BY ORDER OF THE STATE
§ 1
THE antechamber, wide and long, ran the whole length of Mother Théot's apartment. Her witch's lair and the room where she had just had her interview with Chauvelin gave directly on it on the one side, and two other living rooms on the other. At one end of the antechamber there were two windows, usually kept closely shuttered; and at the other was the main entrance door, which led to landing and staircase.
The antechamber was empty. It appeared to mock Chauvelin's excitement, with its grey-washed walls streaked with grime, its worm-eaten benches and tarnished chandelier. Mother Théot, voluble and quaking with fear, was close at his heels. Curtly he ordered her to be gone; her mutterings irritated him, her obvious fear of something unknown grated unpleasantly on his nerves. He cursed himself for his cowardice, and cursed the one man who alone in this world had the power to unnerve him.
"I was dreaming, of course," he muttered aloud to himself between his teeth. "I have that arch-devil, his laugh, his voice, his affectations, on the brain!"
He was on the point of going to the main door, in order to peer out on the landing or down the stairs, when he heard his name called immediately behind him. Theresia Cabarrus was standing under the lintel of the door which gave on the sybil's sanctum, her delicate hand holding back the portière.
"Citizen Chauvelin," she said, "I was waiting for you."
"And I, citoyenne," he retorted gruffly, "had in truth forgotten you."
"Mother Théot left me alone for a while, to commune with the spirits," she explained.
"Ah!" he riposted, slightly sarcastic. "With what result?"
"To help you further, citizen Chauvelin," she replied; "if you have need of me."
"Ah!" he exclaimed with a savage curse. "In truth, I have need of every willing hand that will raise itself against mine enemy. I have need of you, citizeness; of that old witch; of Rateau, the coalheaver; of every patriot who will sit and watch this house, to which we have brought the one bait that will lure the goldfish to our net."
"Have I not proved my willingness, citizen?" she retorted, with a smile. "Think you 'tis pleasant to give up my life, my salon, my easy, contented existence, and become a mere drudge in your service?"
"A drudge," he broke in with a chuckle, "who will soon be greater than a Queen."
"Ah, if I thought that!..." she exclaimed.
"I am as sure of it as that I am alive," he replied firmly. "You will never do anything with citizen Tallien, citoyenne. He is too mean, too cowardly. But bring the Scarlet Pimpernel to his knees at the chariot wheel of Robespierre, and even the crown of the Bourbons would be yours for the asking."
"I know that, citizen," she rejoined dryly; "else I were not here."
"We hold all the winning cards," he went on eagerly. "Lady Blakeney is in our hands. So long as we hold her, we have the certainty that sooner or later the English spy will establish communication with her. Catherine Théot is a good jailer, and Captain Boyer upstairs has a number of men under his command—veritable sleuthhounds, whose efficiency I can guarantee and whose eagerness is stimulated by the promise of a magnificent reward. But experience has taught me that that accursed Scarlet Pimpernel is never so dangerous as when we think we hold him. His extraordinary histrionic powers have been our undoing hitherto. No man's eyes are keen enough to pierce his disguises. That is why, citoyenne, I dragged you to England; that is why I placed you face to face with him, and said to you, 'That is the man.' Since then, with your help, we hold the decoy. Now you are my coadjutor and my help. in your eyes I place my trust; in your wits, your instinct. In whatever guise the Scarlet Pimpernel presents himself before you—and he will present himself before you, or he is no longer the impudent and reckless adventurer I know him to be!—I feel that you at least will recognize him."
"Yes; I think I should recognize him," she mused.
"Think you that I do not appreciate the sacrifice you make—the anxiety, the watchfulness to which you so nobly subject yourself? But 'tis you above all who are the lure which must inevitably attract the Scarlet Pimpernel into my hands."
"Soon, I hope," she sighed wearily.
