"MY WIFE! WHAT WIFE? I HAVE NO WIFE."
Two months before the chain-gangs set out for Marseilles from the
Prison of St. Martin des Champs, namely at the end of March, Walter
Clarges descended from a hackney coach outside the house in which he
had lived in the Rue de la Dauphine, and entered its roomy hall, or
passage. Then, taking a key from his pocket, he was about to open the
door of his own suite of apartments on the right of the hall, when he
saw that, attached to the door, was a great padlock which fastened a
chain into two staples fixed in the outer and inner framework. He saw,
too, something else. A spider's web that had been spun above the chain
itself by the insect, which, at the present moment, was reposing in
its self-made house.
For a moment, seeing this, he stood there pondering while looking down
upon the creature in its web--accepting, acknowledging, the sign of
desolation which this thing gave--then, ever so gently, he shrugged
his shoulders with a gesture that might have brought the tears to the
eyes of any woman--nay, of any man--who had observed him.
"Scarce," he muttered, "could I have expected aught else. After so
long. After so long." Then, turning away, he went to the back of the
long hall where, opening a small door, he called down some stairs to
the woman who had been the housekeeper three months before--at the
time when he brought Laure to his rooms.
Presently, after answering him from where she was, she appeared, her
sleeves turned up and her hands wet, as though fresh from some simple
household work, and, seeing him, exclaimed--
"In truth! It is Monsieur Clarges. Returned--at last! Monsieur has
been away long. Perhaps to his own land. No matter. Now he is back.
Yet--yet----" she said, looking up at him in the gleaming light of the
spring sun: "Monsieur has not been well. He is white--oh, so white!
Evidently not well."
"I have been close to death for months. At death's door. In the
hospital of the Trinity. No matter for that. Instead, tell me where
the lady is whom I left here on--on--the night I brought her. When did
she cease to occupy these rooms; when depart? As I see she must have
done by this." And he indicated with his finger the spider in its web.
"Also, what message, what letter has she left for me?"
For answer the woman glanced into his face with wide-open eyes--eyes
full of astonishment, surprise. Then she said:
"Monsieur asks strange questions. Letters! Messages! From her?"
"From her. Surely she did not go away and leave none behind."
"But--but----" the other stammered, she being appalled by the look in
his eyes; "beyond doubt she went with Monsieur. Upon that night. I
have ever thought so. I----"
"She went away upon that night!" he said, his voice deep and low.
"Upon that night?"
"Why, yes, Monsieur," the woman replied. "Why, yes." And now she found
her natural garrulity; she began to tell her tale, such as it was. "I
have always thought that, after Monsieur had given his orders as to
Madame's occupation of the rooms, he and the lady had changed their
minds and had decided to go away together. Especially since a
compatriot of Monsieur's called a few days later and said that Madame
was Monsieur's wife--that--that--the marriage had taken place on the
morning of that day."
"My compatriot told you that?"
"He told me so. As well as that he himself had assisted at the
wedding. Therefore, I felt no surprise at the absence of Monsieur and
Madame."
"What?" asked Walter Clarges, still in the low deep voice that was
owing, perhaps, to the thrust through the lungs he had received in the
Rue des Saints Apostoliques three months ago, perhaps to the tidings
he was now gleaning--"what happened on that night? How did she go
away? Surely, surely, you must have known she did not go with me."
"Alas!" the woman answered. "I knew nothing; saw nothing. I knew not
when she went, and deemed for certain that Monsieur had returned for
her. That he had taken her away with him."
"You mean, then, that she went alone? Walked forth from this house
alone. Leaving no word--no message. Has--never--since--sent--one. You
mean that?"
"Monsieur, I know not what I mean. Oh! Monsieur, listen. That night
was a night of horror. Awful things were being done outside. Monsieur
knows. Hideous, heart-rending things! A neighbour of mine, Madame
Prue, came in, rushed in in the evening, and said that the archers and
exempts were seizing people in the streets who had committed no
crimes, yet had been denounced by their neighbours as criminals. Her
own son, she said, was abroad in the streets, and he was so wild, as
well as hated by all in the quarter because he was a fighter and a
brawler in his cups. She feared--she feared--she knew not what. That
he might resist and become quarrelsome. Thereby, be lost and sent to
the prisons--the galleys; even, some whispered, to foreign lands,
exiled for ever. And she, Madame Prue, begged me to go with her, to
assist in finding him--to--to----" and the woman paused to take
breath.
"Go on," said Walter Clarges. "Go on. You went. When did you return?"
