Servants of Sin

"And they were equally unfortunate. There was one-"

"There was one," she replied, interrupting, and with her glance firmly fixed him, "who desired my love; who desired me for his wife. A year ago. Is it not so? And, Monsieur Clarges, what was my answer to him? You should know. Recall it."

"Your answer was that you did not love him; that, therefore, you could be no wife of his. Now, Mademoiselle, recall yourself-it is your turn-what he then said. It was this, I think. That he so loved you that, without receiving back any love from you in return, he begged you to grant his prayer; to believe that he would win that love at last if you would but give yourself to him; while, if you desired it, he would so show the reverence he held you in-that, once you were his wife, he would demand nothing more from you. Nothing but that he might be by your side; be but as a brother, a champion, a sentinel to watch and guard over you, although a husband in truth. That was what he said. That was all he desired. Mademoiselle, will the Duc Desparre be as loyal a husband as this, do you think?"

"The Duc Desparre will never be husband of mine."

The Englishman again shrugged his shoulders. He had learnt the trick well during a long exile in Paris-an exile dating from the time when the Pretender's cause was lost by the Earl of Mar, and he, a Jacobite, had followed him to France after the "'15."

"But how to avoid it now?" he asked. "The time draws near-is at hand. How escape?"

"Is there not one way?" she asked, with again an upward glance of those eyes.

"No no no!" he replied, his calmness deserting him now. "No! no! Not that! Not that!"

"How else? There is no other."

As they spoke the play still went on at the tables; women shrieked still, half in earnest half in jest, as a card turned up that told against them. Still Vandecque crouched over the board where he held the bank and where his greedy hands drew in the stakes, for he was winning heavily. Already he had twenty thousand livres before him drawn from the pockets of Mirabel, Sainte Foix, the stockbrokers of the Rues Quincampoix and Vivienne, and from the female gamblers. And, gambler himself, he had forgotten all else; he had forgotten almost that the niece whom he guarded so carefully until the time should come when he would hand her over to her purchaser, was in the room.

"It is an accursed law," the Englishman murmured; "a vile, accursed law which gives a father or a guardian such power. In no other country would it be possible. Yet Lau-Mademoiselle-that which you meditate must never be. Oh! to think of it! To think of it!"

He buried his head in his hands now as he spoke-he had taken a seat beside her-and reflected on the terror of the thing, the horror that she, whom he had loved so madly-whom, alas! he loved still, though she cared nothing for him-should be doomed to one of two extremes-marriage with Desparre, or a convent. Or, worse-a third, a more fearful horror! That which she meditated-death!

For that, if she had taken this resolve, she would carry it out he did not doubt. She would never have proclaimed her intention had she not been determined. She had said it was the only way!

But, suddenly, he looked up at her, bent his head nearer to hers, whispered a word. Then said aloud:

"There is your safety. There your only chance. Take it."

As he spoke, she started, and a rich glow came into her face while her eyes sparkled; but a moment later her countenance fell again, and she drew away from him.

"No! no!" she said. "No! no! Not that way. Not that. Not such a sacrifice as that. Never! never never!"

CHAPTER III

THE ROMANCE OF MONSIEUR VANDECQUE

An evening or so after the meeting between Laure Vauxcelles and Walter Clarges at the gambling hell kept by the Demoiselles Montjoie, Vandecque sat in the saloon of his apartments in the Passage du Commerce. Very comfortable apartments they were, too, if bizarre ornaments and rococo furniture, combined with the most gorgeous colours possible to be obtained, could be considered as providing comfort. Yet, since it was a period of bizarrerie and whimsical caprice in furniture, clothing, and life generally (including morals), it may be that, to most people-certainly to most people with whom the once broken-down but now successful gambler was permitted to associate-the rococo nature of his surroundings would not have appeared particularly out of place. And, undoubtedly, such a warm nest must have brought comfort to the heart of the man who paid at the present moment 250f. a week for the right of occupying that nest, since there had been a time once when he scarce knew how to find one franc a day whereby to pay in advance for a night's lodgings in a back alley. Also, he had passed, previously to that period of discomfort, a portion of his life away from Paris in a condition which the French termed politely (whenever they mentioned such an unpleasant subject) "in retreat," and had been subjected to a process that they designated as "marqué," which, in plain English, means that he had been at the galleys as a slave and had been branded. "For the cause of religion," he said, if he ever said anything at all on the subject; "for a question of theft and larceny with violence" being, however, written in the factum of the eminent French counsel who appeared against him before the judges in Paris.

