Aided by the light of the moon which now soared high in the heavens, she being in her second quarter, the women--of whom there still remained many out of the original number that quitted Paris--distributed themselves about this vast and sumptuous abode of gloom. Some, and these were the women who felt the most worn out and prostrate of all, flung themselves at once upon the rich Segoda ottomans and lounges which were in the saloon they had entered; one or two even cast themselves down upon the soft, thick Smyrna carpets, protesting they could go no further, no, not so much as up a flight of stairs even to find a bed; while others did what these would not, and so proceeded to the first floor. Amongst them went Marion and Laure.
Yet this, they soon found, was also full of reception rooms and with none of the sleeping apartments upon it; there being a vast saloon stretching the whole length of the front of the house with smaller rooms at the back, and in the former the two women cast themselves down, lying close together upon a lounge so big that two more besides themselves might easily have reposed thereon.
"Sleep," said Marion, "sleep for some hours at least. To-morrow they will come for us; yet, heart up! the work cannot be hard. 'Tis but to nurse the sick; and, remember, if we survive--if we escape contagion--we shall doubtless be free. That Sheriff, that unhappy, bereaved man promised as much; he will not go back upon his word."
"Can he undo the law?" muttered her companion, as now she prepared to find rest by Marion's side. "Are we not condemned to be deported to the other side of the world? How then can he set us free? And, even though free, what use the freedom? We have not the wherewithal to live."
"Bah!" exclaimed Marion, ruthlessly thrusting aside every doubt that might rise in Laure's, or her own, mind as to the possibility of a brighter future ahead: "Bah! we are outside the law's grip now. We can set ourselves free at any moment. Can we not escape from out this city as inhabitants who are fugitives? Or get away----"
"In these prison rags!" Laure exclaimed, recalling to the other's memory how the garb they wore--the coarse black dress and the equally coarse prison linen--was known and would be recognised from one side of France to the other. "Marked, branded as we are Even with the impress of the carcan still on our necks! It is impossible!"
"Is it? Child, you do not understand. Do you not think that in this great, rich house there are countless handsome dresses and vast quantities of women's clothing? We can go forth decked as we choose--even as rich women fleeing from the scourge. Have no fear," the brave, sturdy creature added; "that we cannot depart when we desire. And--leave all--trust all--to me."
"How to live though we should escape? I am fit for nothing. I can do no work: even though I were strong. I know nothing. My uncle reared me too delicately."
"I can do all, I am strong. I will work for both of us. Now sleep."
And they did sleep, lying side by side. Side by side as they had done before when chained together, and as they had trudged along the awful road which led to still more awful horrors than even the route could produce. In the morning Marion arose as the first rays of dawn stole in through the windows of the great room, while thinking at first, ere she was thoroughly awake, that the guardians would come in a moment to curse into consciousness all who still slept, and half dreaming that she was again on the road. Then, she remembered that these men would never trouble her more; that, in a manner of speaking, she and Laure were free. Yet she remembered that their freedom was a ghastly one, and that death was all around them; that the pestilence was slaying a thousand people a day (as she had heard one galley slave say to another); and that, ere they had been in Marseilles many hours, it might lay its hot, poisonous hands on her and her companions.
Laure still slept, and, gazing down upon her, Marion saw how white and worn she was--yet how beautiful still! Upon that beauty nothing which she had yet undergone had had full power of destruction. Neither sun nor rain nor wind, nor the long dreary tramp and the rough, coarse food--not even the sleeping in outhouses and barns, and, sometimes, of necessity, beneath the open heavens and in the cold night wind--could spoil the soft graceful curves of chin or cheek, or alter the features. Burnt black almost, worn to skin and bone, and with, on those features, that look which toil almost ever, and sorrow always, brings, she lay there as beautiful still in all the absolute originality of her beauty as on the day she was supposed to be about to marry one man and had married another.
Looking down upon her, that other woman, that woman whose own life had been so turbulent--and who, like Laure, had been reared among the people but who had, doubtless, never known the refining influences which even such a man as Vandecque could offer to one whom he loved for herself, as well as valued for her loveliness--wept. She wept hot, scalding tears, such as only those amongst us whose lives have been fierce and tempestuous (almost always, alas! because of those fiery passions which Nature has implanted in our hearts, and which, could we but have the arbitrament of them, we would hurl away for ever from us), can weep. Then, slowly, she did that which she could not remember having once done for long past years--not since she was a tiny, innocent child. She sunk first on one knee and then on the other, and so knelt at the side of the sleeping girl, murmuring:
"If I may dare to pray--I--I--who have so outraged Him and all His laws. Yet, what to say--how to frame a prayer? 'Tis years since she who taught me my first one at her knee--since she--ah! pity me, God," Marion broke off, "I know not how to pray."
Yet, all the same, she prayed (if, in truth, "prayer is the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed") that this stricken, forlorn woman might live through all the dangers that now encompassed her; that once more she might see the noble, chivalrous man who had married her, and be at last folded to his heart. While, even as she bent over Laure, the latter's lips parted, and it seemed as though she muttered the name "Walter."
