Chapter 8
The historic ball given by the then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs—Lord Grenville—was the most brilliant function of the year. Though the autumn season had only just begun, everybody who was anybody had contrived to be in London in time to be present there, and to shine at this ball, to the best of his or her respective ability.
His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales had promised to be present. He was coming on presently from the opera. Lord Grenville himself had listened to the two first acts of Orpheus, before preparing to receive his guests. At ten o’clock—an unusually late hour in those days—the grand rooms of the Foreign Office, exquisitely decorated with exotic palms and flowers, were filled to overflowing. One room had been set apart for dancing, and the dainty strains of the minuet made a soft accompaniment to the gay chatter, the merry laughter of the numerous and brilliant company.
But, above all, Chauvelin had a purpose at heart. He firmly believed that the French aristocrat was the most bitter enemy of France; he would have wished to see every one of them annihilated: he was one of those who, during this awful Reign of Terror, had been the first to utter the historic and ferocious desire “that aristocrats might have but one head between them, so that it might be cut off with a single stroke of the guillotine.” And thus he looked upon every French aristocrat, who had succeeded in escaping from France, as so much prey of which the guillotine had been unwarrantably cheated. There is no doubt that those royalist emigres, once they had managed to cross the frontier, did their very best to stir up foreign indignation against France. Plots without end were hatched in England, in Belgium, in Holland, to try and induce some great power to send troops into.
Suddenly there was a great stir on the handsome staircase, all conversation stopped for a moment as the majordomo’s voice outside announced, “His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and suite, Sir Percy Blakeney, Lady Blakeney.”
Lord Grenville went quickly to the door to receive his exalted guest.
The Prince of Wales, dressed in a magnificent court suit of salmon-coloured velvet richly embroidered with gold, entered with Marguerite Blakeney on his arm; and on his left Sir Percy, in gorgeous shimmering cream satin, cut in the extravagant ‘Incroyable’ style, his fair hair free from powder, priceless lace at his neck and wrists, and the flat chapeau-bras under his arm.
After the few conventional words of deferential greeting, Lord Grenville said to his royal guest, “Will your Highness permit me to introduce M. Chauvelin, the accredited agent of the French Government?”
Chauvelin, immediately the Prince entered, had stepped forward, expecting this introduction. He bowed very low, whilst the Prince returned his salute with a curt nod of the head.
“Monsieur,” said His Royal Highness coldly, “we will try to forget the government that sent you, and look upon you merely as our guest—a private gentleman from France. As such you are welcome, Monsieur.”
“Monseigneur,” rejoined Chauvelin, bowing once again. “Madame,” he added, bowing ceremoniously before Marguerite.
“Ah! my little Chauvelin!” she said with unconcerned gaiety, and extending her tiny hand to him. “Monsieur and I are old friends, your Royal Highness.”
“Ah, then,” said the Prince, this time very graciously, “you are doubly welcome, Monsieur.”
“There is someone else I would crave permission to present to your Royal Highness,” here interposed Lord Grenville.
“Ah! who is it?” asked the Prince.
“Madame la Comtesse de Tournay de Basserive and her family, who have but recently come from France.”
“By all means!—They are among the lucky ones then!”
Lord Grenville turned in search of the Comtesse, who sat at the further end of the room.
“Lud love me!” whispered his Royal Highness to Marguerite, as soon as he had caught sight of the rigid figure of the old lady; “Lud love me! she looks very virtuous and very melancholy.”
“Faith, your Royal Highness,” she rejoined with a smile, “virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when it is crushed.”
“Virtue, alas!” sighed the Prince, “is mostly unbecoming to your charming sex, Madame.”
“Madame la Comtesse de Tournay de Basserive,” said Lord Grenville, introducing the lady.
“This is a pleasure, Madame; my royal father, as you know, is ever glad to welcome those of your compatriots whom France has driven from her shores.”
“Your Royal Highness is ever gracious,” replied the Comtesse with becoming dignity. Then, indicating her daughter, who stood timidly by her side: “My daughter Suzanne, Monseigneur,” she said.
“Ah! charming!—charming!” said the Prince, “and now allow me, Comtesse, to introduce you, Lady Blakeney, who honours us with her friendship. You and she will have much to say to one another, I vow. Every compatriot of Lady Blakeney’s is doubly welcome for her sake. Her friends are our friends; her enemies, the enemies of England.”
“His Royal Highness is ever gracious, Madame,” said Marguerite, demurely, and with a wealth of mischief in her twinkling blue eyes, “but there is no need for his kind of meditation. Your amiable reception of me at our last meeting still dwells pleasantly in my memory.”
“We poor exiles, Madame,” rejoined the Comtesse, frigidly, “show our gratitude to England by devotion to the wishes of Monseigneur.”
“Madame!” said Marguerite, with another ceremonious curtsey.
“Madame,” responded the Comtesse with equal dignity.
The Prince in the meanwhile was saying a few gracious words to the young Vicomte.
“I am happy to know you, Monsieur le Vicomte,” he said. “I knew your father well when he was ambassador in London.”
