The berceuse had passed through Aix and was nearing Gardanne-le-Pin, leaving to its right the dead lake known as l'Etang de Berre, while, rising up on its left, were the last and most southern spurs of the Lower Alps.
It was drawing very near to Marseilles. Inside that travelling carriage, which comprised, as has been said, a sleeping apartment and sitting-room combined, as well as a cooking place and a bed for the servant, all was very quiet now except for the snores of the knavish valet, Lolive, which occasionally reached the ears of the white-faced, stricken man in the inner compartment; the man who, in spite of the softness of the couch on which he lay, never closed his eyes, but instead, whispered, muttered, continually to himself: "If I should be too late. God! if the transports should have sailed!"
Behind, and just above where his head lay upon the pillow of that couch, there was let into the panel of the carriage a small glass window covered by a little curtain, or pad of leather, a convenience as common in those days as in far later ones, and, through this, Desparre, lifting himself at frequent intervals upon one elbow, would glance now and again as a man might do who was desirous of noting--by the objects which he passed on the road--how far he had got upon his journey. Yet, hardly could this be the case with him now, since the route the berceuse was following was one over which he had never travelled before. In the many journeys he had made, either with the regiment in which he had served so long or when riding swiftly to rejoin it after leave of absence, this road had, by chance, never been previously used by him. What, therefore, could this terror-haunted man be in dread of seeing, when, lifting the leather pad, he placed his white face against the glass and peered out; what did he see but the foliage of the warm southern land lying steeped in the rays of the moon, while no breeze rustled the leaves that hung lifelessly on the branches in the unstirred, murky heat of an almost tropical summer's night; or the white, gleaming, dusty road that stretched behind him like a thread as far as his eyes could follow it?
In truth, he expected to see nothing; he knew that there was nothing to come behind him which he need fear, unless it were some mounted robber whom he could shoot, and would shoot, from the interior of his carriage--from out that window--with his silver-mounted pistols--as he would shoot a mad dog or a wolf that might attack him; he knew that there was no human creature on earth who could molest him or bar his way. He had made that safe, at least, he told himself, though, even in the telling, in the recalling how he had done it, he shuddered. Still, it was done! The Englishman who had thwarted him, as he then considered, but for whose interference he now thanked the Being whom, even in his evil heart, he acknowledged as God, was dead; had been left lying dead upon the stones of Paris months ago. Dead, after saving him from another infamy which he would have added to all the horrors of his past life, though, in this case, unknowingly. And Vandecque--ay, Vandecque--the man who could have told so much, who could have told how that Englishman had been hacked and done to death so that his patron's vengeance might be glutted both on him and the woman he had once meant to marry. Well! Vandecque was safe. Neither could that gambler rise up to denounce him, nor could he ever stand before the world and point to Desparre as the murderer of the man who had married his adopted niece. He, too, was disposed of. Yet, still, the traveller glanced ever and anon through that window as the berceuse rolled on, not knowing why he did so nor what he feared, nor what he expected to see.
"Laure, his own child! His daughter!" he mused again, as he had now mused for so long. The child of the one woman he had ever really loved--of a woman who had fondly loved him, who had believed and trusted in him. And he, called away suddenly to join his regiment to take active service, had never even known what had befallen her, had never even dreamt that she was about to become a mother. He had not known that she had been cast forth into the streets by her parents to die, but had, instead, deemed that she was false to him from the moment he left Paris, and had, therefore, hidden herself away from him ever afterwards.
Well! he was innocent of all this--innocent of all that had befallen her and their child, innocent of what a hideous, hateful crime his marriage would have been: yet guilty, blood-guilty in his vengeance on that child after she had escaped from marrying him. Guilty of sending her to the prison under a false charge of attempted murder--of banishing her to a savage, almost unknown land. Guilty of murder in yet another form than that which he had meted out to her husband--of the cruel, wicked murder of an innocent woman. And now he had learnt that this woman was his own child, his own flesh and blood!
And he might be too late to save her. The transports had probably sailed, or--and again he shuddered--she might have fallen dead on the road in that long, dreary march from Paris to the South. He knew well enough what the horrors were that the chain-gangs experienced in their journeys towards the sea-coast towns--nay, all France knew. They had heard and talked for years of how the convict men and women dropped dead day by day; of how, each morning, the cordon resumed its march with some numbers short of what it had been on the previous morning--of how bodies were left lying by the wayside to bake in the sun and to have the eyes picked out by the crows until the communes found and buried them.
Awful enough would have been his vengeance had she been an ordinary woman who had despised and scorned him. But, as it was, she was his own daughter!
Would he be in time to save her? Or, if not, would he still find her alive if he should follow her to New France? And if so, if he could save her either at Marseilles or in that town now rising at the mouth of the Mississippi, then--then--well then, instead of hating Diane Grignan de Poissy for the revenge she had taken on him, he would bless her, worship her for at last revealing the secret she had so cherished as an instrument of future vengeance.
