Lord Tony’s Wife Baroness Orczy (story read aloud .TXT) 📖

came a step or two closer to her, “I have waited all these years. For four years I have thought and striven and planned, planned to be even with your father and with you one day. You had fled the country⁠—like cowards, bah!⁠—ready to lend your arms to the foreigner against your own country in order to reestablish a tyrant upon the throne whom the whole of the people of France loathed and detested. You had fled, but soon I learned whither you had gone. Then I set to work to gain access to you.⁠ ⁠… I learned English.⁠ ⁠… I too went to England⁠ ⁠… under an assumed name⁠ ⁠… with the necessary introductions so as to gain a footing in the circles in which you moved. I won your father’s condescension⁠—almost his friendship!⁠ ⁠… The rich banker from Brest should be fleeced in order to provide funds for the armies that were to devastate France⁠—and the rich banker of Brest refused to be fleeced unless he was lured by the promise of Mlle. de Kernogan’s hand in marriage.”

“You need not, Monsieur,” rejoined Yvonne coldly, while Martin-Roget paused in order to draw breath, “you need not, believe me, take the trouble to recount all the machinations which you carried through in order to gain your ends. Enough that my father was so foolish as to trust you, and that we are now completely in your power, but⁠ ⁠…”

“There is no ‘but,’ ” he broke in gruffly, “you are in my power and will be made to learn the law of the talion which demands an eye for an eye, a life for a life: that is the law which the people are applying to that herd of aristos who were arrogant tyrants once and are shrinking, cowering slaves now. Oh! you were very proud that night, Mademoiselle Yvonne de Kernogan, when a few peasant lads told you some home truths while you sat disdainful and callous in your carriage, but there is one fact that you can never efface from your memory, strive how you may, and that is that for a few minutes I held you in my arms and that I kissed you, my fine lady, aye! kissed you like I would any pert kitchen wench, even I, Pierre Adet, the miller’s son.”

He drew nearer and nearer to her as he spoke; she, leaning against the taffrail, could not retreat any further from him. He laughed.

“If you fall over into the water, I shall not complain,” he said, “it will save our proconsul the trouble, and the guillotine some work. But you need not fear. I am not trying to kiss you again. You are nothing to me, you and your father, less than nothing. Your death in misery and wretchedness is all I want, whether you find a dishonoured grave in the Loire or by suicide I care less than nothing. But let me tell you this,” he added, and his voice came now like a hissing sound through his set teeth, “that there is no intention on my part to make glorious martyrs of you both. I dare say you have heard some pretty stories over in England of aristos climbing the steps of the guillotine with an ecstatic look of martyrdom upon their face: and tales of the tumbrils of Paris laden with men and women going to their death and shouting ‘God save the King’ all the way. That is not the sort of paltry revenge which would satisfy me. My father was hanged by yours as a malefactor⁠—hanged, I say, like a common thief! he, a man who had never wronged a single soul in the whole course of his life, who had been an example of fine living, of hard work, of noble courage through many adversities. My mother was left a widow⁠—not the honoured widow of an honourable man⁠—but a pariah, the relict of a malefactor who had died of the hangman’s rope⁠—my sister was left an orphan⁠—dishonoured⁠—without hope of gaining the love of a respectable man. All that I and my family owe to ci-devant M. le duc de Kernogan, and therefore I tell you, that both he and his daughter shall not die like martyrs but like malefactors too⁠—shamed⁠—dishonoured⁠—loathed and execrated even by their own kindred! Take note of that, M. le duc de Kernogan! You have sown shame, shame shall you reap! and the name of which you are so proud will be dragged in the mire until it has become a byword in the land for all that is despicable and base.”

Perhaps at no time of his life had Martin-Roget, erstwhile Pierre Adet, spoken with such an intensity of passion, even though he was at all times turbulent and a ready prey to his own emotions. But all that he had kept hidden in the inmost recesses of his heart, ever since as a young stripling he had chafed at the social conditions of his country, now welled forth in that wild harangue. For the first time in his life he felt that he was really master of those who had once despised and oppressed him. He held them and was the arbiter of their fate. The sense of possession and of power had gone to his head like wine: he was intoxicated with his own feeling of triumphant revenge, and this impassioned rhetoric flowed from his mouth like the insentient babble of a drunken man.

The duc de Kernogan, sitting on the coil of cordages with his elbows on his knees and his head buried in his hands, had no thought of breaking in on the other man’s ravings. The bitterness of remorse paralysed his thinking faculties. Martin-Roget’s savage words struck upon his senses like blows from a sledgehammer. He knew that nothing but his own folly was the cause of Yvonne’s and his own misfortune. Yvonne had been safe from all evil fortune under the protection of her fine young English husband; he⁠—the father who should have been her chief protector⁠—had dragged her