Lord Tony's Wife (23 page)

To this she made no reply, but he knew that he had his answer. Smothering a curse, he resumed after a while:

‘So you prefer to drag your father to death with you? Yet he has begged you to consider your decision and to listen to reason. He has given his consent to our marriage.’

‘Let me see my father,’ she retorted firmly, ‘and hear him say that with his own lips.’

‘Ah!’ she added quickly, for at her words Martin-Roget had turned his head away and shrugged his shoulders with well-assumed indifference, ‘you cannot and dare not let me see him. For three days now you have kept us apart and no doubt fed us both up with your lies. My father is duc de Kernogan, Marquis de Trentemoult,’ she added proudly, ‘he would far rather die side by side with his daughter than see her wedded to a criminal.’

‘And you, my girl,’ rejoined Martin-Roget coldly, ‘would you see your father branded as a malefactor, linked to a thief and sent to perish in the Loire?’

‘My father,’ she retorted, ‘will die as he has lived, a brave and honourable gentleman. The brand of a malefactor cannot cling to his name. Sorrow we are ready to endure—death is less than nothing to us—we will but follow in the footsteps of our King and of our Queen and of many whom we care for and whom you and your proconsul and your colleagues have brutally murdered. Shame cannot touch us, and our honour and our pride are so far beyond your reach that your impious and blood-stained hands can never sully them.’

She had spoken very slowly and very quietly. There were no heroics about her attitude. Even Martin-Roget—callous brute though he was—felt that she had only spoken just as she felt, and that nothing that he might say, no plea that he might urge, would ever shake her determination.

‘Then it seems to me,’ he said, ‘that I am only wasting my time by trying to make you see reason and common-sense. You look upon me as a brute. Well! perhaps I am. At any rate I am that which your father and you have made me. Four years ago, when you had power over me and over mine, you brutalized us. To-day we—the people—are your masters and we make you suffer, not for all—that were impossible—but for part of what you made us suffer. That, after all, is only bare justice. By making you my wife I would have saved you from death—not from humiliation, for that you must endure, and at my hands in a full measure—but I would have made you my wife because I still have pleasant recollections of that kiss which I snatched from you on that never-to-be-forgotten night and in the darkness—a kiss for which you would gladly have seen me hang then, if you could have laid hands on me.’

He paused, trying to read what was going on behind those fine eyes of hers, with their vacant, far-seeing gaze which seemed like another barrier between her and him. At this rough allusion to that moment of horror and of shame, she had not moved a muscle, nor did her gaze lose its fixity.

He laughed.

‘It is an unpleasant recollection, eh, my proud lady? The first kiss of passion was not implanted on your exquisite lips by that fine gentleman whom you deemed worthy of your hand and your love, but by Pierre Adet, the miller’s son, what? a creature not quite so human as your horse or your pet dog. Neither you nor I are like to forget that methinks…’

Yvonne vouchsafed no reply to the taunt, and for a moment there was silence in the room, until Chauvelin’s thin, suave voice broke in quite gently:

‘Do not lose your patience with the wench, citizen Martin-Roget. Your time is too precious to be wasted in useless recriminations.’

‘I have finished with her,’ retorted the other sullenly. ‘She shall be dealt with now as I think best. I agree with citizen Carrier. He is right after all. To the Loire with the lot of that foul brood!’

‘Nay!’ here rejoined Chauvelin with placid urbanity, ‘are you not a little harsh, citizen, with our fair Yvonne? Remember! Women have moods and megrims. What they indignantly refuse to yield to us one day, they will grant with a smile the next. Our beautiful Yvonne is no exception to this rule, I’ll warrant.’

Even while he spoke he threw a glance of warning on his colleague. There was something enigmatic in his manner at this moment, in the strange suavity wherewith he spoke these words of conciliation and of gentleness. Martin-Roget was as usual ready with an impatient retort. He was in a mood to bully and to brutalize, to heap threat upon threat, to win by frightfulness that which he could not gain by persuasion. Perhaps that at this moment he desired Yvonne de Kernogan for wife, more even than he desired her death. At any rate his headstrong temper was ready to chafe against any warning or advice. But once again Chauvelin’s stronger mentality dominated over his less resolute colleague. Martin-Roget—the fowler—was in his turn caught in the net of a keener snarer than himself, and whilst—with the obstinacy of the weak—he was making mental resolutions to rebuke Chauvelin for his interference later on, he had already fallen in with the latter’s attitude.

