CHAPTER XIII

"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.