose from her knees and glanced at him inquiringly, he shook his head gently.
"No," he said, in answer to her questioning eyes. "No. She has not written yet. Not yet. Leave me now if you will. These at least must be attended to."
When she had gone from out the room, after turning back ere she did so to cast a swift glance at him, a glance which led her to passing her apron across her eyes after she had gained the passage, he sat down in the deep fauteuil by the fire in which he had so often sat since he had lived there--the fauteuil in which his wife of a day had sat before him on their wedding night--and brooded long ere he opened the letters which lay to his hand.
"What does it mean?" he murmured to himself. "What? Were Vandecque and that creeping snake, Desparre, whom I saw lurking in the porch of a house ere I was vanquished, on their way here when we met? Did they come on here afterwards? Yet, even so, what could they do to her? Nothing! The law punishes not those women who disobey their parents or guardians by marrying against their wish, but, instead, the man who marries them. It could do nothing to her. If she went from here she went of her own free will, even though cajoled by Vandecque into doing so. As for Desparre, what harm could he do? She hated him; she married me when she might have married him. No! No! It is Vandecque I must seek. Vandecque! At once. At once. Now. Yet, to begin with, these letters."
Those from his mother were the first to which he turned; before all else he, this married yet wifeless man, sought news of her. Her love, at least, never faltered; never! And, he reflected sadly, it was the only woman's love he was ever likely to know. There could be no other now that he was wedded to one who had disappeared from out his life an hour after his back was turned.
"Yet, stay," he mused, as these thoughts sped swiftly through his troubled mind. "Stay. She may have followed my injunctions and have made her way to England. The news I seek may be here, in these."
But, even as he so thought, something, some fear or apprehension, told him that it was not so, and that his mother had no information to give him of his wife.
Swiftly he ran through his letters after opening them, putting away for the moment all consideration of his mother's anxiety as to what might have happened to him, since she had not heard from him for so long. Swiftly only to find that, beyond all doubt, she had neither seen nor heard aught of Laure. There was no mention of her. No word.
"I have no wife," he murmured. "No wife; nothing but a bond that will for ever prevent me from having wife or child, or home. Ah well! so be it. I saved her; saved her from him. Of my own free will I did it. It is enough."
Yet, though she had gone away thus and had left him without word or sign, he remembered that there was still one other thing--two other things--for him to do. Things that he had mused upon for weeks as he lay in the hospital in which he found himself on emerging from a long delirium, and while his wounded lung was slowly healing--the determination to find both Desparre and Vandecque, and, then, to slay both.
To kill Vandecque as he would kill a rat or a snake that had bitten him; to force Desparre to stand before him, rapier in hand, and to run the villain through the lungs, even as his jackals had done to him while their employer looked on from out the shelter of the porch.
This he meant to set about now, at once, to-day; but, first, let him read his mother's letters and write one in reply.
Those letters were full of the distress she was in at gleaning no news from him, full of tender dread as to what might have befallen him in Paris, which, she had heard, even in her country seclusion, was in a terrible state of turmoil in consequence of the bursting of the Mississippi bubble and the ruin following thereon; also, they expressed great fear that, in some manner, his Jacobite devotion might have led him into trouble, even though he was out of England.
Thus the first two ran. The third contained stranger and more pregnant news; news of so unexpected a nature that even this gentle, anxious mother put aside for the moment her wail of distress over the lack of tidings from her son to communicate it.
His distant cousin, she wrote, Lord Westover, was dead, burned to death in his own house in Cumberland, and with him had also perished his son; therefore Walter Clarges, her own dear son, had, unexpectedly to all, inherited the title as well as a large and ample fortune. He must, consequently, she said, on receipt of this at once put himself in communication with the men of business of the Westover family, the notary and the steward; if, too, she added, he could see his way to giving in his adherence to the reigning family his career might now be a great, almost an illustrious, one. The Hanoverian King was welcoming all to his Court who had once espoused the now utterly ruined Stuart cause. All would be forgotten if Walter but chose to give in his allegiance to the new ruler of England. And, perhaps with a view to inducing him to think seriously of such a change, she mentioned that she had heard from a sure source that, not six months before he met with his terrible death, the late Earl had seen King George, and had been graciously received by him. There was, she thought, no doubt that he at least had made his peace with the reigning monarch.