"Soon," he asserted firmly. "I dare swear it! Until then, citizeness, in the name of your own future, and in the name of France, I adjure you to watch. Watch and listen! Oh, think of the stakes for which we are playing, you and I! Bring the Scarlet Pimpernel to his knees, citoyenne, and Robespierre will be as much your slave as he is now the prey to a strange dread of that one man. Robespierre fears the Scarlet Pimpernel. A superstitious conviction had seized hold of him that the English spy will bring about his downfall. We have all seen of late how aloof he holds himself. He no longer attends the Committees. He no longer goes to the Clubs; he shuns his friends; and his furtive glance is for ever trying to pierce some imaginary disguise, under which he alternately fears and hopes to discover his arch-enemy. He dreads assassination, anonymous attacks. In every obscure member of the Convention who walks up the steps of the tribune, he fears to find the Scarlet Pimpernel under a new, impenetrable mask. Ah, citoyenne! what influence you would have over him if through your agency all those fears could be drowned in the blood of that abominable Englishman!"
"Now, who would have thought that?" a mocking voice broke in suddenly, with a quiet chuckle. "I vow, my dear M. Chambertin, you are waxing more eloquent than ever before!"
Like the laughter of a while ago, the voice seemed to come from nowhere. It was in the air, muffled by the clouds of Mother Théot's perfumes, or by the thickness of doors and tapestries. Weird, yet human.
"By Satan, this is intolerable!" Chauvelin exclaimed; and paying no heed to Theresia's faint cry of terror, he ran to the main door. It was on the latch. He tore it open and dashed out upon the landing.
§ 2
From here a narrow stone staircase, dank and sombre, led downwards as well as upwards, in a spiral. The house had only the two stories, perched above some disused and dilapidated storage-rooms, to which a double outside door and wicket gave access from the street.
The staircase received its only light from a small window high up in the roof, the panes of which were coated with grime, so that the well of the stairs, especially past the first-floor landing, was almost in complete gloom. For an instant Chauvelin hesitated. Never a coward physically, he yet had no mind to precipitate himself down a dark staircase when mayhap his enemy was lying in wait for him down below.
Only for an instant however. The very next second had brought forth the positive reflection: "bah! Assassination, and in the dark, are not the Englishman's ways."
Scarce a few yards from where he stood, the other side of the door, was the dry moat which ran round the Arsenal. From there, at a call from him, a dozen men and more would surge from the ground—sleuthhounds, as he had told Theresia a moment ago, who were there on the watch and whom he could trust to do his work swiftly and securely—if only he could reach the door and call for help. Elusive as that accursed Pimpernel was, successful chase might even now be given to him.
Chauvelin ran down half a dozen steps, peered down the shaft of the staircase, and spied a tiny light, which moved swiftly to and fro. Then presently, below the light a bit of tallow candle, then a grimy hand holding the candle, an arm, the top of a shaggy head crowned by a greasy red cap, a broad back under a tattered blue jersey. He heard the thump of heavy soles upon the stone flooring below, and a moment or two later the weird, sepulchral sound of a churchyard cough. Then the light disappeared. For a second or two the darkness appeared more impenetrably dense; then one or two narrow streaks of daylight showed the position of the outside door. Something prompted him to call:
"Is that you, citizen Rateau?"
It was foolish, of course. And the very next moment he had his answer. A voice—the mocking voice he knew so well—called up to him in reply:
"At your service, dear M. Chambertin!" Can I do anything for you?"
Chauvelin swore, threw all prudence to the winds, and ran down the stairs as fast as his shaking knees would allow him. Some three steps from the bottom he paused for the space of a second, like one turned to stone by what he saw. Yet it was simple enough: just the same tiny light, the grimy hand holding the tallow candle, the shaggy head with the greasy red cap.... The figure in the gloom looked preternaturally large, and the flickering light threw fantastic shadows on the face and neck of the colossus, distorting the nose to a grotesque length and the chin to weird proportions.
