Lord Tony's Wife (14 page)

Nor did he announce his departure to her in so many words. As soon as the maid had gone, he took his beloved in his arms.

‘They have stolen Tony’s wife from him,’ he said with that light, quaint laugh of his. ‘I told you that the man Martin-Roget had planned some devilish mischief—well! he has succeeded so far, thanks to that unspeakable fool the duc de Kernogan.’

He told her briefly the history of the past few days.

‘Tony did not take my warning seriously enough,’ he concluded with a sigh; ‘he ought never to have allowed his wife out of his sight.’

Marguerite had not interrupted him while he spoke. At first she just lay in his arms, quiescent and listening, nerving herself by a supreme effort not to utter one sigh of misery or one word of appeal. Then, as her knees shook under her, she sank back into a chair by the hearth and he knelt beside her with his arms clasped tightly round her shoulders, his cheek pressed against hers. He had no need to tell her that duty and friendship called, that the call of honour was once again–as it so often has been in the world—louder than that of love.

She understood and she knew, and he, with that super-sensitive instinct of his, understood the heroic effort which she made.

‘Your love, dear heart,’ he whispered, ‘will draw me back safely home as it hath so often done before. You believe that, do you not?’

And she had the supreme courage to murmur: ‘Yes!’

Chapter Eight - The Road to Portishead

I

It was not until Bath had very obviously been left behind that Yvonne de Kernogan—Lady Anthony Dewhurst—realized that she had been trapped.

During the first half-hour of the journey her father had lain back against the cushions of the carriage with eyes closed, his face pale and wan as if with great suffering. Yvonne, her mind a prey to the gravest anxiety sat beside him, holding his limp cold hand in hers. Once or twice she ventured on a timid question as to his health and he invariably murmured a feeble assurance that he felt well, only very tired and disinclined to talk. Anon she suggested—diffidently, for she did not mean to disturb him—that the driver did not appear to know his way into Bath, he had turned into a side road which she felt sure was not the right one. M. le duc then roused himself for a moment from his lethargy. He leaned forward and gazed out of the window.

‘The man is quite right, Yvonne,’ he said quietly, ‘he knows his way. He brought me along this road yesterday. He gets into Bath by a slight dιtour but it is pleasanter driving.’

This reply satisfied her. She was a stranger in the land, and knew little or nothing of the environs of Bath. True, last Monday morning after the ceremony of her marriage she had driven out to Combwich, but dawn was only just breaking then, and she had lain for the most part—wearied and happy–in her young husband’s arms. She had taken scant note of roads and signposts.

A few minutes later the coach came to a halt and Yvonne, looking through the window, saw a man who was muffled up to the chin and enveloped in a huge travelling cape, mount swiftly up beside the driver.

‘Who is that man?’ she queried sharply.

‘Some friend of the coachman’s, no doubt,’ murmured her father in reply, ‘to whom he is giving a lift as far as Bath.’

The barouche had moved on again.

Yvonne could not have told you why, but at her father’s last words she had felt a sudden cold grip at her heart—the first since she started. It was neither fear nor yet suspicion, but a chill seemed to go right through her. She gazed anxiously through the window, and then looked at her father with eyes that challenged and that doubted. But M. le duc would not meet her gaze. He had once more closed his eyes and sat quite still, pale and haggard, like a man who is suffering acutely.

II

‘Father we are going back to Bath, are we not?’

The query came out trenchant and hard from her throat which now felt hoarse and choked. Her whole being was suddenly pervaded by a vast and nameless fear. Time had gone on, and there was no sign in the distance of the great city. M. de Kernogan made no reply, but he opened his eyes and a curious glance shot from them at the terror-stricken face of his daughter.

Then she knew—knew that she had been tricked and trapped–that her father had played a hideous and complicated rτle of hypocrisy and duplicity in order to take her away from the husband whom she idolized.