"Ay", Marion muttered, "that is it. But where is he? Where? Oh! if he were but near to save her." Then she sighed deeply, as she would not have sighed could she have known that, already, the man whose name was in the sleeping and waking thoughts of each woman had reached the city, intent upon finding and rescuing his wife. His wife, whom he had loved since first his eyes fell on her fresh, pure beauty in the fœtid, sickly air of a Paris gambling hell.
For Walter Clarges knew all now. He knew of the deadly, damnable vengeance that Desparre had taken on the woman whom he would have married if she had not cast him off for another. Himself!
The knowledge had come to Clarges in that strange way, by one of those improbable incidents which are the jest of the ignorant scoffers who, in their self-importance and self-sufficient conceit, are unaware that actual life is more full of strange coincidences than the most subtle of plot-weavers has ever been able to devise. It had come to him when least to be expected--in such a manner and at such an opportune moment as to make the knowledge vouchsafed to him appear to be the work of Providence alone.
He had been passing one night at dusk down the street which led to that in which he dwelt, while musing, as ever, on whether she had been false to him--so bitterly, cruelly false as to make her memory and all regrets worthless--when his attention was attracted by an altercation going on between two men. One, a middle-aged, powerful-looking individual; the other, a beggar and almost old.
"Fie! Fie! Shame on you!" he said to the former, as he saw him strike the second with his cane. "For shame! The man is older than you, and apparently feeble. Put up your stick, bully, or seek a more suitable adversary."
"Monsieur's self to wit, perhaps," the aggressor sneered, yet ceasing his blows all the same. "Pray, does Monsieur regulate the laws by which gentlemen are to be molested by whining mendicants in the public places of Paris? This fellow has followed me with his petition for alms through a whole street."
"I will see that he does so no more," Walter Clarges said, quietly yet effectively. "At least, you shall beat him no further. You had best begone now," and there was something in his tone, as well as in his stalwart appearance, which induced the other to draw off and proceed on his way. Not, of course, without the usual protestations of "another time," and "when the opportunity should serve," and so forth. But, still, he went.
"What ails you?" asked Walter, gazing down now on the man whom he had saved from further drubbing. "Answer," he continued, seeing that the beggar turned his face away from him, and seemed, indeed, inclined to shuffle off after mumbling some thanks in his throat which were almost inaudible and entirely indistinct. "Answer me. And here is something to heal your aches from that fellow's cane." Whereon he held out a small silver coin to him.
But still the man made off, walking as swiftly as two lame feet would allow, and keeping at the same time his face turned from the other, as well as not seeing, or pretending not to see, the proffered coin.
"A strange beggar!" exclaimed Walter, now. "You pester a man until he beats you, yet refuse alms when cheerfully offered. By heavens perhaps he was not so wrong. At least, you are an ungrateful churl."
"I am not ungrateful," the fellow answered, turning suddenly upon Walter, and showing a blotched, liquor-stained face. "No; yet I will not take your money. It would blister me."
"In heaven's name, who are you?" Walter exclaimed, utterly amazed.
"Look at me and see!" And now the man thrust his blotchy visage close up to the other's, as though inviting the most open inspection.
"I protest I never set eyes on you before. My friend, you have injured someone else--evidently you must have injured him!--and mistake me for that person."
"I do not mistake. You are the man who was set upon and done to death, left for dead--as all supposed--on the night when Law's bubble was nearly pricked; the man whose newly-married wife was flung into the prison----"
"Ah! My God! What?"
"Of St. Martin des Champs, and thence deported to America. Nay, nay," the fellow shrieked suddenly, seeing the effect of his words; "do not swoon, nor faint. Heavens!" he added to himself, "he is about to drop dead at my feet."
He might well have thought so! The man before him had become as rigid as a corpse that had been placed upright on its dead feet and left to topple over to the earth as soon as all support was withdrawn.
Clarges' eyes were open, it was true--better, the appalled man thought, they should have been shut than look at him as they did!--yet they were glassy, staring, dreadful. His face was not white now with the whiteness of human flesh--it was marble--alabaster--ghastly as the dead! So, too, with his lips--they being but a thin, grey, livid line upon that face. And he spoke not, no muscle twitched, no limb moved. Only--one thing happened; one sign was given by the statue standing before the shaking outcast. That sign consisted of a clink upon the stones at his feet--the coin which that outcast had refused to take had dropped from the other's nerveless, relaxed hand.
At last the man knew that he who was before him had not been turned to stone, had not died standing there erect. From that livid line formed of two compressed lips, a voice issued and said:--
"The prison of St. Martin des Champs! And--deported--to--America! Is this true? You swear it?"
"Before Heaven and all the angels."
There was another pause, another moment of statuelike calm. Then, again, that voice asked:--
"Whose doing was it? Who sent her--there?"
"The noble--the man they termed a Duke. The man she had jilted for you."
"Come with me. I--I--can walk, move, now."