In that night, as he thought all these things, a revolution took place in the soul of Armand Desparre; he was no longer all bad. Vile as he had been and execrable, a man who had trifled with women's hearts, who had received benefits from at least one woman under the pretence of becoming her husband eventually; a man who had been a very tiger in his rage and hate against those who had thwarted him, and a shedder of blood, yet now--now that his evil life stood revealed clearly before him, he shuddered at it. On this night he registered a vow that, if he lived, he would make amends. His child should be rescued if it were possible, even though he, with paralysis staring him threateningly in the face, should have to voyage to the other side of the world to save her. That, at least, should be done. As for the Englishman murdered at his instigation who was that child's husband, nothing could call him back to life from the Paris graveyard in which he had doubtless been lying for months; while for Vandecque--but of Vandecque he could not dare to allow himself to think. His fate, as an accomplice removed, was too terrible, even more terrible than his vengeance on Laure Vauxcelles, as she had come to be called.
Unknowingly, Diane Grignan de Poissy had gone far by what she had done--by the vengeance she had been nursing warm for years to use against him if he proved faithless to her--towards enabling him to whiten and purify his soul at last.
Again, as it had become customary for him to do since he had lain in the travelling carriage, and from the time of quitting Eaux St. Fer, he lifted the cover of the little window and glanced out. And it seemed to him that the night was passing away, that soon the day-spring would have come. The stars were paling and already the moon sank towards the northwest; he saw birds moving in the trees and pluming themselves and heard them twittering; also it had grown very cold. Sounding his repeating clock it struck four. The August dawn was near at hand. A little later and a grey light had come--daybreak.
The route stretched far behind him; for half a league he could see the white thread tapering to a point, then disappearing sharply and suddenly round a bend of the road which he remembered having passed. And as he gazed, recalling this and recollecting that at that bend he had noticed a lightning-blasted fir tree growing out of a sandy hillock, he saw a black speck emerge from behind the point, with, beneath it, a continual smoke of white dust. Then the speck grew and grew, while the smoke of dust became larger and larger and also whiter, until at last he knew that it was a horseman coming on at a swift rate, a horseman who loomed larger and larger as each moment passed and brought him rapidly nearer to the lumbering berceuse in which the watcher sat.
"He rides apace," Desparre muttered; "hot and swiftly. He presses his hat down upon his head as the morning breeze catches it and hurries forward. It is some courrier du Roi who posts rapidly. One who rides with orders."
Observing how well the man sat his horse, his body appearing as though part of the animal's own, and how, thereby, the creature skimmed easily along the road and overtook the berceuse more and more every moment, he decided that this was some cavalry soldier, young and well trained, whose skill had been acquired first in the schools and then, mayhap, on many a battlefield. Whereon he sighed, recalling how he himself, in other days, had ridden fast through summer nights and dewy dawns, with no thought in his mind but his duty and--his future! And now--now!--he was a broken-down invalid; a man whose soul was black and withered with an evil past. Would he ever----?
He paused in his reflections, scarcely knowing why he did so or what had caused their sudden termination. Yet he realised that something quite different from those reflections had come to his mind to drive them forth--some idea totally removed from them. What was it? What was he thinking of? That--he comprehended at last, after still further meditation--that this form following behind, enshrouded in its long riding-cloak, was not strange to him; that he had seen those square shoulders, which that cloak covered but did not conceal, somewhere before. Yet, what a fantasy must this be! There were thousands of men in France with as good a figure as this man's, as well-knit a frame, as broad and shapely shoulders.
Perhaps he was going mad to imagine such things; perhaps madness sometimes preceded that paralysis with which he was threatened and which he feared so much! Yet, at this moment, when now the sun rose up bright and warm from beyond where the Rhone lay, and threw a long horizontal ray across the road that both he and the horseman were travelling at a rapidly decreasing distance apart, the rider put up his hand, unfastened the hook of his cloak, and, taking the latter off, rolled it up and placed it before him on the saddle. Whereby he revealed a well-shaped, manly form, clad in a dark riding suit passemented with silver galloon. Yet, still, his face was not quite visible since the laced three-cornered hat was now tilted well over it to keep the rays of the bright morning sun from out his eyes, into which they now streamed as the road made another turn.
"I am not mad," Desparre whispered to himself. "I have seen that form before. Yet where? Where?"
This he could not answer. He could not even resolve in his own mind whether the knowledge that he was acquainted with that on-coming figure disturbed him or not, yet he turned his glance away from the eyehole of the carriage and cast it on a shelf above the couch. A shelf on which lay the box wherein reposed his silver-hilted pistols.
Then he returned to the little window, holding the leathern flap so lowered with a finger raised above his head, that he could gaze forth while exposing to view little more of his features than his eyes.
The horseman was overtaking him rapidly, he would be close to him directly, so close that his face must then be plainly discernible; he would be able to discover whether he had been deceived into that quaint supposition that the figure was actually known to him, or whether, instead, he was cherishing some strange delusion. Doubtless the latter was the case! Yet, all the same, the finger let down the flap a little more, so that there was now only a slit wide enough to enable his eyes to peer through the glass.
