In an hour, however, he returned out of breath and with a face white
from despair. Wogan was still writing at his table, but at his first
glance towards Gaydon he started quickly to his feet, and altogether
forgot to cover over his sheet of paper. He carefully shut the door.
"You have bad news," said he.
"There was never worse," answered Gaydon. He had run so fast, he was so
discomposed, that he could with difficulty speak. But he gasped his bad
news out in the end.
"I went to my brother major to report my return. He was entertaining his
friends. He had a letter this morning from Strasbourg and he read it
aloud. The letter said a rumour was running through the town that the
Chevalier Wogan had already rescued the Princess and was being hotly
pursued on the road to Trent."
If Wogan felt any disquietude he was careful to hide it. He sat
comfortably down upon the sofa.
"I expected rumour would be busy with us," said he, "but never that it
would take so favourable a shape."
"Favourable!" exclaimed Gaydon.
"To be sure, for its falsity will be established to-morrow, and
ridicule cast upon those who spread and believed it. False alarms are
the proper strategy to conceal the real assault. The rumour does us a
service. Our secret is very well kept, for here am I in Schlestadt, and
people living in Schlestadt believe me on the road to Trent. I will go
back with you to the major's and have a laugh at his correspondent.
Courage, my friend. We will give our enemies a month. Let them cry wolf
as often as they will during that month, we'll get into the fold all the
more easily in the end."
Wogan took his hat to accompany Gaydon, but at that moment he heard
another man stumbling in a great haste up the stairs. Misset broke into
the room with a face as discomposed as Gaydon's had been.
"Here's another who has heard the same rumour," said Wogan.
"It is more than a rumour," said Misset. "It is an order, and most
peremptory, from the Court of France, forbidding any officer of Dillon's
regiment to be absent for more than twenty-four hours from his duties on
pain of being broke. Our secret's out. That's the plain truth of the
matter."
He stood by the table drumming with his fingers in a great agitation.
Then his fingers stopped. He had been drumming upon Wogan's sheet of
paper, and the writing on the sheet had suddenly attracted his notice.
It was writing in unusually regular lines. Gaydon, arrested by Misset's
change from restlessness to fixity, looked that way for a second, too,
but he turned his head aside very quickly. Wogan's handwriting was none
of his business.
"We will give them a month," said Wogan, who was conjecturing at the
motive of this order from the Court of France. "No doubt we are
suspected. I never had a hope that we should not be. The Court of
France, you see, can do no less than forbid us, but I should not be
surprised if it winks at us on the sly. We will give them a month.
Colonel Lally is a friend of mine and a friend of the King. We will get
an abatement of that order, so that not one of you shall be cashiered."
"I don't flinch at that," said Misset, "but the secret's out."
"Then we must use the more precautions," said Wogan. He had no doubt
whatever that somehow he would bring the Princess safely out of her
prison to Bologna. It could not be that she was born to be wasted.
Misset, however, was not so confident upon the matter.
"A strange, imperturbable man is Charles Wogan," said he to Gaydon and
O'Toole the same evening. "Did you happen by any chance to cast your eye
over the paper I had my hand on?"
"I did not," said Gaydon, in a great hurry. "It was a private letter, no
doubt."
"It was poetry. There's no need for you to hurry, my friend. It was more
than mere poetry, it was in Latin. I read the first line on the page,
and it ran, '_Te, dum spernit, arat novus accola; max ubi cultam_--'"
Gaydon tore his arm away from Misset. "I'll hear no more of it," he
cried. "Poetry is none of my business."
"There, Dick, you are wrong," said O'Toole, sententiously. Both Misset
and Gaydon came to a dead stop and stared. Never had poetry so strange
an advocate. O'Toole set his great legs apart and his arms akimbo. He
rocked himself backwards and forwards on his heels and toes, while a
benevolent smile of superiority wrinkled across his broad face from ear
to ear. "Yes, I've done it," said he; "I've written poetry. It is a
thing a polite gentleman should be able to do. So I did it. It wasn't in
Latin, because the young lady it was written to didn't understand Latin.
Her name was Lucy, and I rhymed her to 'juicy,' and the pleasure of it
made her purple in the face. There were to have been four lines, but
there were never more than three and a half because I could not think of
a suitable rhyme to O'Toole. Lucy said she knew one, but she would never
tell it me."
