But if he found her; if God had spared her; if she still lived! What then? What had he then to do? To stand before her whom he had most unrighteously sent to so cruel a doom, to acknowledge himself so vile, so deep a villain that life was too good for such as he; yet, also, to purge himself in her eyes of one, of two, crimes. To prove to her that he knew not that her mother, ere dying, had ever borne him a child; to prove to her that he had never dreamt, when he proposed to marry her, that he was so near committing the most hideous crime that could be perpetrated. And afterwards-afterwards-then-well, then, she might curse him as he stood before her, or the third stroke that he knew would-must come-might come then. What mattered; nothing could matter then. He would have saved her. That was enough.
Why did not the menial come to tell him the berceuse was ready-the great cumbersome form of carriage which Guise had invented fifty years before, so that one might sleep in their beds even while they travelled on and on through day and night, and also take their meals therein-the commodious carriage which had been built for himself in exact imitation of that possessed by the present young Duc de Richelieu et Fronsac.
Young Richelieu! What a scoundrelly ruffian he was, he found himself meditating; what a villain, what a seducer; how he would have revelled in the idea of a man marrying his own daughter after leaving the mother to starve, how-. He broke off in these musings to curse Lolive and all his pack of pampered servants, coachmen and footmen, who were snoring still in their beds, and to curse himself; to wonder when the third stroke would come and how: to wonder also if it would be when he stood before his wronged daughter. To muse if he would fall dead, writhing at her feet-to-
Lolive re-entered the room. The berceuse was ready, the horses got out of the stables. Would Monsieur have all his goods packed and taken with him, also his jewellery, or-or should he wake the landlord and confide everything to him until-until Monsieur's return? Only, Lolive thought to himself, Monsieur might, in truth, never return. He was ill, very ill; he might die on the road to Marseilles. He hoped that, at least (though he did not say so), the Duke would not take the money and the jewellery with him. Thus, he could find it later!
"Take," said Desparre, his eyes glinting hideously, as Lolive thought, "take all that is of small compass and of value. Give it to me, I will bestow the money and jewellery where it will be safe in the carriage. Give it to me."
With a smothered oath, the valet did as he was bidden, Desparre placing the jewellery in the pockets of his vast travelling cloak, and the money about him, and bidding Lolive pack the clothes, the wigs and the swords at once, and swiftly. And the pistols; they, too, should go.
"There are highwaymen, brigands, upon the road, Lolive," he muttered, fixing the valet with his eye. "Thieves everywhere. It may befall that I shall have to shoot a thief on the way. I had best be armed-ready."
Wherefore he took the box containing his silver-hilted pistols upon his knee, and, with the lid up, sat regarding the man as he hastily packed all that was to accompany them on the journey to Marseilles.
"My God!" the fellow muttered, "he makes me tremble. Can this man, half alive, half dead, divine my thoughts?"
The boxes were packed at last with their changes of linen and clothes; once more Desparre was left alone. Lolive was despatched to arouse the landlord and to inform him that Monsieur had to depart at once for Marseilles on important matters, but that his room was to be retained for him and his furniture and other things taken proper care of. And the valet was also bidden to say that the Duke did not require the presence of the landlord to see him depart. The reason whereof being that Desparre felt sure that the man knew as well as all in Eaux St. Fer knew what had befallen him that day; and how a play had been produced by a vengeful woman for the sole purpose of holding him up to the derision, the execration, of all who were in the little watering-place, nobility and others, as well as the "refuse" who had not been admitted to the representation but were aware of what had happened.
Everyone knew! He could never return here, nor to Paris. If he found his child, if he saved her, then-then he must go away somewhere, or-or, perhaps, then the third stroke would fall. Well, so best. He would be better dead. He could not live long; he understood by the doctor's manner that his doom was pronounced, assured. Better dead!
Upon the night air, up from the street below, he could hear the rumble of the berceuse on the stones as it approached the door of the house where he lodged; he could also hear the horses shaking their harness, and the mutterings of the coachman and the footman at being thus dragged forth from their beds at night.
It was time to go-time for Lolive and the footman to come up with the carrying chair, which he used now when stairs had to be either ascended or descended, not so much because he could not walk as because he did not care to do so. He could have got down those stairs to-night, he knew, even after this second shock, this further and last warning of his impending end-only he would not. These menials, these dogs of his, would have heard from Lolive of that stroke-they would be peering curiously at him out of their low, cunning eyes to see whether he were worse or not.
Therefore, he let them carry him down and place him on his bed in the sleeping carriage, while all the time but one thought occupied his mind.
That thought-what he would find at the end of his journey, and whether he would find his child alive or dead?
CHAPTER XXI
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.