His life had been a romance, he was in the habit of observing in his moments of ease, which were when the gambling hells were closed during the day-time, or the stockbrokers' offices in the Rues Quincampoix and Vivienne during the night-time. And so, indeed, it had been if romance is constituted and made up of robbery, cheating, chicanery, the wearing of blazing scarlet coats one month and the standing bare-backed in prison yards during the next, there to have the shoulders and loins scourged with a whip previously steeped in brine. A romance, if drinking flasks of champagne and iced tokay at one period, and water out of street fountains at another, or riding in gilt sedan-chairs one week and being flogged along at a cart tail another, formed one. For all these things had happened to Jean Vandecque, as well as the galleys in the past, with the carcan, or collar around his neck, and the possession of the gorgeous apartments in the Passage du Commerce at the present moment-all these, and many more.

With also another romance-or the commencement and foundation of one. That which has now to be told.

Struggling on foot along the great road that leads from the South to Paris, ten years before this story begins, Jean Vandecque (with the discharge of a liberated convict from the galley Le Requin huddled away in the bosom of his filthy shirt) viewed the capital at last-his face burnt black by the Mediterranean suns under which he had slaved for five years, and by the hot winds which had swept over his nakedness during that time. God knows how he would have got so far, how have traversed those weary miles without falling dead by the wayside, had it not been for that internal power which he possessed (in common with the lowest, as well as the highest of beasts) of finding subsistence somehow; of supporting life. An egg stolen here and there along the country roads; a fowl seized, throttled, and eaten raw, if no sticks could be found wherewith to make a fire; a child robbed of a loaf-and lucky that it was not throttled too; a lonely grange despoiled; a shopkeeper's till in some hamlet emptied of a few sous; a woman cajoled out of a drink of common wine; and Paris at last. Paris, the home of the rich and well-to-do; the refuge of every knave and sharper who wished to prey upon others. Paris, into which he limped footsore and weary, and clad in dusty rags; Paris, full of wealth and full of fools to be exploited.

He found his home, or, at least, he found the home in which his unhappy wife sheltered; a garret under the roof of a crazy, tumble-down house behind Notre Dame-found both home and wife after a day's search and many inquiries made in cellars and reeking courts and hideous alleys, into which none were allowed to penetrate except those who bore the brand of vagabond and scoundrel stamped clear and indelible upon them.

Also, he found something else: A child-a girl eight years old-playing in a heap of charred faggots in the chimney; a child who told him that she was hungry, and that there was no food at all in the place.

"Whose is the brat?" he asked of his wife, knowing very well that, at least, it was not hers, since it must of a certainty have been born three years before he went "into retreat" on the Mediterranean. "Whose? Have you grown so rich that you adopt children now; or is it paid for, eh?"

"It is paid for," the patient creature said, shuddering at the man's return, since she had hoped that he had died in the galley and would never, consequently, wander back to Paris to molest her. "Paid for, and will be-"

"Badly paid for, at least, since its adoption leads you to no better circumstances than these in which I find you. Give me some food. I have eaten nothing for hours."

"Nor I; nor the child there. Not for twenty-four hours. I have not a sol; nor anything to sell."

The man looked at his wife from under bushy black eyebrows-though eyebrows not much blacker than his baked face; then he thrust his hand into his pocket and drew forth five sols and weighed them in his hands as though they were gold pieces. He had stolen them that morning from the basket of a blind man sleeping in the sun outside St. Roch, when no one was looking.

"Go, buy bread," he said. "Get something. I am starving. Go."

"Bread-with these! They will not buy enough for one. And we are so hungry, she and I. See, the child weeps for hunger. Have you no more?"

"Not a coin. Have you?"

"Alas! God, He knows! Nothing. And we are dying of hunger."

"How is it you are not at work, earning something?"

"They will trust me no more. They fear I shall sell the goods confided to me. Who entrusts velvets, or silk, or laces to such as I, or lets such as I enter their shops to work there?"

"What is to be done, then?"

"Die," the woman said. "There is nought else to do."

"Bah! In Paris! Imbecile! In Paris, full of wealth and food! Stay here till I return."

And he went swiftly out. Some hours later, when the sun had sunk behind the great roof of the Cathedral, when the children were playing about beneath the spot where the statues were, and when the pigeons were seeking their niches, those three were eating a hearty meal, all seated on the floor, since there was neither chair nor table nor bed within the room; a meal consisting of a loaf, a piece of bacon, and some hard-boiled eggs. The woman and the child got but a poor share, 'tis true, their portions being the morsels which Vandecque tossed to them every now and again; while of a wine bottle, which he constantly applied to his mouth, they got nothing at all. Yet their hunger was appeased; they were glad enough to do without drink.