* * * * * *
They were seated opposite to each other in Walter Clarges' room half an hour later, and the fellow, who had by such a strange chance been brought into contact with him, had told his tale, or partly told it. He had described how he had been one of those employed by another who worked under "the man they termed a Duke," to assist in falling on him who was now before him; how they, the attackers, had left him for dead, and how they had been bidden to follow to this very house to assist in another matter.
"She lay there--there," he said, "when we came in," and he pointed to a spot at the side of the table; "dead, too, as we all thought. He and his creature, the man who gave you yourcoup de grâce, as we imagined.--I--I cannot remember his name----"
"I can," Walter said. "It was Vandecque. Go on."
"That is the name. Vandecque bade us lift her up and convey her to the prison. To St. Martin des Champs, because it was the nearest. And we did so, Heaven pardon us! Yet, ere we set forth, that man, that noble--that rat--he did one thing that even such ruffians as we were shuddered at.
"What did he do?" Walter asked, dreading to know what awful outrage might have been offered to his insensible wife as she lay before her ruffian captor. "What? Tell me all."
"He tore from his lace cravat, where it hung down over his breast, a piece of it; tore it roughly, raggedly and--and--he placed it in her right hand, clenching the fingers on it. Then he whispered in his lieutenant's ears, 'the evidence against her, mon ami. Yes. Yes. The damning evidence, Vandecque.' Yes--Vandecque. That was the name."
Again the man was startled--at the look upon the face of the other. As well as at the words he heard him mutter; the words:--"It shall be thy evidence, too, blackest of devils. The passport to thy master."
Aloud he said:--
"Do you know more? Is--is--oh! my wife--my wife!--is--has she set out?"
"La Châine went to Marseilles a month ago."
"How fast do they--does la Châine, as you term it--travel?"
"But slowly. Especially the chain-gang of women. They must needs go slowly."
Again Walter Clarges said nothing for some moments; he was calculating how long, if mounted on relay after relay of swift horses, it would take him to catch up with that chain--to reach Marseilles as soon as it--to rescue her. For he knew he could do it--he who was now an English peer could save her who was an English peer's--who was his--wife. He had but to yield on one point, to proclaim himself an adherent of the King who sat on England's throne, and the ambassador would obtain an order from the French Government to the prison authorities to at once hand over his wife to him. And politics were nothing now! They vanished for ever from his thoughts! Then he again addressed the creature before him. "You should have been well paid for your foul work," he said. "So paid that never again ought you to have known want. How is it I find you a beggar?"
"Ah!" the man cried. "It was our ruin. We were blown upon somehow to the ministry of police a day or two later for some little errors--Heaven only knows how there were any who could do so, but thus it was. We were imprisoned, ruined. I but escaped the galleys by a chance. Yet, I, too, was ill-treated. I was cast into prison for two months. God help me! I am ruined. There was some private enemy."
"Doubtless, your previous employer."
"I have thought so."
"And that other vagabond. That villain, Vandecque! What of him? He is missing." The man cast his bloodshot eyes round the room as though fearing that, even here, he might be overheard, or that the one whom they called a duke might be somewhere near and able to wreak further condign vengeance on him; then he whispered huskily:
"Ay--he is missing. Some of us--I have met them in the wineshops--think he is dead. He knew too much. He--all of us--have paid for our knowledge of that night's work. Yes, dead! we think."
"'Tis very possible. Desparre would leave no witness--none to call him to account. Yet," muttered Walter to himself, "that account has soon to be made. I am alive, at least. But first--first--for her. For Laure!"
It was during the day preceding the night on which those unhappy, forlorn women were conducted down to the north gates of the pest-ridden city that Walter Clarges himself entered Marseilles.
He had passed those women on the previous night, unseen in the darkness and himself unseeing, while they, worn out and inert, lay in some barns and outhouses belonging to a farm some miles off the city. He had ridden by within two hundred yards of where the woman he loved so much was enfolded in the arms of Marion Lascelles, half dead with fatigue and misery. He had ridden by, not dreaming how near they were to each other!
On the morning following he had also passed, not knowing whom it contained, the travelling carriage of the man who had wrought so much evil in his own and his wife's life; he had gone on fast and swiftly towards Marseilles, impelled to even greater speed by the first news of the horror which had fallen on the city, as well as by the hope that he might be in time to rescue her from that horror and the danger of an awful death. And, if not that--if happily, for so he must deem it now, she, with the other female prisoners, should have been sent on board the transports for New France and already departed--then he was still full of the determination to follow her across the ocean, and so, ultimately, effect her freedom.
Only an hour or two later, and after he and the villain Desparre had passed the spot where the first news of the pest was heard by them, La Châine went by too. Yet, by that time all around and within the inn was desolate, while the place itself was abandoned and shut up, the landlord and his family having closed the house and joined the other refugees in their flight. The spot was too near to Marseilles to make it safe to remain there; it was too much visited by the stricken inhabitants as they fled to the open country to continue long unattacked by the poisonous germs brought with them by those inhabitants.
