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I Will Repay

B >> Baroness Emmuska Orczy >> I Will Repay




"I can't burn these. You see, I shall not be able to have long
conversations with Marie Antoinette. I must give her my suggestions in
writing, that she may study them and not fail me, through lack of
knowledge of her part."

"Better that than papers in these times, my friend: these papers, if
found, would send you, untried, to the guillotine."

"I am careful, and, at present, quite beyond suspicion. Moreover,
among the papers is a complete collection of passports, suitable for
any character the Queen and her attendant may be forced to assume. It
has taken me some months to collect them, so as not to arouse
suspicion; I gradually got them together , on one pretence or another:
now I am ready for any eventuality..."

He suddenly paused. A look in his friend's face had given him a swift
warning.

He turned, and there in the doorway, holding back the heavy portière,
stood Juliette, graceful, smiling, a little pale, this no doubt owing
to the flickering light of the unsnuffed candles.

So young and girlish did she look in her soft, white muslin frock that
at sight of her the tension in Déroulède's face seemed to relax.
Instinctively he had thrown the papers back into the desk, but his look
had softened, from the fire of obstinate energy to that of
inexpressible tenderness.

Blakeney was quietly watching the young girl as she stood in the
doorway, a little bashful and undecided.

"Madame Déroulède sent me," she said hesitatingly, "she says the hour is
getting late and she is very anxious. M. Déroulède, would you come and
reassure her?"

"In a moment, mademoiselle," he replied lightly, "my friend and I have
just finished our talk. May I have the honour to present him? - Sir
Percy Blakeney, a traveller from England. Blakeney, this is
Mademoiselle Juliette de Marny, my mother's guest."





CHAPTER VII

A warning.


Sir Percy bowed very low, with all the graceful flourish and elaborate
gesture the eccentric customs of the time demanded.

He had not said a word, since the first exclamation of warning, with
which he had drawn his friend's attention to the young girl in the
doorway.

Noiselessly, as she had come, Juliette glided out of the room again,
leaving behind her an atmosphere of wild flowers, of the bouquet she
had gathered, then scattered in the woods.

There was silence in the room for awhile. Déroulède was locking up his
deks and slipping the keys into his pocket.

"Shall we join my mother for a moment, Blakeney?" he said, moving
towards the door.

"I shall be proud to pay my respects," replied Sir Percy; "but before
we close the subject, I think I'll change my mind about those papers.
If I am bo be of service to you I think I had best look through them,
and give you my opinion of your schemes."

Déroulède looked at him keenly for a moment.

"Certainly," he said at last, going up to his desk. "I'll stay with
you whilst you read them through."

"La! not to-night, my friend," said Sir Percy lightly; "the hour is
late, and madame is waiting for us. They'll be quite safe with me, and
you'll entrust them to my care."

Déroulède seemed to hesitate. Blakeney had spoken in his usual airy
manner, and was even now busy readjusting the set of his
perfectly-tailored coat.

"Perhaps you cannot quite trust me?" laughed Sir Percy gaily. "I
seemed too lukewarm just now."

"No; it's not that, Blakeney!" said Déroulède quietly at last. "There is
no mistrust in me, all the mistrust is on your side."

"Faith! -" began Sir Percy.

"Nay! do not explain. I understand and appreciate your friendship, but
I should like to convince you how unjust is your mistrust of one of
God's purest angels, that ever walked the earth."

"Oho! that's it, is it, friend Déroulède? Methought you had foresworn the
sex altogether, and now you are in love."

"Madly, blindly, stupidly in love, my friend," said Déroulède with a sigh.
"Hopelessly, I fear me!"

"Why hopelessly?"

"She is the daughter of the late Duc de Marny, one of the oldest names
in France; a Royalist to the backbone..."

"Hence your overwhelming sympathy for the Queen!"

"Nay! you wrong me there, friend. I'd have tried to save the Queen,
even if I had never learned to love Juliette. But you see now how
unjust were your suspicions."

"Had I any?"

"Don't deny it. You were loud in urging me to burn those papers a
moment ago. You called them useless and dangerous and now..."

"I still think them useless and dangerous, and by reading them would
wish to confirm my opinion and give weight to my arguments."

"If I were to part from them now I would seem to be mistrusting her."

"You are a mad idealist, my dear Déroulède!"

"How can I help it? I have lived under the same roof with her for
three weeks now. I have begun to understand what a saint is like."