Wogan's poetry, however, was of quite a different kind, and had Gaydon
looked at it a trifle more closely, he would have experienced some
relief. It was all about the sorrows and miseries of his unfortunate
race and the cruel oppression of England. England owed all its great men
to Ireland and was currish enough never to acknowledge the debt. Wogan
always grew melancholy and grave-faced on that subject when he had the
leisure to be idle. He thought bitterly of the many Irish officers sent
into exile and killed in the service of alien countries; his sense of
injustice grew into a passionate sort of despair, and the despair
tumbled out of him in sonorous Latin verse written in the Virgilian
measure. He wrote a deal of it during this month of waiting, and a long
while afterwards sent an extract to Dr. Swift and received the great
man's compliments upon its felicity, as anyone may see for himself in
the doctor's correspondence.
How the month passed for James Stuart in Rome may be partly guessed from
a letter which was brought to Wogan by Michael Vezozzi, the Chevalier's
body-servant.
The letter announced that King George of England had offered the
Princess Clementina a dowry of £100,000 if she would marry the Prince of
Baden, and that the Prince of Baden with a numerous following was
already at Innspruck to prosecute his suit.
"I do not know but what her Highness," he wrote, "will receive the best
consolation for her sufferings on my account if she accepts so
favourable a proposal, rather than run so many hazards as she must needs
do as my wife. For myself, I have been summoned most urgently into Spain
and am travelling thither on the instant."
Wogan could make neither head nor tail of the letter. Why should the
King go to Spain at the time when the Princess Clementina might be
expected at Bologna? It was plain that he did not expect Wogan would
succeed. He was disheartened. Wogan came to the conclusion that there
was the whole meaning of the letter. He was, however, for other reasons
glad to receive it.
"It is very well I have this letter," said he, "for until it came I had
no scrap of writing whatever to show either to her Highness or, what I
take to be more important, to her Highness's mother," and he went back
to his poetry.
Misset and his wife, on the other hand, drove forward to the town of
Colmar, where they bought a travelling carriage and the necessaries for
the journey. Misset left his wife at Colmar, but returned every
twenty-four hours himself. They made the excuse that Misset had won a
deal of money at play and was minded to lay it out in presents to his
wife. The stratagem had a wonderful success at Schlestadt, especially
amongst the ladies, who could do nothing day and night but praise in
their husbands' hearing so excellent a mode of disposing of one's
winnings.
O'Toole spent his month in polishing his pistols and sharpening his
sword. It is true that he had to persuade Jenny to bear them company,
but that was the work of an afternoon. He told her the story of the rich
Austrian heiress, promised her a hundred guineas and a damask gown, gave
her a kiss, and the matter was settled.
Jenny passed her month in a delicious excitement. She was a daughter of
the camp, and had no fears whatever. She was a conspirator; she was
trusted with a tremendous secret; she was to help the beautiful and
enormous O'Toole to a rich and beautiful wife; she was to outwit an old
curmudgeon of an uncle; she was to succour a maiden heart-broken and
imprisoned. Jenny was quite uplifted. Never had a maid-servant been born
to so high a destiny. Her only difficulty was to keep silence, and when
the silence became no longer endurable she would run on some excuse or
another to Wogan and divert him with the properest sentiments.
"To me," she would cry, "there's nothing sinful in changing clothes
with the beautiful mistress of O'Toole. Christian charity says we are to
make others happy. I am a Christian, and as to the uncle he can go to
the devil! He can do nothing to me but talk, and I don't understand his
stupid language."
Jenny was the one person really happy during this month. It was Wogan's
effort to keep her so, for she was the very pivot of his plan.
There remains yet one other who had most reason of all to repine at the
delay, the Princess Clementina. Her mother wearied her with perpetual
complaints, the Prince of Baden, who was allowed admittance to the
villa, persecuted her with his attentions; she knew nothing of what was
planned for her escape, and the rigorous confinement was not relaxed. It
was not a happy time for Clementina. Yet she was not entirely unhappy. A
thought had come to her and stayed with her which called the colour to
her cheeks and a smile to her lips. It accounted to her for the delay;
her pride was restored by it; because of it she became yet more patient
with her mother, more gentle with the Prince of Baden, more
good-humoured to her gaolers. It sang at her heart like a bird; it
lightened in her grey eyes. It had come to her one sleepless night, and
the morning had not revealed it as a mere phantasy born of the night.
The more she pondered it, the more certain was she of its truth. Her
King was coming himself at the hazard of his life to rescue her.