A DISCOVERY
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
f[oe]tid, 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 your _coup 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!"