"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 hoa.r.s.ely. "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 some one 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 gla.s.s and overturned benches came to her as through a part.i.tion--close by but m.u.f.fled.
In the immediate nearness all was silence and darkness.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ENGLISH ADVENTURERS
I
It was with that m.u.f.fled din still ringing in her ear and with the conception of all that was going on, on the other side of the part.i.tion, 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 part.i.tion-wall, a shaft of feeble light struck straight across to the foot of the stairs: it lit up the rec.u.mbent 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 const.i.tution undermined by privations and mayhap too by gnawing remorse, he had succ.u.mbed 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 Lemoine--like a parcel of rubbish and left here to be dragged away again and thrown again like a dog into some unhallowed ground--that thought was so horrible, so monstrous, that at first it dominated even sorrow. Then came the heartrending sense of loneliness. Yvonne Dewhurst had endured so much these past few days that awhile ago she would have affirmed that nothing could appal her in the future. But this was indeed the awful and overwhelming climax to what had already been a surfeit of misery.
This! she, Yvonne, cowering beside her dead father, with no one to stand between her and any insult, any outrage which might be put upon her, with nothing now but a few laths between her and that yelling, screeching mob outside.
Oh! the loneliness! the utter, utter loneliness!
She kissed the inert hand, the pale forehead: with gentle, reverent fingers she tried to smooth out those lines of horror and of fear which gave such a pitiful expression to the face. Of all the wrongs which her father had done her she never thought for a moment. It was he who had brought her to this terrible pa.s.s: he who had betrayed her into the hands of her deadliest enemy: he who had torn her from the protecting arms of her dear milor and flung her and himself at the mercy of a set of inhuman wretches who knew neither compunction nor pity.
But all this she forgot, as she knelt beside the lifeless form--the last thing on earth that belonged to her--the last protection to which she might have clung.
II
Out of the confusion of sounds which came--deadened by the intervening part.i.tion--to her ear, it was impossible to distinguish anything very clearly. All that Yvonne could do, as soon as she had in a measure collected her scattered senses, was to try and piece together the events of the last few minutes--minutes which indeed seemed like days and even years to her.
Instinctively she gave to the inert hand which she held an additional tender touch. At any rate her father was out of it all. He was at rest and at peace. As for the rest, it was in G.o.d"s hands. Having only herself to think of now, she ceased to care what became of her. He was out of it all: and those wretches after all could not do more than kill her. A complete numbness of senses and of mind had succeeded the feverish excitement of the past few hours: whether hope still survived at this moment in Yvonne Dewhurst"s mind it were impossible to say.
Certain it is that it lay dormant--buried beneath the overwhelming misery of her loneliness.
She took the fichu from her shoulders and laid it reverently over the dead man"s face: she folded the hands across the breast. She could not cry: she could only pray, and that quite mechanically.
The thought of her dear milor, of his clever friend, of the message which she had received in prison, of the guide who had led her to this awful place, was relegated--almost as a memory--in the furthermost cell of her brain.
III
But after awhile outraged nature, still full of vitality and of youth, re-a.s.serted itself. She felt numb and cold and struggled to her feet.
From somewhere close to her a continuous current of air indicated the presence of some sort of window. Yvonne, faint with the close and sickly smell, which even that current failed to disperse, felt her way all round the walls of the narrow landing.
The window was in the wall between the part.i.tion and the staircase, it was small and quite low down. It was crossed with heavy iron bars.
Yvonne leaned up against it, grateful for the breath of pure air.
For awhile yet she remained unconscious of everything save the confused din which still went on inside the tavern, and at first the sounds which came through the grated window mingled with those on the other side of the part.i.tion. But gradually as she contrived to fill her lungs with the cold breath of heaven, it seemed as if a curtain was being slowly drawn away from her atrophied senses.
Just below the window two men were speaking. She could hear them quite distinctly now--and soon one of the voices--clearer than the other--struck her ear with unmistakable familiarity.
"I told Paul Friche to come out here and speak to me," Yvonne heard that same voice say.
"Then he should be here," replied the other, "and if I am not mistaken...."
There was a pause, and then the first voice was raised again.
"Halt! Is that Paul Friche?"
"At your service, citizen," came in reply.
"Well! Is everything working smoothly inside?"
"Quite smoothly; but your Englishmen are not there."