"And 'twill be when you understand that your idol has feet of clay that
you'll learn the real lesson of love," said Blakeney earnestly.

"Is it love to worship a saint in heaven, whom you dare not touch, who
hovers above you like a cloud, which floats away from you even as you
gaze? To love is to feel one being in the world at one with us, our
equal in sin as well as in virtue. To love, for us men, is to clasp
one woman with our arms, feeling that she lives and breathes just as we
do, suffers as we do, thinks with us, loves with us, and, above all,
sins with us. Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if
she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall
at the feet of your idol an you wish, but drag her down to your level
after that - the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart."

Who shall render faithfully a true account of the magnetism which
poured forth from this remarkable man as he spoke: this well-dressed,
foppish apostle of the greatest love that man has ever known. And as
he spoke the whole story of his own great, true love for the woman who
once had so deeply wronged him seemed to stand clearly written in the
strong, lazy, good-humoured, kindly face glowing with tenderness for
her.

Déroulède felt this magnetism, and therefore did not resent the implied
suggestion, anent the saint whom he was still content to worship.

A dreamer and an idealist, his mind held spellbound by the great social
problems which were causing the upheaval of a whole country, he had not
yet had the time to learn the sweet lesson which Nature teaches to her
elect - the lesson of a great, a true, human and passionate love. To
him, at present, Juliette represented the perfect embodiment of his
most idealistic dreams. She stood in his mind so far above him that if
she proved unattainable, he would scarce have suffered. It was such a
foregone conclusion.

Blakeney's words were the first to stir in his heart a desire for
something beyond that quasi-mediaeval worship, something weaker and yet
infinitely stronger, something more earthy and yet almost divine.

"And now, shall we join the ladies?" said Blakeney after a long pause,
during which the mental workings of his alert brain were almost
visible, in the earnest look which he cast at his friend. "You shall
keep the papers in your desk, give them into the keeping of your saint,
trust her all in all rather than not at all, and if the time should
come that your heaven-enthroned ideal fall somewhat heavily to earth,
then give me the privilege of being a witness to your happiness."

"You are still mistrustful, Blakeney," said Déroulède lightly. "If you say
much more I'll give these papers into Mademoiselle Marny's keeping
until to-morrow."





CHAPTER VIII

Anne Mie.


That night, when Blakeney, wrapped in his cloak, was walking down the
Rue Ecole de Médecine towards his own lodgings, he suddenly felt a timid
hand upon his sleeve.

Anne Mie stood beside him, her pale, melancholy face peeping up at the
tall Englishman, through the folds of a dark hood closely tied under
her chin.

"Monsieur," she said timidly, "do not think me very presumptuous. I -
I would wish to have five minutes' talk with you - may I?"

He looked down with great kindness at the quaint, wizened little
figure, and the strong face softened at the sight of the poor, deformed
shoulder, the hard, pinched look of the young mouth, the general look
of pathetic helplessness which appeals so strongly to the chivalrous.

"Indeed, mademoiselle," he said gently, "you make me very proud; and I
can serve you in any way, I pray you command me. But," he added,
seeing Anne Mie's somewhat scared look, "this street is scarce fit for
private conversation. Shall we try and find a better spot?"

Paris had not yet gone to bed. In these times it was really safest to
be out in the open streets. There, everybody was more busy, more on
the move, on the lookout for suspected houses, leaving the wanderer
alone.

Blakeney led Anne Mie towards the Luxembourg Gardens, the great
devastated pleasure-ground of the ci-devant tyrans of the people. The
beautiful Anne of Austria, and the Medici before her, Louis XIII, and
his gallant musketeers - all have given place to the great
cannon-forging industry of this besieged Republic. France, attacked on
every side, is forcing her sons to defend her: persecuted, martyrised,
done to death by her, she is still their Mother: La Patrie, who needs
their arms against the foreign foe. England is threatening the north,
Prussia and Austria the east. Admiral Hood's flag is flying on Toulon
Arsenal.

The siege of the Republic!

And the Republic is fighting for dear life. The Tuileries and
Luxembourg Gardens are transformed into a township of gigantic
smithies; and Anne Mie, with scared eyes, and clinging to Blakeney's
arm, cast furtive, terrified glances at the huge furnaces and the
begrimed, darkly scowling faces of the workers within.

"The people of France in arms against tyranny!" Great placards,
bearing these inspiriting words, are affixed to gallows-shaped posts,
and flutter in the evening breeze, rendered scorching by the heat of
the furnaces all around.

