The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood Part 74

She was ghastly pale: the rough ordeal of imprisonment had robbed her dress and demeanour of all its coquetry; but she faced the magistrate with self-possessed, insolent effrontery, and met his stern look with cold, unflinching eyes.

"Why am I brought here?" she began, fiercely. "How dare you detain me?

You and your masters shall answer for this ill-usage. I am an English lady, belonging to one of the proudest families in the country. The British Emba.s.sy, the British nation, will call you to the strictest account."

"Ta! ta! ta!" said the judge, with a gesture of the hand essentially French; "I think you are slightly mistaken; you are no more English than I am. I know you, and all about you, Cyprienne Vergette--otherwise Gascoigne, otherwise Wilders.

"Shall I tell you a little of your early history? How you eloped from Gibraltar, where your father was Vice-Consul; how you came to Paris with your lover; your marriage, your life, your desertion of your husband, your a.s.sociation with Ledantec, your second marriage, your plots against Milord Essendine and his family, your murder--"

"It is a lie!" she interrupted him, hastily. "I never committed murder."

"You compa.s.sed Lord Lydstone's death, although you did not strike the blow. You would have caused the death of another English officer, but, happily, he has escaped your murderous intrigues."

Only that morning the French journals had copied from the English an account of McKay's almost providential escape on the 18th of June.

"But your last attempt has failed utterly. Mr.--" he referred to his papers for the name--"McKay is safe within the British lines. The agent you employed to inveigle him into danger is dead, but with his last breath he confessed that he had had his orders from you. Now, Cyprienne Vergette, what have you to say?"

"I deny everything. I protest against your jurisdiction."

"The a.s.size Court will hear, but scarcely admit, your plea. That tribunal and its president will deal you as you deserve."

CHAPTER XV.

L'ENVOI.

The _Burlington Castle_ made a short halt at Constantinople, and another, somewhat longer, at Malta; a third was to be made at Gibraltar, where two of our most important characters proposed to leave the s.h.i.+p.

The delay at Malta was to allow Miss Hidalgo to make her appearance in the Supreme Court as princ.i.p.al witness against the baker, Giuseppe Pisani, commonly called Valetta Joe.

The British military authorities in the Crimea had hesitated to deal summarily with the spy's offence. He might have been hanged out of hand under the Mutiny Act; but such swift retribution, however richly merited, was obnoxious to our general's sense of justice.

He preferred to leave the criminal to the ordinary tribunals of his native island. It could adjudge and carry out any punishment short of death, if so inclined. In the Crimea the capital sentence only would have been possible.

The trial was short and summary. Mariquita, dressed still in the sober, quaker-like garb of a hospital-nurse, said what she had to say in a few simple words. Her sweet face and artless manner were the admiration of the whole court, and there was a little round of applause as it came out that she had ventured so far and braved so much out of love for the gallant soldier who was leaning on his crutches close by her side.

Valetta Joe was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment for four years, and with his conviction the reader's interest in him will probably cease. It disposed of the last of McKay's active enemies; Benito, as we have seen, had died in Balaclava hospital, and Cyprienne Vergette and her accomplice were in the grip of the French law.

The enemies had disappeared; friends only remained. When he landed at Gibraltar numbers came to greet him, from the Governor himself to the Tio Pedro and the old crone his wife. Letters had already a.s.sured them of Mariquita's safety, and they wept crocodile tears of joy as they clasped her once more in their arms.

They were her only relatives, and as such McKay was compelled to surrender his love to them for a time. But only for the very briefest time. He measured their affections at its true value, and had no compunction in a.s.serting his claim over theirs to protect and cherish her.

He easily persuaded them and Mariquita, but with some tender insistence, to hurry on the marriage, and it took place within a few short weeks of their return to the Rock. Why should he wait? He was his own master; the only relative whose consent and approval he coveted--his mother--had already promised gladly to accept the girl of his choice.

His great relatives, the Essendines, might question the propriety of the match, anxious that he should look higher, and find his future bride amongst the aristocracy to which he now rightly belonged.

That was a point on which he meant to please himself, and did.

