Lord Tony's Wife (34 page)

“Citizen Carrier!” cried Chauvelin at the top of his voice, trying to dominate the hubbub, “one minute…I have excellent news for you…the English spy…”

“Curse you for a set of blundering fools,” came with a husky cry from out the darkness, “you have let that English devil escape…I knew it…I knew it…the assassin is at large…the murderer…my coach at once…my coach…Lalouλt—do not leave me.”

Chauvelin had by this time succeeded in pushing his way to the forefront of the crowd: Martin-Roget, tall and powerful, had effectually made a way for him. Through the dense gloom he could see the misshapen form of the proconsul, wildly gesticulating with one arm and with the other clinging convulsively to young Lalouλt who already had his hand on the handle of the carriage door.

With a quick, resolute gesture Chauvelin stepped between the door and the advancing proconsul.

“Citizen Carrier,” he said with calm determination, “on my oath there is no cause for alarm. Your life is absolutely safe…I entreat you to return to your lodgings…”

To emphasize his words he had stretched out a hand and firmly grasped the proconsul’s coat sleeve. This gesture, however, instead of pacifying the apparently terror-stricken maniac, seemed to have the effect of further exasperating his insensate fear. With a loud oath he tore himself free from Chauvelin’s grasp.

“Ten thousand devils,” he cried hoarsely, “who is this fool who dares to interfere with me? Stand aside man…stand aside or…”

And before Chauvelin could utter another word or Martin-Roget come to his colleague’s rescue, there came the sudden sharp report of a pistol; the horses reared, the crowd was scattered in every direction, Chauvelin was knocked over by a smart blow on the head whilst a vigorous drag on his shoulder alone saved him from falling under the wheels of the coach.

Whilst confusion was at its highest, the carriage door was closed to with a bang and there was a loud, commanding cry hurled through the window at the coachman on his box.

“En avant, Citizen Coachman! Drive for your life! through the Savenay gate. The English assassins are on our heels.”

The postilion cracked his whip. The horses, maddened by the report, by the pushing, jostling crowd and the confused cries and screams around, plunged forward, wild with excitement. Their hoofs clattered on the hard road. Some of the crowd ran after the coach across the Place, shouting lustily: “The Proconsul! the Proconsul!”

Chauvelin—dazed and bruised—was picked up by Martin-Roget.

“The cowardly brute!” was all that he said between his teeth, “he shall rue this outrage as soon as I can give my mind to his affairs. In the meanwhile…”

The clatter of the horses’ hoofs was already dying away in the distance. For a few seconds longer the rattle of the coach was still accompanied by cries of “The Proconsul! the Proconsul!” Fleury at the bridge-head, seeing and hearing its approach, had only just time to order his Marats to stand at attention. A salvo should have been fired when the representative of the people, the high and mighty proconsul, was abroad, but there was no time for that, and the coach clattered over the bridge at breakneck speed, whilst Carrier with his head out of the window was hurling anathemas and insults at Fleury for having allowed the paid spies of that cursed British Government to threaten the life of a representative of the people.

“I go to Savenay,” he shouted just at the last, “until that assassin has been thrown in the Loire. But when I return…look to yourself, Commandant Fleury.”

Then the carriage turned down the Quai de la Fosse and a few minutes later was swallowed up by the gloom.

IV

Chauvelin, supported by Martin-Roget, was hobbling back across the Place. The crowd was still standing about, vaguely wondering why it had got so excited over the departure of the proconsul and the rattle of a coach and pair across the bridge, when on the island there was still an assassin at large—an English spy, the capture of whom would be one of the great events in the chronicles of the city of Nantes.

“I think,” said Martin-Roget, “that we may as well go to bed now, and leave the rest to Commandant Fleury. The Englishman may not be captured for some hours, and I for one am over-fatigued.”

“Then go to bed an you desire, Citizen Martin-Roget,” retorted Chauvelin dryly, “I for one will stay here until I see the Englishman in the hands of Commandant Fleury.”

“Hark,” interposed Martin-Roget abruptly. “What was that?”

Chauvelin had paused even before Martin-Roget’s restraining hand had rested on his arm. He stood still in the middle of the Place and his knees shook under him so that he nearly fell prone to the ground.

“What is it?” reiterated Martin-Roget with vague puzzlement. “It sounds like young Lalouλt’s voice.”

Chauvelin said nothing. He had forgotten his bruises: he no longer hobbled—he ran across the Place to the front of the hotel whence the voice had come which was so like that of young Lalouλt.