“Ah, Monseigneur!” replied the Vicomte, “I was a little boy then and now I owe the honour of this meeting to our protector, the Scarlet Pimpernel.”
“Hush!” said the Prince, earnestly and quickly, as he indicated Chauvelin, who had stood a little on one side throughout the whole of this little scene, watching Marguerite and the Comtesse with an amused, sarcastic little smile around his thin lips.
“Nay, Monseigneur,” he said now, as if in direct response to the Prince’s challenge, “pray do not check this gentleman’s display of gratitude; the name of that interesting red flower is well known to me—and to France.”
The Prince looked at him keenly for a moment or two.
“Faith, then, Monsieur,” he said, “perhaps you know more about our national hero than we do ourselves. Per chance you know who he is. See!” he added, turning to the groups round the room, “the ladies hang upon your lips. You would render yourself popular among the fair sex if you were to gratify their curiosity.”
“Ah, Monseigneur,” said Chauvelin, significantly, “rumour has it in France that your Highness could—as you would—give the truest account of that enigmatical wayside flower.”
He looked quickly and keenly at Marguerite as he spoke; but she betrayed no emotion, and her eyes met his quite fearlessly.
Chauvelin did no more than bow placidly both to the Prince and to Marguerite; he felt that both speeches were intended—each in their way—to convey contempt or defiance. The pleasure-loving, idle Prince he despised: the beautiful woman, who in her golden hair wore a spray of small red flowers composed of rubies and diamonds—her he held in the hollow of hand: he could afford to remain silent and to wait events.
A long, jovial, inane laugh broke the sudden silence which had fallen over everyone.
“And we poor husbands,” came in slow, affected accents from gorgeous Sir Percy, “we have to stand by…while they worship a demmed shadow.”
Everyone laughed—the Prince more loudly than anyone. The tension of subdued excitement was relieved, and the next moment everyone was laughing and chatting merrily as the gay crowd broke up and dispersed in the adjoining rooms.
Marguerite suffered intensely. Though she laughed and chatted, though she was more admired, more surrounded, more feted than any woman there, she felt like one condemned to death, living her last day upon this earth.
There he stood, the moral support, the cool-headed adviser, surrounded by a crowd of brainless, empty-headed young fops, who were even now repeating from mouth to mouth, and with every sign of the keenest enjoyment, a doggerel quatrain which he had just given forth. Everywhere the absurd, silly words met her: people seemed to have little else to speak about, even the Prince had asked her, with a little laugh, whether she appreciated her husband’s latest poetic efforts.
“All done in the tying of a cravat,” Sir Percy had declared to his clique of admirers.
“We seek him here, we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell? That demmed, elusive Pimpernel”
Sir Percy’s BON MOT had gone the round of the brilliant reception-rooms. The Prince was enchanted. He vowed that life without Blakeney would be but a dreary desert. Then, taking him by the arm, had led him to the card-room, and engaged him in a long game of hazard.
Sir Percy, whose chief interest in most social gatherings seemed to centre round the card-table, usually allowed his wife to flirt, dance, to amuse or bore herself as much as she liked. And to-night, having delivered himself of his BON MOT, he had left Marguerite surrounded by a crowd of admirers of all ages, all anxious and willing to help her to forget that somewhere in the spacious reception rooms, there was a long, lazy being who had been fool enough to suppose that the cleverest woman in Europe would settle down to the prosaic bonds of English matrimony.
Her still overwrought nerves, her excitement and agitation, lent beautiful Marguerite Blakeney much additional charm: escorted by a veritable bevy of men of all ages and of most nationalities, she called forth many exclamations of admiration from everyone as she passed.
She would not allow herself any more time to think. Her early, somewhat Bohemian training had made her something of a fatalist. She felt that events would shape themselves, that the directing of them was not in her hands. From Chauvelin she knew that she could expect no mercy. He had set a price on Armand’s head, and left it to her to pay or not, as she chose.
Later on in the evening she caught sight of Sir Andrew Ffoulkes and Lord Antony Dewhurst, who seemingly had just arrived. She noticed at once that Sir Andrew immediately made for little Suzanne de Tournay, and that the two young people soon managed to isolate themselves in one of the deep embrasures of the mullioned windows, there to carry on a long conversation, which seemed very earnest and very pleasant on both sides.
Both the young men looked a little haggard and anxious, but otherwise they were irreproachably dressed, and there was not the slightest sign, about their courtly demeanour, of the terrible catastrophe, which they must have felt hovering round them and round their chief.
That the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had no intention of abandoning its cause, she had gathered through little Suzanne herself, who spoke openly of the assurance she and her mother had had that the Comte de Tournay would be rescued from France by the league, within the next few days. Vaguely she began to wonder, as she looked at the brilliant and fashionable in the gaily-lighted ball-room, which of these worldly men round her was the mysterious “Scarlet Pimpernel,” who held the threads of such daring plots, and the fate of valuable lives in his hands.
He was at the ball, of course, somewhere, since Sir Andrew Ffoulkes and Lord Antony Dewhurst were here, evidently expecting to meet their chief—and perhaps to get a fresh MOT D’ORDRE from him.
