A NIGHT RIDE
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.