I
The letter dropped from Mme. de Plélan's thin, white hand. She looked across at her daughter with eyes full of tears.
"And now that Monseigneur has gone," she said mournfully, "I feel as if I had lost the very mainstay of our valiant little party."
The girl sighed, somewhat impatiently.
"Monseigneur," she said, "would be the first to bid you smother your regrets for the past, maman, and to concentrate your thoughts on the dangers that still lie ahead."
She was busy at a desk that stood open before her, glancing at a number of papers, classifying some, throwing a great number into the fire which crackled cheerfully in the hearth, whilst others she tied together and put into a small tin box that stood close to her hand.
"It was kind and gracious of Monseigneur," continued Madame la Marquise dolefully, "to think of sending me a courier when he must have been so busy with his preparations for his sudden departure. Oh, that departure!" she added, as once again tears of wrath as well as of sorrow welled up to her eyes. "The shame of it! The humiliation as well as the bitter, bitter disappointment!"
Constance de Plélan made no comment this time on her mother's lamentations. She had apparently completed the work on which she had been engaged, for now she rose, closed the desk and locking the small tin box with a key which she selected from a bunch at her belt she took it up under her arm. Then she turned to her mother:
"Will you tell me, maman," she said, "just what Monseigneur says in his letter?"
Constance stood there in the grey light of the winter afternoon, with the flicker of the firelight playing on her tall, graceful figure, her arm extended, holding the metal box, her small head carried with the stately dignity of a goddess.
"Those devils will be here directly," continued the girl; and as she spoke the delicate lines of her face were distorted by an expression of intense and passionate hatred. "But we are ready for them. I have only this box to put away in its usual hiding-place—after which, let them come!"
Mme. de Plélan again took up the letter, the perusal of which had caused her so much sorrow. It had arrived by courier a few minutes ago; now, at her daughter's request, she began to read it aloud:
"This is what Monseigneur the Bishop writes," she said. "'My dear friend, immediately on receipt of this missive, set to work at once to destroy any compromising papers you may have in the house. I have no doubt that the posse of police which has just ransacked my place will pay you a visit also. My friendship for you is well known, and your name may appear in one or two of the letters which those brutes have confiscated. Alas! the landing of Monsieur le Comte d'Artois on these shores has ended in disaster. The spies of the Corsican upstart were on his track from the first. They followed His Royal Highness to my Palace, kidnapped him as if he were a bale of goods and shipped him straight back to England. My life and liberty are, it seems, to be spared, but I have been ordered into exile at my château in the Dauphiné. God guard and preserve you all! We must wait for happier times!"
Constance said nothing for a moment or two. She stood staring into the fire, her lips tightly pressed.
"And all," she mused after a while, speaking slowly and dreamily, "through the machinations of that extraordinary man, who is said to be a secret agent of Bonaparte's most powerful Minister."
"A man without a name!" added the Marquise, bitter scorn ringing through every word she spoke. "A meagre, insignificant creature, grey and colourless as his coat."
"But clever—and relentless," said the girl. "That Man in Grey is killing our hopes one by one."
"I loathe the brute!" ejaculated Madame fervently.
"Monsieur de Saint-Tropèze is dead," continued Constance in the same dreary, monotonous voice. "The Spaniard is a prisoner; Marie Vaillant a failure; Monseigneur an exile; and still that Man in Grey is allowed to live. Oh, it is monstrous!" she said, her whole body suddenly quivering with passion. "Monstrous and cowardly! Are there no men amongst us who will rid the King of such a pestilential foe?"
Mme. de Plélan started as if she had been struck. She stared at her daughter, trying to fathom all that was going on behind that smooth young brow and within the depths of those passion-filled eyes.
"You mean——?" she murmured.
The girl nodded. "Why not?" she retorted quite calmly.
"Oh, if we could!" replied Madame. "But he is so cautious, so wary—and lately he has always had two or three spies at his heels."
"There are ways——"
"Oh, as to that, there are a number of our own men who would willingly take every risk in order to rid us of the brute. But in cases of that kind," she added slowly, "failure always means such terrible reprisals—the death of two or three more of our leaders on the guillotine—and we can ill spare them just now."
"I did not mean anything so clumsy," explained Constance quietly. "An attempted murder from behind a hedge is, as you say, foredoomed to failure. From what one knows of the Man in Grey he is not likely to fall a victim to such an artless trap."
"Then what did you mean, Constance?" asked Madame coldly.
"Men have been decoyed before now," replied the girl, as she looked her mother straight between the eyes; "and have of their own will walked into traps from which there was no escape. The man in the grey coat may be surrounded by spies, his precious life may be watched over by an army of myrmidons, but he is the most astute as well as the most relentless enemy of our King—and what other women have done before now, surely we can do again."
Mme. la Marquise made no immediate reply. She was gazing almost with awe upon her daughter, who, flushed with ardour, quivering with excitement, appeared the very embodiment of that reckless patriotism which had already sent Charlotte Corday to the scaffold.
"Constance, in God's name," she murmured, "tell me what you mean——"
But before the girl could reply, the words died upon her lips. From the other side of the château there had come the sound of a great commotion, the clatter of horses' hoofs upon the flagged forecourt, the clanging of metal, the champing of bits, and finally loud and peremptory words of command.
"The police!" exclaimed Madame la Marquise in a hoarse whisper.
"Those devils!" ejaculated the girl with savage intensity of hate.
But neither of the women showed the slightest sign of fear, or even of agitation. They were made of that firm nerve which is always ready to meet danger in whatever form, at whatever hour it may present itself. Conspiracy and intrigue were in their blood. They had never become reconciled to the new régime that had sent their King and Queen to the guillotine and kept their present uncrowned King in exile. They had never bowed their necks to the democratic or the military yoke. They still fought tooth and nail for the restoration of a system which they believed was based upon divine right—caring little that that system had been rejected by the entire people of France. And since they could no longer fight in the open—for their party had dwindled to vanishing-point and lacked both men and materials—they plotted in the dark, in secret, but with unswerving loyalty to their King and unbounded belief in ultimate victory.
So now with a posse of police at their gates they did not lose their heads. On the contrary, Madame la Marquise de Plélan's attitude became if anything more dignified and more calm. She arranged her silk dress in prim folds around her, readjusting the set of her lace coif, and took up a piece of knitting wherewith she busied her perfectly steady fingers. Constance, still carrying the metal box, turned to go out of the room.
"I will return," she said, "when I have disposed of this box."
"What have you kept in it?" asked Madame rather anxiously. "From what I hear, secret hiding-places stand but little chance when that grey-coated ferret is about."
Apparently, however, the young girl had not heard her mother's query, for even as the usual ominous "Open, in the name of the law!" rang out through the silence of the château, she had run out of the room and was speeding down the long corridor towards her own apartments.