At this moment the road took still another turn and, in an instant, the rider was lost to his view. Then, next, that road rose considerably, whereby the berceuse was forced to creep up the incline at a pace which was less than a walk. The man behind him must, therefore, come up in a few minutes; even his horse would, at a walking pace alone, overtake his own animals as they struggled and dragged at the heavy lumbering carriage behind them.
But still he kept the flap open with his upraised hand, and still he peered forth from the window, it being darkened and blurred by the moisture from his nostrils. Then, suddenly, the carriage stopped, the horses were doubtless obliged to rest for an instant from their labours, and, a moment or so later, the horseman had come round the corner and up the inclined road at a trot, he reaching almost the back of the berceuse ere pulling up. At which Desparre dropped the flap as though it had been molten steel which seared his hand; dropped it and staggered back on to the couch close by, whiter than before, shaking, too, as if palsied! For he had not been deceived in his surmise as to recognising the horseman's figure; he knew now that he had not. He had seen the man's face at last! And it was the face of the man whom Desparre thought to be long since lying buried in some Paris graveyard, the face of the man who had married Laure; the husband of the woman he had caused to be sent out an exile to the New World. That man, alive--strong--well!
"What should he do? What? What? What?" he asked himself, as he recognised this rider's presence and its nearness to him and observed that he could hear the horse's blowings, as well as the great gusts emitted from its nostrils and the way it shook itself on slackening its pace on the other side of the back panel of his carriage. What? He could not get out and fight him in his diseased, enfeebled state, brought on by a year of hot and fiery debauch in Paris following on years of coarser debauches when he had been a poor man; he would have no chance--one thrust and he would be disarmed, a second and he would be dead, run through and through. Yet he knew that, if the man outside but caught a glimpse of his face, death must be his portion. They had met often at Vandecque's and at the demoiselle's Montjoie; almost he thought that the Englishman had recognised him as he concealed himself in the porch of the house in the Rue des Saints Apostoliques--if he saw his features now, he would drag him forth from the carriage, throttle him, stab him to the heart. Doubtless he would do that at once--these English were implacable when wronged!--doubtless, too, he was in pursuit of him, had sought him in Paris, followed him to Eaux St. Fer, was following him to Marseilles. For, that he should be here endeavouring to find his wife he deemed impossible. She had been almost spirited away to the prison of St. Martin-des-Champs and there were but one or two knew what had become of her; while those who did so know had been--had been--well--made secure.
He had followed him, and--now--he had found him! Now! and there was but an inch, a half inch of carriage panel between them; at any moment he might hear the man's summons to him to come forth and meet his doom. And he would be powerless to resist--he was ill, he repeated to himself again, and his servants were poltroons; they could not assist him.
Thinking thus--glancing round the confined spot in which he was cooped up--wondering what he should do, his eyes lighted on the pistol box upon the shelf.
The pistol box! The pistol box! Whereon, seeing it, he began to muse as to whether a shot well directed through that small window--not now, in full daylight, but later, in some gloomy copse they might pass through--would not be the shortest way to end all and free himself from the enemy whom he had already so bitterly wronged.
Whatever effect such musings might have brought forth, even to bloodshed, had Walter Clarges continued to ride close behind the carriage containing his enemy--of which fact he was, in actual truth, profoundly unconscious--cannot be told, since, scarcely had Desparre given way to those musings, than events shaped themselves into so different a form that the idea with regard to the pistols was at once abandoned.
For, ere the summit of the ascent, which was in itself a trifling one, had been reached by both the berceuse and the rider following it, Desparre was surprised--nay, startled--to discover that the man he dreaded so much was not by any possibility tracking him; that the pursuit of him was not his object.
Clarges had ridden past the carriage almost immediately after coming up with it; he had gone on ahead of it--and that rapidly, too--directly after reaching level ground once more.
"Startled" is, indeed, the word most fitting to express the feelings of the man who had but a moment before been quivering with excitement--with nervous fear--within his carriage, not knowing whether his end was close at hand or not. He had felt so sure that the presence of that other, in this region so remote from where they had ever met before, could only be due to the fact that Clarges was in search of and in pursuit of him, that, when he discovered such was not the case, his amazement was extreme. Since, if Clarges sought not him, for whom did he look? Was it the woman who had become his wife? Yet, if so, how did he know that she was, had been, near this spot, even if, by now, already gone far away across the sea whose nearest waters sparkled by this time in the morning sun. For Marseilles was close at hand; another league or so, and Desparre would have reached that city--would know the worst. He would know whether his child had departed to that distant, remote colony, or had died on the roadside ere reaching the city. But his freedom from the presence of that man, of that avenger--even though it might be only momentary--even though the Englishman might only have taken a place in front of the horses instead of riding behind the carriage--enabled him to reflect more calmly now on what the future would probably bring forth when he came into contact with his enemy--as come he must. In those reflections he began to understand that vengeance could scarcely be taken upon him, sinner though he was. Clarges had married the daughter--he could not slay the father. No! not although that father had plotted to slay him--had in truth, nearly slain him by the hands of others. Not although he had himself taken such hideous vengeance on that daughter, not knowing who she was.