The youngster—it was undoubtedly he—was standing at the angle of the hotel: above him a lanthorn threw a dim circle of light on his bare head with its mass of dark curls, and on a small knot of idlers with two or three of the town guard amongst them. The first words spoken by him which Chauvelin distinguished quite clearly were:

“You are all mad…or else drunk…The citizen proconsul is upstairs in his room…He has just sent me down to hear what news there is of the English spies…”

V

No one made reply. It seemed as if some giant and spectral hand had passed over this mass of people and with its magic touch had stilled their turbulent passions, silenced their imprecations and cooled their ardour—and left naught but a vague fear, a subtle sense of awe as when something unexplainable and supernatural has manifested itself before the eyes of men.

From far away the roll of coach-wheels rapidly disappearing in the distance alone broke the silence of the night.

“Is there no one here who will explain what all this means?” queried young Lalouλt, who alone had remained self-assured and calm, for he alone knew nothing of what had happened. “Citizen Fleury, are you there?”

Then as once again he received no reply, he added peremptorily:

“Hey! some one there! Are you all louts and oafs that not one of you can speak?”

A timid voice from the rear ventured on explanation.

“The citizen proconsul was here a moment ago…We all saw him, and you, Citizen Lalouλt, were with him…”

An imprecation from young Lalouλt silenced the timid voice for the nonce…and then another resumed the halting narrative:

“We all could have sworn that we saw you, Citizen Lalouλt, also the citizen proconsul…He got into the coach with you…you…that is…they have driven off…”

“This is some awful and treacherous hoax,” cried the youngster, now in a towering passion; “the citizen proconsul is upstairs in bed, I tell you…and I have only just come out of the hotel…! Name of a name of a dog! am I standing here or am I not?”

Then suddenly he bethought himself of the many events of the day which had culminated in this gigantic feat of legerdemain.

“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 look-out for a small, wizened figure of a man—the man with the pale, keen eyes who had failed to recognize in the pseudo Paul Friche, in the dirty, out-at-elbows sans-culotte—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-Lalouλt 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 self-same 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 Ste-Anne. The taller and younger 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 Monsieur le Duc de Kernogan will rest in peace in hallowed ground. Monsieur le Curι 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 Monsieur le Duc immediately,” admonished the younger man, “and apprise Monsieur le Curι of what has happened.”

“Aye! aye! I’ll do that, milor’, within the hour. Though Monsieur 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 Mademoiselle Yvonne in the first pony-cart she ever possessed. I drove her—ah! that was a bitter day!—her and Monsieur le Duc when they left Kernogan never to return. I drove Mademoiselle 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 chβteau. That was the beginning of things, milor’. God alone knows what has happened to Pierre Adet. His father Jean was hanged by order of Monsieur le Duc. Now monsieur 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 Mademoiselle Yvonne.”

“Mademoiselle 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 Monsieur 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 to-night. 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 fκtes 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 faithful handmaiden, and the excitement of the chase after the other quarry had fortunately drawn every possible enemy from his track. He had set his teeth and accomplished his task, and even the deathly anxiety for the wife whom he idolized had been crushed, under the iron heel of a grim resolve. Now his work was done, and from far away he heard the rattle of the coach-wheels which were bringing his beloved nearer and nearer to him.

Five minutes longer and the coach came to a halt. A cheery voice called out gaily:

“Tony! are you there?”

“Percy!” exclaimed the young man.

Already he knew that all was well. The gallant leader, the loyal and loving friend, had taxed every resource of a boundlessly fertile brain in order to win yet another wreath of immortal laurels for the League which he commanded, and the very tone of his merry voice proclaimed the triumph which had crowned his daring scheme.

The next moment Yvonne lay in the arms of her dear milor’. He had stepped into the carriage, even while Sir Percy climbed nimbly on the box and took the reins from the bewildered coachman’s hands.

“Citizen Proconsul…” murmured the latter, who of a truth thought that he was dreaming.

“Get off the box, you old noodle,” quoth the pseudo-proconsul peremptorily. “Thou and thy friend the postilion will remain here in the road, and on the morrow you’ll explain to whomsoever it may concern that the English spy made a murderous attack on you both and left you half dead outside the postern gate of the cemetery of Ste-Anne. Here,” he added as he threw a purse down to the two men—who, half-dazed and overcome by superstitious fear, had indeed scrambled down, one from his box, the other from his horse—“there’s a hundred francs for each of you in there, and mind you drink to the health of the English spy and the confusion of your brutish proconsul.”