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

“no screaming, or I’ll smash some of those front teeth of yours. You said some rich friends were coming along for you presently. Well then! come and wait for them out of the crowd!”

Indeed Yvonne had no desire to struggle or to scream. Salvation she thought had come to her and to her father in this rough guise. In another moment mayhap he would have forced her to follow him, to leave milor in the lurch, to jeopardise forever every chance of safety.

“It is all for the best, father dear,” she managed to cry out over her shoulder, for she had just caught sight of him being seized round the shoulders by Lemoine and heard him protesting loudly:

“I’ll not go! I’ll not go! Let me go!” he shouted hoarsely. “My daughter! Yvonne! Let me go! You devil!”

But Lemoine had twice the vigour of the duc de Kernogan, nor did he care one jot about the other’s protests. He hated all this row inside his house, but there had been rows in it before and he was beginning to hope that nothing serious would come of it. On the other hand, Paul Friche might be right about these aristos; there might be forty or fifty francs to be made out of them, and in any case they had one or two things upon their persons which might be worth a few francs⁠—and who knows? they might even have something in their pockets worth taking.

This hope and thought gave Lemoine additional strength, and seeing that the aristo struggled so desperately, he thought to silence him by bringing his heavy fist with a crash upon the old man’s head.

“Yvonne! A moi!” shouted M. le duc ere he fell back senseless.

That awful cry, Yvonne heard it as she was being dragged through the noisome crowd. It mingled in her ear with the other awful sounds⁠—the oaths and blasphemies which filled the air with their hideousness. It died away just as a formidable crash against the entrance door suddenly silenced every cry within.

“All hands up!” came with a peremptory word of command from the doorway.

“Mercy on us!” murmured the woman Lemoine, who still had Yvonne by the hand, “we are undone this time.”

There was a clatter and grounding of arms⁠—a scurrying of bare feet and sabots upon the floor, the mingled sounds of men trying to fly and being caught in the act and hurled back: screams of terror from the women, one or two pitiable calls, a few shrill cries from frightened children, a few dull thuds as of human bodies falling.⁠ ⁠… It was all so confused, so unspeakably horrible. Yvonne was hardly conscious. Near her someone whispered hurriedly:

“Put the aristos away somewhere, maman Lemoine⁠ ⁠… the whole thing may only be a scare⁠ ⁠… the Marats may only be here about the aristos⁠ ⁠… they will probably leave you alone if you give them up⁠ ⁠… perhaps you’ll get a reward⁠ ⁠… Put them away till some of this row subsides⁠ ⁠… I’ll talk to commandant Fleury if I can.”

Yvonne felt her knees giving way under her. There was nothing more to hope for now⁠—nothing. She felt herself lifted from the ground⁠—she was too sick and faint to realise what was happening: through the din which filled her ears she vainly tried to distinguish her father’s voice again.

V

A moment or two later she found herself squatting somewhere on the ground. How she got here she did not know⁠—where she was she knew still less. She was in total darkness. A fusty, close smell of food and wine gave her a wretched feeling of nausea⁠—her head ached intolerably, her eyes were hot, her throat dry: there was a constant buzzing in her ears.

The terrible sounds of fighting and screaming and cursing, the crash of broken glass and overturned benches came to her as through a partition⁠—close by but muffled.

In the immediate nearness all was silence and darkness.

VIII The English Adventurers I

It was with that muffled din still ringing in her ear and with the conception of all that was going on, on the other side of the partition, standing like an awesome spectre of evil before her mind, that Yvonne woke to the consciousness that her father was dead.

He lay along the last half-dozen steps of a narrow wooden staircase which had its base in the narrow, cupboard-like landing on to which the Lemoines had just thrust them both. Through a small heart-shaped hole cut in the door of the partition-wall, a shaft of feeble light struck straight across to the foot of the stairs: it lit up the recumbent figure of the last of the ducs de Kernogan, killed in a brawl in a house of evil fame.

Weakened by starvation, by the hardships of the past few days, his constitution undermined by privations and mayhap too by gnawing remorse, he had succumbed to the stunning blow dealt to him by a half drunken brute. His cry: “Yvonne! A moi!” was the last despairing call of a soul racked with remorse to the daughter whom he had so cruelly wronged.

When first that feeble shaft of light had revealed to her the presence of that inert form upon the steps, she had struggled to her feet and⁠—dazed⁠—had tottered up to it. Even before she had touched the face, the hands, before she had bent her ear to the half-closed mouth and failed to catch the slightest breath, she knew the full extent of her misery. The look in the wide-open eyes did not terrify her, but they told her the truth, and since then she had cowered beside her dead father on the bottom step of the narrow stairs, her fingers tightly closed over that one hand which never would be raised against her.

An unspeakable sense of horror filled her soul. The thought that he⁠—the proud father, the haughty aristocrat, should lie like this and in such a spot, dragged in and thrown down⁠—no doubt by