But, did the Englishman know all, or, if he were told of what was absolutely the case, would he believe, would----?
A cry, a commotion ahead, broke in upon his meditations, his hopes of personal salvation from a violent death. The carriage stopped with a jerk and he heard sudden and excited talking. What was the reason? Had Clarges suddenly faced round and ordered the coachman to halt ere he proceeded to exercise his vengeance on the master--had he? What could have happened? A moment later, the valet, aroused from his heavy, perhaps guilty, slumbers, had thrust aside the curtain which separated the bed-chamber (for so it was termed) from the fore part of the berceuse, and was standing half in, half out, of the little room, undressed as yet and with a look of agony; almost, indeed, a look of horror, on his features.
"Oh! Monsieur, Monsieur le Duc," he gasped, "there is terrible news. Terrible. We cannot go forward."
"Cannot go forward!" Desparre ejaculated. "Why not? Has that man--that man who passed us endeavoured to stop the carriage?"
"No, Monsieur. No. But--but they flee from the city; in hundreds they flee. There are some outside already, Marseilles is----"
"What?"
"Stricken with the pest. They die like flies; they lie in thousands unburied in the streets. It is death to enter it. Nay, more," and the man shook all over, "it is death to be here."
"My God! Marseilles stricken again. Yet we must go on. We must, I say. Where is that--that cavalier who overtook--rode past us?"
"He has gone on, Monsieur le Duc. He would not be stayed, though warned also. The people, the fugitives--there are a score at the inn a few yards ahead of where we are--warned him to turn back ere too late, and told him it was death to approach the city; that, here even, so near to it, the air is infected, tainted, poisonous! He heeded them not but said his mission was itself one of life or death, and that this news made that mission--his reaching the city at once--even more imperative. Oh! Monsieur le Duc, for God's sake give the orders to turn back."
"Fool, poltroon, be silent So, also, by this news, if it be true, is my reaching the city become more imperative. Where is this crowd, this inn you speak of?"
It was natural he should ask the question, since the bed-chamber of the berceuse had no other window but the little one at the back out of which its occupant could gaze.
"Where," he repeated, "is the crowd--the inn?"
"Close outside, Monsieur; but, oh! in the name of all the Saints, go not forth. It is death! It is death!"
"It is death if I do aught but go on," the Duke muttered to himself; "death to her if she is there and cannot be saved." And, at that moment, Desparre was at his best. Even this man of vile record was dominated by some good angel now.
As he spoke, he pushed the valet aside and, shambling through the still smaller compartment outside the curtain in which the fellow slept and cooked, he appeared on the little platform beneath where the coachman and a footman sat, and from which it was easy by a step to reach the ground.
"What is this I hear of the pestilence at Marseilles?" he asked, as, seeing in front of him an inn before which his carriage was drawn up, as well as a number of strange, sickly-looking beings huddled about in front of it--some lying on wooden benches running alongside tables and some upon the ground--he addressed them. "What? Answer me."
Yet he knew that no answer was required. One glance at those beings told all, especially to him who had once known the pest raging in Catalonia and had seen the ravages it made, and once also at Bordeaux. Those chalk-white faces, those yellow eyes and the great blotches beneath them, were enough. These people might not be absolutely stricken with the pestilence, yet they had almost been so ere they fled.
"We have escaped," one answered, "though it may be only for a time. It is in us. We burn with thirst, shiver with cold. On such a morn as this! Marseilles is lost! Already forty thousand lie dead in her; they pile quicklime on them in the streets to burn them up. At Aix ten thousand are dead--at Toulon ten thousand; thousands more at a hundred other places. Turn back. Turn back, whosoever you are; be warned in time."
"Man," Desparre answered, "we have passed by Aix, yet we are not stricken. I must go on," and his white face blanched even whiter while his eyes rested on those unhappy people. Yet all the same, he did not, would not, falter. He had vowed that his attempt to save his child should act as his redemption if such might be the case; he would never turn back! No, not though the pest awaited him with its fiery poisonous breath at the gates; not even though the Englishman stood before him with his drawn sword ready to be thrust through his heart. He would go on.
He felt positive, something within warned him, that his hour was not far off. And also some strange presentiment seemed to tell him that by, or through, the pest his death was to come--not by the man whom he had himself striven to slay.
Partly he was wrong, partly he was right. An awful penalty awaited him for his misdeeds as well as through his misdeeds, though how the blow was to be struck he had not truly divined.
"Who," he asked, still standing on the platform of his carriage with his richly-embroidered sleeping gown around him, "are there besides the Marseillais? Are--there--any--strangers?"
