Clementina by A. E. W. Mason (rocket ebook reader txt) 📖

about the Caprara Palace when he handed the passport to Charles Wogan at Schlestadt. Wogan was sitting propped up with pillows in a chair, and he asked Gaydon many questions of the news at Rome, and how the King bore himself.

"The King was not in the best of spirits," said Gaydon.

"With this," cried Wogan, flourishing the passport, "we'll find a means to hearten him."

Gaydon filled a pipe and lighted it.

"Will you tell me, Wogan," he asked,—"I am by nature curious,—was it the King who proposed this enterprise to you, or was it you who proposed it to the King?"

[pg 146]

The question had an extraordinary effect. Wogan was startled out of his chair.

"What do you mean?" he exclaimed fiercely. There was something more than fierceness in the words,—an accent of fear, it almost seemed to Gaydon. There was a look almost of fear in his eyes, as though he had let some appalling secret slip. Gaydon stared at him in wonder, and Wogan recovered himself with a laugh. "Faith," said he, "it is a question to perplex a man. I misdoubt but we both had the thought about the same time. 'Wogan,' said he, 'there's the Princess with a chain on her leg, so to speak,' and I answered him, 'A chain's a galling sort of thing to a lady's ankle.' There was little more said if I remember right."

Gaydon nodded as though his curiosity was now satisfied. Wogan's alarm was strange, no doubt, strange and unexpected like the Chevalier's visit to the Caprara Palace. Gaydon had a glimpse of dark and troubled waters, but he turned his face away. They were none of his business.

[pg 147] CHAPTER X

In an hour, however, he returned out of breath and with a face white from despair. Wogan was still writing at his table, but at his first glance towards Gaydon he started quickly to his feet, and altogether forgot to cover over his sheet of paper. He carefully shut the door.

"You have bad news," said he.

"There was never worse," answered Gaydon. He had run so fast, he was so discomposed, that he could with difficulty speak. But he gasped his bad news out in the end.

"I went to my brother major to report my return. He was entertaining his friends. He had a letter this morning from Strasbourg and he read it aloud. The letter said a rumour was running through the town that the Chevalier Wogan had already rescued the Princess and was being hotly pursued on the road to Trent."

If Wogan felt any disquietude he was careful to hide it. He sat comfortably down upon the sofa.

"I expected rumour would be busy with us," said he, "but never that it would take so favourable a shape."

"Favourable!" exclaimed Gaydon.

[pg 148]

"To be sure, for its falsity will be established to-morrow, and ridicule cast upon those who spread and believed it. False alarms are the proper strategy to conceal the real assault. The rumour does us a service. Our secret is very well kept, for here am I in Schlestadt, and people living in Schlestadt believe me on the road to Trent. I will go back with you to the major's and have a laugh at his correspondent. Courage, my friend. We will give our enemies a month. Let them cry wolf as often as they will during that month, we'll get into the fold all the more easily in the end."

Wogan took his hat to accompany Gaydon, but at that moment he heard another man stumbling in a great haste up the stairs. Misset broke into the room with a face as discomposed as Gaydon's had been.

"Here's another who has heard the same rumour," said Wogan.

"It is more than a rumour," said Misset. "It is an order, and most peremptory, from the Court of France, forbidding any officer of Dillon's regiment to be absent for more than twenty-four hours from his duties on pain of being broke. Our secret's out. That's the plain truth of the matter."

He stood by the table drumming with his fingers in a great agitation. Then his fingers stopped. He had been drumming upon Wogan's sheet of paper, and the writing on the sheet had suddenly attracted his notice. It was writing in unusually regular lines. Gaydon, arrested by Misset's [pg 149] change from restlessness to fixity, looked that way for a second, too, but he turned his head aside very quickly. Wogan's handwriting was none of his business.

"We will give them a month," said Wogan, who was conjecturing at the motive of this order from the Court of France. "No doubt we are suspected. I never had a hope that we should not be. The Court of France, you see, can do no less than forbid us, but I should not be surprised if it winks at us on the sly. We will give them a month. Colonel Lally is a friend of mine and a friend of the King. We will get an abatement of that order, so that not one of you shall be cashiered."

"I don't flinch at that," said Misset, "but the secret's out."

"Then we must use the more precautions," said Wogan. He had no doubt whatever that somehow he would bring the Princess safely out of her prison to Bologna. It could not be that she was born to be wasted. Misset, however, was not so confident upon the matter.

"A strange, imperturbable man is Charles Wogan," said he to Gaydon and O'Toole the same evening. "Did you happen by any chance to cast your eye over the paper I had my hand on?"

"I did not," said Gaydon, in a great hurry. "It was a private letter, no doubt."

"It was poetry. There's no need for you to hurry, my friend. It was more than mere poetry, it was in Latin. I read the first line on the page, [pg 150] and it ran, 'Te, dum spernit, arat novus accola; max ubi cultam—'"

Gaydon tore his arm away from Misset. "I'll hear no more of it," he cried. "Poetry is none of my business."

"There, Dick, you are wrong," said O'Toole, sententiously. Both Misset and Gaydon came to a dead stop and stared. Never had poetry so strange an advocate. O'Toole set his great legs apart and his arms akimbo. He rocked himself backwards and forwards on his heels and toes, while a benevolent smile of superiority wrinkled across his broad face from ear to ear. "Yes, I've done it," said he; "I've written poetry. It is a thing a polite gentleman should be able to do. So I did it. It wasn't in Latin, because the young lady it was written to didn't understand Latin. Her name was Lucy, and I rhymed her to 'juicy,' and the pleasure of it made her purple in the face. There were to have been four lines, but there were never more than three and a half because I could not think of a suitable rhyme to O'Toole. Lucy said she knew one, but she would never tell it me."

Wogan's poetry, however, was of quite a different kind, and had Gaydon looked at it a trifle more closely, he would have experienced some relief. It was all about the sorrows and miseries of his unfortunate race and the cruel oppression of England. England owed all its great men to Ireland and was currish enough never to acknowledge the debt. Wogan always grew melancholy and grave-faced [pg 151] on that subject when he had the leisure to be idle. He thought bitterly of the many Irish officers sent into exile and killed in the service of alien countries; his sense of injustice grew into a passionate sort of despair, and the despair tumbled out of him in sonorous Latin verse written in the Virgilian measure. He wrote a deal of it during this month of waiting, and a long while afterwards sent an extract to Dr. Swift and received the great man's compliments upon its felicity, as anyone may see for himself in the doctor's correspondence.

How the month passed for James Stuart in Rome may be partly guessed from a letter which was brought to Wogan by Michael Vezozzi, the Chevalier's body-servant.

The letter announced that King George of England had offered the Princess Clementina a dowry of £100,000 if she would marry the Prince of Baden, and that the Prince of Baden with a numerous following was already at Innspruck to prosecute his suit.

"I do not know but what her Highness," he wrote, "will receive the best consolation for her sufferings on my account if she accepts so favourable a proposal, rather than run so many hazards as she must needs do as my wife. For myself, I have been summoned most urgently into Spain and am travelling thither on the instant."

Wogan could make neither head nor tail of the letter. Why should the King go to Spain at the time when the Princess Clementina might be expected [pg 152] at Bologna? It was plain that he did not expect Wogan would succeed. He was disheartened. Wogan came to the conclusion that there was the whole meaning of the letter. He was, however, for other reasons glad to receive it.

"It is very well I have this letter," said he, "for until it came I had no scrap of writing whatever