Produced by Al Haines.
_A Marriage
Under the Terror_
_By_
_Patricia Wentworth_
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
Knickerbocker Press
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, April, 1910
Reprinted, May, 1910
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
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To _A Marriage Under the Terror_ has been awarded in England the first
prize in the Melrose Novel Competition, a competition that was not
restricted to first stories. The distinguished literary reputation of
the three judges--Mrs. Flora Annie Steel, Miss Mary Cholmondeley, and
Mrs. Henry de la Pasture--was a guaranty alike to the contestants and to
the public that the story selected as the winner would without question
be fully entitled to that distinction. In consequence, many authors of
experience entered the contest, with the result that the number of
manuscripts submitted was greater than that in the competition
previously conducted by Mr. Melrose.
Among such a number of good stories individual taste must always play an
important part in the decision. It is, therefore, no small tribute to
the transcendent interest of the winning novel that, though the judges
worked independently, each selected _A Marriage Under the Terror_ as the
most distinctive novel in the group.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. A Purloined Cipher
II. A Forced Entrance
III. Shut out by a Prison Wall
IV. The Terror Let Loose
V. A Carnival of Blood
VI. A Doubtful Safety
VII. The Inner Conflict
VIII. An Offer of Friendship
IX. The Old Ideal and the New
X. The Fate of a King
XI. The Irrevocable Vote
XII. Separation
XIII. Disturbing Insinuations
XIV. A Dangerous Acquaintance
XV. Sans Souci
XVI. An Unwelcome Visitor
XVII. Distressing News
XVIII. A Trial and a Wedding
XIX. The Barrier
XX. A Royalist Plot
XXI. A New Environment
XXII. At Home and Afield
XXIII. Return of Two Fugitives
XXIV. Burning of the Chateau
XXV. Escape of Two Madcaps
XXVI. A Dying Woman
XXVII. Betrayal
XXVIII. Inmates of the Prison
XXIX. Through Darkness to Light
A MARRIAGE UNDER THE TERROR
CHAPTER I
A PURLOINED CIPHER
It was high noon on a mid-August morning of the year 1792, but Jeanne,
the waiting-maid, had only just set the coffee down on the small table
within the ruelle of Mme de Montargis' magnificent bed. Great ladies
did not trouble themselves to rise too early in those days, and a beauty
who has been a beauty for twenty years was not more anxious then than
now to face the unflattering freshness of the morning air. Laure de
Montargis stirred in the shadow of her brocaded curtains, put out a
white hand for the cup, sipped from it, murmured that the coffee was
cold, and pushed it from her with a fretful exclamation that made Jeanne
frown as she drew the tan-coloured curtains and let in the mid-day
glare. Madame had been up late, Madame had lost at faro, and her
servants would have to put up with Heaven alone knew how many megrims in
consequence.
"Madame suffers?" inquired Jeanne obsequiously, but with pursed lips.
The lady closed her eyes. Laying her head back against the delicately
embroidered pillows, she indicated by a gesture that her sufferings
might be taken for granted.
"Madame has the migraine?" suggested the soft, rather false-sounding
voice. "Madame will not receive?"
"Heavens! girl, how you pester me," said the Marquise sharply.
Then, falling again to a languid tone, "Is there any one there?"
Jeanne smiled with malicious, averted face as she poured rose-water from
a silver ewer into a Sevres bowl, and watched it rise, dimpling, to the
flower-wreathed brim.
"There is M. le Vicomte as usual, Madame, and Mme la Comtesse de Maille,
who, learning that Madame was but now awakened, told me that she would
wait whilst I inquired if Madame would see her."
"Good Heavens! what an hour to come," said the lady, with a peevish air.
"Madame la Comtesse seemed much moved. One would say something had
occurred," said Jeanne.
The Marquise raised her head sharply.
"--And you stand chattering there? Just Heaven! The trial that it is to
have an imbecile about one! The glass quickly, and the rouge, and the
lace for my head. No, not that rouge,--the new sort that Isidore
brought yesterday;--arrange these two curls,--now a little powder.
Fool! what powder is this?"
"Madame's own," submitted Jeanne meekly.
The suffering lady raised herself and dealt the girl a sounding box on
the ear.
"Idiot! did I not tell you I had tired of the perfume, and that in
future the white lilac powder was the only one I would use? Did I not
tell you?"
"Yes, Madame"--but there was a spark beneath the waiting-maid's
discreetly dropped lids.
The Marquise de Montargis sat bolt upright, and contemplated her
reflection in the wide silver mirror which Jeanne was steadying. Her
passion had brought a little flush to her cheeks, and she noted
approvingly that the colour became her.