To Walter Clarges--or the Earl of Westover, as he now was--this news seemed, however, of little value. Titles, political principles--which he felt sure he should never feel disposed to change--even considerable wealth, were at the present moment nothing to him; nothing in comparison with what he had to do, with what he had set himself to do.
This was to seek out and wreak his vengeance on those two men, Desparre and his tool and creature, Vandecque. As for her, his wife--now an English aristocrat, a woman of high patrician rank by marriage--she had gone; she had left him without a word, without a message as to what life she intended to lead henceforward, or what existence to pursue. Yet, he had no quarrel with, no rancour against, her; he could have none. He had offered himself to her as a man who might be her earthly saviour, though without demanding in return any of the rights of a husband, without demanding the slightest show or pretence of affection; and she had taken him at his word, she had accepted his sacrifice! That was all. Upon her he had no right to exercise any vengeance whatsoever.
It was on Desparre first; on Vandecque next; or rather, on whichever might first come to his hand, that the punishment must fall; and fall it should, heavily. Of this he was resolved.
Pondering thus, he picked up the letter addressed to him in a woman's handwriting, and, opening it, began its perusal.
Yet, as he did so, as he read through it swiftly, his face became white and blanched. Once he muttered to himself, "My God, what awful horror have I saved her from!" And once he shivered as though he sat on some bleak moor, across which the wintry wind swept icily, instead of in his own room, on the hearth of which the blazing logs now roared cheerfully up the great open chimney.
When Walter Clarges was left lying on the footway of the Rue des Saints Apostoliques, on that cold, wintry night after Vandecque's rapier had struck through his left lung, there was not an hour's life left in him if succour had not been promptly at hand. Fortunately, however, such was the case, and, ere he had been stretched there twenty minutes, his prostrate form was found by a number of soldiers of the "Regiment of Orleans," who happened to pass down the street on their way to where their quarters were, near the Hôtel de Ville. All these men had been drinking considerably on this night of lawlessness and anarchy, they having, indeed, been sent forth under the charge of some officers to restore, if possible, peace and tranquillity to the streets, and to prevent the archers and exempts from continuing the wholesale arresting and dragging off to prison (after first clubbing and beating them senseless) of many innocent persons. And, for the rescues which they had made of many such innocent people, they had met with much gratitude and had been treated to draughts of liquor strong enough and copious enough to have turned even more seasoned heads than theirs, and were now reeling back to their quarters singing songs, yelling out vulgar ribaldries, and accosting jocosely, and with many barrack-room gallantries, the few women who ventured forth, or were forced to be abroad on such a night.
"Body of a dog," said one, a big, brawny fellow, whose magnificent uniform shone resplendent under the rays of the now fully risen moon, as they flashed down from the snow upon the roofs, "is our Regent turned fool? What will he gain by this devil's game of arresting all the people who object to lose their money in his cursed schemes. 'Tis well De Noailles sent us out into the streets to-night to stop it all, or the boy-king might never sit on the old one's throne. By my grandmother's soul, our good Parisians will not endure everything, and Philippe, who is wise, when he is not drinking or making love, should know better than to play such a fool's game. 'Tis that infernal Dubois, or his English friend, the financier----"
"La! la!" said another, equally big and brawny, "blaspheme not Le Débonnaire. He is our master. Ho! le Débonnaire!" Whereon he began to sing a song that everyone sung in Paris at this time, in which he was joined by all his comrades:
"Long live our Regent,He is so débonnaire."
Then he broke off, exclaiming while his comrades continued the refrain, "Ha! What have we here? Ten thousand thunders! Is it a battlefield? Behold Look at this Dead men around! The house-wall splashed with blood! How it gleams, sticky and shiny, in the moon's rays! Poor beasts!"
