The Elusive Pimpernel Baroness Orczy (read more books txt) 📖

was so close to hers, she could see a quaint little smile playing round the corners of his mouth.

“Nay, m’dear,” he said gently, “ ’tis not ten thousand lives that call to me today⁠ ⁠… only one at best.⁠ ⁠… Don’t you hate to think of that poor little old cure sitting in the midst of his ruined pride and hopes: the jewels so confidently entrusted to his care, stolen from him, he waiting, perhaps, in his little presbytery for the day when those brutes will march him to prison and to death.⁠ ⁠… Nay! I think a little sea voyage and English country air would suit the Abbé Foucquet, m’dear, and I only mean to ask him to cross the Channel with me!⁠ ⁠…”

“Percy!” she pleaded.

“Oh! I know! I know!” he rejoined with that short deprecatory sigh of his, which seemed always to close any discussion between them on that point, “you are thinking of that absurd duel⁠ ⁠…” He laughed lightly, good-humouredly, and his eyes gleamed with merriment.

“La, m’dear!” he said gaily, “will you not reflect a moment? Could I refuse the challenge before His Royal Highness and the ladies? I couldn’t.⁠ ⁠… Faith! that was it.⁠ ⁠… Just a case of couldn’t.⁠ ⁠… Fate did it all⁠ ⁠… the quarrel⁠ ⁠… my interference⁠ ⁠… the challenge.⁠ ⁠… He had planned it all of course.⁠ ⁠… Let us own that he is a brave man, seeing that he and I are not even yet for that beating he gave me on the Calais cliffs.”

“Yes! he has planned it all,” she retorted vehemently. “The quarrel tonight, your journey to France, your meeting with him face to face at a given hour and place where he can most readily, most easily close the deathtrap upon you.”

This time he broke into a laugh. A good, hearty laugh, full of the joy of living, of the madness and intoxication of a bold adventure, a laugh that had not one particle of anxiety or of tremor in it.

“Nay! m’dear!” he said, “but your ladyship is astonishing.⁠ ⁠… Close a deathtrap upon your humble servant?⁠ ⁠… Nay! the governing citizens of France will have to be very active and mighty wide-awake ere they succeed in stealing a march on me.⁠ ⁠… Zounds! but we’ll give them an exciting chase this time.⁠ ⁠… Nay! little woman, do not fear!” he said with sudden infinite gentleness, “those demmed murderers have not got me yet.”

Oh! how often she had fought with him thus: with him, the adventurer, the part of his dual nature that was her bitter enemy, and which took him, the lover, away from her side. She knew so well the finality of it all, the amazing hold which that unconquerable desire for these mad adventures had upon him. Impulsive, ardent as she was, Marguerite felt in her very soul an overwhelming fury against herself for her own weakness, her own powerlessness in the face of that which forever threatened to ruin her life and her happiness.

Yes! and his also! for he loved her! he loved her! he loved her! the thought went on hammering in her mind, for she knew of its great truth! He loved her and went away! And she, poor, puny weakling, was unable to hold him back; the tendrils which fastened his soul to hers were not so tenacious as those which made him cling to suffering humanity, over there in France, where men and women were in fear of death and torture, and looked upon the elusive and mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel as a heaven-born hero sent to save them from their doom. To them at these times his very heartstrings seemed to turn with unconquerable force, and when, with all the ardour of her own passion, she tried to play upon the cords of his love for her, he could not respond, for they⁠—the strangers⁠—had the stronger claim.

And yet through it all she knew that this love of humanity, this mad desire to serve and to help, in no way detracted from his love for her. Nay, it intensified it, made it purer and better, adding to the joy of perfect intercourse the poetic and subtle fragrance of ever-recurring pain.

But now at last she felt weary of the fight: her heart was aching, bruised and sore. An infinite fatigue seemed to weigh like lead upon her very soul. This seemed so different to any other parting, that had perforce been during the past year. The presence of Chauvelin in her house, the obvious planning of this departure for France, had filled her with a foreboding, nay, almost a certitude of a gigantic and deadly cataclysm.

Her senses began to reel; she seemed not to see anything very distinctly: even the loved form took on a strange and ghostlike shape. He now looked preternaturally tall, and there was a mist between her and him.

She thought that he spoke to her again, but she was not quite sure, for his voice sounded like some weird and mysterious echo. A bosquet of climbing heliotrope close by threw a fragrance into the evening air, which turned her giddy with its overpowering sweetness.

She closed her eyes, for she felt as if she must die, if she held them open any longer; and as she closed them it seemed to her as if he folded her in one last, long, heavenly embrace.

He felt her graceful figure swaying in his arms like a tall and slender lily bending to the wind. He saw that she was but half-conscious, and thanked heaven for this kindly solace to his heartbreaking farewell.

There was a sloping, mossy bank close by, there where the marble terrace yielded to the encroaching shrubbery: a tangle of pale pink monthly roses made a bower overhead. She was just sufficiently conscious to enable him to lead her to this soft green couch. There he laid her amongst the roses, kissed the dear, tired eyes, her hands, her lips, her tiny feet, and went.

XVI The Passport

The rhythmic clapper of oars roused Marguerite from this trance-like swoon.

In a moment she