[CHAPTER XXXII.]
"LOVE STRONG AS DEATH!"
Neither the Duc de Biron nor De Vaudreville had thought it necessary to place any of their soldiery or police within the mansion--perhaps because the person they required was himself outside it--and, consequently, there was nothing to prevent Bertie from making his way from the hall to the upper regions where he naturally supposed Kate would be--nothing, that is to say, beyond a few terrified-looking menservants, who, on perceiving him mount the stairs, retreated before him, probably imagining that he had been left in possession of the place by those who had taken away their master. They were quickly, however, undeceived by the stranger calling to them to ask who was now in charge of the establishment, and to whom he should address himself with a view to finding Lady Fordingbridge.
"Lady Fordingbridge," one of the footmen replied, answering him in French, as he had spoken, though his accent showed plainly enough that he was a Scotchman--"Lady Fordingbridge! She sees no one; she is very ill. She is, indeed----"
"What!" interrupted Bertie, in so sad a voice that even the man refrained from concluding his speech, which he had intended to do with the words, "dying, they say."
But here a lady who had been descending the stairs from above, and now reached the corridor on the first floor at the same time that Elphinston did, came forward and said, as she motioned the servants back:
"It is indeed Captain Elphinston! Oh, why not have come sooner, and why, of all nights, be so unhappy as to select this one? Captain Elphinston, your disappearance has very nearly brought Lady Fordingbridge to her grave--that, and the tragic death of her husband."
"She knows that, then?" he asked, as he recognised the lady who spoke to him, she being the wife of Lord Ogilvie, whose title at that time was forfeited in England, though afterward restored--"she knows that, then?"
"Yes, she knows it," Lady Ogilvie replied.
"Does she also know the reason of it--of why he was led forth to execution on the Place de Grève?" Bertie next demanded. He himself knew it now; his mother, whom he found still alive and well, though terribly prostrated by the two years and more of anxiety which she had endured since his disappearance, having told him all.