"Strangers. Nay, nay! Strangers. Bon Dieu! Does Monsieur think strangers seek Marseilles now, when even we, the Marseillais, flee from it? When we leave our houses, our goods, sometimes our own flesh and blood, behind? Who should be there?"
"The commerce is great," he replied. "To all parts of the world go forth ships laden with merchandise. All traffic, all commerce cannot be stopped, even by such a scourge as this!"
"Not stopped!" the man replied. "Monsieur, you do not know. It is impossible that monsieur should understand. There are no ships; they lie out at sea. They will not approach. None, except the galleys. Their cargo counts not."
For a moment the Duke made no reply, while his eyes wandered from that group of fugitives to the people gazing forth from the inn window; to, also, his own servants looking paralysed with fear as they stood about, all having left the berceuse temporarily and crossed to the other side of the road so as not to be too near to the infected ones; then he said:
"There left Paris some weeks ago--many weeks now--two gangs of--of emigrant convicts for--for the New World. One cordon was of men, the other of--of women. Have they, are--are they there in that great pest house?" And he drew in his breath as he awaited the reply.
"The men are there."
"My God!" he whispered.
"They arrived yesterday."
"Have they sailed--put to sea? For New France?"
"I know not. There are, I tell monsieur, no ships. Those which were to transport those gallows' birds would not perhaps come in. They may have gone elsewhere."
"And the women?"
"I know not. If they are there, they will work in the streets--the men at burning and burying. The women at nursing."
"Have many persons there succumbed?"
"Many! Of those in the town almost half; at least a half."
Desparre asked no more questions but turned away, shaking at that last reply. Yet a moment later he returned to where the fugitives were (he was so white now that one whispered to another that already he was "struck"), took from his pocket a purse, and, shaking from it several gold pieces into his hand, held them out towards the poor creatures. Yet, even as he did so, he paused a moment, saying:
"Nay, do not come for them--there!" And he threw the coins towards where the people were huddled together.
For a moment they seemed astonished, even though he muttered, "Doubtless they will be of assistance," and he noticed that only one man in the small crowd picked them up--he with whom he had first conversed. But he saw a man whose head was out of the window smile, if the look upon his wretched face could be called by that name, whereby he was led to believe that the man who had last spoken was some rich merchant flying from the stricken city, even as the poorest and most humble fled. He understood that wealth made no difference in such a case as this.
He gave now the orders to proceed towards Marseilles, bidding his coachman and footman resume their places on the box, and his valet re-enter the berceuse. Instead, however, of doing so, they remained standing stolidly upon the farther side of the road muttering to themselves, shaking their heads, and looking into each other's eyes, as though seeking for support in their disobedience.
At last the coachman spoke, saying:
"Monsieur le Duc, we cannot go on. We--we dare not. This is no duty of ours--to risk our lives in this manner. No wages could repay us for doing that."
"You must go on," Desparre said; "you must conduct me to the gates of Marseilles. Beyond that, I demand no more. It is but two leagues. If I were not sick and ailing I would dismiss you here and walk into the city by myself. As it is, you must finish the journey. If not----"
"If not--what?" demanded the footman, speaking in an almost insolent tone. "What, Monsieur le Duc? These are not feudal days; there is no law here. All law is at an end, it seems; and--and, if it were not, no law ever made can compel us to meet death in this manner."
For a moment Desparre looked at the man, his eyes glistening from his pallid, sickly face; then he turned and slowly entered the berceuse. A moment later he reappeared upon the platform, and now he held within his hands his pistols. He was, however, too late. Whether the men had divined what he had intended to do and how he meant to coerce them, or whether they recognised that here was their chance--which might be their last one--of escaping from the horrible prospect of death that lay before them, at least they were gone, They had fled away the moment his back was turned, and had disappeared into a copse lying some distance from the road.
There remained, however, as Desparre supposed, Lolive; yet he recollected that he had been in neither of the compartments as he entered them. In an instant he understood that the man was gone too. The fellow had slid into the inn while his master had been inside the berceuse, and, passing swiftly through it to the back, had thereby made his own escape also.
Desparre would, in days not so long since past, have given way to some tempestuous gust of rage at this abandonment of him by his domestics, creatures who had been well paid and fed, even pampered, since they had been in his service and since he had come to affluence--he would have endeavoured to find them, and, had he done so, have shot them there and then. Yet now, either because he was a changed man in his disposition, or because his physical infirmities were so great, he did nothing beyond letting his glance rest upon the people standing about who had been witnesses of the desertion. Then, at last, he addressed them, haltingly--as he ever spoke now--his words coming with labour from between his lips.
"I am," he said, "a rich man. And--and--there is one in Marseilles dear to me, one whom I must save if I can. She is," the pause was very long here, "my daughter, and--heretofore--I have treated her evilly. I--must--see her if she be still alive; I must see her. If any here will drive my carriage to Marseilles he may demand of me what he will. Otherwise, I, feeble, sick, as I am, must do it myself. Even though I fall dead from the box to the ground in the attempt."
