CHAPTER XII

MARSEILLES

The chain gangs--the men a mile ahead of the women--marched but slowly on their way; indeed, it was impossible that they should progress very fast. Some, as has been said, especially among the female prisoners, had never been accustomed to walking at all; others, amongst both women and men, soon became footsore. The months passed in the dungeons of the prisons, with their bodies chained by the neck to the beam behind them, had given their feet but little opportunity of exercise, that only being obtainable which they got from stamping on the ground to drive out the cold they suffered from during the winter period. No wonder that all became footsore ere a fiftieth part of their toilsome journey was covered.

Yet they went on; they had to go on. Marseilles was, to be exact, 356 miles from Paris by road, and they were timed to do the distance in thirty days; must do it according to the contract made by the Government with the owners of the ships which were to transport the "colonists," the "emigrants," to New France. Thirty days for 356 miles.

About twelve miles a day! Not much that for pedestrians, for hardy walkers, for people used to journeying on foot day by day. A thing to be accomplished easily, and easily to be surpassed, by the countless pedlars who swarmed over the face of France; by itinerant monks, by wandering ballad-singers, strolling players and troops of showmen; yet not easy for women or men who, even if they had ever walked at all, were now quite out of practice; who, also, were ill-fed and, in many cases, were sick and ailing. Yet they had to do it. It must be done.

Each morning, therefore, they set forth again on their route, no matter whether the sun was beating down fiercely on their heads--they being protected only by hats which they had been allowed to plait from the prison straw, in anticipation of the forthcoming journey--or whether the rain was falling in torrents. Each night they lay down wherever the chain halted, which it generally did near some village or hamlet, partly because there the colonists might be allowed to lie and sleep beneath the shelter of barns and outhouses, but more particularly because, thereby, the guards and the galley sergeants and mounted gendarmes could find drinking shops and _pants_ wherein they might rest and refresh themselves. And, gradually, as they went on and on along the great southern road, through Montargis and Cosne, and by Nevers, and on to Moulins and Montmarault, their numbers became a little diminished nightly. Women dropped by the wayside, or, rather, amidst the dust and mud of the high road; it was useless to place them in the carts and carry them further; therefore they were left beneath the hedges and the sparse bushes that bordered the route--left with their coarse prison petticoat thrown over their dead faces to save them from the flies--left there for the villagers to bury when they were found. And, because the women passed along behind the men, they saw--they could not help but see!--unless they were blinded by staggering for league after league through heat and dust, that, with the chain of men, the same thing had happened. Their bodies--some of their bodies--were also to be seen lying beneath the hedges and the bushes, but with no protecting rag over their faces.

Yet, still, those who were not dead went on and on, stumbling, falling, being dragged up by the companion manacled to them, or by the guards (kind in some cases, brutal in others) on and on, like women walking in their sleep; their lids half closed over their glistening, fever-lit eyes, their senses telling them they were suffering, even as the dumb brutes' senses tell them that they are suffering. But no more!

Shackled to the dark handsome woman of the south who had espoused the writer who hated Rome and her customs, was Laure, alive still, though praying that every day might be her last. That she would have ever reached Clermont, to which they were by now arrived, had it not been for this woman, was doubtful. For she, brought up by Vandecque in all the luxury he could afford--partly from love of her, partly because she was a saleable article that, carefully cherished, might fetch a large price--was no more fitted to walk day by day a distance of from ten to fifteen miles than she was fitted to sleep on the ground in barns and outhouses, or to exist on bread and water and anything else which her comrade could procure by stealing or begging from the compassionate landlords of those inns where sometimes the chain halted.

Yet she had done it, she had survived, she was alive; she could feel the cool mountain air of the Dômes sweep down upon and revive her. She was still alive.

It seemed to her as if a miracle alone could have kept her so; a miracle that had for its instrument the woman Marion Lascelles (Lascelles being the name of the man the latter had espoused, but from whom she would be separated until they stood free in Louisiana). For Marion, however vile her past had been, or whatever crimes she might have steeped her hands in, was, at least, an angel of mercy to Laure, though at first she had not been so. Instead, indeed, she, in her great, masterful strength, which neither dungeon nor starvation had been able to subdue, had strode fiercely along the baked roads which led, as she muttered to herself, to the sea-coast first, and then to freedom, though a freedom thousands of miles away. And, as she so strode, she dragged at the chain which fastened Laure to her, until once, in doing so, she brought down on her the eye of the officer, or guard, who rode near.