The next instant Chauvelin gave a cry like an enraged bull and hurled his meagre person upon the giant, who, shaken at the moment by a tearing fit of coughing, was taken unawares and fell backwards, overborne by the impact, dropping the light as he fell and still wheezing pitiably whilst trying to give vent to his feelings by vigorous curses.
Chauvelin, vaguely surprised at his own strength or the weakness of his opponent, pressed his knee against the latter's chest, gripped him by the throat, smothering his curses and wheezes, turning the funeral cough into agonized gasps.
"At my service, in truth, my gallant Pimpernel!" he murmured hoarsely, feeling his small reserve of strength oozing away by the strenuous effort. "What you can do for me? Wait here, until I have you bound and gagged, safe against further mischief!"
His victim had in fact given a last convulsive gasp, lay now at full length upon the stone floor, with arms outstretched, motionless. Chauvelin relaxed his grip. His strength was spent, he was bathed in sweat, his body shook from head to foot. But he was triumphant! His mocking enemy, carried away by his own histrionics, had overtaxed his colossal strength. The carefully simulated fit of coughing had taken away his breath at the critical moment; the surprise attack had done the rest; and Chauvelin—meagre, feeble, usually the merest human insect beside the powerful Englishman—had conquered by sheer pluck and resource.
There lay the Scarlet Pimpernel, who had assumed the guise of asthmatic Rateau once too often, helpless and broken beneath the weight of the man whom he had hoodwinked and derided. And now at last all the intrigues, the humiliations, the schemes and the disappointments, were at an end. He—Chauvelin—free and honoured: Robespierre his grateful servant.
A wave of dizziness passed over his brain—the dizziness of coming glory. His senses reeled. When he staggered to his feet he could scarcely stand. The darkness was thick around him; only two streaks of daylight at right angles to one another came through the chinks of the outside door and vaguely illumined the interior of the dilapidated store-room, the last step or two of the winding stairway, the row of empty barrels on one side, the pile of rubbish on the other, and on the stone floor the huge figure in grimy and tattered rags, lying prone and motionless. Guided by those streaks of light, Chauvelin lurched up to the door, fumbled for the latch of the wicket-gate, and finding it pulled the gate open and almost fell out into the open.
§ 2
The Rue de la Planchette was as usual lonely and deserted. It was a second or two before Chauvelin spied a passer-by. That minute he spent in calling for help with all his might. The passer-by he quickly dispatched across to the Arsenal for assistance.
"In the name of the Republic!" he said solemnly.
But already his cries had attracted the attention of the sentries. Within two or three minutes, half a dozen men of the National Guard were speeding down the street. Soon they had reached the house, the door where Chauvelin, still breathless but with his habitual official manner that brooked of no argument, gave them hasty instructions.
"The man lying on the ground in there," he commanded. "Seize him and raise him. Then one of you find some cord and bind him securely."
The men flung the double doors wide open. A flood of light illumined the store-room. There lay the huge figure on the floor, no longer motionless, but trying to scramble to his feet, once more torn by a fit of coughing. The man ran up to him; one of them laughed.
"Why, if it isn't old Rateau!"
They lifted him up by his arms. He was helpless as a child, and his face was of a dull purple colour.
"He will die!" another man said, with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders.
But, in a way, they were sorry for him. He was one of themselves. Nothing of the aristo about asthmatic old Rateau!
"Hast thou been playing again at being an English milor, poor old Rateau?" another man asked compassionately.
They had succeeded in propping him up and sitting him down upon a barrel. His fit of coughing was subsiding. He had breath enough now to swear. He raised his head and encountered the pale eyes of citizen Chauvelin fixed as if sightlessly upon him.
"Name of a dog!" he began; but got no farther. Giddiness seized him, for he was weak from coughing and from that strangling grip round his throat, after he had been attacked in the darkness and thrown violently to the ground.