‘The wench has had three whole days wherein to alter her present mood,’ he said more quietly, ‘and you know yourself, citizen, that the proconsul will not wait after to-day.’

‘The day is young yet,’ rejoined Chauvelin. ‘It still hath six hours to its credit…Six hours…Three hundred and sixty minutes!’ he contined with a pleasant little laugh; ‘time enough for a woman to change her mind three hundred and sixty times. Let me advise you, citizen, to leave the wench to her own meditations for the present, and I trust that she will accept the advise of a man who has a sincere regard for her beauty and her charms and who is old enough to be her father, and seriously think the situation over in a conciliatory spirit. M. le duc de Kernogan will be grateful to her, for of a truth he is not over happy either at the moment…and will be still less happy in the dιpτt to-morrow: it is over-crowded, and typhus, I fear me, is rampant among the prisoners. He has, I am convinced—in spite of what the citizeness says to the contrary—a rooted objection to being hurled into the Loire, or to be arraigned before the bar of the Convention, not as an aristocrat and a traitor but as an unit of an undesirable herd of criminals sent up to Paris for trial, by an anxious and harried proconsul. There! there!’ he added benignly, ‘we will not worry our fair Yvonne any longer, will we, citizen? I think she has grasped the alternative and will soon realize that marriage with an honourable patriot is not such an untoward fate after all.’

‘And now, citizen Martin-Roget,’ he concluded, ‘I pray you allow me to take my leave of the fair lady and to give you the wise recommendation to do likewise. She will be far better alone for awhile. Night brings good counsel, so they say.’

He watched the girl keenly while he spoke. Her impassivity had not deserted her for a single moment: but whether her calmness was of hope or of despair he was unable to decide. On the whole he thought it must be the latter: hope would have kindled a spark in those dark, purple-rimmed eyes, it would have brought moisture to the lips, a tremor to the hand.

The Scarlet Pimpernel was in Nantes—that fact was established beyond a doubt—but Chauvelin had come to the conclusion that so far as Yvonne Dewhurst herself was concerned, she knew nothing of the mysterious agencies that were working on her behalf.

Chauvelin’s hand closed with a nervous contraction over the packet of papers in his pocket. Something of the secret of that enigmatic English adventurer lay revealed within its folds. Chauvelin had not yet had the opportunity of examining them: the interview with Yvonne had been the most important business for the moment.

From somewhere in the distance a city clock struck six. The afternoon was wearing on. The keenest brain in Europe was on the watch to drag one woman and one man from the deadly trap which had been so successfully set for them. A few hours more and Chauvelin in his turn would be pitting his wits against the resources of that intricate brain, and he felt like a war-horse scenting blood and battle. He was aching to get to work—aching to form his plans—to lay his snares—to dispose his trap so that the noble English quarry should not fail to be caught within its meshes.

He gave a last look to Yvonne, who was still sitting quite impassive, gazing through the squalid walls into some beautiful distance, the reflection of which gave to her pale, wan face an added beauty.

‘Let us go, citizen Martin-Roget,’ he said peremptorily. ‘There is nothing else that we can do here.’

And Martin-Roget, the weaker morally of the two, yielded to the stronger personality of his colleague. He would have liked to stay on for awhile, to gloat for a few moments longer over the helplessness of the woman who to him represented the root of every evil which had ever befallen him and his family. But Chauvelin commanded and he felt impelled to obey. He gave one long, last look on Yvonne—a look that was as full of triumph as of mockery—he looked round the four dank walls, the unglazed window, the broken pitcher, the mouldy bread. Revenge was of a truth the sweetest emotion of the human heart. Pierre Adet—son of the miller who had been hanged by orders of the Duc de Kernogan for a crime which he had never committed—would not at this moment have changed places with Fortune’s Benjamin.

IV

Downstairs in Louise Adet’s kitchen, Martin-Roget seized his colleague by the arm.

‘Sit down a moment, citizen,’ he said persuasively, ‘and tell me what you think of it all.’

Chauvelin sat down at the other’s invitation. All his movements were slow, deliberate, perfectly calm.

‘I think,’ he said drily, ‘as far as your marriage with the wench is concerned, that you are beaten, my friend.’