Walter entered the city, therefore, on the midday preceding the arrival of those unhappy, forlorn women; he entered it at last after having made what was, perhaps, one of the fastest journeys ever yet effected from Paris to the great city in the South, so often spoken of in happier days, by those who dwelt therein, as the Queen of the Mediterranean.
How he had done it, how compassed all those leagues, he hardly knew. Indeed, he could scarcely have given a description of how that long journey had been made, and seemed, in truth, to remember nothing beyond the fact that it had been accomplished more by the lavish use of money than aught else. He had (he could recall, as he looked back to what appeared almost an indistinct dream) bought more than one horse and ridden it to a standstill; and had, next, hired as swift a travelling carriage as it was possible to obtain, so that, thereby, he might snatch some hour or so of rest. Then he remembered that he had also left that in its turn, had bought another horse--and--and had--nay, he could scarcely recollect what it was he had done next, how progressed, where slept, and how taken food and nourishment. Yet, what mattered? He had done it. He was here at last. That was enough. But now that he was in the great seething plague spot, now that he was here and riding his horse down Le Cours amidst heaps of decaying dead, both human and canine (with, also, some crows poisoned and lying dead from pecking at those who were stricken), all of whom tainted the air and spread fresh poison and disease around, how was he to find her? And if he found her, inwhatcondition would it be? Would she be there, and his eyes glanced stealthily, nervously towards those heaps--or--or--would he never find her at all! Some--he had been told at the gate, where they handed him the repulsive cloth steeped in vinegar which he was bidden to wrap round his neck--were destroyed by quicklime as they died; while there was an awful whisper going about that the thousands of dead now lying in the streets were to be burnt in one vast holocaust, and that, likewise, the houses in which more than a certain number had died were to be closed up for a long space of time with what was termed "walled up doors and windows." Suppose--suppose, therefore, she had died, or should die, in any of these circumstances, and he should never find her--never hear of her again! Never, although he had reached the very place in which she was! Suppose he should never know what had been her actual fate!
"I must find her," he muttered; "I must find her!" And he prayed God that he might do so ere long; that he might discover her alive and well, so that he could rescue her from this loathsome place and take her away with him to safety and health. He could make her so happy now that he was rich. He must find her!
At the gate where he had been given the disinfectants, the man in charge stared at him as one stares at a madman or some foolhardy creature who insists on doing the very thing which all people possessed of sanity are intent upon not doing at any cost. He stared at the well-dressed stranger, who, flinging himself off his horse, had battered at the gate to be let in--much the same as, on the other side of it, people battered against it in their desire to be let out.
"Admit you!" exclaimed the galley slave who now filled the post of the dead and gone gate-keepers (with, for reward, a prospect of freedom before him when the pest should be finally over, if he should be alive by that time). "Admit you! Name of Heaven one does not often hear that request! Are you sick of life? It must be so!"
"Nay; instead, I seek to preserve life, even though I lose my own in doing so. To preserve the life of one I love." Then, observing the man's strange appearance, his red cap and convict's garb, he asked: "Are you the warder of the gate?"
"For want of better! When one has not a snipe they take a blackbird. I am the substitute of the warders. They lie in the outhouse now. I may lie there, too, ere long."
"Has--has any cordon of women--female convicts--emigrants--passed in lately? From Paris? Speak, I beseech you," and he had again recourse to that which had not failed him yet, a gift of money.
The man pocketed the double piece in an instant. Then he said: "I cannot say. I was sent here but yesterday--the warders would have known."
"Go and ask them."
"Ask them.Ciel!they would return a strange answer. Man, they are dead! Do you not understand?"
"Is everybody dead in this unhappy place?" Walter asked, despairingly.
"Not yet. But as like as not they will soon be. You see,mon ami, we die gaily. Of us, of us others--gentlemen condemned for crimes we never committed--forty were sent into the city from our galleys two days ago. Four remain alive. I am one." Then, changing the subject, he said: "Is the life you love that of a woman who comes--or has come--in the cordon of which you speak?"
"God pity me! yes. She is my wife. Yet an innocent."
"Ha! An innocent. So! so! We are all innocent--all the convicts and convict emigrants. Also, our woman-kind. Well! enter, go find her if she is here. Then, away at once. Escape is easy, for the sufficient reason there will be none to stop you."
"Why not, therefore, flee yourself?"
"Oh I as for that, we have our reasons. We may grow rich by remaining, and we are paid eight livres a day to encourage us. There is much hidden treasure. And our costume is a little pronounced. We should not get far. Moreover," with a look of incredible cunning, "we shall get our yellow paper, our 'passport,' if we do well and survive! We shall be gentlemen at large once more. If we survive!"
Sickened by the sordid calculations of this criminal, Walter Clarges turned away, then, addressing the man once more, he said:
"I will go seek through the city for my wife. If I find her not I will return to you. You will tell me if the cordon I have spoken of arrives. Will you not?" and again he had recourse to the usual mode of obtaining favours.
"Ay! never fear. If they come in you shall know of it."