"Beasts in truth!" exclaimed a third. "Archers, exempts!Fichtre!who cares for them. Dirty police, watchmen essaying the duties of soldiers--of gentlemen, of ourselves. Bah!" and he kicked a dead archer lying in the road with such force that the thud of his heavy-spurred riding-boots sounded hideously against the corpse's ribs. "Let them lie there till the dogs find them."
"Ay! ay!" exclaimed the first of the speakers. "Let them lie. But this other, here; this is no exempt nor archer--instead, a gentleman. Look to his clothes and lace, and his hands. White as De Noailles's own. Also, he is not dead yet."
Meanwhile, he who thus spoke was bending over Walter Clarges and had already run his great muscular arm beneath the wounded man's shoulders, thus lifting him into a sitting position, whereby a stream of blood issued swiftly from his lips, and, running down his chin, stained the steinkirk and breast lace beneath.
"That saves him," he exclaimed, "for a time, at least. The red wine was choking the unfortunate. And observe; you understand? This is a gentleman. Set upon by these sewer rats either for robbery--or--or--or," and he winked sapiently, "by some rival."
Whereon, as he spoke, the man who had kicked the dead fellow lying in the road looked very much as though he were about to repeat the performance. Yet he was arrested in the act by what the other, who was supporting Walter's still inanimate form, said:
"Nay, fool, kick not the garbage. They cannot feel. Instead, scour their pockets. Doubtless the pay of Judas is in them. And, if so, 'tis rightly ours for saving this one. To the soldier and gentleman the spoils of war. To the gentlemen of Monseigneur's guard the perquisites of those wretches."
Meanwhile, even as he spoke, the gentleman of Monseigneur's guard was doing his best to restore the victim of Desparre and Vandecque to life. Half a handful of snow was placed on the latter's burning forehead; his vest was opened by the summary process of tearing the lace out of it and wrenching the sides apart. Gradually, Clarges unclosed his eyes, understanding what was being done.
"God bless you!" he murmured as well as the blood in his mouth would let him. "God bless you! My purse is in my pocket. Take----" Then relapsed into insensibility.
"Bah! for his purse. This is a gentleman. We do not rob one another. The dog eats not dog, as the Jew said to the man who unhappily looked like one. Instead, despoil those carrion, and, you others, help me to bear him to the Trinity. 'Tis close at hand. Hast found aught, Gaspard?"
"Ay!" the other gentleman of the guard replied. "A pocketful of louis-d'ors. Ho! for Babette and Alison and the wine flask to-morrow."
"Good! Good!" the first replied. "The wine cup and the girls to-morrow. Yet, not a word of anything to anybody. We found this Monsieur stretched on the ground wounded. As for the refuse here," and he looked scornfully at the dead men, "poof! we do not see them. They are beneath the notice of sabreurs. Lift him gently; use your cloaks as bands beneath his body. So away to the Trinity. Forward!Marchez, mes dragons!"
* * * * * *
The days drew into weeks, and the weeks into months. The winter, with its snows and frosts was gone; the spring was coming. Yet, still, Walter Clarges lay, white as a marble statue, in the hospital bed, hovering 'twixt life and death. But, because he was young and healthy, and had ever been sober and temperate, his constitution triumphed over the thrust that had pierced his lung and gone dangerously near to piercing his heart; his wound healed well and cleanly both inside and out, his mouth ceased at last to fill with blood each time he coughed or essayed to speak. Recovery was close at hand.
That he was a gentleman the surgeons recognised as plainly as the good-natured swashbucklers of Monseigneur's guard had done. His clear-cut, aristocratic features and his delicate shapely hands showed this as surely as his rich apparel (he had put on the best he had for his wedding), his jewelled watch by Tompion (which his father had left him), and his well-filled purse seemed to testify the same. But they did not know that what the purse contained was all he would have in the world after he had made provision for the woman he had married in the morning, and had paid every debt. At last, one day, the surgeon spoke to him, telling him that he was well and cured. If he had a home he might go forth to it, nothing now being required but that he should exercise some little care with his lung, while endeavouring to catch no chill--and so forth.