Farther on, a group of older men, squatting on the ground, are busy
making tents, and some women - the same Megaeras who daily shriek round
the guillotine - are plying their needles and scissors for the purpose
of making clothes for the soldiers.

The soldiers are the entire able-bodied male population of France.

"The people of France in arms against tyranny!"

That is their sign, their trade-mark; one of these placards, fitfully
illumined by a torch of resin, towers above a group of children busy
tearing up scraps of old linen - their mothers', their sisters' linen -
in order to make lint for the wounded.

Loud curses and suppressed mutterings fill the smoke-laden air.

The people of France, in arms against tyranny, is bending its broad
back before the most cruel, the most absolute and brutish slave-driving
ever exercised over mankind.

Not even mediaeval Christianity has ever dared such wholesale
enforcements of its doctrines, as this constitution of Liberty and
Fraternity.

Merlin's "Law of the Suspect" has just been formulated. From now
onward each and every citizen of France must watch his words, his
looks, his gestures, lest they be suspect. Of what - of treason to the
Republic, to the people? Nay, worse! lest they be suspect of being
suspect to the great era of Liberty.

Therefore in the smithies and among the groups of tent-makers a
moment's negligence, a careless attention to the work, might lead to a
brief trial on the morrow and the inevitable guillotine. Negligence is
treason to the higher interests of the Republic.

Blakeney dragged Anne Mie away from the sight. These roaring furnaces
frightened her; he took her down the Place St Michel, towards the
river. It was quieter here.

"What dreadful people they have become," she said, shuddering; "even I
can remember how different they used to be."

The houses on the banks of the river were mostly converted into
hospitals, preparatory for the great siege. Some hundred mètres lower
down, the new children's hospital, endowed by Citizen-Deputy Déroulède,
loomed, white, clean, and comfortable-looking, amidst its more squalid
fellows.

"I think it would be best not to sit down," suggested Blakeney, "and
wiser for you to throw your hood away from your face."

He seemed to have no fears for himself; many had said that he bore a
charmed life; and yet ever since Admiral Hood had planted his flag on
Toulon Arsenal, the English were more feared than ever, and The Scarlet
Pimpernel more hated than most.

"You wished to speak to me about Paul Déroulède," he said kindly, seeing
that the young girl was making desperate efforts to say what lay on her
mind. "He is my friend, you know."

"Yes; that is why I wished to ask you a question," she replied.

"What is it?"

"Who is Juliette de Marny, and why did she seek an entrance into Paul's
house?"

"Did she seek it, then?"

"Yes; I saw the scene from the balcony. At the time it did not strike
me as a farce. I merely thought that she had been stupid and
foolhardy. But since then I have reflected. She provoked the mob of
the street, wilfully, just at the very moment when she reached M.
Déroulède's door. She meant to appeal to his chivalry, and called for
help, well knowing that he would respond."

She spoke rapidly and excitedly now, throwing off all shyness and
reserve. Blakeney was forced to check her vehemence, which might have
been thought "suspicious" by some idle citizen unpleasantly inclined.

"Wel? And now?" he asked, for the young girl had paused, as if ashamed
of her excitement.

"And now she stays in the house, on and on, day after day," continued
Anne Mie, speaking more quietly, though with no less intensity. "Why
does she not go? She is not safe in France. She belongs to the most
hated of all the classes - the idle, rich aristocrats of the old régime.
Paul has several times suggested plans for her emigration to England.
Madame Déroulède, who is an angel, loves her, and would not like to part
from her, but it would be obviously wiser for her to go, and yet she
stays. Why?"

"Presumably because..."

"Because she is in love with Paul?" interupted Anne Mie vehemently.
"No, no; she does not love him - at least - Oh! sometimes I don't
know. Her eyes light up when he comes, and she is listless when he
goes. She always spends a longer time over her toilet, when we expect
him home to dinner," she added, with a touch of naïve feminity. "But -
if it be love, then that love is strange and unwomanly; it is a love
that will not be for his good..."

"Why should you think that?"

"I don't know," said the girl simply. "Isn't it an instinct?"

"Not a very unerring one in this case, I fear."

"Why?"

"Because your own love for Paul Déroulède has blinded you - Ah! you must
pardon me, mademoiselle; you sought this conversation and not I, and I
fear me I have wounded you. Yet I would wish you to know how deep is
my sympathy with you, and how great my desire to render you a service
if I could."