"Not for three hours. We could not find the son--he has never been
found yet. God alone knows where he is. His mother is heartbroken.
They say--they say there are hundreds in the prisons being transported
to foreign lands--to----."
"You came not back for three hours! And the lady--my--my--wife?"
"Monsieur, she was gone. And I thought nought of it. The streets were
in turbulence, shots were heard now and again; even houses, apartments
entered. I deemed you had returned for her, dreading to leave her
alone; that you had taken Madame away, dreading also to keep her in
this quarter. That you had, perhaps, sought a better one, or the
suburbs, and were enjoying--well! your honeymoon."
"My honeymoon," he whispered to himself. "My God!" Then he said aloud.
"And there was no message? No letter left in the room? You are sure?"
"There was nothing. I entered the room meaning to offer Madame some
supper--it was vacant. No sign of aught. The fire was gone out. The
lamp was extinct. There was--nothing."
"Nothing!" Walter repeated. "Nothing! No sign of aught. Not a line of
writing. No letter left then or come since."
"Oh," exclaimed the woman, "as for 'come since'--there are
several----"
"And you have kept me thus in torture! Where are they? Where? Where?
Doubtless one is from her?"
"I will go and fetch them. Since Monsieur has been away I have not
opened the rooms. Not since I cleaned them during the first days of
Monsieur's absence."
"Fetch them at once, I beseech you. Yet, ere you go, give me the key
of this padlock. Let me enter the rooms. Bring the letters here at
once."
The woman sped on her way to the back of the house, and, while she was
gone, Walter applied the key to the padlock--brushing away the spider
and its web as he did so--then turned the other key of the door and
entered his sitting-room while he muttered, "She will have gone to
England, as I wished her. She has written from there. All will be
well. All. All. Yet why did she go so soon? Why leave this house the
moment my back was turned?"
And, even as he remembered she had done this, he felt a pang at his
heart.
Why! Why I Why had she acted thus? Why before seeing him again; before
waiting for his return?
The rooms looked very lonely and desolate as he glanced around them,
while throwing open the wooden shutters ere he did so--lonely and
desolate as all rooms and houses invariably appear which have remained
unused and shut up for some considerable space of time. And they
seemed even more so than they would otherwise have done, because of
her whom he had left sitting by what was now a cold and empty hearth.
Where, he asked himself, where was she? Yet he would soon know--in an
instant; he could hear the woman's pattens clattering up the bare cold
steps of the stairs and along the hall--he would soon know.
She came in a moment later, one hand full of kindlings and paper to
make a fire, the other grasping some letters--half a dozen--a dozen.
And amongst them there must be one--more than one from her--he could
see the English frank--also the red post-boy stamped in the corner.
She had written.
He snatched as gently as might be the little parcel from the woman's
hand, ran the letters rapidly through his own--and recognised in a
moment that there were none, was not one, from her. Not one! Three
were from his mother, another was in a woman's writing which he did
not recognise, another from his compatriot, from him who had witnessed
his marriage. But from her--nothing!
He let the servant lay and light the fire while he stood by looking
down into the fast kindling flames and holding the letters in his hand
listlessly, then, when she rose from her knees and glanced at him
inquiringly, he shook his head gently.
"No," he said, in answer to her questioning eyes. "No. She has not
written yet. Not yet. Leave me now if you will. These at least must be
attended to."
When she had gone from out the room, after turning back ere she did so
to cast a swift glance at him, a glance which led her to passing her
apron across her eyes after she had gained the passage, he sat down in
the deep fauteuil by the fire in which he had so often sat since he
had lived there--the fauteuil in which his wife of a day had sat
before him on their wedding night--and brooded long ere he opened the
letters which lay to his hand.
"What does it mean?" he murmured to himself. "What? Were Vandecque and
that creeping snake, Desparre, whom I saw lurking in the porch of a
house ere I was vanquished, on their way here when we met? Did they
come on here afterwards? Yet, even so, what could they do to her?
Nothing! The law punishes not those women who disobey their parents or
guardians by marrying against their wish, but, instead, the man who
marries them. It could do nothing to her. If she went from here she
went of her own free will, even though cajoled by Vandecque into doing
so. As for Desparre, what harm could he do? She hated him; she married
me when she might have married him. No! No! It is Vandecque I must
seek. Vandecque! At once. At once. Now. Yet, to begin with, these
letters."
Those from his mother were the first to which he turned; before all
else he, this married yet wifeless man, sought news of her. Her love,
at least, never faltered; never! And, he reflected sadly, it was the
only woman's love he was ever likely to know. There could be no other
now that he was wedded to one who had disappeared from out his life an
hour after his back was turned.