Whereon Walter Clarges took his way down Le Cours and traversed the rows of dead and dying who lay all around him at his horse's feet, seeing as he went along the same horrors that, in the coming midnight, his wife and her companions in misery were also to gaze upon. The daylight showed him more than the dark of twelve hours later was to show to them, yet robbed, perhaps, the surroundings of some of those tragic shadows and black suggestions which night ever brings, or, at least, hints at.
It was almost incredible that the ravages of an all devouring plague, accompanied in human minds by the most terrible fear that can haunt them--the fear of a swift-approaching, loathsome death--could have so transformed an always gay, and generally brilliant, city into such a place as it had now become. Incredible, also, that those who still lived while dreading a death that might creep stealthily on them at any moment, could act towards those already dead with the callous indifference which they actually exhibited.
He saw some convicts flinging bodies from windows, high up in the houses, down into the streets, where they would lie till some steps could be taken for gathering and removing them--and he shuddered while seeing that now and again the wretches laughed, even though the very work that they were about might be at the moment impregnating them with the disease itself. He saw a pretty woman--a once pretty woman--flung forth in a sheet; an old man hurled naked from a window; while a little babe would sometimes excite their derision, if, in the flight to earth, anything happened that might be considered sufficient to arouse it. He saw, too, lost children shrieking for their parents--long afterwards it came to his knowledge that, in this time of trouble and disorder, some strange mistakes had been made with these little creatures. He learnt that beggars' offspring had undoubtedly become confused with the children of rich merchants who had died from the pest, and that the reverse had also happened. In one case, many years afterwards (the account of which reached England and was much discussed) a merchant's child had been mistaken for that of an outcast woman, and had eventually earned its living as a domestic servant working for the very pauper child who had, by another mistake, been put in possession of the wealth the other should have inherited.
Still, he went on; nerved, steeled to endure such sights; determined that neither regiments of dead, nor battalions of dying, nor scores of frightened, trembling inhabitants fleeing to what they hoped might be safety in some distant, untouched village, should prevent him from seeking for the woman he had loved madly since first his eyes rested on her. The woman he had won for his wife only to lose a few hours later!
Through terrible spectacles he went, scanning every female form and face, looking for women who might be clad in the coarse sacking of the convictemigrée; peering at dying women and at dead. And he knew, he could not fail to recognise, how awful a grip this pest had got on the city, not only by the forms he saw lying about, but by the action of the living. Monks and priests were passing to and fro, one holding a can of broth, another administering the liquid to the stricken; yet all, he observed, pressing hard to their own nostrils the aromatically-steeped cloths with which they endeavoured to preserve their own lives. He saw, too, an old and reverend bishop passing across a market place, attended by some of his priests, who gave benedictions to all around him and wept even as he did so. A bishop, who, calm with that holy calm which he was surely fitted to be the possessor of, disdained to do more than wear around his neck the bandage which might preserve him from contagion. He pressed nothing to his lips, but, instead, used those lips to utter prayers and to bestow blessings all around him. This was, although Walter knew it not, the saintly Belsunce de Castelmoron, the Reverend Bishop of Marseilles, of whom Pope afterwards wrote:
"Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer breath,When nature sickened, and each gate was Death?"
"Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer breath,When nature sickened, and each gate was Death?"
Of convicts, galley slaves, there were many everywhere, since, as soon as one batch sent from the vessels lying at the Quai de Riveneuve was decimated, or more than decimated, another was turned into the city to assist in removing the dead, and, where possible, burying them within the city ramparts and port-walls, which had been discovered to be not entirely solid but to possess large vacant spaces within them that might serve as catacombs. And, also, they were removing many to the churches, the vaults of which were opened, and, when stuffed full of the dead, were filled with quicklime and closed up again, it remaining doubtful, however, if the churches themselves could be used for worship for many years to come.
In that dreadful ride he saw and heard such things that he wondered he did not, himself, fall dead off his horse from horror. He saw men and their wives afraid to approach each other for fear of contracting contagion; he observed many people running about the streets who had gone mad from fright; once, in the midst of all these shocking surroundings, he perceived a wedding party--the bride and bridegroom laughing and shrieking, while the man, who was either overcome with drink or frenzy, called out boisterously, "Thy uncle can thwart us no more, Julie. The pest has done us this service at least."
Next, he passed through a street at which a little trading was taking place, some provisions being sold there. Yet he noticed what precautions prevailed over even such transactions as these. He saw a great cauldron of boiling water with a fire burning fiercely beneath it, and into this cauldron was plunged every coin that changed hands, pincers being used for the purpose. It was feared that even the pieces of metal might convey the disease! And he observed that those who brought fish to sell were driven away with shouts and execrations, and made to retire with their bundles. It was rumoured, he heard one man say, that all the fish near land were poisoned and infected by the bodies that had been cast into the sea.
The night drew near as still he paced the city streets and open places, and he knew that both he and his horse must rest somewhere--either out in the open or in some deserted house or stable. Food, too, must be obtained for both. Only--where?
