THE DUKE'S DESIRE
Vandecque never discovered who that woman was, whence she came, nor
where she vanished to. Never, though he brought to bear upon the quest
which he instituted for her an amount of intelligent search that his
long training in all kinds of cunning had well fitted him to put in
action. He watched for days, nay, weeks, in the neighbourhood of the
Hospital of Mercy, to or from which most of the Sisters, who were not
engaged in nursing or other acts of charity elsewhere, passed
regularly--yet never, amongst some scores of them who met his eyes,
could he discover the woman he sought. He questioned, too, those in
the court who had been dwelling there when first his wife came to
occupy the garret in which he had found her later, as to whether they
could remember aught of the arrival of the child. He asked questions
that produced nothing satisfactory, since all testified to the truth
of that which the poor woman had so often told him--namely, that the
child was brought to her before she came to this spot. Indeed, he
would have questioned Laure herself as to what she could remember
concerning her earliest years, only what use was it to ask questions
of one who had been but an infant, unable even to talk, at the time
the event happened.
At last--and after being confronted for months by nothing but a dense
blackness of oblivion which he could not penetrate--he decided that
the woman who had appeared to him as a simple and unsophisticated
_religieuse_, capable only of blindly and faithfully carrying out the
orders given to her by another person, was, in truth, no Sister of
Charity whatever, but a scheming person who had temporarily assumed
the garb she wore as a disguise. He came also to believe that she
herself was Laure's mother, that she had bound herself in some way to
make the payment which he had by such extreme good fortune become the
recipient of, and that, in one thing at least, she had uttered the
actual truth--the actual truth when she had said that those louis'
would be the last forthcoming, that there could never be any more. Had
she not, he recalled to mind, said that such a sum as she brought was
not easily come by, as an excuse for her not having paid them before?
Also, had she not wept a little over the child, folded her to her
bosom, and called her "Poor little thing"? Did not both these things
most probably point to the fact that, judged by the latter actions,
she was the girl's mother, and, according to the statement which
preceded it, that she was not a woman of extraordinarily large means?
Had she been so, she would have been both able and willing to pay down
more than five hundred louis' for the hiding of her secret, and would,
to have that secret kept always safely (and also to possess the power
of seeing the child now and again without fear of detection) have been
prepared to make fresh payments from time to time.
For five hundred louis' was what the canvas bag had contained. Five
hundred louis', as Vandecque found when, on returning to the garret
after losing sight of the woman at the entrance to the court, he had
turned them all out on to the table. Five hundred louis' exactly,
neither more nor less, proving that the sum was a carefully counted
one; doubtless, too, one duly arranged for. Louis' that were of all
kinds, and of the reigns during which they had been in existence--the
original ones of Louis the Just; the more imposing ones of Le Roi
Soleil, with the great sun blazing on the reverse side; the bright,
new ones but recently struck for the present boy-king by order of the
Regent; all of which led the astute Vandecque to conclude that the
pile had been long accumulating--that the first batch might be an old
nest egg, or an inheritance; that the second batch was made up of
savings added gradually; that the third had been got together by hook
or by crook, with a determination to complete the full sum.
"Yet, what matters!" he said, to himself, as he tossed the gold pieces
about in his eager hands, and gloated over them with his greedy eyes;
tossing, too, a double louis d'or of the treacherous Le Juste, which
he had come across, to the child to play with--"what matters where
they come from, how they were gathered together to hide a woman's
shame? They are mine now! Mine! Mine! Mine! A capital! A bank! The
foundation of a fortune, carefully handled! Come, child; come, Laure;
come with me. To the _fournisseur's_, first; then to the dining rooms.
Some new, clean clothes for both of us, and then a meal to make our
hearts dance within us. We are rich, my child; rich, my little one.
Rich! Rich! Rich!"
For, to the whilom beggared outcast and galley slave, five hundred
louis' were wealth.
Time passed; in truth it seemed that Vandecque was indeed rich, or
growing rich. The garret was left behind; four rooms in the Rue du
Paon preceded by a year or so that apartment in the Passage du
Commerce at which he eventually arrived. Four rooms, one a
dining-room, another a parlour, in which at midnight there came
sometimes a score of men to gamble--women sometimes came too--and a
bedroom for each. He was growing well-to-do, his capital accumulating
as capital will accumulate in the hands of the man who always holds
the bank and makes it a stipulation that, on those terms alone, can
people gamble beneath his roof.