"Yes," he said, "I have a home, such as it is. An apartment in a back street, yet good enough, perhaps, for an English exile--an English Jacobite."
He had told them who he was and his name, while contenting himself with simply describing the attack upon him as one made by armed ruffians on that night of confusion, and thinking it best that he should say no more. To narrate the reason why he had been thus attacked, to state that he had taken a woman away from her lawful guardian, and married her on the morning when she was about to have become the wife of a prominent member of the noblesse--prominent in more ways than one!--would, he knew, be unwise. It might be that, even now, Desparre or Vandecque could set the law upon him, in spite of their base attempt at murder. If such were the case, and he should become a prisoner in the Bastille or Vincennes, his chance of being of further help to his wife would be utterly gone. And, for the same reason, he had not, during the last two weeks that he had been enabled to speak or write, sent any message to the custodian of the house where he lived, nor to his wife. He imagined that, since he had not returned on that night as he had promised to do, she would continue to remain on in the apartments in the Rue de la Dauphine until she heard from him. He had shown her his strong box and had told her that it contained four thousand livres, enough to provide her with her subsistence for some time to come. Surely she would not fail to utilise the money--would not forget that she was his lawful wife, and, though caring nothing for him, was therefore fully entitled to do with it what she chose. He would find her there on his return. And then--then they would make their arrangements for parting. He would force himself to bury, in what must henceforth be a dead heart, the love and adoration he had for her. Nay, he would do more. He had told her that, in days to come, he would find some means of setting her free from the yoke of their marriage, that yoke which must gall her so in the future. He could scarcely imagine as yet how this freedom was to be obtained, but, because of that adoration, that love and worship of his, it should be done. He had saved her from Desparre; soon she would need him no more. Then she could fling him away, if any means could be devised to break the bonds that bound her to him.
What he did find when he reached the house in the Rue de la Dauphine has been told, and how, when there, he learned that his thoughts of setting her free had long since been anticipated. She had waited for no effort on his part. She had escaped and left him the first moment that a chance arose, after having availed herself of the sacrifice he had made, all too willingly, for her.
"So be it," he said at last, as he sat before the burning logs, thinking over all these things, while that letter, written in some unknown woman's handwriting, lay at his feet "So be it; she is gone. I have no wife. Yet, yet"--and he gazed down as he spoke at the paper--"had she known this story which it tells--if it is the truth, she should have thanked me five thousand times over for the service I did her. To have saved her from Desparre as her husband was, perhaps, something worth doing--to save her from the awful, hellish union into which she would have entered unknowingly, would surely have entitled me to her everlasting gratitude--even without her love."
And, again, he shuddered as he glanced at the letter lying there.
"Now," he exclaimed, springing to his feet, "that is over; done with; put away for ever. One thing alone is not--my vengeance."
"Vandecque's abode I know," he muttered, "though not the address of that double-dyed scoundrel, his master. That I must learn later. Now for the jackal."
He seized his roquelaure and was about to throw it over his shoulder when he paused, remembering that he was unarmed--since the last sword he had worn, that one which had been broken in the affray of the Rue des Saints Apostoliques, was left where it had fallen. Then he went into his sleeping room and came forth bearing a strong serviceable rapier, which he passed through his sash.
"It has done good work for me before now," he mused; "'twill serve yet to spit the foul creature I go to seek."
Whereupon, putting the letter from his unknown female correspondent in his pocket, he went forth and made his way to the spot at which he had met his wife on the morning of their ill-starred marriage; the "Jardin des Roses," out of which the Passage du Commerce opened.
The roses were not yet in bloom, the spring flowers were only now struggling into bud; yet all looked gay and bright, and vastly different from what it had done on that cold wintry morning when Laure had stolen forth trembling to the arbour in which he waited for her, and had gone with him to that ceremony which she then regarded as but a lesser evil than the one she fled from.