Fear and her love for the man of her choice gave her initiative and strength. Before M. de Kernogan could realize what she was doing, before he could make a movement to stop her, she had seized the handle of the carriage door, wrenched the door open and jumped out into the road. She fell on her face in the mud, but the next moment she picked herself up again and started to run—down the road which the carriage had just traversed, on and on as fast as she could go. She ran on blindly, unreasoningly, impelled by a purely physical instinct to escape, not thinking how childish, how futile such an attempt was bound to be.

Already after the first few minutes of this swift career over the muddy road, she heard quick, heavy footsteps behind her. Her father could not run like that—the coachman could not have thus left his horses—but still she could hear those footsteps at a run—a quicker run than hers–and they were gaining on her—every minute, every second. The next, she felt two powerful arms suddenly seizing her by the shoulders. She stumbled and would once more have fallen, but for those same strong arms which held her close.

‘Let me go! Let me go!’ she cried, panting.

But she was held and could no longer move. She looked up into the face of Martin-Roget, who without any hesitation or compunction lifted her up as if she had been a bale of light goods and carried her back toward the coach. She had forgotten the man who had been picked up on the road awhile ago, and had been sitting beside the coachman since.

He deposited her in the barouche beside her father, then quietly closed the door and once more mounted to his seat on the box. The carriage moved on again. M. de Kernogan was no longer lethargic, he looked down on his daughter’s inert form beside him, and not one look of tenderness or compassion softened the hard callousness of his face.

‘Any resistance, my child,’ he said coldly, ‘will as you see be useless as well as undignified. I deplore this necessary violence, but I should be forced once more to requisition M. Martin-Roget’s help if you attempted such foolish tricks again. When you are a little more calm, we will talk openly together.’

For the moment she was lying back against the cushions of the carriage; her nerves having momentarily given way before this appalling catastrophe which had overtaken her and the hideous outrage to which she was being subjected by her own father. She was sobbing convulsively. But in the face of his abominable callousness, she made a great effort to regain her self-control. Her pride, her dignity came to the rescue. She had had time in those few seconds to realize that she was indeed more helpless than any bird in a fowler’s net, and that only absolute calm and presence of mind could possibly save her now.

If indeed there was the slightest hope of salvation.

She drew herself up and resolutely dried her eyes and readjusted her hair and her hood and mantle.

‘We can talk openly at once, sir,’ she said coldly. ‘I am ready to hear what explanation you can offer for this monstrous outrage.’

‘I owe you no explanation, my child,’ he retorted calmly. ‘Presently when you are restored to your own sense of dignity and of self-respect you will remember that a lady of the house of Kernogan does not elope in the night with a stranger and a heretic like some kitchen-wench. Having so far forgotten herself my daughter must, alas! take the consequences, which I deplore, of her own sins and lack of honour.’

‘And no doubt, father,’ she retorted, stung to the quick by his insults, ‘that you too will anon be restored to your own sense of self-respect and remember that hitherto no gentleman of the house of Kernogan has acted the part of a liar and of a hypocrite!’

‘Silence!’ he commanded sternly.

‘Yes!’ she reiterated wildly, ‘it was the rτle of a liar and of a hypocrite that you played from the moment when you sat down to pen that letter full of protestations of affection and forgiveness, until like a veritable Judas you betrayed your own daughter with a kiss. Shame on you, father!’ she cried. ‘Shame!’

‘Enough!’ he said, as he seized her wrist so roughly that the cry of pain which involuntarily escaped her effectually checked the words in her mouth. ‘You are mad, beside yourself, a thoughtless, senseless creature whom I shall have to coerce more effectually if you do not cease your ravings. Do not force me to have recourse once again to M. Martin-Roget’s assistance to keep your undignified outbursts in check.’

The name of the man whom she had learned to hate and fear more than any other human being in the world was sufficient to restore to her that measure of self-control which had again threatened to leave her.

‘Enough indeed,’ she said more calmly; ‘the brain that could devise and carry out such infamy in cold blood is not like to be influenced by a defenceless woman’s tears. Will you at least tell me whither you are taking me?’