For a moment none spoke. None! not even those who, a short time back, would have performed so slight a task for a crown and have been glad to do it. Not one, though now, doubtless, a hundred pistoles would be forthcoming if asked from a man who travelled in so luxurious a manner. They knew what was in that city; they had had awful experience of the poisonous, infected breath that was mowing down thousands weekly, and, though some in the little crowd were of the poorest of the population, they did not stir to earn a golden reward. Gold, precious as it was, fell to insignificance before the preservation of their lives, squalid though such lives were even at the best of times.
A silence fell upon all; there was not one volunteer, not one who, meeting Desparre's imploring glance as it roved over them, responded to that glance. Then, suddenly, the man who had conversed with Desparre when last he appeared on the platform, the one who had taken no notice of the coins the latter tossed out in his sudden fit of charity, came forward and took in his hands the reins lying on the backs of the horses, and began to mount to the deserted box.
"I will drive you to the gates," he said quietly, "since your misery is so extreme. Yet, in God's grace, it must be less than mine. You may find this daughter of whom you speak alive even now--but for me--God two of mine are gone. I shall never see them again. As for your money, I need it not. I would have given a whole fleet of ships, a hundred thousand louis--I could have done it very well and not felt the loss--to have saved my children's lives. Oh! my children! My children! My children!" and, as he shook the reins, he wept piteously.
Midnight sounded from the tower of the ancient cathedral of Marseilles--the deep tones of the bell, in unison with all the bells of the other churches in the stricken city, being borne across the upland by the soft breeze from off the Mediterranean to where the women of the cordon stood--and those women were free at last from one awful form of suffering. The hateful collar was gone from off their necks; the chains that looped and bound them together had fallen from their wrists under the blows of the convicts, and lay in a mass upon the ground. They could hold up their heads and straighten the backs which had been bowed so long by the weight of the collar; they could stretch their limbs and rejoice--if such women could ever rejoice again at aught!--that they might raise their arms unencumbered by either steel or iron shackles. Yet, around their necks, around their arms, were impressed livid marks that, if they should live, it would take months to efface. More months than it had taken to produce the impression which the things had stamped into their flesh.
Then the order was given by the Sheriff, that broken-hearted man, that they should descend into the city; the very tones in which it was uttered--so different from the harsh, cruel commands of the men who had escorted the forlorn women from Paris!--being almost enough to make compliance with that order easy.
"Come," said Marion Lascelles to Laure, "come, dear one. Even though we march into the jaws of death, at least we go no longer as slaves, but as freed women. Let be. Things might be worse. Had those cowardly dogs, our warders, stayed by our side we should have been whipped or cursed into this nest of pestilence."
So they went on, following their sorrowful guide; the men of the galleys marching near them and relating the awful ravages of the plague which had stricken the city. Yet not without some exclamations of satisfaction issuing from the lips of those outcasts and mingling with their story, since they dilated on the freedom which was now theirs--except at nights when they were re-conducted to the galleys moored by the Quai de Riveneuve; and on, also, the better class of food which--at present! but at present only--they were able to obtain. Upon, too, the almost certain fact of their being entirely pardoned and released when the pestilence should at last be over.
"Will that come to us--if we live?" murmured Laure to the man who walked by the side of her and of Marion. "Will anything we do here, and any dangers to life we encounter, give us our pardon; save us from voyaging to that unknown land?"
"Will it,ma belle!" answered the convict--a brawny, muscular, fellow, who would have been a splendid specimen of humanity but for the fact that he was gaunt and yellow and hideously disfigured by the white cloth steeped in vinegar which he wore swathed round his lower jaw, so that he might continuously inhale the aromatic flavour with each breath he drew. "Will it! Who can doubt it! And, if not, why--name, of a dog!--are we not free already?"
"Free! How?"
"In a manner we are so. What control is there over us--over you, especially? You will live in the streets--or, if you prefer it, in any house you choose to enter; have a care, though, that it is one from which the healthy have fled in fear, not one in which the dead lie poisoning the air. At any moment you can hide yourselves away. While for us--well, there will come a night when we shall not return to the galleys. That is all."
"Has," asked Marion, "a chain of male emigrants entered Marseilles but a few hours before us? They should have done so, seeing that they were not more than a day in advance."
"Yes, yes. They have come. Yet their fortune was different; better or worse than yours, according to how one regards it. One of the merchant ships was still in the port--off the port--a league out to sea, and, well, they risked it. They took the human cargo; they are gone for New France. Had you a man amongst them whom you loved, my black beauty?" he asked, gazing into the dark eyes of Marion, those eyes whose splendour not all she had gone through could dull.
"My husband was amongst them," she replied quietly; while, to herself, she added: "Poor wretch! He did little enough good in marrying me. Yet this leaves me free to devote myself to her."
"Your husband," the convict exclaimed with a laugh. "Your husband? Good! he will never claim you. You can take another if you desire--the first one who falls in love with those superb glances."
"Vagabond! be still," she answered, with such a look from the very eyes he had been praising that the man was silent.