‘Tshaw!’ The exclamation, raucous and surcharged with hate came from Louise Adet. She, too, like Pierre—more so than Pierre mayhap—had cause to hate the Kernogans. She, too, like Pierre had lived the last three days in the full enjoyment of the thought that Fate and Chance were about to level things at last between herself and those detested aristos. Silent and sullen she was shuffling about in the room, among her pots and pans, but she kept an eye upon her brother’s movements and an ear on what he said. Men were apt to lose grit where a pretty wench was concerned. It takes a woman’s rancour and a woman’s determination to carry a scheme of vengeance against another to a successful end.

Martin-Roget rejoined more calmly:

‘I knew that she would still be obstinate,’ he said. ‘If I forced her into a marriage, which I have the right to do, she might take her own life and make me look a fool. So I don’t want to do that. I believe in the persuasiveness of the Rat Mort to-night,’ he added with a cynical laugh, ‘and if that fails…Well! I was never really in love with the fair Yvonne, and now she has even ceased to be desirable…If the Rat Mort fails to act on her sensibilities as I would wish, I can easily console myself by following Carrier’s herd to Paris. Louise shall come with me—eh, little sister?—and we’ll give ourselves the satisfaction of seeing M. le duc de Kernogan and his exquisite daughter stand in the felon’s dock—tried for malpractices and for evil living. We’ll see them branded as convicts and packed off like so much cattle to Cayenne. That will be a sight,’ he concluded with a deep sigh of satisfaction, ‘which will bring rest to my soul.’

He paused: his face looked sullen and evil under the domination of that passion which tortured him.

Louise Adet had shuffled up close to her brother. In one hand she held the wooden spoon wherewith she had been stirring the soup: with the other she brushed away the dark, lank hair which hung in strands over her high, pale forehead. In appearance she was a woman immeasurably older than her years. Her face had the colour of yellow parchment, her skin was stretched tightly over her high cheekbones—her lips were colourless and her eyes large, wide-open, were pale in hue and circled with red. Just now a deep frown of puzzlement between her brows added a sinister expression to her cadaverous face:

‘The Rat Mort?’ she queried in that tired voice of hers. ‘Cayenne? What is all that about?’

‘A splendid scheme of Carrier’s, my Louise,’ replied Martin-Roget airily. ‘We convey the Kernogan woman to the Rat Mort. To-night a descent will be made on that tavern of ill-fame by a company of Marats and every man, woman and child within it will be arrested and sent to Paris as undesirable inhabitants of this most moral city: in Paris they will be tried as malefactors or evil-doers—cut throats, thieves, what? and deported as convicts to Cayenne, or else sent to the guillotine. The Kernogans among that herd! What sayest thou to that, little sister? Thy father, thy lover, hung as thieves! M. le Duc and Mademoiselle branded as convicts! ‘Tis pleasant to think on, eh?’

Louise made no reply. She stood looking at her brother, her pale, red-rimmed eyes seemed to drink in every word that he uttered, while her bony hand wandered mechanically across and across her forehead as if in a pathetic endeavour to clear the brain from everything save of the satisfying thoughts which this prospect of revenge had engendered.

Chauvelin’s gentle voice broke in on her meditations.

‘In the meanwhile,’ he said placidly, ‘remember my warning, citizen Martin-Roget. There are passing clever and mighty agencies at work, even at this hour, to wrest your prey from you. How will you convey the wench to the Rat Mort? Carrier has warned you of spies—but I have warned you against a crowd of English adventurers far more dangerous than an army of spies. Three pairs of eyes—probably more, and one pair the keenest in Europe—will be on the watch to seize upon the woman and to carry her off under your very nose.’

Martin-Roget uttered a savage oath.

‘That brute Carrier has left me in the lurch,’ he said roughly. ‘I don’t believe in your nightmares and your English adventurers, still it would have been better if I could have had the woman conveyed to the tavern under armed escort.’

‘Armed escort has been denied you, and anyway it would not be much use. You and I, citizen Martin-Roget, must act independently of Carrier. Your friends down there,’ he added, indicating the street with a jerk of the head, ‘must redouble their watchfulness. The village lads of Vertou are of a truth no match intellectually with our English adventurers, but they have vigorous fists in case there is an attack on the wench while she walks across to the Rat Mort.’