The men around him recoiled at sight of citizen Chauvelin. His appearance was almost death-like. His cheeks and lips were livid; his hair dishevelled; his eyes of an unearthly paleness. One hand, clawlike and shaking, he held out before him, as if to ward off some horrible apparition.
This trance-like state made up of a ghastly fear and a sense of the most hideous, most unearthly impotence, lasted for several seconds. The men themselves were frightened. Unable to understand what had happened, they thought that citizen Chauvelin, whom they all knew by sight, had suddenly lost his reason or was possessed of a devil. For in truth there was nothing about poor old Rateau to frighten a child!
Fortunately the tension was over before real panic had seized on any of them. The next moment Chauvelin had pulled himself together with one of those mighty efforts of will of which strong natures are always capable. With an impatient gesture he passed his hand across his brow, then backwards and forwards in front of his face, as if to chase away the demon of terror that obsessed him. He gazed on Rateau for a moment or two, his eyes travelling over the uncouth, semi-conscious figure of the coalheaver with a searching, undefinable glance. Then, as if suddenly struck with an idea, he spoke to the man nearest him:
"Sergeant Chazot? Is he at the Arsenal?"
"Yes, citizen," the man replied.
"Run across quickly then," Chauvelin continued; "and bring him hither at once."
The soldier obeyed, and a few more minutes—ten, perhaps—went by in silence. Rateau, weary, cursing, not altogether in full possession of his faculties, sat huddled up on the barrel, his bleary eyes following every movement of citizen Chauvelin with an anxious, furtive gaze. The latter was pacing up and down the stone floor, like a caged, impatient animal. From time to time he paused, either to peer out into the open in the direction of the Arsenal, or to search the dark angles of the store-room, kicking the piles of rubbish about with his foot.
§ 4
Anon he uttered a sigh of satisfaction. The soldier had returned, was even now in the doorway with a comrade—a short, thick-set, powerful-looking fellow—beside him.
"Sergeant Chazot!" Chauvelin said abruptly.
"At your commands, citizen!" the sergeant replied, and at a sign from the other followed him to the most distant corner of the room.
"Bend your ear and listen," Chauvelin murmured peremptorily. "I don't want those fools to hear." And, having assured himself that he and Chazot could speak without being overheard, he pointed to Rateau, then went on rapidly: "You will take this lout over to the cavalry barracks. See the veterinary. Tell him——"
He paused, as if unable to proceed. His lips were trembling, his face, ashen-white, looked spectral in the gloom. Chazot, not understand, waited patiently.
"That lout," Chauvelin resumed more steadily after a while, "is in collusion with a gang of dangerous English spies. One Englishman especially—tall, and a master of histrionics—uses this man as a kind of double. Perhaps you heard...?"
Chazot nodded.
"I know, citizen," he said sagely. "The Fraternal Supper in the Rue St. Honoré. Comrades have told me that no one could tell who was Rateau the coalheaver and who the English milor."
"Exactly!" Chauvelin rejoined dryly, quite firmly now. "Therefore, I want to make sure. The veterinary, you understand? He brands the horses for the cavalry. I want a brand on this lout's arm. Just a letter... a distinguishing mark..."
Chazot gave an involuntary gasp.
"But, citizen——!" he exclaimed.
"Eh? What?" the other retorted sharply. "In the service of the Republic there is no 'but,' Sergeant Chazot."
"I know that, citizen," Chazot, abashed, murmured humbly. "I only meant ... it seems so strange..."
"Stranger things than that occur every day in Paris, my friend," Chauvelin said dryly. "We brand horses that are the property of the State; why not a man? Time may come," he added with a vicious snarl, "when the Republic may demand that every local citizen carry—indelibly branded in his flesh and by order of the State—the sign of his own allegiance."
"'Tis not for me to argue, citizen," Chazot rejoined, with a careless shrug of the shoulders. "If you tell me to take citizen Rateau over to the veterinary at the cavalry barracks and have him branded like cattle, why..."