Meanwhile Laure was fast developing into a woman--was one almost. She
was now seventeen, for she was within a year of the time when the
exile, Walter Clarges, was to whisper the words of suggested salvation
in her ear in the saloon of the demoiselles Montjoie--suggested
salvation from her marriage with Monsieur le Duc Desparre, from his
embraces. A beautiful girl, too, with her sweet hair bound up now
about her shapely head, her deep hazel eyes full and lustrous, calm
and pure. Una herself passed no more undefiled amidst the horrors of
Wandering Wood than did Laure Vauxcelles amidst the gamblers and the
dissolute _roués_ who surrounded the court of Philippe le Débonnaire,
and who, ere the games began at night--when occasionally permitted to
see her--found time to cast admiring glances at her wondrous,
fast-budding beauty.
The name Vauxcelles was, of course, no more hers than was that of
Laure, which had been given to her by poor Madame Vandecque when first
she took the deserted and discarded waif to her kindly heart. But as
Vandecque had elected to style her his niece, so, too, he decided to
give her a name which would have been that of an actual niece if he
had ever had one. He recalled the fact that he had once possessed an
elder sister, now long since dead, who had married a man from Lorraine
whose name was Vauxcelles, and, he being also dead, the name was
bestowed on his _protégée_. It answered well enough, he told himself,
since Laure had come to his late wife far too early in her life to
remember aught that had preceded her arrival under the roof of the
unhappy woman's earlier garret; and it formed a sufficient answer and
explanation to any questions the girl might ever ask as to her origin.
In sober fact, she believed that she was actually the child of his
dead and gone sister and her husband.
She would have loved her uncle more dearly than she did--she would
have loved the grave, serious man who had suffered so for his
"religion," as he often told her, but for two things. The first was
that she knew him to be a gambler; that he grew rich by enticing men
to his apartments and by winning their money; that several young men
had been ruined beneath their roof, and that more than one had
destroyed himself after such ruin had fallen upon him. She knew, too,
that others stole so as to be able to take part in the faro and biribi
that was played there; to take part, too, in the brilliant society of
those members of the aristocracy who condescended to visit the Rue du
Paon and to win their stolen money. For there sometimes came, amongst
others, that most horrible of young roués, the Duc de Richelieu and
Fronsac, from whom the girl shrank as from a leper, or some noisome
reptile; there, too, came De Noailles, reeking with the impurities of
an unclean life; and De Biron, who was almost as bad. Sometimes also,
amongst the women, came the proud De Sabran, who condescended to be
the Regent's "friend," but redeemed herself in her own eyes by
insulting him hourly, and by telling him that, when God had finished
making men and lackeys, He took the remnants of the clay and made
Kings and Regents. Laughing La Phalaris came, too, sometimes; also
Madame de Parabère; once the Regent came himself; leaning heavily on
the arm of his Scotch financier, and, under his astute mathematical
calculations, managed to secure a large number of Vandecque's
pistoles, so that the latter cursed inwardly while maintaining
outwardly a face as calm and still as alabaster.
An illustrious company was this which met in the ex-galley slave's
apartments!
What to Laure was worse than all, however, was that her uncle
sometimes desired her to be agreeable to occasional guests who
honoured his rooms with their presence. Not, it is true, to the
dissolute roués nor the Regent's mistresses--to do the soiled and
smirched swindler of bygone days justice, he respected the girl's
innocence and purity too much for that--nor to those men who were
married and from whom there was nothing to be obtained. But he
perceived clearly enough her swift developing beauty; he knew that
there, in that beauty, was a charm so fresh and fascinating that it
might well be set as a stake against a great title, an ancient and
proud name, the possession of enormous wealth. Before loveliness
inferior to Laure's, and purity not more deep--for such would have
been impossible--he had known of, heard of, the heads of the noblest
houses in France bowing, while exchanging for the possession of such
charms the right to share their names. What had happened before, he
mused, might well happen again.
Laure, the outcast, the outcome of the gutters and the mud, the
abandoned child, might yet live to share a ducal coronet, a name borne
with honour since the days of the early Capets. And, with her, he
would mount, too, go hand in hand, put away for ever a disgraceful
past, a past from which he still feared that some spectre might yet
arise to denounce and proclaim him. If she would only yield to his
counsel--only do that! If she only would!
Suitors such as he desired were not lacking. One, he was resolved she
should accept by hook or by crook, as he said to himself in his own
phrase. This was the newly succeeded Duc Desparre, the man who a year
before had been serving as an officer on paltry pay in the Regiment de
Bellebrune, and taking part in the Catalonian campaign--the man who,
in middle life, had succeeded to a dukedom which a boy of eighteen had
himself succeeded to but a year before that. But the lad was then
already worn out with dissipation which a sickly constitution,
transmitted to him by half-a-dozen equally dissipated forerunners, was
not able to withstand. A cold contracted at a midnight fête given by
the Regent in the gardens of Madame de Parabère's country villa at
Asnieres, had done its work. It had placed in the hands of the soldier
who had nothing but his pay and his bundle of swords (and a few
presents occasionally sent him by an admiring woman), a dukedom, a
large estate, a great rent-roll.