When, after a short honeymoon at Granada, the young married couple returned to Gibraltar and travelled leisurely homewards, Lord Essendine was one of the first to welcome him on arrival, and to congratulate him on the beauty of his bride.

By-and-by, when the days of mourning were ended, Lady Essendine came out of her strict retirement to present Mrs. McKay at Court; and the handsome Spanish girl with the strange romantic history was one of the greatest successes of the next London season. Ere long the future succession of the Essendine t.i.tle was a.s.sured beyond doubt. McKay was blessed with a numerous family--many sons came to satisfy the head of the house that the t.i.tle of Essendine and the family name were in no danger of extinction. But Lord Essendine lived for many years after the termination of the Crimean war, and McKay was a general officer and a Knight of the Bath before he became the fifteenth Earl of Essendine.

Having thus disposed of the hero whose early career was so chequered and eventful, I must add a word as to the fate of the other actors in this veracious narrative.

First as to Hyde, who continued to be known by that name to his death, preferring it greatly to the other, with its painful memories. He remained a prisoner in the depot of the Prefecture only a few days.

The confession made by Ledantec and the evidence of other witnesses so amply attested the innocence of the M. Gascoigne accused of the Tinplate Street murder that his release followed as a matter of course. Hyde waited in Paris to hear the issue of the trial of the real offenders, and, painful as it was to be present at the sentence of the woman who had once borne his name, he yet listened without flinching to the whole story. After all, there was a certain relief in knowing that he was well rid of her. It was little likely that the Central prison to which she was consigned in perpetual "reclusion"

would ever surrender its prey.

He heard, too, with lively satisfaction, the sentence of his old foe, Ledantec, to hard labour at the galleys for twenty years.

With these trials, and the penalties that followed them, he turned down for ever the dark page of his life, and presently returned to England, where he spent the remainder of his leave with his old friend and comrade, McKay.

After that had expired he returned to the Crimea, and was present at the closing scenes of the war. He continued to serve with the Royal Picts for many years more--the regiment had become his home--and, as he was in due course promoted to the post of paymaster, his position and income were materially changed.

He lived to a green old age, retiring from the service full of rank and honour. Colonel Hyde was long a notable figure at his club in Pall Mall, which gained a new and very popular _chef_ when Anatole Belhomme wrote him that he had been summarily dismissed from the French police.

Hyde spent a great portion of every year at Essendine Castle, after his friend had succeeded to the estates, and there was no more honoured guest than he at the coming of age of Rupert, Viscount Lydstone, his G.o.dson.

The boy whom Mrs. Wilders had hesitated to surrender to old Lord Essendine, from greed rather than maternal instinct, was not neglected by the old peer. After the mother had pa.s.sed out of sight, the son was brought up decently, given a good education, and eventually started in life. He adopted the military profession, and was not denied the support and encouragement of Stanislas McKay.

Our hero was able to help his uncle, too, the much-aggrieved functionary of the Military Munition Department, and secured for him the decoration he had so long coveted in vain.

Uncle Barto, the worthy captain of the _Burlington Castle_, made a snug fortune by his commercial ventures during the war, and paid regular visits to his nephew, Stanny. Mrs. McKay, or Countess of Essendine as she became, could never forget what she owed for his generous hospitality on board the _Burlington_.

THE END.

BLUE BLOOD.

CHAPTER I.

"The idea is simply preposterous. I decline to entertain it. I cannot listen to it--not for one moment. Never!"

The speaker was Mrs. Purling, "heiress of the Purlings"; imperious, emphatic, self-opinionated, as women become who have had their own way all their lives through.

"But, mother," went on Harold, her only son--like herself, large and broadly built; but, unlike her, quiet and rather submissive in manner, as one who had been habitually kept under--"I am really in earnest. I am absolutely sick of doing nothing."

"Because you won't do what you might. There is plenty for you to do.

Has not the d.u.c.h.ess asked you to Scotland? You refuse--and such a splendid invitation! I have offered you a yacht. I say you may share a river in Norway with dear Lord Faro. I implore you to drive a coach, to keep racehorses, to take your place in the best society, as the representative of the Purling--"