"Not like cattle, citizen," Chauvelin broke in blandly. "You shall commence proceedings by administering to citizen Rateau a whole bottle of excellent eau de vie, at the Government's expense. Then, when he is thoroughly and irretrievably drunk, the veterinary will put the brand upon his left forearm ... just on letter.... Why, the drunken reprobate will never feel it!"
"As you command, citizen," Chazot assented with perfect indifference. "I am not responsible. I do as I'm told."
"Like the fine soldier that you are, citizen Chazot!" Chauvelin concluded. "And I know that I can trust to your discretion."
"Oh, as to that——!"
"It would not serve you to be otherwise; that's understood. So now, my friend, get you gone with the lout; and take these few words of instructions with you, for the citizen veterinary."
He took tablet and point from his pocket and scribbled a few words; signed it "Chauvelin" with that elegant flourish which can be traced to this day on so many secret orders that emanated from the Committee of Public Safety during the two years of its existence.
Chazot took the written order and slipped it into his pocket. Then he turned on his heel and briefly gave the necessary orders to the men. Once more they hoisted the helpless giant up on his feet. Rateau was willing enough to go. He was willing to do anything so long as they took him away from here, away from the presence of that small devil with the haggard face and the pale, piercing eyes. He allowed himself to be conducted out of the building without a murmur.
Chauvelin watched the little party—the six men, the asthmatic coalheaver and lastly the sergeant—file out of the place, then cross the Rue de la Planchette and take the turning opposite, the one that led through the Porte and the Rue St. Antoine to the cavalry barracks in the Quartier Bastille. After which, he carefully closed the double outside doors and, guided by instinct since the place down here was in darkness once more, he groped his way to the foot of the stairs and slowly mounted to the floor above.
§ 5
He reached the first-floor landing. The door which led into Mother Théot's apartments was on the latch, and Chauvelin had just stretched out his hand with a view to pushing it open, when the door swung out on its hinges, as if moved by an invisible hand, and a pleasant, mocking voice immediately behind him said, with grave politeness:
"Allow me, my dear M. Chambertin!"
FOUR DAYS
§ 1
WHAT occurred during the next few seconds Chauvelin himself would have been least able to say. Whether he stepped of his own accord into the antechamber of Catherine Théot's apartment, or whether an unseen hand pushed him in, he could not have told you. Certain it is that, when he returned to the full realization of things, he was sitting on one of the benches, his back against the wall, whilst immediately in front of him, looking down on him through half-closed, lazy eyes, débonnair, well groomed, unperturbed, stood his arch-enemy, Sir Percy Blakeney.
The antechamber was gloomy in the extreme. Some one in the interval had lighted the tallow candles in the centre chandelier, and these shed a feeble, flickering light on the dank, bare walls, the carpetless floor, the shuttered windows; whilst a thin spiral of evil-smelling smoke wound its way to the blakened ceiling above.
Of Theresia Cabarrus there was not a sign. Chauvelin looked about him, feeling like a goaded animal shut up in a narrow space with its tormentor. He was making desperate efforts to regain his composure, above all he made appeal to that courage which was wont never to desert him. In truth, Chauvelin had never been a physical coward, nor was he afraid of death or outrage at the hands of the man whom he had so deeply wronged, and whom he had pursued with a veritable lust of hate. No! he did not fear death at the hands of the Scarlet Pimpernel. What he feared was ridicule, humiliation, those schemes—bold, adventurous, seemingly impossible—which he knew were already seething behind the smooth, unruffled brow of his arch-enemy, behind those lazy, supercilious eyes, which had the power to irritate his nerves to the verge of dementia.
