CHAPTER XXIV

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!"