Servants of Sin: A Romance

by John Bloundelle-Burton

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.