Lord Tony’s Wife, Baroness Orczy [bill gates best books TXT] 📗

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 bloodstained 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 commonsense. 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 brutalised us. Today 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, farseeing 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 brutalise, 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 today.”

“The day is young yet,” rejoined Chauvelin. “It still hath six hours to its credit.⁠ ⁠… Six hours.⁠ ⁠… Three hundred and sixty minutes!” he continued 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 advice 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 depot tomorrow: it is overcrowded, 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