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

with vanity. He always gloried in the atrocities which he committed, and though he professed to look with contempt on every one of his colleagues, he was always glad of an opportunity to display his inventive powers before them, and to obtain their fulsome eulogy.

“I know well enough what they talk about in Paris,” he said, “but I have an answer⁠—a substantial, definite answer for all their rubbish. Dignity of the Republic? Bah! Impartial justice? ’Tis force, strength, Spartan vigour that we want⁠ ⁠… and I’ll show them.⁠ ⁠… Listen to my plan, citizen Martin-Roget, and see how it will work in with yours. My idea is to collect together all the most disreputable and notorious evildoers of this city⁠ ⁠… there are plenty in the entrepôt at the present moment, and there are plenty more still at large in the streets of Nantes⁠—thieves, malefactors, forgers of State bonds, assassins and women of evil fame⁠ ⁠… and to send them in a batch to Paris to appear before the Committee of Public Safety, whilst I will send to my colleagues there a letter couched in terms of gentle reproach: ‘See!’ I shall say, ‘what I have to contend with in Nantes. See! the moral pestilence that infests the city. These evildoers are but a few among the hundreds and thousands of whom I am vainly trying to purge this city which you have entrusted to my care!’ They won’t know how to deal with the rabble,” he continued with his harsh strident laugh. “They may send them to the guillotine wholesale or deport them to Cayenne, and they will have to give them some semblance of a trial in any case. But they will have to admit that my severe measures are justified, and in future, I imagine, they will leave me more severely alone.”

“If as you say,” urged Martin-Roget, “the National Convention give your crowd a trial, you will have to produce some witnesses.”

“So I will,” retorted Carrier cynically. “So I will. Have I not said that I will round up all the most noted evildoers in the town? There are plenty of them I assure you. Lately, my Company Marat have not greatly troubled about them. After Savenay there was such a crowd of rebels to deal with, there was no room in our prisons for malefactors as well. But we can easily lay our hands on a couple of hundred or so, and members of the municipality or of the district council, or tradespeople of substance in the city will only be too glad to be rid of them, and will testify against those that were actually caught red-handed. Not one but has suffered from the pestilential rabble that has infested the streets at night, and lately I have been pestered with complaints of all these night-birds⁠—men and women and⁠ ⁠…”

Suddenly he paused. He had caught Martin-Roget’s feverish gaze fixed excitedly upon him. Whereupon he leaned back in his chair, threw his head back and broke into loud and immoderate laughter.

“By the devil and all his myrmidons, citizen!” he said, as soon as he had recovered his breath, “meseems you have tumbled to my meaning as a pig into a heap of garbage. Is not ten thousand francs far too small a sum to pay for such a perfect realisation of all your dreams? We’ll send the Kernogan girl and her father to Paris with the herd, what?⁠ ⁠… I promise you that such filth and mud will be thrown on them and on their precious name that no one will care to bear it for centuries to come.”

Martin-Roget of a truth had much ado to control his own excitement. As the proconsul unfolded his infamous plan, he had at once seen as in a vision the realisation of all his hopes. What more awful humiliation, what more dire disgrace could be devised for proud Kernogan and his daughter than being herded together with the vilest scum that could be gathered together among the flotsam and jetsam of the population of a seaport town? What more perfect retaliation could there be for the ignominious death of Jean Adet the miller?

Martin-Roget leaned forward in his chair. The hideous figure of Carrier was no longer hideous to him. He saw in that misshapen, gawky form the very embodiment of the god of vengeance, the wielder of the flail of retributive justice which was about to strike the guilty at last.

“You are right, citizen Carrier,” he said, and his voice was thick and hoarse with excitement. He rested his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. He hammered his nails against his teeth. “That was exactly in my mind while you spoke.”

“I am always right,” retorted Carrier loftily. “No one knows better than I do how to deal with traitors.”

“And how is the whole thing to be accomplished? The wench is in my sister’s house at present⁠ ⁠… the father is in the Rat Mort.⁠ ⁠…”

“And the Rat Mort is an excellent place.⁠ ⁠… I know of none better. It is one of the worst-famed houses in the whole of Nantes⁠ ⁠… the meeting-place of all the vagabonds, the thieves and the cutthroats of the city.”

“Yes! I know that to my cost. My sister’s house is next door to it. At night the street is not safe for decent females to be abroad: and though there is a platoon of Marats on guard at Le Bouffay close by, they do nothing to free the neighbourhood of that pest.”

“Bah!” retorted Carrier with cynical indifference, “they have more important quarry to net. Rebels and traitors swarm in Nantes, what? Commandant Fleury has had no time hitherto to waste on mere cutthroats, although I had thoughts before now of razing the place to the ground. Citizen Lamberty has his lodgings on the other side and he does nothing but complain of the brawls that go on there o’ nights. Sure it is that while a stone of the Rat Mort remains standing all the nighthawks of Nantes will congregate around