"Put the rouge just here, and here, Jeanne," she ordered, her anger
subsiding;--then, with a fresh outburst--"Imbecile, not so much! One
does not have the complexion of a milkmaid when one is in bed with the
migraine; just a shade here now, a nuance. That will do; go and bring
them in."
She drew a rose-coloured satin wrap about her, and posed her head, in
its cloud of delicate lace, carefully. Her bed was as gorgeous as it
well might be. Long curtains of rosy brocade fell about it, and a
coverlid of finest needlework, embroidered with bunches of red and white
roses on a white satin ground, was thrown across it. The carved pillars
showed cupids pelting one another with flowers plucked from the garlands
that wreathed their naked chubbiness.
Madame de Montargis herself had been a beauty for twenty years, but a
life of light pleasures, and a heart incapable of experiencing more than
a momentary emotion had combined to leave her face as unlined and almost
as lovely as when Paris first proclaimed her its reigning queen of
beauty.
She was eminently satisfied with her own looks as she turned languidly
on her soft pillows to greet her friends.
Mme de Maille bent and embraced her; M. le Vicomte Selincourt stooped
and kissed her gracefully extended hand. Jeanne brought seats, and
after a few polite inquiries Mme de Maille plunged into her news.
"Ma chere amie!" she exclaimed, "I come to tell you the good news. My
daughter and her husband have reached England in safety." Tears filled
her soft blue eyes, and she raised them to the ceiling with a gesture
that would have been affected had her emotion been less evidently
sincere.
"Ah! chere Comtesse, a thousand felicitations!"
"My dear, I have been on thorns, I have not slept, I have not eaten, I
have wept rivers, I have said more prayers in a month than my confessor
has ever before induced me to say in a year. First I thought they would
be stopped at the barriers, and then--then I pictured to myself a
hundred misfortunes, a thousand inconveniences! I saw my Adele ill,
fainting from the fatigues of the road; I imagined assaults of brigands,
shipwrecks, storms,--in short, everything of the most unfortunate,--ah!
my dear friends, you do not know what a mother suffers,--and now I have
the happiness of receiving a letter from my dearest Adele,--she is well;
she is contented. They have been received with the greatest amiability,
and, my friends, I am too happy."
"And your happiness is that of your friends," bowed the Vicomte.
Mme de Montargis' congratulations were polite, if a trifle perfunctory.
The convenances demanded that one should simulate an interest in the
affairs of one's acquaintances, but in reality, and at this hour of the
day, how they did bore one! And Marie de Maille, with her soft airs,
and that insufferable Adele of hers, whom she had always spoilt so
abominably. It was a little too much! One had affairs of one's own.
With the fretful expression of half an hour before she drew a letter
from beneath her pillow.
"I too have news to impart," she said, with rather a pinched smile.
"News that concerns you very closely, M. le Vicomte," and she fixed her
eyes on Selincourt.
"That concerns me?"
"But yes, Monsieur, since what concerns Mademoiselle your betrothed must
concern you, and closely, as I said."
"Mademoiselle my betrothed, Mlle de Rochambeau!" he cried quickly. "Is
she then ill?"
Mme de Montargis smiled maliciously.
"Hark to the anxious lover! But calm yourself, my friend, she is
certainly not ill, or she would not now be on her way to Paris."
"To Paris?"
"That, Monsieur, is, I believe, her destination."
"What? She is coming to Paris now?" inquired Mme de Maille with
concern.
The Marquise shrugged her shoulders.
"It is very inconvenient, but what would you?" she said lightly; "as you
know, dear friend, she was betrothed to M. le Vicomte when she was a
child. Then my good cousin, the Comte de Rochambeau, takes it into his
virtuous head that this world, even in his rural retreat, is no longer
good enough for him, and follows Madame, his equally virtuous wife, to
Paradise, where they are no doubt extremely happy. Until yesterday I
pictured Mademoiselle almost as saintly and contented with the holy
Sisters of the Grace Dieu Convent, who have looked after her for the
last ten years or so. Then comes this letter; it seems there have been
riots, a chateau burned, an intendant or two murdered, and the good nuns
take advantage of the fact that the steward of Rochambeau and his wife
are making a journey to Paris to confide Mademoiselle to their care, and
mine. It seems," she concluded, with a little laugh, "that they think
Paris is safe, these good nuns."
"Poor child, poor child!" exclaimed Mme de Maille in a distressed voice;
"can you not stop her, turn her back?"
The Marquise laughed again.
"Dear friend, she is probably arriving at this minute. The Sisters are
women of energy."
"At least M. de Selincourt is to be congratulated," said Mme de Maille
after a pause; "that is if Mademoiselle resembles her parents. I
remember her mother very well,--how charming, how spirituelle, how
amiable! I knew her for only too short a time, and yet, looking back, it
seems to me that I never had a friend I valued more."