Then he determined he would make his way back to the gate and discover if, by any chance, the chain-gang of women had yet arrived. If it had not, it must, he felt sure, be very near, or--perhaps--already lying outside the city. To-morrow at daybreak he would begin his search again.
Remembering the way he had come, guided by terrible signs, by shocking sights which he recollected having passed on his way to the spot he was now returning from; guided, also, by the glow left by the sun as it began to sink, he went on his road back towards the gate, observing the names of the streets at the corners as he did so. One, which now he was passing through, and which he noticed was calledLa Rue des Carmes Déchaussés, seemed to have, for some reason, been more deserted by its inhabitants than several others he had traversed. Perhaps, he thought, because the fever had developed itself more pronouncedly here than elsewhere; perhaps because the inhabitants were wealthy enough to take themselves off at the first sign of the approach of the pestilence. That might be so. Now, the doors and, in many cases, the windows stood open; he could see through these windows--even in the fast falling dusk--that the rooms were sumptuously furnished, yet how desolate and neglected all seemed! How fearful must have been the terror of their owners when they could flee while leaving behind them all their treasures and belongings, leaving even their doors open behind them to the midnight prowlers or thieves who must surely be about after dark. Or, had those prowlers and thieves themselves burst open those doors, while neglecting to shut them again after they had glutted themselves with the treasures within?
Musing thus he halted, regarding one particularly open house--it was number 77--then started to see he was not alone in the street.
Coming slowly up it was a man who walked as though with difficulty; a man who, seeing a solitary woman's body lying on the footpath, crossed over to her, turned over the body, and regarded the face. Then he seemed to shake his head and walk on again towards where Walter Clarges sat his horse observing him. And, far down the street, he saw also another figure, indistinct as to features, distinct as to dress. A man arrayed in the garb of a convict; a man who, as he crept along, gave to the watcher the idea that he was tracking him who was ahead.
Ahead and near Clarges now, so near that he could see his features. And, as he saw and recognised them, he gave a gasp, while exclaiming hastily, "My God!"
For the first man of the two, the one who now drew close to him, was Desparre!
The night was close at hand as those two men came together, they being brought so by the slow, heavy approach of Desparre towards where the other sat his horse watching him. The dark had almost come. But, still, there was a sufficiency of dusky light left beneath the stars which began to twinkle above in the deep, sapphire sky for the features of each to be recognised by the other.
"Yet," Clarges asked himself, as he dismounted and left his tired horse standing unheld in the deserted street, "did Desparre recognise his features?" He could hardly decide.
The man had stopped in that halting, dragging walk up the long, deserted street which rose slightly on a hill; he had stopped and was looking--yes, looking--staring--at him, yet saying nothing either with his lips or by the expression of those glassy eyes. He was standing still before him, mute and rigid.
And Clarges noted, all unimportant as it was, that far down the street, a hundred yards away, the galley slave who was the only other living creature about besides themselves, had halted too--had halted and was looking up towards them as though wondering curiously what these men might have to do with one another.
"Desparre!" exclaimed Walter Clarges now, abandoning all title, all form of ceremony. "Desparre, how it is that you have been delivered into my hands here to-night in this loathsome, plague-stricken spot, I know not. Yet I know one thing. We have met. Met for me to kill you, or for you to kill me!"
To his astonishment, to his utter amazement, the other was silent--silent as if stricken dumb, as if turned to stone. But still the glassy eyes regarded him and seemed to glisten in the light that was almost darkness now.
Clarges paused a moment while observing that figure before him and wondering if this might be some devilish ruse, some scheme concocted in Desparre's mind for either saving himself or perpetrating some act of treachery. The villain might, he thought, have a pistol in his breast or pocket which he would suddenly draw forth and discharge full at him. Then, seeing that the other still remained mute and motionless, he said:
"No silence on your part can save you. Be dumb if you will, but act. Draw your sword at once or stand there to be slain, to be righteously executed. I have to avenge to-night the wrongs of myself and of my wife--your daughter. Ha! you know that!"
As he mentioned "my wife--your daughter," he saw that he had moved the man. His face became contorted with a horrible spasm; one part of it seemed to be drawn down suddenly, the mouth, by the process, assuming a hideous, one-sided grin.
Desparre was now awful to gaze upon.
Unsheathing his own sword, Clarges advanced towards him, uttering only one word, the word "Draw." Then he stood before the other, waiting, watching what he would do, while determined that, if he did not draw as he bade him, he would thrust his weapon through his craven breast and so put an end to his vile life.
At first Desparre did nothing, but stood stock and motionless before him with always that drawn-down look upon one side of his face, though now his lower jaw seemed, as seen through the dusk, to be working horribly, and his teeth, one or two of which were discoloured, showing like fangs.
Then he put his hand to his sword--it appeared as though that hand would never reach the hilt, as though it were numbed or dead--and with what looked like extreme effort, drew forth the blade. Yet only to let it drop listlessly by his side directly afterwards, the point clicking metallically against the cobble stones of the street as he did so.