* * * * * *

The passing years brought changes to two of these outcasts, as it did to the wealthy in Paris. Vandecque's wife had died of the small-pox twelve months after his return; the adopted child, Vandecque's niece, Mdlle. Vauxcelles, was developing fast into a lovely girl; while as for Vandecque-well! the gallows bird, the man who had worn the iron collar round his neck and who bore upon his shoulders the brand, had disappeared, and in his place had come a grave, sedate person clad always in sombre clothes, yet a man conspicuous for the purity of his linen and lace and the neatness of his attire. While, although he had not as yet attained to the splendour of the Passage du Commerce, his rooms in the Rue du Paon were comfortable and there was no lack of either food, or drink, or fuel-the three things that the outcast who has escaped and triumphed over the miseries and memories of the past most seeks to make sure of in the future.

He was known also to great and rich personages now, he had patrons amongst the nobility and was acquainted with the roués who circled round the Regent. He was prominent, and, as he frequently told himself, was "respected."

He was a successful man.

How he had become so, however, he did not dilate on-or certainly not on the earlier of his successes after his reappearance! – even when making those statements about his romantic life with which he occasionally favoured his friends. Had he done so, he would not, perhaps, have shocked very much the ears, or morals, of his listeners, but he must, at least, have betrayed the names of several eminent patrons for whom he had done dirty work in a manner which might have placed his own ears, if not his life, in danger, and would, thereby, probably have led to his once more traversing the road to Marseilles or to Cette-which is almost the same thing-to again partake of the shelter of the galleys.

Yet he would never have found or come into contact with these illustrious patrons, these men who required secret agents to minister to their private pleasures, had it not been for a stupendous piece of good fortune which befell him shortly after his return to Paris from the Mediterranean. It was, indeed, so strange a piece of good fortune that it may well be set down here as a striking instance of how the Devil takes care of his own.

From his late wife he had never been able to obtain any information as to who "the brat" was whom he had found playing about in the ashes on the hearth in the garret, when he returned from his period of southern seclusion; he had not found out even so much as what name she was supposed to bear, except that of "Laure," which seemed to have been bestowed on the child by Madame Vandecque on the principle that one name was as good as another by which to call a child. She had said herself that she did not know anything further-that, being horribly poor after Vandecque had departed for the south, she had yielded to the offer of an abbé-now dead-to adopt the girl, twenty-five louis-d'ors being paid to her for doing so. That was all, she said, that she knew. But, she added (with a firmness which considerably astonished her lord and master) that, especially as she had come to love the creature which was so dependent on her, she meant to carry out her contract and to do her best by her. To Vandecque's suspicious nature-a nature sharpened by countless acts of roguery of all kinds-this statement presented itself as a lie, and he believed that either his wife had received a very much larger sum of money in payment for the child's adoption than she had stated, or that she was surreptitiously receiving regular sums of money at intervals on its behalf. Of the two ideas, he inclined more to the latter than the former, and it was owing to this belief that he did not at once take steps to disembarrass himself of the burden with which he found himself saddled, and send the child of at once to the Home of the Foundlings whence she would eventually have been sold to a beggar for a few livres and trained to demand alms in the street, as usually happened to deserted children in the reign of Louis the Great. Later on he was thankful-he told himself that he was "devoutly thankful" – that he had never done anything of the sort.

He was one day, about a year after his wife's death, mounting the ricketty stairs which led to the garret in which he had found the woman on his return, when, to his astonishment, he saw a Sister of Charity standing outside the door of his room, looking hesitatingly about her, and glancing down towards him as he ascended to where she was. And it was very evident to him that the woman had been knocking at his door without receiving any answer to her summons. This was a thing certain to happen in any case, since it was Vandecque's habit on quitting his shelter during the day-time to send Laure to play with all the other vagrant children of the alley, and to put the key in his pocket. At night, the plan was varied somewhat when he went forth, the girl being sent to her bed and locked into the room for safety.

"Madame desires-?" he said now, as he reached the landing on which the sister stood, while taking off his frayed hat to her with an inimitable gesture of politeness which his varied and "romantic" career had taught him well enough how to assume when necessary. "Madame desires-"

"To see the woman, Madame Jasmin," the sister answered, her grave solemn eyes roving over the man's poor clothes as she answered. Or, perhaps, since his clothes in such a spot as this would scarcely be out of place, examining his face with curiosity.