John Bloundelle-Burton - Servants of Sin

For, to the whilom beggared outcast and galley slave, five hundred louis' were wealth.

Time passed; in truth it seemed that Vandecque was indeed rich, or growing rich. The garret was left behind; four rooms in the Rue du Paon preceded by a year or so that apartment in the Passage du Commerce at which he eventually arrived. Four rooms, one a dining-room, another a parlour, in which at midnight there came sometimes a score of men to gamble-women sometimes came too-and a bedroom for each. He was growing well-to-do, his capital accumulating as capital will accumulate in the hands of the man who always holds the bank and makes it a stipulation that, on those terms alone, can people gamble beneath his roof.

Meanwhile Laure was fast developing into a woman-was one almost. She was now seventeen, for she was within a year of the time when the exile, Walter Clarges, was to whisper the words of suggested salvation in her ear in the saloon of the demoiselles Montjoie-suggested salvation from her marriage with Monsieur le Duc Desparre, from his embraces. A beautiful girl, too, with her sweet hair bound up now about her shapely head, her deep hazel eyes full and lustrous, calm and pure. Una herself passed no more undefiled amidst the horrors of Wandering Wood than did Laure Vauxcelles amidst the gamblers and the dissolute roués who surrounded the court of Philippe le Débonnaire, and who, ere the games began at night-when occasionally permitted to see her-found time to cast admiring glances at her wondrous, fast-budding beauty.

The name Vauxcelles was, of course, no more hers than was that of Laure, which had been given to her by poor Madame Vandecque when first she took the deserted and discarded waif to her kindly heart. But as Vandecque had elected to style her his niece, so, too, he decided to give her a name which would have been that of an actual niece if he had ever had one. He recalled the fact that he had once possessed an elder sister, now long since dead, who had married a man from Lorraine whose name was Vauxcelles, and, he being also dead, the name was bestowed on his protégée . It answered well enough, he told himself, since Laure had come to his late wife far too early in her life to remember aught that had preceded her arrival under the roof of the unhappy woman's earlier garret; and it formed a sufficient answer and explanation to any questions the girl might ever ask as to her origin. In sober fact, she believed that she was actually the child of his dead and gone sister and her husband.

She would have loved her uncle more dearly than she did-she would have loved the grave, serious man who had suffered so for his "religion," as he often told her, but for two things. The first was that she knew him to be a gambler; that he grew rich by enticing men to his apartments and by winning their money; that several young men had been ruined beneath their roof, and that more than one had destroyed himself after such ruin had fallen upon him. She knew, too, that others stole so as to be able to take part in the faro and biribi that was played there; to take part, too, in the brilliant society of those members of the aristocracy who condescended to visit the Rue du Paon and to win their stolen money. For there sometimes came, amongst others, that most horrible of young roués, the Duc de Richelieu and Fronsac, from whom the girl shrank as from a leper, or some noisome reptile; there, too, came De Noailles, reeking with the impurities of an unclean life; and De Biron, who was almost as bad. Sometimes also, amongst the women, came the proud De Sabran, who condescended to be the Regent's "friend," but redeemed herself in her own eyes by insulting him hourly, and by telling him that, when God had finished making men and lackeys, He took the remnants of the clay and made Kings and Regents. Laughing La Phalaris came, too, sometimes; also Madame de Parabère; once the Regent came himself; leaning heavily on the arm of his Scotch financier, and, under his astute mathematical calculations, managed to secure a large number of Vandecque's pistoles, so that the latter cursed inwardly while maintaining outwardly a face as calm and still as alabaster.

An illustrious company was this which met in the ex-galley slave's apartments!

What to Laure was worse than all, however, was that her uncle sometimes desired her to be agreeable to occasional guests who honoured his rooms with their presence. Not, it is true, to the dissolute roués nor the Regent's mistresses-to do the soiled and smirched swindler of bygone days justice, he respected the girl's innocence and purity too much for that-nor to those men who were married and from whom there was nothing to be obtained. But he perceived clearly enough her swift developing beauty; he knew that there, in that beauty, was a charm so fresh and fascinating that it might well be set as a stake against a great title, an ancient and proud name, the possession of enormous wealth. Before loveliness inferior to Laure's, and purity not more deep-for such would have been impossible-he had known of, heard of, the heads of the noblest houses in France bowing, while exchanging for the possession of such charms the right to share their names. What had happened before, he mused, might well happen again.

Laure, the outcast, the outcome of the gutters and the mud, the abandoned child, might yet live to share a ducal coronet, a name borne with honour since the days of the early Capets. And, with her, he would mount, too, go hand in hand, put away for ever a disgraceful past, a past from which he still feared that some spectre might yet arise to denounce and proclaim him. If she would only yield to his counsel-only do that! If she only would!

Suitors such as he desired were not lacking. One, he was resolved she should accept by hook or by crook, as he said to himself in his own phrase. This was the newly succeeded Duc Desparre, the man who a year before had been serving as an officer on paltry pay in the Regiment de Bellebrune, and taking part in the Catalonian campaign-the man who, in middle life, had succeeded to a dukedom which a boy of eighteen had himself succeeded to but a year before that. But the lad was then already worn out with dissipation which a sickly constitution, transmitted to him by half-a-dozen equally dissipated forerunners, was not able to withstand. A cold contracted at a midnight fête given by the Regent in the gardens of Madame de Parabère's country villa at Asnieres, had done its work. It had placed in the hands of the soldier who had nothing but his pay and his bundle of swords (and a few presents occasionally sent him by an admiring woman), a dukedom, a large estate, a great rent-roll.

It was six months before that snowy night on which the Marquise Grignan de Poissy paid her visit to Monsieur le Duc, that Desparre, flinging all considerations of family, of an ancient title and a still more ancient name, to the winds, determined that this girl should be his wife, that he would buy her with his coronet, since in no other way could she be his.

"I desire her. I love her. I will possess her," he said to himself by night and day; "I will. I must marry her. Curse it, 'tis strange, too, how her beauty has bound me down; I who have loved so many, yet never thought of marrying one of them. I, the poor soldier, who had nothing to offer in exchange for a woman's heart but a wedding ring, and would never give even that. Now that I am well to do, a great prize, I sacrifice myself."

Yet he chuckled, too, as he resolved to make the sacrifice, recognising that it was not only his love for and desire of possessing this girl which was egging him on to the determination, but something else as well. The desire to retaliate upon his numerous kinswomen who had once ignored him, but who now grovelled at his feet. To wound, as he termed them, the "women of his tribe," whose doors were mostly shut to the beggarly captain of the Regiment de Bellebrune, but who, in every case, would have now prostrated themselves before him with pleasure-the elder ones because there was much of the family wealth which he might direct towards them and their children eventually, if he so chose, and also because rumour said that his acquaintanceship with the Regent and John Law was doubling and trebling that wealth; the younger ones because there was the title and the coronet and the great position ready to be shared with some woman. Yet he meant to defeat them all, to retaliate upon them for past slights. The only share which they should have in any wedding of his would be the witnessing of it with another woman, and that a woman of whom no one knew anything beyond the fact that she belonged to the inferior classes, and was the niece and ward of a man who kept a gambling-house.