Pimpernel and Rosemary, Baroness Orczy [i have read the book a hundred times .txt] 📗

A tall, ragged, uncouth, unshaved creature sauntered into the room, with hands in pockets and a chawed cigar stump in the corner of his mouth. Strangely enough the elegant high-bred M. de Kervoisin received this extraordinary visitor with the utmost courtesy. He rose to greet him, shook him warmly by the hand, offered him a chair, coffee, liqueurs, cigarettes. The newcomer declined everything except the armchair, into which he threw himself with obvious satisfaction.

“Tired, my friend?” M. de Kervoisin queried amiably.

“Of course,” the other replied curtly. “I have been up nearly two hours.”

“The want of sleep,” M. de Kervoisin murmured with an engaging smile. Then he added drily: “And I suppose some emotion⁠ ⁠…”

“Emotion?” the other broke in with a harsh laugh. “None, I assure you, save what is pleasurable.”

“What? To see a woman shot?”

He who went by the strange appellation of Number Ten threw aside the chawed stump of his cigar, then he carefully selected a cigarette from M. de Kervoisin’s case, and lit it leisurely before he replied:

“Yes, my friend⁠ ⁠… to see a woman shot. Have you never seen a human creature shot or hung?”

“No, never!” M. de Kervoisin replied with a shudder. “And I hope I never may.”

“It is a thrill well worth experiencing,” the other remarked and blew rings of cigarette smoke through his pursed lips. “Yes,” he went on drily, “well worth experiencing.”

“Ah!” M. de Kervoisin rejoined with a sigh, “you English are astonishing.”

“Yes, I dare say we seem so to you,” Number Ten retorted. “But we do not shoot women.”

“So I understand. The danger of spies is not quite so acute with you as it is with us; and this woman was really dangerous.”

“She was dangerous because she was so extraordinarily clever. In all my experience I never came across anything quite so ingenious as the way she went to work.”

“She worked from the British aerodrome, I think you told me, behind Guillaumet?”

“And calculated that out of every half-dozen English machines that went up, at least three would come down behind the German lines: so she inserted all the information she could get in the linings of the airmen’s tunics. A clever idea,” Number Ten added thoughtfully, “and in the end I only discovered the trick by accident.”

He smiled, and stared for a second straight out before him, and as he did so memory brought back vividly the picture of the tumble-down house at Guillaumet, and Alice Gerbier sitting there, stitching, stitching with the pile of tunics before her, and he himself⁠—disguised as a loafer, commonly called Lucien l’Américain, for no particular reason, as he certainly was not American⁠—hanging round the woman for weeks, vaguely suspecting at first, then certain, then wondering how the trick was done, the clever trick whereby so much valuable information was conveyed to the Germans, information that could only have been obtained in the neighbourhood of the English aerodrome. And he saw himself, the spy-tracker, the secret-service agent, carefully setting the trap which had ensnared so many women ever since the world began, the trap set with a bait to lure a woman’s vanity, and an old maid’s passionate longing for love. And to these memory pictures another now was added, the picture of Alice Gerbier in the early dawn in the prison yard of Lille, with her back to the wall, and a handkerchief over her eyes, and a platoon of soldiers with rifles raised. And gradually as these pictures passed before his mind’s eye, became strangely vivid and then passed by again, the man’s expressive face became hideous in its aspect of ruthless cruelty. The eyes narrowed till they were mere slits, the lips curled up over the gums displaying a row of teeth pointed and sharp as those of a wolf.

A discreet cough from M. de Kervoisin roused him from his meditation.

“You are certainly a prince amongst secret service agents, my friend,” M. de Kervoisin said suavely. “I don’t know what we should do without you. But Alice Gerbier certainly represents your crowning triumph.”

Number Ten gave a harsh laugh.

“It certainly was a thrill,” he said coolly, “well worth experiencing.”

To Peter Blakeney, Rosemary Fowkes’ engagement to his friend Tarkington seemed not only incredible but impossible. The end of the world! Death! Annihilation! Hell! Anything!

But it could not be true.

He was playing at Lord’s that day; Tarkington told him the news at the luncheon interval, and Peter had thought for the moment that for once in his life Tarkington must be drunk. But Tarkington looked just as he always did⁠—grave, impassive, and wonderfully kind. Indeed, he seemed specially kind just then. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps Rosemary had told him. Women were so queer. Perhaps she did tell Tarkington that he, Peter, had once been fool enough to⁠—

Anyway, Tarkington was sober, and very grave and kind, and he told Peter in his quiet, unemotional way that he considered himself the happiest man on God’s earth. Of course he was, if Rosemary⁠—But it was impossible. Impossible! Impossible!!

That afternoon Peter hit many boundaries, and at the end of play was 148 not out.

In the evening he went to the Five Arts’ Ball at the Albert Hall. He knew that Rosemary would be there; he had designed the dress she would be wearing, and Tarkington told him, sometime during that afternoon, that he was taking his fiancée to the ball.

His fiancée! Dear old Tarkington! So kind, so unemotional! Rosemary’s husband presently! Ye gods!

At the Albert Hall ball Peter wore that beautiful Hungarian national dress that had belonged to his grandfather, a wonderful dress of semi-barbaric splendour, with the priceless fifteenth-century jewellery which he had inherited from his mother⁠—the buttons, the sword-belt, the clasp for the mantle⁠—they had been in the Heves family ever since it was fashioned by Florentine workmen imported into Hungary by a medieval queen. Peter dressed himself with the greatest care. If a thing was worth doing at all, it was worth doing well, and Rosemary had said once that she would like