"My cousin De Rochambeau was crazy about her," reflected Mme de
Montargis; "he might have married anybody, and he chose an Irish girl
without a sou. It was the talk of Paris at the time. He was the
handsomest man at Court."
"And Aileen Desmond the loveliest girl," put in Mme de Maille
thoughtlessly; then, observing her hostess's change of expression, she
coloured, but continued--"They were not so badly matched, and," with a
little sigh, "they were very happy. It was a real romance."
Mme de Montargis' eyes flashed. Twenty years ago beautiful Aileen
Desmond had been her rival at Court. Now that for quite a dozen years
gossip had coupled her name with that of the Vicomte de Selincourt, was
Aileen Desmond's daughter to take her mother's place in that bygone
rivalry?
Mme de Maille, catching her glance, wondered how it would fare with any
defenceless girl who came between Laure de Montargis and her lover. She
was still wondering whilst she made her farewells.
When M. le Vicomte had bowed her out he came moodily back to his place.
"It is very inconvenient, Madame," he said pettishly.
"You say so," returned the lady.
"Pardon, Madame, it was you who said so."
The Marquise laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh.
"Of course it was I," she cried. "Who else? It is hardly likely that
M. le Vicomte finds a rich bride inconvenient."
Selincourt's face changed a little, but he waved the words away.
"Mademoiselle is nothing to me," he asserted. "Chere amie, do you
suspect, do you doubt the faithful heart which for years has beaten only
for one beloved object?"
The lady pouted, but her eyes ceased to sparkle.
"And that object?" she inquired, with a practised glance.
"Angel of my life--need you ask?"
It was indeed unnecessary, since a very short acquaintance with this
fervid lover was sufficient to assure any one that his devotion to
himself was indeed his ruling and unalterable passion; perhaps the
Marquise was aware of this, and was content to take the second, but not
the third place, in his affections. She looked at him coquettishly.
"Ah," she said, "you mean it now, now perhaps, Monsieur, but when she
comes, when you are married?"
"Eh, ma foi," and the Vicomte waved away his prospective marriage vows
as lightly as if they were thistle-down, "one does not marry for love;
the heart must be free, not bound,--and where will the free heart turn
except to the magnet that has drawn it for so long?"
Madame extended a white, languid hand, and Monsieur kissed it with more
elegance than fervour. As he was raising his head she whispered
sharply:
"The new cipher, have you got it?"
He bent lower, and kissed the fair hand again, lingeringly.
"It is here, and I have drafted the letter we spoke of; it must go this
week."
"The Queen is well?"
"Well, but impatient for news. There is an Austrian medicine that she
longs for."
"Chut! Enough, one is never safe."
"Adieu, then, m'amie."
"Adieu, M. le Vicomte."
Monsieur took his leave with an exquisite bow, and all the forms that
elegance prescribed, and Madame lay back against her pillows with closed
eyes, and the frown which she never permitted to appear in society.
Jeanne threw a sharp glance at her as she returned from closing the door
upon Selincourt. Her ears had made her aware of whispering, and now her
eyes showed her a small crumpled scrap of paper, just inside the ruelle
of Madame's bed. A love-letter? Perhaps, or perhaps not. In any case
the correspondence of the mistress is the perquisite of the maid, and as
Jeanne came softly to the bedside she covered the little twisted note
with a dexterous foot, and, bending to adjust the rose-embroidered
coverlid, secured and hid her prize. In a moment she had passed behind
the heavy curtains and was scanning it with a practised eye--an eye that
saw more than the innocent-seeming figures with which the white paper
was dotted. Jeanne had seen ciphers before, and a glance sufficed to
show her the nature of this one, for at the foot of the draft was a row
of signs and figures, mysterious no longer in the light of the key that
stood beneath them. Apparently Jeanne knew something about secret
correspondence too, for there in the shadow behind the curtain she
nodded and smiled, and once even shook her fist towards the unconscious
Marquise. Next moment she was again in evidence, and but for that paper
tucked away inside her bodice she would have found her morning a hard
one. Madame wished this, Madame wished that; Madame would have her
forehead bathed, her feet rubbed, a thousand whims complied with and a
thousand fancies gratified. Soft-voiced and deft, Jeanne moved
incessantly to and fro on those small, neatly-shod feet, which she
sometimes compared not uncomplacently with those of her mistress, until,
at last, at the latter end of all conceivable fancies there came one for
repose,--the rosy curtains were drawn, and Jeanne was free.
Half an hour later a deftly-cloaked figure stood before a table at which
a dark-faced man wrote busily--a paper was handed over, a password asked
and given.
"Is it enough now?" asked Jeanne the waiting-maid. And the dark-faced
man answered, without looking up, "It is enough--the cup is full."