Marguerite looked round at everyone, at the aristocratic high-typed Norman faces, the squarely-built, fair-haired Saxon, the more gentle, humorous caste of the Celt, wondering which of these betrayed the power, the energy, the cunning which had imposed its will and its leadership upon a number of high-born English gentlemen, among whom rumour asserted was His Royal Highness himself.
Sir Andrew Ffoulkes? Surely not, with his gentle blue eyes, which were looking so tenderly and longingly after little Suzanne, who was being led away from the pleasant TETE-A-TETE by her stern mother. Marguerite watched him across the room, as he finally turned away with a sigh, and seemed to stand, aimless and lonely, now that Suzanne’s dainty little figure had disappeared in the crowd.
She watched him as he strolled towards the doorway, which led to a small boudoir beyond, then paused and leaned against the framework of it, looking still anxiously all round him.
Marguerite contrived for the moment to evade her present attentive cavalier, and she skirted the fashionable crowd, drawing nearer to the doorway, against which Sir Andrew was leaning. Why she wished to get closer to him, she could not have said: perhaps she was impelled by an all-powerful fatality, which so often seems to rule the destinies of men.
For one moment longer—oh! it was the merest flash—Marguerite paused: the next she had, with admirably played unconcern, resumed her walk across the room—but this time more quickly towards that doorway whence Sir Andrew had now disappeared.
All this, from the moment that Marguerite had caught sight of Sir Andrew leaning against the doorway, until she followed him into the little boudoir beyond, had occurred in less than a minute. Fate is usually swift when she deals a blow.
Barely another thirty seconds had elapsed between the moment when Lord Hastings slipped the mysterious ‘something’ into Sir Andrew’s hand, and the one when she, in her turn, reached the deserted boudoir. Sir Andrew was standing with his back to her and close to a table upon which stood a massive silver candelabra. A slip of paper was in his hand, and he was in the very act of perusing its contents.
Unperceived, her soft clinging robe making not the slightest sound upon the heavy carpet, not daring to breathe until she had accomplished her purpose, Marguerite slipped close behind him. At that moment he looked round and saw her; she uttered a groan, passed her hand across her forehead, and murmured faintly, “The heat in the room was terrible. I felt so faint. Ah!”
She tottered almost as if she would fall, and Sir Andrew, quickly recovering himself, and crumpling in his hand the tiny note he had been reading, was only apparently, just in time to support her.
“You are ill, Lady Blakeney?” he asked with much concern, “Let me.”
“No, no, nothing—” she interrupted quickly. “A chair—quick.”
She sank into a chair close to the table, and throwing back her head, closing her eyes.
“There!” she murmured, still faintly; “the giddiness is passing off. Do not heed me, Sir Andrew; I assure you I already feel better.”
For one moment there was dead silence in the little boudoir. Beyond, from the brilliant ball-room, the sweet notes of the gavotte, the frou-frou of rich dresses, the talk and laughter of a large and merry crowd, came as a strange, weird accompaniment to the drama which was being enacted here.
Marguerite burst into a long, merry peal of laughter.
“Why do you stare at me like that?” she said playfully.
“I assure you I feel much better; your remedy has proved most effectual. This room is most delightedly cool,” she added, with the same perfect composure, “and the sound of the gavotte from the ball-room is fascinating and soothing.”
She gave a quick cry of alarm: “The candles, Sir Andrew—quick!”
When Sir Andrew once more looked at her, he only saw upon her face alarm at the untoward accident and relief at its happy issue; whilst the tiny and momentous note had apparently fluttered to the ground. Eagerly the young man picked it up, and his face looked much relieved, as his fingers closed tightly over it.
“For shame, Sir Andrew,” she said, shaking her head with a playful sigh, “making havoc in the heart of some impressionable duchess, whilst conquering the affections of my sweet little Suzanne. Well, well! I do believe it was Cupid himself who stood by you, and threatened the entire Foreign Office with destruction by fire, just on purpose to make me drop love’s message, before it had been polluted by my indiscreet eyes. To think that, a moment longer, and I might have known the secrets of an erring duchess.”
“You will forgive me, Lady Blakeney,” said Sir Andrew, now as calm as she was herself, “if I resume the interesting occupation which you have interrupted?”
“By all means, Sir Andrew! How should I venture to thwart the love-god again? Perhaps he would mete out some terrible chastisement against my presumption. Burn your love-token, by all means!”
Sir Andrew had already twisted the paper into a long spill, and was once again holding it to the flame of the candle, which had remained alight. He did not notice the strange smile on the face of his fair VIS-A-VIS, so intent was he on the work of destruction; perhaps, had he done so, the look of relief would have faded from his face. He watched the fateful note, as it curled under the flame. Soon the last fragment fell on the floor, and he placed his heel upon the ashes.
“And now, Sir Andrew,” said Marguerite Blakeney, with the pretty nonchalance peculiar to herself, and with the most winning of smiles, “will you venture to excite the jealousy of your fair lady by asking me to dance the minuet?”
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