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

have anything to do with it and I won’t have my Marats implicated in the affair either. Name of a dog! have I not told you that I am beset with spies? It would of a truth be a climax if I was denounced as having dragged aristos to a house of ill-fame and then had them arrested there as malefactors! Now out with you! I have had enough of this! If your rabble is at the Rat Mort tonight, they shall be arrested with all the other cutthroats. That is my last word. The rest is your affair. Lalouët! the door!”

And without another word, and without listening to further protests from Martin-Roget or Chauvelin, Jacques Lalouët closed the doors of the audience chamber in their face.

VII

Outside on the landing, Martin-Roget swore a violent, all comprehensive oath.

“To think that we are under the heel of that skunk!” he said.

“And that in the pursuit of our own ends we have need of his help!” added Chauvelin with a sigh.

“If it were not for that⁠ ⁠… And even now,” continued Martin-Roget moodily, “I doubt what I can do. Yvonne de Kernogan will not follow me willingly either to the Rat Mort or elsewhere, and if I am not to have her conveyed by the guard⁠ ⁠…”

He paused and swore again. His companion’s silence appeared to irritate him.

“What do you advise me to do, citizen Chauvelin?” he asked.

“For the moment,” replied Chauvelin imperturbably, “I should advise you to join me in a walk along the quay as far as Le Bouffay. I have work to see to inside the building and the northwesterly wind is sure to be of good counsel.”

An angry retort hovered on Martin-Roget’s lips, but after a second or two he succeeded in holding his irascible temper in check. He gave a quick sigh of impatience.

“Very well,” he said curtly. “Let us to Le Bouffay by all means. I have much to think on, and as you say the northwesterly wind may blow away the cobwebs which for the nonce do o’ercloud my brain.”

And the two men wrapped their mantles closely round their shoulders, for the air was keen. Then they descended the staircase of the hotel and went out into the street.

II Le Bouffay I

In the centre of the Place the guillotine stood idle⁠—the paint had worn off her sides⁠—she looked weatherbeaten and forlorn⁠—stern and forbidding still, but in a kind of sullen loneliness, with the ugly stains of crimson on her, turned to rust and grime.

The Place itself was deserted, in strange contrast to the bustle and the movement which characterised it in the days when the death of men, women and children was a daily spectacle here for the crowd. Then a constant stream of traffic, of carts and of tumbrils, of soldiers and gaffers encumbered it in every corner, now a few tumble-down booths set up against the frontage of the grim edifice⁠—once the stronghold of the Dukes of Brittany, now little else but a huge prison⁠—a few vendors and still fewer purchasers of the scanty wares displayed under their ragged awnings, one or two idlers loafing against the mud-stained walls, one or two urchins playing in the gutters were the only signs of life. Martin-Roget with his colleague Chauvelin turned into the Place from the quay⁠—they walked rapidly and kept their mantles closely wrapped under their chin, for the afternoon had turned bitterly cold. It was then close upon five o’clock⁠—a dark, moonless, starless night had set in with only a suspicion of frost in the damp air; but a blustering northwesterly wind blowing down the river and tearing round the narrow streets and the open Place, caused passersby to muffle themselves, shivering, yet tighter in their cloaks.

Martin-Roget was talking volubly and excitedly, his tall, broad figure towering above the slender form of his companion. From time to time he tossed his mantle aside with an impatient, febrile gesture and then paused in the middle of the Place, with one hand on the other man’s shoulder, marking a point in his discourse or emphasising his argument with short staccato sentences and brief, emphatic words. Chauvelin⁠—placid and impenetrable as usual⁠—listened much and talked little. He was ready to stand still or to walk along just as his colleague’s mood demanded; in the darkness, and with the collar of a large mantle pulled tightly up to his ears, it was impossible to guess by any sign in his face what was going on in his mind.

They were a strange contrast these two men⁠—temperamentally as well as physically⁠—even though they had so much in common and were both the direct products of that same social upheaval which was shaking the archaic dominion of France to its very foundations. Martin-Roget, tall, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, the typical self-educated peasant, with square jaw and flat head, with wide bony hands and spatulated fingers: and Chauvelin⁠—the aristocrat turned demagogue, thin and frail-looking, bland of manner and suave of speech, with delicate hands and pale, almost ascetic face.

The one represented all that was most brutish and sensual in this fight of one caste against the other, the thirst for the other’s blood, the human beast that has been brought to bay through wrongs perpetrated against it by others and has turned upon its oppressors, lashing out right and left with blind and lustful fury at the crowd of tyrants that had kept him in subjection for so long. Whilst Chauvelin was the personification of the spiritual side of this bloody Revolution⁠—the spirit of cool and calculating reprisals that would demand an eye for an eye and see that it got two. The idealist who dreams of the righteousness of his own cause and the destruction of its enemies, but who leaves to others the accomplishment of all the carnage and the bloodshed which his idealism has demanded, and which his reason has appraised as necessary for the triumph of which he dreams. Chauvelin was the