This impudent adventurer—no better than a spy, despite his aristocratic mien and air of lofty scorn—this meddlesome English brigand, was the one man in the world who had, when he measured his prowess against him, invariably brought him to ignominy and derision, made him a laughing-stock before those whom he had been wont to dominate; and at this moment, when once again he was being forced to look into those strangely provoking eyes, he appraised their glance as he would to sword of a proved adversary, and felt as he did so just that same unaccountable dread of them which had so often paralysed his limbs and atrophied his brain whenever mischance flung him into the presence of his enemy.
He could not understand why Theresia Cabarrus had deserted him. Even a woman, if she happened to be a friend, would by her presence have afforded him moral support.
"You are looking for Mme. de Fontenay, I believe, dear M. Chambertin," Sir Percy said lightly, as if divining his thoughts. "The ladies—ah, the ladies! They add charm, piquancy, eh? to the driest conversations. Alas!" he went on with mock affectation, "that Mme. de Fontenay should have fled at first sound of my voice! Now she hath sought refuge in the old witch's lair, there to consult the spirits as to how best she can get out again, seeing that the door is now locked.... Deemed awkward, a locked door, when a pretty woman wants to be on the other side. What think you, M. Chambertin?"
"I only think, Sir Percy," Chauvelin contrived to retort, calling all his wits and all his courage to aid him in his humiliating position, "I only think of another pretty woman, who is in the room just above our heads and who would also be mightily glad to find herself the other side of a locked door."
"Your thoughts," Sir Percy retorted with a light laugh, "are always so ingenuous, my dear M. Chambertin. Strangely enough, mine just at this moment run on the possibility—not a very unlikely one, you will admit—of shaking the breath out of your ugly little body, as I would that of a rat."
"Shake, my dear Sir Percy, shake!" Chauvelin riposted with well-simulated calm. "I grant you that I am a puny rat and you are the most magnificent of lions; but even if I lie mangled and breathless on this stone floor at your feet, Lady Blakeney will still be a prisoner in our hands."
"And you will still be wearing the worst-cut pair of breeches it has ever been my bad fortune to behold," Sir Percy retorted, quite unruffled. "Lud love you, man! Have you guillotined all the good tailors in Paris?"
"You choose to be flippant, Sir Percy," Chauvelin rejoined dryly. "But, though you have chosen for the past few years to play the rôle of a brainless nincompoop, I have cause to know that behind your affectations there lurks an amount of sound common sense."
"Lud, how you flatter me, my dear sir!" quoth Sir Percy airily. "I vow you had not so high an opinion of me last time I had the honour of conversing with you. It was at Nantes; do you remember?"
"There, as elsewhere, you succeeded in circumventing me, Sir Percy."
"No, no!" he protested. "Not in circumventing you. Only in making you look a demmed fool!"
"Call it that, if you like, sir," Chauvelin admitted, with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. "Luck has favoured you many a time. As I had the honour to tell you, you have had the laugh of us in the past, and no doubt you are under the impression that you will have it again this time."
"I am such a believer in impressions, my dear sir. The impression now that I have your charming personality is indelibly graven upon my memory."
"Sir Percy Blakeney counts a good memory as one of his many accomplishments. Another is his adventurous spirit, and the gallantry which must inevitably bring him into the net which we have been at pains to spread for him. Lady Blakeney——"
"Name her not, man!" Sir Percy broke in with affect deliberation; "or I verily believe that within sixty seconds you would be a dead man!"
"I am not worthy to speak her name, c'est entendu," Chauvelin retorted with mock humility. "Nevertheless, Sir Percy, it is around the person of that gravious lady that the Fates will spin their web during the next few days. You may kill me. Of course, I am at this moment entirely at your mercy. But before you embark on such a perilous undertaking, will you allow me to place the position a little more clearly before you?"
"Lud, man!" quoth Sir Percy with a quaint laugh. "That's what I'm here for! Think you that I have sought your agreeable company for the mere pleasure of gazing at your amiable countenance?"
"I only desired to explain to you, Sir Percy, the dangers to which you expose Lady Blakeney, if you laid violent hands upon me. 'Tis you, remember, who sought this interview—not I."