"Yet, stay," he mused, as these thoughts sped swiftly through his
troubled mind. "Stay. She may have followed my injunctions and have
made her way to England. The news I seek may be here, in these."
But, even as he so thought, something, some fear or apprehension, told
him that it was not so, and that his mother had no information to give
him of his wife.
Swiftly he ran through his letters after opening them, putting away
for the moment all consideration of his mother's anxiety as to what
might have happened to him, since she had not heard from him for so
long. Swiftly only to find that, beyond all doubt, she had neither
seen nor heard aught of Laure. There was no mention of her. No word.
"I have no wife," he murmured. "No wife; nothing but a bond that will
for ever prevent me from having wife or child, or home. Ah well! so be
it. I saved her; saved her from him. Of my own free will I did it. It
is enough."
Yet, though she had gone away thus and had left him without word or
sign, he remembered that there was still one other thing--two other
things--for him to do. Things that he had mused upon for weeks as he
lay in the hospital in which he found himself on emerging from a long
delirium, and while his wounded lung was slowly healing--the
determination to find both Desparre and Vandecque, and, then, to slay
both.
To kill Vandecque as he would kill a rat or a snake that had bitten
him; to force Desparre to stand before him, rapier in hand, and to run
the villain through the lungs, even as his jackals had done to him
while their employer looked on from out the shelter of the porch.
This he meant to set about now, at once, to-day; but, first, let him
read his mother's letters and write one in reply.
Those letters were full of the distress she was in at gleaning no news
from him, full of tender dread as to what might have befallen him in
Paris, which, she had heard, even in her country seclusion, was in a
terrible state of turmoil in consequence of the bursting of the
Mississippi bubble and the ruin following thereon; also, they
expressed great fear that, in some manner, his Jacobite devotion might
have led him into trouble, even though he was out of England.
Thus the first two ran. The third contained stranger and more pregnant
news; news of so unexpected a nature that even this gentle, anxious
mother put aside for the moment her wail of distress over the lack of
tidings from her son to communicate it.
His distant cousin, she wrote, Lord Westover, was dead, burned to
death in his own house in Cumberland, and with him had also perished
his son; therefore Walter Clarges, her own dear son, had, unexpectedly
to all, inherited the title as well as a large and ample fortune. He
must, consequently, she said, on receipt of this at once put himself
in communication with the men of business of the Westover family, the
notary and the steward; if, too, she added, he could see his way to
giving in his adherence to the reigning family his career might now be
a great, almost an illustrious, one. The Hanoverian King was welcoming
all to his Court who had once espoused the now utterly ruined Stuart
cause. All would be forgotten if Walter but chose to give in his
allegiance to the new ruler of England. And, perhaps with a view to
inducing him to think seriously of such a change, she mentioned that
she had heard from a sure source that, not six months before he met
with his terrible death, the late Earl had seen King George, and had
been graciously received by him. There was, she thought, no doubt that
he at least had made his peace with the reigning monarch.
To Walter Clarges--or the Earl of Westover, as he now was--this news
seemed, however, of little value. Titles, political principles--which
he felt sure he should never feel disposed to change--even
considerable wealth, were at the present moment nothing to him;
nothing in comparison with what he had to do, with what he had set
himself to do.
This was to seek out and wreak his vengeance on those two men,
Desparre and his tool and creature, Vandecque. As for her, his
wife--now an English aristocrat, a woman of high patrician rank by
marriage--she had gone; she had left him without a word, without a
message as to what life she intended to lead henceforward, or what
existence to pursue. Yet, he had no quarrel with, no rancour against,
her; he could have none. He had offered himself to her as a man who
might be her earthly saviour, though without demanding in return any
of the rights of a husband, without demanding the slightest show or
pretence of affection; and she had taken him at his word, she had
accepted his sacrifice! That was all. Upon her he had no right to
exercise any vengeance whatsoever.
It was on Desparre first; on Vandecque next; or rather, on whichever
might first come to his hand, that the punishment must fall; and fall
it should, heavily. Of this he was resolved.
Pondering thus, he picked up the letter addressed to him in a woman's
handwriting, and, opening it, began its perusal.
Yet, as he did so, as he read through it swiftly, his face became
white and blanched. Once he muttered to himself, "My God, what awful
horror have I saved her from!" And once he shivered as though he sat
on some bleak moor, across which the wintry wind swept icily, instead
of in his own room, on the hearth of which the blazing logs now roared
cheerfully up the great open chimney.