"What ails her?" he asked, guiding his horse up close to them, while Marion saw his hand tighten on the whip he held as though about to administer a blow. "What ails her? Does she want a taste of this?" and he shook it before their eyes. The fellows in charge of the chain gangs were indeed officers, but, since none but the most brutal, or those who had risen from the lowest ranks, would condescend to accept this employment, to which they were regularly appointed for periods, their savageness was not extraordinary.

"Nay," replied Marion; "it is my fault. I am too rough with her. And you can see that she is a gentlewoman, delicately bred. If," and her black eyes flashed at him, "you are a man, strike not one as helpless as she is."

"Oh! as for that," the fellow answered, "there are no delicately-bred ones here. Sentenced convicts all, while you are in our hands. Yet, since you are the best-looking women in the gang--I love both fair and dark myself!--I will not beat her this time. But there must be no lagging; the transports sail under three weeks from now if the wind is fair. We must be there--at Marseilles."

"She shall not lag," Marion replied. "If she fails I will carry her."

"God bless you," Laure said to her that night, as, still chained to each other, they lay down together in a shelter for sheep outside Issoire, since the dreary march was now almost half compassed though many leagues had still to be accomplished. "God bless you, you are a true woman." Then she put out her hand and touched the dark one of the woman at her side, and called her "sister."

With this began their friendship; with it began, too, a revolution in the hot, fiery blood that coursed through the veins of Marion Lascelles. She scarcely knew at first what crime the woman next to her had been condemned for, though she had caught something of what the chaplain of the prison had said to the fellow who desired to marry Laure; but one thing she did know, namely that, besides herself, this was an innocent, suffering creature. And this weakling had called her "sister"; had prayed God to bless her--to bless her! "When," she mused, "when, if ever, had such a prayer gone up to heaven for her; when, when?" Not, she thought, since she was a simple, innocent child, roaming about the sandy, sunburnt beach of Hérault with her hand in her mother's--a fisherman's widow, now years since dead. And from that day she was no longer the fierce companion, but instead, the protector of Laure, striving always to give the latter some portion of her own sparse allowance of food; stealing bits of meat out of the _pots-au-feu_ if the chance ever came her way, sharing all with her; walking with her arm round her waist, while Laure's head reclined on her shoulders.

"I shall die," the latter said more than once, "I shall die ere we reach Marseilles. Oh! Marion, let them not leave me by the wayside."

"Bah!" Marion answered, "you shall not die. I will fight death for you, wrestle with him, hold you back from him. You have to live."

"For what?" the other would ask. "For what?" and her soft eyes would look so sad that Marion, still unregenerate, would swear a fierce southern oath to herself, while she folded Laure to her bosom and strained her to it with her strong arms. "For what?" Marion would repeat. "Why, for freedom, first; for justice. That poor imbecile marching ahead of us" (she was referring to her newly-espoused husband) "has it seems the gift of writing, at least, since it has brought him to this pass. We will tell him your history" (for Marion knew it all now): "then he shall put it into words, and so, somehow, it shall have its effect. In this new land to which we go there must be a governor, or vice-regent, or someone in power. He will surely help you, especially after he has seen you! And there are two other reasons why you should live."

"I do not know them," Laure faltered.

"You love your husband?"

"Ah!" the other gasped.

"You love him, I say. My God! do I not know what love is!" and she smote her breast as she spoke. "You love him. You have told me all. You loved him; you came to love him on the day you married him, the day he saved you from that--that animal!"

"He is dead!" Laure wailed. "He is dead!"

"I doubt it. Men do not die easily." Possibly, here, too, she was speaking from experience. "I doubt it. More like, those animals, Desparre and your uncle, caused him to be arrested and thrown into prison; remember, they may have encountered him on their road to you. He may be--who knows?--in the chain that is now on its road to Brest or Dunkirk."

Laure wrung her hands and shook her head at this, while Marion continued:--

"Or suppose Desparre lied to you; suppose they had not encountered him at all. Suppose, I say, he came back to you that night, the next morning, and found you gone; with none to tell where--you say yourself that no servant appeared on the scene ere the exempts dragged you away. Suppose he came back. What then?"

