Servants of Sin. John Bloundelle-Burton
the orders given to her by another person, was, in truth, no Sister of Charity whatever, but a scheming person who had temporarily assumed the garb she wore as a disguise. He came also to believe that she herself was Laure's mother, that she had bound herself in some way to make the payment which he had by such extreme good fortune become the recipient of, and that, in one thing at least, she had uttered the actual truth-the actual truth when she had said that those louis' would be the last forthcoming, that there could never be any more. Had she not, he recalled to mind, said that such a sum as she brought was not easily come by, as an excuse for her not having paid them before? Also, had she not wept a little over the child, folded her to her bosom, and called her "Poor little thing"? Did not both these things most probably point to the fact that, judged by the latter actions, she was the girl's mother, and, according to the statement which preceded it, that she was not a woman of extraordinarily large means? Had she been so, she would have been both able and willing to pay down more than five hundred louis' for the hiding of her secret, and would, to have that secret kept always safely (and also to possess the power of seeing the child now and again without fear of detection) have been prepared to make fresh payments from time to time.
For five hundred louis' was what the canvas bag had contained. Five hundred louis', as Vandecque found when, on returning to the garret after losing sight of the woman at the entrance to the court, he had turned them all out on to the table. Five hundred louis' exactly, neither more nor less, proving that the sum was a carefully counted one; doubtless, too, one duly arranged for. Louis' that were of all kinds, and of the reigns during which they had been in existence-the original ones of Louis the Just; the more imposing ones of Le Roi Soleil, with the great sun blazing on the reverse side; the bright, new ones but recently struck for the present boy-king by order of the Regent; all of which led the astute Vandecque to conclude that the pile had been long accumulating-that the first batch might be an old nest egg, or an inheritance; that the second batch was made up of savings added gradually; that the third had been got together by hook or by crook, with a determination to complete the full sum.
"Yet, what matters!" he said, to himself, as he tossed the gold pieces about in his eager hands, and gloated over them with his greedy eyes; tossing, too, a double louis d'or of the treacherous Le Juste, which he had come across, to the child to play with-"what matters where they come from, how they were gathered together to hide a woman's shame? They are mine now! Mine! Mine! Mine! A capital! A bank! The foundation of a fortune, carefully handled! Come, child; come, Laure; come with me. To the fournisseur's, first; then to the dining rooms. Some new, clean clothes for both of us, and then a meal to make our hearts dance within us. We are rich, my child; rich, my little one. Rich! Rich! Rich!"
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