"You are right, my dear sir, always right; and I'll not interrupt again. I pray you to proceed."
"Allow me then to make my point clear. There are at this moment a score of men of the National Guard in the room above your head. Every one of them goes to the guillotine if they allow their prisoner to escape; every one of them receives a reward of ten thousand livres the day they capture the Scarlet Pimpernel. A good spur for vigilance, what? But that is not all," Chauvelin went on quite steadily, seeing that Sir Percy had apparently become thoughtful and absorbed. "The men are under the command of Captain Boyer, and he understands that every day at a certain hour—seven in the evening, to be precise—I will be with him and interrogate him as to the welfare of the prisoner. If—mark me, Sir Percy!—if on any one day I do not appear before him at that hour, his orders are to shoot the prisoner on sight...."
The word was scarce out of his mouth; it broke in a hoarse spasm. Sir Percy had him by the throat, shook him indeed as he would a rat.
"You cur!" he said in an ominous whisper, his face quite close now to that of his enemy, his jaw set, his eyes no longer good-humoured and mildly scornful, but burning with the fire of a mighty, unbridled wrath. "You damned—insolent—miserable cur! As there is a Heaven above us——"
Then suddenly his grip relaxed, the whole face changed as if an unseen hand has swept away the fierce lines of anger and hate. The eyes softened beneath their heavy lids, the set lips broke into a mocking smile. He let go his hold of the Terrorist's throat; and the unfortunate man, panting and breathless, fell heavily against the wall. He tried to steady himself as best he could, but his knees were shaking, and faint and helpless, he finally collapsed upon the nearest bench, the while Sir Percy straightened out his tall figure, with unruffled composure rubbed his slender hands one against the other, as if to free them from dust, and said, with gentle, good-humoured sarcasm:
"Do put your cravat straight, man! You look a disgusting object!"
He dragged the corner of a bench forward, sat astride upon it, and waited with perfect sang-froid, spy-glass in hand, while Chauvelin mechanically readjusted the set of his clothes.
"That's better?" he said approvingly. "Just the bow at the back of your neck... a little more to the right ... now your cuffs .... Ah, you look quite tidy again!... a perfect picture, I vow, my dear M. Chambertin, of elegance and of a well-regulated mind!"
"Sir Percy——!" Chauvelin broke in with a vicious snarl.
"I entreat you to accept my apologies," the other rejoined with utmost courtesy. "I was on the verge of losing my temper, which we in England would call demmed bad form. I'll not transgress again. I pray you, proceed with what you were saying. So interesting—demmed interesting! You were talking about murdering a woman in cold blood, I think——"
"In hot blood, Sir Percy," Chauvelin rejoined more firmly. "Blood fired by thoughts of just revenge."
"Pardon! My mistake! As you were saying——"
"'Tis you who attack us. You—the meddlesome Scarlet Pimpernel, with your accursed gang!... We defend ourselves as best we can, using what weapons lie closest to our hand——"
"Such as murder, outrage, abduction ... and wearing breeches the cut of which would provoke a saint to indignation."
"Murder, abduction, outrage, as you will, Sir Percy," Chauvelin retorted, as cool now as his opponent. "Had you ceased to interfere in the affairs of France when first you escaped punishment for your machinations, you would not now be in the sorry plight in which your own intrigues have at last landed you. Had you left us alone, we should by now have forgotten you."
"Which would have been such a pity, my dear M. Chambertin," Blakeney rejoined gravely. "I should not like you to forget me. Believe me, I have enjoyed life so much these past two years, I would not give up those pleasures even for that of seeing you and your friends have a bath or wear tidy buckles on your shoes."
"You will have cause to indulge in those pleasures within the next few days, Sir Percy," Chauvelin rejoined dryly.