They were by now close to the northern gate of Marseilles; and here for a little while they halted, the Sheriff, whose name was Le Vieux--and who is still remembered there for his acts of mercy and goodness to all--addressing some archers who formed a group outside the gate, and bidding them produce food and wine, as well as some vinegar-steeped cloths for the neck of each woman.
"Who are they?" asked another Sheriff, who came up at this moment, while he scanned the worn and emaciated women and ran his eyes over their dusty and weather-stained clothes. "Surely you are not bringing to our charnel house the refugees from other stricken towns? Not from Toulon and Arles?"
"Nay," replied Le Vieux, "not so. But women who may, by God's grace, be yet of some service to those left alive. If there are any!" he added ominously. Then he asked: "What is the count to-day?"
The other shrugged his shoulders ere he replied:
"There is no count. It is abandoned. Who shall count? The tellers die themselves ere the record is made. Poublanc made a list yesterday--now----"
"He is not dead? My God I he is not dead?" The other nodded his head solemnly. After which he said:
"He lies on his doorstep--dead. He was struck this morning--now----!"
* * * * * *
It was a charnel-house to which the Cordon entered! The second Sheriff had spoken truly!
Yet, at this time, but half of the ninety thousand[4]who were to die in Marseilles of this pestilence had achieved their doom. Still, all was bad enough--awful, heart-rending! Not since ten thousand people died daily in Rome, in the first century of the Christian era, had so horrible a blight fallen upon any city. Nor had any city presented so terrible a sight as did Marseilles now when the women entered it, while glancing shudderingly to right and left as they passed along.
The dead lay unburied in the streets where they had fallen--men, women, and children being huddled together in heaps; it seemed even as if, after one heap had lain there for some hours, another had fallen on top of it, so that one might suppose that these second layers of dead represented those who, coming forth to search for their kindred and friends, had in their turn been stricken and fallen over them. There were also the bodies of many dogs lying stretched by the sides of the human victims, it being thought afterwards that they had taken the infection through sniffing at and caressing those who were dear to them. Yet--heart-rending as such a sight as this was to see, and doubly so as the women regarded it, partly under the rays of the moon and partly by aid of the flames of the fires which had been lit to destroy the contagion if possible--there was still worse to be witnessed.
This was the sight of those still left alive.
The women who had once formed the chain of female emigrants, and who, unfettered at last, marched along in company towards a spot where the Sheriff had said they would be able to sleep in peace for the remainder of the night, were now passing down a public promenade which ran for some three hundred yards through the principal part of the city. This promenade was known as Le Cours, and was bordered on each side by trees, mostly acacias and limes, which in summer threw a pleasant shade over the sitters and strollers during the day time, and, in the evening of the same season, had often served as a place for summer evening fetes to be held in, for open-air balmasqués, and as a rendezvous for lovers. Now the picture it presented was frightful!
In its midst there was a fountain with water gushing from the lips of fauns, nymphs, and satyrs into a basin beneath, and at that fountain the moon showed poor stricken men drinking copiously to cool their burning thirst, or leaning over the smooth sides of the basin and holding their extended tongues in the water. Or they lay gasping with their heads against the stone-work, in their endeavours to cool the heat of their throbbing brains, and to still, if might be, the splitting headaches which racked them. For clothes, many had nothing about them but a counterpane snatched hastily from off a bed ere they had rushed forth in agony unspeakable; often, too, when they had left their houses fully dressed, they had torn off their apparel in their inability to bear the warmth imparted by the garments. Yet numbers of them were not poor--if outward signs were sure testimony of wealth. One woman--young, perhaps beautiful, ere stricken by the disfiguring signs of the pest--was resplendent on breast and neck and hands with jewels that glittered in the moonbeams. Doubtless she had seized all she owned ere rushing from her house in misery!
If death levels all, so, too, had the pest in this desolated city plunged into strange companionship persons who, in other days, would never have been brought together. Hard by this bedizened woman was another, a woman of the people--perhaps a beggar, or a work girl, or a washer-woman at the best--who screamed and wailed over a dead babe lying in her lap. At her side was an old man, well clad and handsomely belaced, who shrieked forth offers of pistoles and louis' to any who would ease him of his pain, and then suddenly paused to call to him a dog hard by, to utter endearing words to it, and to endeavour to persuade it to draw near to him and quit the spot on which it lay writhing. A beggar, too! an awful thing of rags and patches! sat gibbering near them, and held out a can into which a monk passing by poured some soup, as he did into many others--yet, no sooner had the man put the stuff to his mouth than he hurled away the can, shrieking that the broth burned him to the vitals.
"This is the end," muttered Marion to herself, her dark eyes roving over all and seeing all as the women passed along--themselves now hideous in their vinegar-steeped wrappings--"the end of our journey!" Then she glanced down, frightened, at Laure, to see if she had heard her words. And she observed that this woman of gentler nature was walking by her side with her eyes closed, while supported and guided only by her own tender arm. The sight was too awful for Laure to gaze upon.