"I was about to ask a service of you, monsieur."

"Then command me, I beg of you."

"You are Paul's friend - persuade him that that woman in his house is a
standing danger to his life and liberty."

"He would not listen to me."

"Oh! a man always listens to another."

"Except on one subject - the woman he loves."

He had said the last words very gently but very firmly. He was deeply,
tenderly sorry for the poor, deformed, fragile girl, doomed to be a
witness of that most heartrending of human tragedies, the passing away
of her own scarce-hoped-for happiness. But he felt that at this moment
the kindest act would be one of complete truth. He knew that Paul
Déroulède's heart was completely given to Juliette de Marny; he too, like
Anne Mie, instinctively mistrusted the beautiful girl and her strange,
silent ways, but, unlike the poor hunchback, he knew that no sin which
Juliette might commit would henceforth tear her from out the heart of
his friend; that if, indeed, she turned out to be false, or even
treacherous, she would, nevertheless, still hold a place in Déroulède's
very soul, which no one else would ever fill.

"You think he loves her?" asked Anne Mie at last.

"I am sure of it."

"And she?"

"Ah! I do not know. I would trust your instinct - a woman's - sooner
than my own."

"She is false, I tell you, and is hatching treason against Paul."

"Then all we can do is to wait."

"Wait?"

"And watch carefully, earnestly, all the time. There! shall I pledge
you my word that Déroulède shall come to no harm?"

"Pledge me your word that you'll part him from that woman."

"Nay; that is beyond my power. A man like Paul Déroulède only loves once
in life, but when he does, it is for always."

Once more she was silent, pressing her lips closely together, as if
afraid of what she might say.

He saw that she was bitterly disappointed, and sought for a means of
tempering the cruelty of the blow.

"It will be your task to watch over Paul," he said; "with your
friendship to guard and protect him, we need have no fear for his
safety, I think."

"I will watch," she replied quietly.

Gradually he had led her steps back towards the Rue Ecole de Médecine.

A great melancholy had fallen over his bold, adventurous spirit. How
full of tragedies was this great city, in the last throes of its insane
and cruel struggle for an unattainable goal. And yet, despite its
guillotine and mock trials, its tyrannical laws and overfilled prisons,
its very sorrows paled before the dead, dull misery of this deformed
girl's heart.

A wild exaltation, a fever of enthusiasm lent glamour to the scenes
which were daily enacted on the Place de la Revolution, turning the
final acts of the tragedies into glaring, lurid melodrama, almost
unreal in its poignant appeal to the sensibilities.

But here there was only this dead, dull misery, an aching heart, a
poor, fragile creature in the throes of an agonised struggle for a
fast-disappearing happiness.

Anne Mie hardly knew now what she had hoped, when she sought this
interview with Sir Percy Blakeney. Drowning in a sea of hopelessness,
she had clutched at what might prove a chance of safety. Her reason
told her that Paul's friend was right. Déroulède was a man who would love
but once in his life. He had never loved - for he had too much pitied
- poor, pathetic litte Anne Mie.

Nay; why should we say that love and pity are akin?

Love, the great, the strong, the conquering god - Love that subdues a
world, and rides roughshod over principle, virtue, tradition, over
home, kindred, and religion - what cares he for the easy conquest of
the pathetic being, who appeals to his sympathy?

Love means equality - the same height of heroism or of sin. When Love
stoops to pity, he has ceased to soar in the boundless space, that
rarefied atmosphere wherein man feels himself made at last truly in the
image of God.





CHAPTER IX

Jealousy.


At the door of her home Blakeney parted from Anne Mie, with all the
courtesy with which he would have bade adieu to the greatest lady in
his own land.

Anne Mie let herself into the house with her own latch-key. She closed
the heavy door noiselessly, then glided upstairs like a quaint little
ghost.

But on the landing above she met Paul Déroulède.

He had just come out of his room, and was still fully dressed.

"Anne Mie!" he said, with such an obvious cry of pleasure, that the
young girl, with beating heart, paused a moment on the top of the
stairs, as if hoping to hear that cry again, feeling that indeed he was
glad to see her, had been uneasy because of her long absence.

"Have I made you anxious?" she asked at last.

"Anxious!" he exclaimed. "Little one, I have hardly lived this last
hour, since I realised that you had gone out so late as this, and all
alone."

"How dit you know?"