Was the coward struck lifeless with fear? Almost, it seemed so. Yet but a moment later, Clarges knew that it was something worse than fear that possessed him. For now the sword he had held so languidly fell altogether from his hand and clattered upon the stones as it did so, while Desparre stood shaking before the man who was about to slay him, his arms quivering helplessly, his face appalling in its distortions, his body swaying. Then he, too, fell heavily, and lay, as it seemed, lifeless before the other, his arms stretched out wide.
And Clarges, bending over him, regarding him as though he still doubted whether this were a ruse or not, yet knowing, feeling certain, that it was not so--did not perceive that the skulking form of the galley-slave had drawn nearer to them--that the man was now crouching in a stooping posture on the other side of the street regarding him and Desparre, while his starting, eager eyes observed all that was happening.
"Has he died of fright?" Clarges whispered to himself, while he bent over the prostrate man. "Died of fright or by God's visitation? Or is he dead? Anyway, he has escaped me for the present. So be it. We shall meet again, unless this scourge which is over all the place takes him or me, or both of us, before we can do so."
Whereupon, he left Desparre lying there. He could not stab him now, helpless as he was and dead or dying? Yet, as he remounted his tired steed which had stood tranquilly in the road where he had left it, he remembered that, during the many weeks he had lain in the Paris Hospital, and while the wounds administered at that craven's instigation were healing, he had seen men brought into it who had fallen almost lifeless in the street from paralysis and apoplexy. From paralysis! Yes, that must be what had now stricken this man; he felt sure it must. He remembered that there was one so brought in who had dropped in the street suddenly--the doctors said from a great shock he had received--whose face had been drawn down as Desparre's was, whose jaws had twitched, even in his insensibility, in much the same way.
Yes, he reflected, it was that, it must be that which had stricken this man thus at the moment when he had meant to slay him. One death had saved him from another, since now he must surely be near his end. If he did not perish of the stroke, the fever would doubtless lay hold upon him. His account was made. And musing thus, thanking God, too, that he had been spared from taking the life of even so great a villain as Desparre, and from having for ever the burden of the man's execution upon his head, he slowly rode off from the street of the Barefooted Carmelites, to learn, if possible, whether the cordon of women from Paris had yet arrived. But scarcely had his horse's hoofs ceased to echo down that mournful, deserted place in which now lay two bodies stretched upon their backs--the one, that of the poor dead woman at the lower end of it, the other, that of the wealthy and highly descended Armand, Duc Desparre--than forth from the porch across the street there stole the form of the skulking convict,--the convict who had been tracking Desparre from long before he entered the street, the galley-slave who had stood, or crouched aside, to see what should be the result of the meeting with the man who had dismounted from his horse to parley with him.
With almost the sinuous crawl of the panther, this convict--old, and with his close cropped hair flecked with grey--stole across the wide street to where the form of Desparre lay; then, reaching that form, he went down on one knee beside it, and, in the dark, felt all over it, lifting up his own hands now and again and peering at them in the night as though to see if they glistened with anything they might have come against, while feeling also one palm with the fingers of the other hand to discover if it was wet. Yet such was not the case.
"Almost I could have sworn," thegalérienmuttered, "that I heard his sword fall from him. That he was disarmed and therefore run through a moment later. Yet he is not wounded; there is no blood. What does it mean? That man was Walter Clarges--alive! Alive Alive! He whom I have deemed dead for months. Her husband--and alive! He must have slain him. He must. He must. He would be more than human, more than man, to spare him after all that he and she have suffered. He must have run that black treacherous heart through and through. Yet, there is no wound that I can find; no blood!"
Again and again--feeling the body all over, feeling, too, that the heart was beating beneath his hand and that there was no sign of cold or stiffness coming into that form as it lay motionless there--he was forced at last to the conclusion that, for some strange reason, Clarges had spared his bitterest foe.
"Spared him," he hissed. "Spared him. Why, why, why!" and he rose to his feet cursing Clarges for his weakness or folly. Cursing him even as he looked down and meditated on throttling the man lying there before him.
"He may spare him," he said. "I will not. My wrongs are as great, as bitter as theirs. I will have his life. Here--to-night."
He had touched with his foot, some moments before, the sword which Desparre had let fall from his nerveless hand, and the clatter of which had led him to imagine that the duke had been disarmed. Now, he picked up the weapon, tried it once against the stones, then bent over the miserable man with his arm shortened so as to drive the blade a moment later through throat and breast.
"Hellhound!" he muttered, "your hour is truly come. Devil! go to your master. You swore she should go unharmed if I would but assist you in your vengeance on him; that--that knowing I loved her--God, how I had learnt to love her! in spite of my trying to force her to marry such as you so that she might be great and powerful--she should be given back to me. Whereby we could yet have lived happy, prosperous, unmolested, together. Together! Together! And you sent her to exile and death, and me--your tool--to the galleys. Die!"
