It was natural he should ask the question, since the bed-chamber of the berceuse had no other window but the little one at the back out of which its occupant could gaze.
"Where," he repeated, "is the crowd--the inn?"
"Close outside, Monsieur; but, oh! in the name of all the Saints, go not forth. It is death! It is death!"
"It is death if I do aught but go on," the Duke muttered to himself; "death to her if she is there and cannot be saved." And, at that moment, Desparre was at his best. Even this man of vile record was dominated by some good angel now.
As he spoke, he pushed the valet aside and, shambling through the still smaller compartment outside the curtain in which the fellow slept and cooked, he appeared on the little platform beneath where the coachman and a footman sat, and from which it was easy by a step to reach the ground.
"What is this I hear of the pestilence at Marseilles?" he asked, as, seeing in front of him an inn before which his carriage was drawn up, as well as a number of strange, sickly-looking beings huddled about in front of it--some lying on wooden benches running alongside tables and some upon the ground--he addressed them. "What? Answer me."
Yet he knew that no answer was required. One glance at those beings told all, especially to him who had once known the pest raging in Catalonia and had seen the ravages it made, and once also at Bordeaux. Those chalk-white faces, those yellow eyes and the great blotches beneath them, were enough. These people might not be absolutely stricken with the pestilence, yet they had almost been so ere they fled.
"We have escaped," one answered, "though it may be only for a time. It is in us. We burn with thirst, shiver with cold. On such a morn as this! Marseilles is lost! Already forty thousand lie dead in her; they pile quicklime on them in the streets to burn them up. At Aix ten thousand are dead--at Toulon ten thousand; thousands more at a hundred other places. Turn back. Turn back, whosoever you are; be warned in time."
"Man," Desparre answered, "we have passed by Aix, yet we are not stricken. I must go on," and his white face blanched even whiter while his eyes rested on those unhappy people. Yet all the same, he did not, would not, falter. He had vowed that his attempt to save his child should act as his redemption if such might be the case; he would never turn back! No, not though the pest awaited him with its fiery poisonous breath at the gates; not even though the Englishman stood before him with his drawn sword ready to be thrust through his heart. He would go on.
He felt positive, something within warned him, that his hour was not far off. And also some strange presentiment seemed to tell him that by, or through, the pest his death was to come--not by the man whom he had himself striven to slay.