Servants of Sin

"My son," the monk said, gazing at the stranger while thinking, perhaps, how good it was to see one so strong and healthy-looking amidst all the surrounding disease. "My son, is it you for whom he waits? But now, ten minutes past, he was sensible and averred he could not die until he saw him for whom he looked. Knowing him to be here, in Marseilles. Is it you?"

"It is I, holy father," Walter answered. "Yet, how should he know me? Let me come nearer and observe him." He passed thereupon to the front of the dying man, so that thus he might regard his face, while heeding however, the monk's injunction not to put his own face too near the other's, and to envelope his nostrils and mouth with a cloth which he handed him. Then, this done-Walter remembering his new-found wife at the moment, and how he must preserve his life for her sake-he bent over a little nearer and gazed at the livid features beneath him.

At first he did not know the man. How should he? The now bristling face had, when he last saw it, been ever scrupulously shaved; upon the head, where now was only close-cropped grey hair, there had been a tye-wig of irreproachable neatness; dark clothes of the best material and cut had been the adornment of this dying man who, to-night, lay prostrate in the hideous garments of the galleys. How should he know him! Hardly might he have known his own father had he met him thus similarly transformed.

Then, suddenly, the man opened his eyes-and he recognised him!

"Merciful God!" he exclaimed. "It is Vandecque."

"Vandecque!" a voice hissed close to his ear, a voice he would scarcely have recognised as that of the southern woman, he had not seen her lips move. "Vandecque! the betrayer of Laure! Heaven destroy him!" while, as she spoke, her hand stole to her breast, opening her dress as it did so.

"Be still," he said sternly; "be still. What! Is not the heaven you have invoked about to punish him? Let go whatever your hand holds."

Yet, as he spoke, he recognised how great and strong had been this woman's love for Laure when it could prompt her even now, at the man's last hour, to desire to slay him.

Then Vandecque began to mutter; his eyes being fixed upon Walter with the dull and filmy look which the dying ever have.

"I," he whispered, "I-loved her. The little child-that-that-wound itself around my heart. She had been-wronged-by those of his-that devil's own order. I would have made her prosperous-rich-one of that order. A patrician instead of an outcast. I loved her. You thwarted me. Therefore I helped him-to-slay you, as I thought."

He closed his eyes now and those around him thought that he was gone, while the monk began the prayers for the dying. Yet, in a moment, he spoke again.

"Save her-save-her. If she still lives."

"She lives," Walter said. "She is saved. By the woman at your side."

"All-is-therefore-well." Vandecque gasped. "All-all. And-listen-listen. You spared that monster-Desparre-last night. Fool! Yet-I was there to-finish the work."

"To finish the work! You! You slew him! He is dead!"

"Ay. Dead! Dead! And-" writhing as he spoke and with his agony upon him, his last moment at hand. His lips were white now, not grey; his eyelids were but two slits through which the glazed eyes peered. "Dead-and buried!" Then the monk's voice alone uprose, reciting the prayers for a passing soul.

* * * * * *

The Mediterranean sparkling beneath the warm sun of the early autumn sky; the blue waves lapping gently the sides of a French bilander which, with all sail set on both her masts, is running swiftly before a northern breeze past Cape de Gata towards Gibraltar. A northern breeze with a touch of the west in it, that comes cool and fresh from off the Sierra Nevada mountains and brings life and health and strength in its breath. Towards Gibraltar the vessel goes on, its course to be set later due north for the tumbling Bay, and then, at last, to England-to happiness and content.

To obtain that bilander, to find seamen fit to work it, and to assure the owner of his payment when once she should reach our shores (a payment of a thousand louis d'ors being made for the voyage!) had been no easy task for Walter Clarges, who now took his title openly; yet, at last, it had been done. In Marseilles it was impossible; there was no sailor to be discovered fit and strong enough to do so much as to haul upon a halliard, while, in Toulon it was no better; but, at last, at Istres in the mouth of the Rhone, to which they proceeded in an open boat, the ship had been found and their escape from all the tainted neighbourhood around assured. They were free! Free of the poisoned South, free at last.

And now Lord Westover walked the deck of the rolling, pitching craft, saying a word here and there to the rough sailor from Aude, who was the master; another, now and again, to the dark-eyed woman who sat by the taffrail beneath the swing of the after-sheet; and going next to a cabin upon the deck and peering in through the window while speaking to his wife within.

At first it had been hard to persuade that dark-eyed woman to accompany them, to induce her to throw in her lot with theirs and bid farewell to the land in which she had sinned and suffered. For she was, indeed, almost distraught at the thought that never more would she struggle and toil for the woman she had come to love so dearly; that, henceforth, no sacrifice on her part was needed.

"Go back to her," she said to Walter after Vandecque had breathed his last, while, since there was nothing else that could be done in a place so encumbered with the dead as Marseilles was, they had left the dead man lying where he died. "Go back to her. She needs you now. Not me. Return to her," and, as she spoke, she cast herself down near the market place as though about to sleep there.

"And you-Marion?" Walter said softly. "You! What of you? You will come with me?"

"She wants me no longer. She has you."

"She needs you ever. You must never part. What shall become of her without you; what will your life be in the future if you have no longer her to tend and care for?"

"My life! My life!" she cried with an upward glance at him from where she had thrown herself down. "What matters that! Every wreck is broken to pieces at last. So shall I be."

Yet still he pleaded, repeating all that Laure had that day said of her and telling of how she had declared that she could never go away unless Marion came too; and, finally, he won. He won so far that, at last, she consented to return to Laure, even though it were but to say farewell to her and then go forth into oblivion for ever.

Yet now she was in the bilander with them, on her way to England to pass the rest of her life in peace. How could she have refused-how! – when the girl wept tears of joy in her arms and murmured that, since she had her husband and Marion by her side, she asked for nothing else? And so the ship went on and on, bearing those in her to freedom and to peace. To a peace and contentment that Laure had never dreamed could come to her again; to a happiness which once Walter Clarges had never dared to hope should at last be his.

THE END

1

This street served as the Bourse of the period.

2

"Archers" were servants of the Provost Marshals and of a position between gendarmes and policemen, but in the service of the prisons. "Exempts" were a kind of Sheriff's officer.

3

A slang name for the scaffold.

4

The total number of deaths in Provence was finally estimated to be 148,000. Aix and Toulon suffered the worst after Marseilles.