The alley led into a street called La Rue de la Bourse, a broad and stately one, full of large commodious houses such as the merchants of Marseilles had been accustomed to inhabit for some centuries. Now, it was deserted by all living things, while, at the same time, the dead lay in the streets as thick as autumn leaves. Huddled together they lay; some with their faces horribly distorted, some almost placid as though they had died in their sleep, some with their heads broken in! These were the people who had leapt from their windows in a frenzy of delirium or in an agony of pain; or, being dead, had been flung forth from those windows by the convicts and galley-slaves who had been sent into the houses to free them from the poisonous bodies of those who had expired.
Marion noticed, too, that the still living were driven off the thresholds of some houses to which they clung--one man, who looked like the master of the abode, was pouring cold water from a bucket down the steps, so that none would be likely to lie there. And, next, she heard a piteous dialogue between two others.
"It is my own house--my own house!" a man, writhing in a porch close to where she was, gasped to another who parleyed with him from a door open about half a foot. "Oh, my son! my son! let me die here on my own doorstep, if I may not enter."
Then the son answered, his tones being muffled by the aromatic bandages around his face:
"My father, it cannot be. Not because I am cruel to you, but because I must be kind to others still unstruck. Your wife and mine, also myself and my babes, are still free from the fever. Would you slay all, yet with no avail to yourself? My father, think of us," and he shut the door gently on the man while beseeching him once again to begone and to carry the contagion he bore about him far away from the house which contained all that should be dear to him.
"Brute!" cried Marion, hearing all this. "Brute! Animal!"
Then, because of her warm, impetuous Southern nature, she hurled more than one curse up at the window from which she saw the son's white face looking forth by now.
"Nay, nay," murmured the dying old man, while understanding. "Nay, curse him not, good woman. He speaks well. Why should I poison them? And--I am old, very old. I must have died soon in any hap. It matters not."
"There are houses here," whispered the convict, who still walked by Marion's and Laure's side, "at the end of the street, which are, by some marvel, unaffected. Yet, also, they are deserted, because they are so near to the poisoned ones. Seek shelter in one for the night, I counsel you."
"Show me one of such," said Marion. "If there is room enough for all of us," and she indicated with her eyes that she referred to the other women who had marched in company from Paris.
"Follow me, then. There is a house at the end, the mansion of one of our richest merchants. Yet he and all are gone; they have escaped safely in one of his ships to sea. He will not return for months; not until the city is free and purged. 'Twould hold a regiment," he added. Then he led the way down towards the house he spoke of.
"To-morrow," he continued, "the Sheriffs will ask me where you are disposed of, and I must say, since you will be required to lend aid. Meanwhile, sleep well, all you women. Above all, when you are in, shut fast every window so that no air enters the house to infect it. Forget not."
"Be sure I will remember," Marion replied. "As well as to shut the doors," she added, not liking too much the looks of this stalwart, though gaunt ruffian, and mistrusting his familiarity, in spite of the services he had more or less rendered them.
But the man only laughed, yet with some slight confusion apparent in his manner, and said:
"Oh! you are too much of my own kind to have any fear. You women have nothing to be robbed of--nothing to lose. And--Marseilles is full of everything which any can desire, except food and health. Here is the house. If you like it not, there are many others."
Casting her eyes up at what was in truth a mansion, Marion answered that it would do very well. Then she advanced up the steps towards it, still leading and supporting Laure, and bidding all the other women follow her.
"My sisters," she cried, "here is rest and shelter from the poisoned air of the city. And there should be good beds and couches within. Ah! we have none of us known a bed for so long. We should sleep well here."
Whereupon one and all filed in after her, uttering prayers that the pestilence might not be lurking within the place and making it even more dangerous than the open air.
"Fear not," the man replied. "Fear not. The owner fled at the first outbreak. Not one has died here unless--unless some have crawled in to do so. It is untainted."
"Now," said Marion to him, "begone and leave us. To-morrow we will do aught that we are bidden. You will find us here," and as he stood upon the steps of the house, she closed the door.
The place echoed gloomily with the reverberation. It appeared to be a vast, mournful building as they cast their eyes around the great hall into which the moonlight streamed through a window above the stairs. Mournful now all deserted as it was, yet a building in which many a festival and much gaiety had, for sure, taken place in vanished years. The stairs were richly carpeted; so, too, the hall. Upon the walls hung pictures and quaint curiosities, brought, doubtless, by the owner's ships from far-off ports; bronzes and silken banners, great jars of Eastern workmanship, savage weapons and shields and tokens; also statues and statuettes in niches and corners.
"The mansion of a rich, wealthy merchant," Marion thought to herself, seeing all these things plainly in the pure moonlight streaming from the untainted heavens above. "The home of gentle women and bright, happy men. Now, the refuge of such as we are--lepers, outcasts, gaol-birds."
And even as she so thought, Marion pushed open a door on the right of the hall, when, seeing that it led to a rich, handsome salon, she bade her companions follow her.