‘We go to a place on the coast now,’ he replied coldly, ‘the outlandish name of which has escaped me. There we embark for Holland, from whence we shall join their Royal Highnesses at Coblentz. It is at Coblentz that your marriage with M. Martin-Roget will take place, and …’

‘Stay, father,’ she broke in, speaking quite as calmly as he did, ‘ere you go any further. Understand me clearly, for I mean every word I say. In the sight of God—if not in that of the laws of France—I am the wife of Lord Anthony Dewhurst. By everything that I hold most sacred and most dear I swear to you that I will never become Martin-Roget’s wife. I would die first,’ she added with burning but resolutely suppressed passion.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Pshaw, my child,’ he said quietly, ‘many a time since the world began have women registered such solemn and sacred vows, only to break them when force of circumstance and their own good sense made them ashamed of their own folly.’

‘How little you know me, father,’ was all that she said in reply.

III

Indeed, Yvonne de Kernogan—Yvonne Dewhurst as she was now in the sight of God and men–had far too much innate dignity and self-respect to continue this discussion, seeing that in any case she was physically the weaker, and that she was absolutely helpless and defenceless in the hands of two men, one of whom—her own father–who should have been her protector, was leagued with her bitterest enemy against her.

That Martin-Roget was her enemy—aye and her father’s too—she had absolutely no doubt. Some obscure yet keen instinct was working in her heart, urging her to mistrust him even more wholly than she had done before. Just now, when he laid ruthless hands on her and carried her, inert and half-swooning, back into the coach, and she lay with closed eyes, her very soul in revolt against this contact with him, against the feel of his arms around her, a vague memory surcharged with horror and with dread stirred within her brain: and over the vista of the past few years she looked back upon an evening in the autumn—a rough night with the wind from the Atlantic blowing across the lowlands of Poitou and soughing in the willow trees that bordered the Loire—she seemed to hear the tumultuous cries of enraged human creatures dominating the sound of the gale, she felt the crowd of evil-intentioned men around the closed carriage wherein she sat, calm and unafraid. Darkness then was all around her. She could not see. She could only hear and feel. And she heard the carriage door being wrenched open, and she felt the cold breath of the wind upon her cheek, and also the hot breath of a man in a passion of fury and of hate.

She had seen nothing then, and mercifully semi-unconsciousness had dulled her aching senses, but even now her soul shrunk with horror at the vague remembrance of that ghostlike form—the spirit of hate and of revenge—of its rough arms encircling her shoulders, its fingers under her chin—and then that awful, loathsome, contaminating kiss which she thought then would have smirched her for ever. It had taken all the pure, sweet kisses of a brave and loyal man whom she loved and revered, to make her forget that hideous, indelible stain: and in the arms of her dear milor she had forgotten that one terrible moment, when she had felt that the embrace of death must be more endurable than that of this unknown and hated man.

It was the memory of that awful night which had come back to her as in a flash while she lay passive and broken in Martin-Roget’s arms. Of course for the moment she had no thought of connecting the rich banker from Brest, the enthusiastic royalist and ιmigrι, with one of those turbulent, uneducated peasant lads who had attacked her carriage that night: all that she was conscious of was that she was outraged by his presence, just as she had been outraged then, and that the contact of his hands, of his arms, was absolutely unendurable.

To fight against the physical power which held her a helpless prisoner in the hands of the enemy was sheer impossibility. She knew that, and was too proud to make feeble and futile efforts which could only end in defeat and further humiliation. She felt hideously wretched and lonely—thoughts of her husband, who at this hour was still serenely unconscious of the terrible catastrophe which had befallen him, brought tears of acute misery to her eyes. What would he do when—to-morrow perhaps–he realized that his bride had been stolen from him, that he had been fooled and duped as she had been too. What could he do when he knew?

She tried to solace her own soul-agony by thinking of his influential friends who, of course, would help him as soon as they knew. There was that mysterious and potent friend of whom he spoke so little, who already had warned him of coming danger and urged on the secret marriage which should have proved a protection. There was Sir Percy Blakeney, of whom he spoke much, who was enormously rich, independent, the most intimate friend of the Regent himself. There was…

But what was the use of clinging even for one instant to those feeble cords of Hope’s broken lyre. By the time her dear lord knew that she was gone, she would be on the high seas, far out of his reach.