"What hopes we cherish, nourish in our hearts," he thought, as he went swiftly over the crushed-shell paths to the opening of the Passage. "Hopes never to be realised. Even as I married her, even as I vowed that never would I ask her for her love, nor demand any consideration for me as her husband, I still dreamed, still prayed that at last--some day--in the distant future--she might come to love me. If only a little. Only a little. And now! And now! And now! Ah, well! It must be borne!"
He reached the house in the Passage as thus he meditated; reached it, and summoned the concierge to come forth from his den. Then, when the man stood before him ready to answer his inquiries, he said:
"I seek him who occupies the second floor of this house. Your tenant, Vandecque."
"Vandecque!" the man exclaimed. "Monsieur Vandecque! You seek him?" and the tones of the man's voice rose shriller and shriller with each word he muttered. "You seek Monsieur Vandecque?"
"'Tis for that I am here. What else? Where is he?" Then, seeing a blank look upon the man's face, he suddenly exclaimed: "Surely he is not dead?"
"Dead; no. Not that I know of. Though, sometimes, I fear. But--but--missing. He may be dead."
"Missing! Since when--how long ago?"
"Since the night of the--the--catastrophe. The night of the day when mademoiselle threw over the illustrious duke to marry an English outcast. They say--many think--that it broke his heart; turned him demented. That he drowned himself, poor gentleman, plunged into the Seine to hide----"
"Bah!" exclaimed Walter, "such fellows as that do not drown themselves. More like he is in hiding for some foul crime, attempted or done. If this is true that you tell me" (he thought it very likely that the man was lying by Vandecque's orders) "what of his companions, his clients--the men who gambled here. The 'illustrious duke' of whom you make mention; where is that vagabond?"
The man rolled up his eyes to heaven as though fearing that the skies must surely be about to fall at such profanation as this, and would have replied uncivilly to his interrogator only--the accent of that interrogator showed him to be an Englishman of the same class as the man who had stolen the Duke's bride. And he remembered that Englishmen were hot and choleric; above all that they permitted no insolence from inferiors. He did not know but that, if he were impertinent, he might find himself saluted with a kick or a blow. But, because he had as much wit of a sub-acid kind as most of his countrymen, he muttered to himself, "Apparently, Monsieur knows Monsieur le Duc." But, aloud, he said, "Monsieur le Duc is extremely unwell. He is no longer strong; in truth, he has lived too well since he removed himself from the army. They say," and the fellow sunk his voice as though what he was now about to impart was of too sacred a nature to be even whispered to the vulgar air, "they say that Monsieur fears a little fluxion, a stroke of apoplexy. His health, too, has suffered from the events of that terrible morning, and that----"
"No matter for his health. Where is he? Tell me that. If I cannot find Vandecque I must see him." Then, taking a louis from his pocket, he held it out, while making no pretence of disguising the bribe. "Here," he said, "here is something for your information. Now, answer, where is the man?"
"He is," the concierge said, slipping the louis with incredible rapidity into his breeches' pocket, "at or near Montpelier. The doctors there are the finest in the world, while the baths are of great repute for such disorders as those of Monsieur le Duc."
"This is the truth? As well as that Vandecque has disappeared?"
"Monsieur, I swear it. And, if Monsieur doubts me, he can see Monsieur Vandecque's apartments. They will prove to him that they have not been occupied for months. Also, if Monsieur demands at the Hôtel Desparre he will learn that, in this case as well, I speak the truth."
"I take you at your word. Let me see the apartments. Later, I will verify what you say as to the absence of Desparre."
"Ascend, Monsieur," said the man, pointing to the stairs. "Ascend, if you please." Walter Clarges did as was suggested, yet, even as he preceded the concierge, he took occasion to put his hand beneath his cloak and loosen his sword in its sheath. He did not know--he felt by no means sure of what he might encounter when he reached those rooms upon the second floor.