Servants of Sin: A Romance

by John Bloundelle-Burton

Swiftly he ran through his letters after opening them, putting away for the moment all consideration of his mother's anxiety as to what might have happened to him, since she had not heard from him for so long. Swiftly only to find that, beyond all doubt, she had neither seen nor heard aught of Laure. There was no mention of her. No word.

"I have no wife," he murmured. "No wife; nothing but a bond that will for ever prevent me from having wife or child, or home. Ah well! so be it. I saved her; saved her from him. Of my own free will I did it. It is enough."

Yet, though she had gone away thus and had left him without word or sign, he remembered that there was still one other thing--two other things--for him to do. Things that he had mused upon for weeks as he lay in the hospital in which he found himself on emerging from a long delirium, and while his wounded lung was slowly healing--the determination to find both Desparre and Vandecque, and, then, to slay both.

To kill Vandecque as he would kill a rat or a snake that had bitten him; to force Desparre to stand before him, rapier in hand, and to run the villain through the lungs, even as his jackals had done to him while their employer looked on from out the shelter of the porch.

This he meant to set about now, at once, to-day; but, first, let him read his mother's letters and write one in reply.

Those letters were full of the distress she was in at gleaning no news from him, full of tender dread as to what might have befallen him in Paris, which, she had heard, even in her country seclusion, was in a terrible state of turmoil in consequence of the bursting of the Mississippi bubble and the ruin following thereon; also, they expressed great fear that, in some manner, his Jacobite devotion might have led him into trouble, even though he was out of England.

Thus the first two ran. The third contained stranger and more pregnant news; news of so unexpected a nature that even this gentle, anxious mother put aside for the moment her wail of distress over the lack of tidings from her son to communicate it.

His distant cousin, she wrote, Lord Westover, was dead, burned to death in his own house in Cumberland, and with him had also perished his son; therefore Walter Clarges, her own dear son, had, unexpectedly to all, inherited the title as well as a large and ample fortune. He must, consequently, she said, on receipt of this at once put himself in communication with the men of business of the Westover family, the notary and the steward; if, too, she added, he could see his way to giving in his adherence to the reigning family his career might now be a great, almost an illustrious, one. The Hanoverian King was welcoming all to his Court who had once espoused the now utterly ruined Stuart cause. All would be forgotten if Walter but chose to give in his allegiance to the new ruler of England. And, perhaps with a view to inducing him to think seriously of such a change, she mentioned that she had heard from a sure source that, not six months before he met with his terrible death, the late Earl had seen King George, and had been graciously received by him. There was, she thought, no doubt that he at least had made his peace with the reigning monarch.

To Walter Clarges--or the Earl of Westover, as he now was--this news seemed, however, of little value. Titles, political principles--which he felt sure he should never feel disposed to change--even considerable wealth, were at the present moment nothing to him; nothing in comparison with what he had to do, with what he had set himself to do.

This was to seek out and wreak his vengeance on those two men, Desparre and his tool and creature, Vandecque. As for her, his wife--now an English aristocrat, a woman of high patrician rank by marriage--she had gone; she had left him without a word, without a message as to what life she intended to lead henceforward, or what existence to pursue. Yet, he had no quarrel with, no rancour against, her; he could have none. He had offered himself to her as a man who might be her earthly saviour, though without demanding in return any of the rights of a husband, without demanding the slightest show or pretence of affection; and she had taken him at his word, she had accepted his sacrifice! That was all. Upon her he had no right to exercise any vengeance whatsoever.