But there was light in the close, stuffy Square itself. Placed on the lumber of the stalls around the open market were pots and pans of burning disinfectants that cast flickering shadows upon everything near them; upon, too, a little group of persons gathered in the middle of the spot where once the Provence roses and the great luscious-scented lilies of the south, and the crimson fuchsias, had been sold in handfuls by the flower-girls. Now, in their place, there lay a man dying, Not in agony, as many had died who had been stricken by the pest, but, instead calmly, insensibly.
A man old and grizzly; yet, looking, perhaps, older than he actually was; white as marble, his lips grey, and, upon his chin and cheeks, a white rim of unshaven beard of three or four days' growth. By his side stood a monk muttering prayers and heedless as to whether the plague struck him or not; at his other side knelt the dark woman who had directed Walter to where he should find his wife--the woman whom he had thought cold and dead of heart, yet whom he now knew to have been Laure's friend and comforter. She was engaged in moistening the dying man's lips with spirits, and in wiping the dank dews of death from off his face, as Walter drew near.
"God bless you," he said, touching her brown hand with his as he came to her side. "God bless you. She has told me; I know all. God bless you."
Yet, even as he spoke to her, he wondered why she drew her hand hurriedly away from his, and why, in the flicker of the flames around, her dark eyes seemed to cast an almost baleful glance at him.
"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.