"I do not know; I cannot think."

"I can. He will find out what has become of you, follow you. _Mon Dieu!_" as a sudden thought flashed into her mind. "Did he not tell you he meant himself to emigrate to Louisiana, the very place to which we go. Courage; courage; courage."

"Oh!" Laure gasped, "if--if I dared to hope that."

"Dared to hope! There is nothing else to be supposed but that. He will be there. Surely, surely, Laure, you will meet your husband in this colony, big as they say it is. All will be well."

"Nay," she said, "nay. It will never be well. He married me to save me from Desparre; he had ceased to love me. Yet--yet, if I could see him once again, only once, I would tell him----"

"What?"

"That I surrendered; that I had come to love him. Yet of what avail would that? He will be a gentleman planter; I--I a released convict, a woman earning her bread by labour. Also, he knows--that--I have no origin."

"He knew it before he married you. And, knowing it, be sure he loved you." And Marion Lascelles, whether she believed the comforting hopes she had endeavoured to raise in the other's breast, or whether she had only uttered them in the desire to put fresh strength into her sad heart, would hear no word of doubt.

But still the chains went on, the men a mile ahead, the women following behind. But ever on, and with the journey growing still more toilsome to these poor creatures worn by this time to skeletons; more toilsome because they were passing through Haute Loire and Ardèche now and the mountains were all around them, and had to be climbed by their bleeding, festering feet. Ascents that had to be made which lasted for hours, followed by descents as wearying to their aching limbs.

In truth, it might have seemed to any who had observed that chain of women that it was a small army of dead women which was passing through the land. An army of dead women who had been burnt black and become mummified, whose bony frames were enveloped in prison garments, foul--even for such things--from rain and the mud they had slept in and the white powdery dust that had blown on to them. Dead women, who, when they halted, fell prostrate and gasping to the earth, or reclined against rocks and trees rigidly, with staring, glassy eyes--eyes that stared, indeed, but saw nothing. Women, in fact, to whose lips the guards and the sergeants of the prisons--themselves burnt black, though not worn to skin and bone by constant walking, since they had their horses and the carts--were forced to hold cups of water, as otherwise the prisoners must have died of thirst, not being able to fetch or lift them for themselves. But still--with now half their number left behind dead, amongst which were two of the women whose children had been taken from them--they went on. Down by where the Rhone swept and swirled; past Beaucaire and Tarascon, past Orgon and Lambèse; past Aix, sacred twenty years before to the slaughter, and the murder, and the mock trials of many Protestants still toiling at the galleys, hopeless and heartbroken. On, on, on, until, beneath a lurid evening sky, the eyes of the guards--but not the sightless eyes of the women--discerned a great city lying upon the shores of a limpid, waveless sea.

Marseilles! It was there before them, before the eyes of those men on horseback and in the carts, only--what was happening, what was doing in it? That, they could not understand.

For, beneath that lurid and gleaming sky, which had succeeded to an awful thunderstorm that had passed over the unhappy chain gang an hour before and drenched them afresh, as they had been drenched so many times in their long march, they saw fires blazing from pinnacles and towers, as well as upon the city walls. They knew, too, that similar fires must be blazing in the streets and market-places and great open spaces--they knew it by another fierce red light that rose up and mingled with the red flames and flecks which the sun cast upon the purple, storm-charged clouds.

"What is it?" a mounted gendarme whispered to a comrade. "What! Can the storm, the lightning, have set the city in flames? Yet, surely not in twenty places at once!"

"Nay, nay," the other muttered, his eyes shaded by his hands as he glanced down to where those flaming lights were illuminating all the heavens with their glare as the night grew on, and the fires burnt more fiercely. "Nay; they burn fuel for some reason, they ignite it themselves."

"What! What! What! For what reasons?"

"God knows," muttered the gendarme, becoming pious under this awe-inspiring thing which he did not understand. "They did it once before," the other whispered. "Once! nay, oftener. My grandam was a Marseillaise. I have heard her tell the tale. They feared the pest."

"The pest--my God! Ere we left Paris people whispered that it had broken out in the Levant. The Levant! Marseilles trades much there. What if--if----" he stammered, turning white with fear and apprehension.

"What if," said his comrade, taking him up, "it should be here!"