"Mademoiselle de Marny knocked at my door an hour ago. She had gone to
your room to see you, and, not finding you there, she searched the
house for you, and finally, in her anxiety, come to me. We did no dare
to tell my mother. I won't ask you where you have been, Anne Mie, but
another time, remember, little one, that the streets of Paris are not
safe, and that those who love you suffer deeply, when they know you to
be in peril."

"Those who love me!" murmured the girl under her breath.

"Could you not have asked me to come with you?"

"No; I wanted to be alone. The streets were quite safe, and - I wanted
to speak with Sir Percy Blakeney."

"With Blakeney?" he exclaimed in boundless astonishment. "Why, what in
the world did you want to say him?"

The girl, so unaccustomed to lying, had blurted out the truth, almost
against her will.

"I thought he could help me, as I was much perturbed and restless."

"You went to him sooner than to me?" said Déroulède in a tone of gentle
reproach, and still puzzled at this extraordinary action on the part of
the girl, usually so shy and reserved.

"My anxiety was about you, and you would have mocked me for it."

"Indeed, I should never mock you, Anne Mie. But why should you be
anxious about me?"

"Because I see you wandering blindly on the brink of a great danger,
and because I see you confiding in those, whom you had best mistrust."

He frowned a little, and bit his lip to check the rough word that was
on the tip of his tongue.

"Is Sir Percy Blakeney one of those whom I had best mistrust?" he said
lightly.

"No," she answered curtly.

"Then, dear, there is no cause for unrest. He is the only one of my
friends whom you have not known intimately. All those who are round me
now, you know that you can trust and that you can love," he added
earnestly and significantly.

He took her hand; it was trembling with obvious suppressed agitation.
She knew that he had guessed what was passing in her mind, and now was
deeply ashamed of what she had done. She had been tortured with
jealousy for the past three weeks, but at least she had suffered quite
alone: on one had been allowed to touch that wound, which more often
than not, excites derision rather than pity. Now, by her own actions,
two men knew her secret. Both were kind and sympathetic; but Déroulède
resented her imputations, and Blakeney had been unable to help her.

A wave of morbid introspection swept over her soul. She realised in a
moment how petty and base had been her thoughts and how purposeless her
actions. She would have given her life at this moment to eradicate
from Déroulède's mind the knowledge of her own jealousy; she hoped that at
least he had not guessed her love.

She tried to read his thoughts, but in the dark passage, only dimly
lighted by the candles in Déroulède's room beyond, she could not see the
expression of his face, but the hand which held hers was warm and
tender. She felt herself pitied, and blushed at the thought. With a
hasty good-night she fled down the passage, and locked herself in her
room, alone with her own thoughts at last.





CHAPTER X

Denunciation.


But what of Juliette?

What of this wild, passionate, romantic creature tortured by a Titanic
conflict? She, but a girl, scarcely yet a woman, torn by the greatest
antagonistic powers that ever fought for a human soul. On the one side
duty, tradition, her dead brother, her father - above all, her religion
and the oath she had sworn before God; on the other justice and honour,
a case of right and wrong, honesty and pity.

How she fought with these powers now!

She fought with them, struggled with them on her knees. She tried to
crush memory, tried to forget that awful midnight scene ten years ago,
her brother's dead body, her father's avenging hand holding her own, as
he begged her to do that, which he was too feeble, too old to
accomplish.

His words rang in her ears from across that long vista of the past.

"Before the face of Almighthy God, who sees and hears me, I swear..."

And she had repeated those words loudly and of her own free will, with
her hand resting on her brother's breast, and God Himself looking down
upon her, for she had called upon Him to listen.

"I swear that I will seek out Paul Déroulède, and in any manner which God
may dictate to me encompass his death, his ruin, or dishonour in
revenge for my brother's death. May my brother's soul remain in
torment until the final Judgment Day if I should break my oath, but may
it rest in eternal peace, the day on which his death is fitly avenged."

Almost it seemed to her as if father and brother were standing by her
side, as she knelt and prayed. - Oh! how she prayed!

In many ways she was only a child. All her years had been passed in
confinement, either beside her dying father or, later, between the four
walls of the Ursuline Convent. And during those years her soul had
been fed on a contemplative, ecstatic religion, a kind of sanctified
superstition, which she would have deemed sacrilege to combat.

Her first step into womanhood was taken with that oath upon her lips;
since then, with a stoical sense of duty, she had lashed herself into a
daily, hourly remembrance of the great mission imposed upon her.

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