The Man in Grey paused. As he completed his narrative Lefèvre stared at him, dumbfounded at the courage, the determination, the dogged perseverance which alone could have brought this amazing undertaking to its grim and gruesome issue.
"After this, my good Lefèvre," remarked the secret agent more lightly, "we shall have to find out something about 'Madame' and quite a good deal about 'Monseigneur.'"
CHAPTER II
THE SPANIARD
I
The man with the wooden leg was still at large, and M. le Procureur Impérial had died a hero's death whilst helping to capture a gang of desperate Chouans in the Cache-Renard woods. This was the public version of the tragic epilogue to those three mysteries, which had puzzled and terrified the countryside during the early days of October, 1809—the robbery of the mail-coach, the burglary in the Palace of Monseigneur the Constitutional Bishop of Alençon, and the murder of Mme. Marquise de Plélan's valet, Maxence.
The intelligent section of the public was loud in its condemnation of the ineptitude displayed by the police in the matter of those abominable crimes, and chief commissary Lefèvre, bound by oath—not to say terror—to hold his tongue as to the real facts of the case, grumbled in his beard and muttered curses on the accredited representative of the Minister of Police—ay, and on M. le Duc d'Otrante himself.
On top of all the public unrest and dissatisfaction came the outrage at the house of M. de Kerblay, a noted advocate of the Paris bar and member of the Senate, who owned a small property in the neighbourhood of Alençon, where he spent a couple of months every year with his wife and family, entertaining a few friends during the shooting season.
In the morning of November the 6th, the neighbourhood was horrified to hear that on the previous night, shortly after ten o'clock, a party of those ruffianly Chouans had made a descent on M. de Kerblay's house, Les Ormeaux. They had demanded admittance in the name of the law. All the servants had gone to bed with the exception of Hector, M. de Kerblay's valet, and he was so scared that he allowed the scélérats to push their way into the house, before he had realised who they were. Ere he could call for help he was set upon, gagged, and locked up in his pantry. The Chouans then proceeded noiselessly upstairs. Mme. de Kerblay was already in bed. The Senator was in his dressing-room, half undressed. They took him completely by surprise, held a pistol to his head, and demanded the immediate payment of twenty-five thousand francs. Should the Senator summon his servants, the rogues would shoot him and his wife and even his children summarily, if they were stopped in their purpose or hindered in their escape.
M. de Kerblay was considerably over sixty. Not too robust in health, terrorised and subdued, he yielded, and with the muzzle of a pistol held to his head and half a dozen swords gleaming around him, he produced the keys of his secretaire and handed over to the Chouans not only all the money he had in the house—something over twenty thousand francs—but a diamond ring, valued at another twenty thousand, which had been given to him by the Emperor in recognition of signal services rendered in the matter of the affairs of the ex-Empress.