And now, he drew back his arm so as to drive the blade home. Yet, even as he did so, even before he thrust it through neck and chest, he whispered savagely. "It is too good a death, it is too easy. He is insensible from fear, he will die without pain. If there were any other way--any method----"
He paused with his eyes roaming round the street from side to side--then started. A moment afterwards he went up the steps of the house with the sword still in his hand, and peered at the numbers painted in great white figures on the door. In the dark of the summer night, in the faint light given by the blazing southern stars, he could decipher them.
"Seventy-seven," he muttered, "seventy-seven." Then paused again as though thinking deeply, his empty hand fingering his grisly, unshaven chin. "Seventy-seven. Ay! I do remember. This house was one of them. One of the first. One of the worst. 'Twill serve."
He leant the sword against the side of the porch, muttering: "He would not stab you to the heart--so--neither will I," then went slowly down the steps again, and back to where Desparre lay unmoved. After which he took both of the other's hands in his, drew them above the shoulder, and stretched the arms out to their full length, and thus hoisted the burden on his own gaunt shoulders--while bending--almost staggering at first--under the weight. Yet he kept his feet; at last he was able to straighten his back, and to stagger up the steps into the house. Here, when once in it, he let the body down to the floor of the passage and stood gasping and breathing heavily for some moments, what time he muttered to himself:
"This will not do. Not here on the first floor. It is too near the street. He must go higher. Higher yet. Otherwise he may be found--and saved!"
Whereupon, having regained his breath, he lifted Desparre on to his shoulders again and slowly mounted to the first floor of the house. Then he rested there, and afterwards went on to the second. Here, as was ever the case in the houses of the well-to-do in the city, the sleeping apartments began; the principal bedroom of the master of the house being in this instance on the front, or street side, while that reserved for guests was on the back, and looked over a small plot of ground, or garden. The moon, now peeping up, showed that both rooms were in a state of great confusion--rooms to which, by this time, the man had crept laboriously with his heavy, horrid burden on his back. The bed, he could see, as still the rays stole in more fully to the front apartment, was in disorder, the upper sheet and coverlet being flung back as though some one had leapt hastily from them; the doors of wardrobes and cupboards stood open; so, too, did the lid of a huge strong-box bound and clasped with iron bands. Easy enough was it for Vandecque to see that, from this room a hurried flight had been made, and with only sufficient time allowed before the departure for the more precious and smaller objects of value to be hastily gathered up. For, upon the floor there lay--as he felt as well as saw, since his feet struck against them--the larger articles of importance, the silverware, the coffee pots and tea-pots, the salvers, and other things. It had been a hurried flight!
"If," said Vandecque to himself, even as his eye glanced round on all these things which he would once have deemed a rich booty had they fallen into his hands, but which now he scorned, since, if he could but gain his freedom by his conduct here and return to Paris a liberated man, he would want for nothing, having at last grown rich through the gambling house; "if I leave him in this house and he recovers consciousness--strength--he may be able to attract attention; to call for assistance from the window. He shall have no chance of that. Come, murderer, come," and again he lifted the insensible man upon his shoulders and bore him into the back, or spare, room.
This was not in a disordered condition. There would be no guests in Marseilles at this time; no visitors from a healthy place to such an unhealthy, stricken one as this. The bed was made and arranged, and on to it Vandecque flung the body of his victim. His victim! Yes, yet how long was it since he himself had been the victim? And, even as he thought of how he had suffered at this man's hand, any compunctions he might have had during the last hour--and, hardened as he was, he had had them!--vanished for ever.
"Arrested by your orders," he muttered, glancing down upon Desparre as he lay senseless on the bed; glaring down, indeed, though only able to see the dim outline of his enemy's form, since, as yet, the moonbeams had scarcely penetrated to this room. "By your orders, though not knowing, never dreaming that it was so; not dreaming that my betrayal came from you. Then the prison of La Tournelle--oh, God! for the third time in my life--the condemnation to the galleys, this time in perpetuity. I--I who had grown well-to-do, who had no need to be a criminal again, who might have finished my life in ease. And Laure--Laure--poor Laure!--whom I had hoped to see a Duchess, and great--happy--or, at least, not unhappy! Cut-throat!" he almost shrieked at the senseless man; "when I learnt, as we gaol birds do learn from one another, all that you had done, I swore to escape from these galleys somehow, to make my way back to Paris, to slay you. Yet, it is better thus; far better. Lie there and die."
Then he went forth from the room, finding the key in the door and turning it upon Desparre.
But, as he descended the stairs and returned to the street, taking no precaution to deaden his footfall in the empty corridors, since he knew well enough that there were none to hear them, he muttered to himself, "Clarges spoke of her to him as 'his wife.' Also he said 'Your daughter.' Mon Dieu! was she that? Was she that? And if so, how should the Englishman know it, how have found out what I spent years in fruitlessly trying to discover?"
Musing thus, he caught up the sword which still stood in the porch, flung it down a drain, and went slowly through the deserted streets towards the Quai de Riveneuve where the galleys were, and to which the convicts returned nightly to sleep--if they had not succumbed during the day to the pestilence.