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

Then suddenly he bethought himself of the many events of the day which had culminated in this gigantic feat of leger-de-main.

“Chauvelin!” he exclaimed. “Where in the name of h‑ll is citizen Chauvelin?”

But Chauvelin for the moment could nowhere be found. Dazed, half-unconscious, wholly distraught, he had fled from the scene of his discomfiture as fast as his trembling knees would allow. Carrier searched the city for him high and low, and for days afterwards the soldiers of the Compagnie Marat gave aristos and rebels a rest: they were on the lookout for a small, wizened figure of a man⁠—the man with the pale, keen eyes who had failed to recognise in the pseudo-Paul Friche, in the dirty, out-at-elbows sansculotte⁠—the most exquisite dandy that had ever graced the salons of Bath and of London: they were searching for the man with the acute and sensitive brain who had failed to scent in the pseudo-Carrier and the pseudo-Lalouët his old and arch enemy Sir Percy Blakeney and the charming wife of my lord Anthony Dewhurst.

A quarter of an hour later citizen-commandant Fleury was at last ushered into the presence of the proconsul and received upon his truly innocent head the full torrent of the despot’s wrath. But Martin-Roget had listened to the counsels of prudence: for obvious reasons he desired to avoid any personal contact for the moment with Carrier, whom fear of the English spies had made into a more abject and more craven tyrant than ever before. At the same time he thought it wisest to try and pacify the brute by sending him the ten thousand francs⁠—the bribe agreed upon for his help in the undertaking which had culminated in such a disastrous failure.

At the selfsame hour whilst Carrier⁠—fuming and swearing⁠—was for the hundredth time uttering that furious “How?” which for the hundredth time had remained unanswered, two men were taking leave of one another at the small postern gate which gives on the cemetery of St. Anne. The taller and younger one of the two had just dropped a heavy purse into the hand of the other. The latter stooped and kissed the kindly hand.

“Milor,” he said, “I swear to you most solemnly that M. le duc de Kernogan will rest in peace in hallowed ground. M. le curé de Vertou⁠—ah! he is a saint and a brave man, milor⁠—comes over whenever he can prudently do so and reads the offices for the dead⁠—over those who have died as Christians, and there is a piece of consecrated ground out here in the open which those fiends of Terrorists have not discovered yet.”

“And you will bury M. le duc immediately,” admonished the younger man, “and apprise M. le curé of what has happened.”

“Aye! aye! I’ll do that, milor, within the hour. Though M. le duc was never a very kind master to me in the past, I cannot forget that I served him and his family for over thirty years as coachman. I drove Mlle. Yvonne in the first pony-cart she ever possessed. I drove her⁠—ah! that was a bitter day!⁠—her and M. le duc when they left Kernogan never to return. I drove Mlle. Yvonne on that memorable night when a crowd of miserable peasants attacked her coach, and that brute Pierre Adet started to lead a rabble against the château. That was the beginning of things, milor. God alone knows what has happened to Pierre Adet. His father Jean was hanged by order of M. le duc. Now M. le duc is destined to lie in a forgotten grave. I serve this abominable Republic by digging graves for her victims. I would be happier, I think, if I knew what had become of Mlle. Yvonne.”

“Mlle. Yvonne is my wife, old friend,” said the younger man softly. “Please God she has years of happiness before her, if I succeed in making her forget all that she has suffered.”

“Amen to that, milor!” rejoined the man fervently. “Then I pray you tell the noble lady to rest assured. Jean-Marie⁠—her old coachman whom she used to trust implicitly in the past⁠—will see that M. le duc de Kernogan is buried as a gentleman and a Christian should be.”

“You are not running too great a risk by this, I hope, my good Jean-Marie,” quoth Lord Tony gently.

“No greater risk, milor,” replied Jean-Marie earnestly, “than the one which you ran by carrying my old master’s dead body on your shoulders through the streets of Nantes.”

“Bah! that was simple enough,” said the younger man, “the hue and cry is after higher quarry tonight. Pray God the hounds have not run the noble game to earth.”

Even as he spoke there came from far away through the darkness the sound of a fast trotting pair of horses and the rumble of coach-wheels on the unpaved road.

“There they are, thank God!” exclaimed Lord Tony, and the tremor in his voice alone betrayed the torturing anxiety which he had been enduring, ever since he had seen the last both of his adored young wife and of his gallant chief in the squalid taproom of the Rat Mort.

With the dead body of Yvonne’s father on his back he had quietly worked his way out of the tavern in the wake of his chief. He had his orders, and for the members of that gallant League of the Scarlet Pimpernel there was no such word as “disobedience” and no such word as “fail.” Through the darkness and through the tortuous streets of Nantes Lord Anthony Dewhurst⁠—the young and wealthy exquisite, the hero of an hundred fêtes and galas in Bath, in London⁠—staggered under the weight of a burden imposed upon him only by his loyalty and a noble sense of self-prescribed discipline⁠—and that burden the dead body of the man who had done him an unforgivable wrong. Without a thought of revolt he had obeyed⁠—and risked his life and worse in the obedience.

The darkness of the night was his