It was six months before that snowy night on which the Marquise
Grignan de Poissy paid her visit to Monsieur le Duc, that Desparre,
flinging all considerations of family, of an ancient title and a still
more ancient name, to the winds, determined that this girl should be
his wife, that he would buy her with his coronet, since in no other
way could she be his.
"I desire her. I love her. I will possess her," he said to himself by
night and day; "I will. I must marry her. Curse it, 'tis strange, too,
how her beauty has bound me down; I who have loved so many, yet never
thought of marrying one of them. I, the poor soldier, who had nothing
to offer in exchange for a woman's heart but a wedding ring, and would
never give even that. Now that I am well to do, a great prize, I
sacrifice myself."
Yet he chuckled, too, as he resolved to make the sacrifice,
recognising that it was not only his love for and desire of possessing
this girl which was egging him on to the determination, but something
else as well. The desire to retaliate upon his numerous kinswomen who
had once ignored him, but who now grovelled at his feet. To wound, as
he termed them, the "women of his tribe," whose doors were mostly shut
to the beggarly captain of the Regiment de Bellebrune, but who, in
every case, would have now prostrated themselves before him with
pleasure--the elder ones because there was much of the family wealth
which he might direct towards them and their children eventually, if
he so chose, and also because rumour said that his acquaintanceship
with the Regent and John Law was doubling and trebling that wealth;
the younger ones because there was the title and the coronet and the
great position ready to be shared with some woman. Yet he meant to
defeat them all, to retaliate upon them for past slights. The only
share which they should have in any wedding of his would be the
witnessing of it with another woman, and that a woman of whom no one
knew anything beyond the fact that she belonged to the inferior
classes, and was the niece and ward of a man who kept a
gambling-house.
It would be a great, a stupendous retaliation--a retaliation he could
gloat over and revel in; a repayment for all he had endured in his
earlier days.
One thing alone stood in the way of the accomplishment of that
retaliation. Laure Vauxcelles refused absolutely to consent to become
the Duchesse Desparre--indeed, to marry anyone--as Vandecque told
Monsieur after he had well sounded his niece on the subject.
"Refuses!" Desparre exclaimed. "Refuses! It is incredible. Is there
any other? That English exile to wit, the man Clarges? If I know aught
of human emotions, he, too, loves her."
"She has refused him also."
"Yet the cases are widely different. He is a beggar; I am Desparre."
"She avers she will marry no one. She has also strange scruples about
this house, about the establishment I keep. She says that from such a
home as this no woman is fit to go forth as a wife."
"Her scruples show that she, at least, is fit to do so. Vandecque, she
must be my wife. I am resolved. What pressure can you bring to bear
upon her? Oh! that I, Desparre, should be forced to sue thus!" he
broke off, muttering to himself in his rage.
"I must think, reflect," Vandecque replied. "Leave it to me. You are
willing to wait, Monsieur?"
"I must have her. She must be my wife."
"Leave it to me."
Monsieur did leave it to him, and, as the autumn drew towards the
winter, Vandecque was able to tell his employer--for such he was--that
all scruples were overcome, that the girl was willing to become his
wife. One thing, however, he did not tell--namely, the influence he
had brought to bear upon her, such influence consisting of the
information he had furnished as to her being an unknown and nameless
waif and stray, who, as he said, he had adopted out of charity. For,
naturally enough, he omitted all mention of the bag of louis' d'or
which he had received on her behalf, and also all mention of anything
else which he imagined his wife had previously received. So, when his
tale was done, it was with no astonishment that he heard Laure
Vauxcelles announce that she was willing to become the Duchesse
Desparre, since he concluded that, as she had now learnt who she
was--or rather who she was not--she was willing to sink all trace of
what she doubtless considered was a shameful origin in a brilliant
future. It never dawned upon his warped and sordid mind that this very
story, while seeming to induce her to compliance, had, in truth,
forced her to a determination to seek oblivion in a manner far
different from that of marriage; an oblivion which should be utter.
As for Desparre, he asked no questions as to how Vandecque had brought
her to that compliance. It was sufficient for him to know, and revel
in the knowledge, that the girl, who moved his middle-aged pulses in a
manner in which they had never been stirred for years before by any
woman, was now to be his possession; sufficient for him also to know
that, in so becoming possessed of her, he would be able to administer
a crushing blow to the vanity as well as the cupidity of the family
which had so long ignored him; a blow from which he thought it was
very doubtful if their arrogance could ever recover.