"What?" Sir Percy exclaimed. "The Committee of Public Safety going to have a bath? Or the Revolutionary Tribunal? Which?"
But Chauvelin was determined not to lose his temper again. Indeed, he abhorred this man so deeply that he felt no anger against him, no resentment; only a cold, calculating hate.
"The pleasure of pitting your wits against the inevitable," he riposted dryly.
"Ah?" quoth Sir Percy airily. "The inevitable has always been such a good friend to me."
"Not this time, I fear, Sir Percy."
"Ah? You really mean this time to——?" and he made a significant gesture across his own neck.
"In as few days as possible."
Whereupon Sir Percy rose, and said solemnly:
"You are right there, my friend, quite right. Delays are always dangerous. If you mean to have my head, why—have if quickly. As for me, delays always bore me to tears."
He yawned and stretched his long limbs.
"I am getting so deemed fatigued," he said. "Do you not think this conversation has lasted quite long enough?"
"It was none of my seeking, Sir Percy."
"Mine, I grant you; mine, absolutely! But, hang it, man! I had to tell you that your breeches were badly cut."
"And I, that we are at your service, to end the business as soon as may be."
"To——?" And once more Sir Percy passed his firm hand across his throat. Then he gave a shudder.
"B-r-r-r!" he exclaimed. "I had no idea you were in such a demmed hurry."
"We await your pleasure, Sir Percy. Lady Blakeney must not be kept in suspense too long. Shall we say that, in three days...?"
"Make if four, my dear M. Chambertin, and I am eternally your debtor."
"In four days then, Sir Percy," Chauvelin rejoined with pronounced sarcasm. "You see how ready I am to meet you in a spirit of conciliation! Four days, you say? Very well then; for four days more we keep our prisoner in those rooms upstairs.... After that——"
He paused, awed mayhap, in spite of himself, by the diabolical thought which had suddenly come into his mind—a sudden inspiration which in truth must have emanated from some unclean spirit with which he held converse. He looked the Scarlet Pimpernel—his enemy—squarely in the face. Conscious of his power, he was no longer afraid. What he longed for most at this moment was to see the least suspicion of a shadow dim the mocking light that danced in those lazy, supercilious eyes, or the merest tremor pass over the slender hand framed in priceless Mechlin lace.
For a while complete silence reigned in the bare, dank room—a silence broken only by the stertorous, rapid breathing of the one man who appeared moved. That man was not Sir Percy Blakeney. He indeed had remained quite still, spy-glass in hand, the good-humoured smile still dancing round his lips. Somewhere in the far distance a church clock struck the hour. Then only did Chauvelin put his full fiendish project into words.
"For four days," he reiterated with slow deliberation, "we keep our prisoner in the room upstairs.... After that, Captain Boyer has orders to shoot her."
Again there was silence—only for a second perhaps; whilst down by the Stygian creek, where Time never was, the elfish ghouls and impish demons set up a howl of delight at the hellish knavery of man.
Just one second, whilst Chauvelin waited for his enemy's answer to this monstrous pronouncement, and the very walls of the drabby apartment appeared to listen, expectant. Overhead, could be dimly heard the measured tramp of heavy feet upon the uncarpeted floor. And suddenly through the bare apartment there rang the sound of a quaint, light-hearted laugh.
"You really are the worst-dressed man I have ever come across, my good M. Chambertin," Sir Percy said with rare good-humour. "You must allow me to give you the address of a good little tailor I came across in the Latin Quarter the other day. No decent man would be seen walking up the guillotine in such a waistcoat as you are wearing. Ad for your boots——" He yawned again. "You really must excuse me! I came home late from the theatre last night, and have not had my usual hours of sleep. So, by your leave——"
"By all means, Sir Percy!" Chauvelin replied complacently. "At this moment you are a free man, because I happen to be alone and unarmed, and because this house is solidly built and my voice would not carry to the floor above. Also because you are so nimble that no doubt you could give me the slip long before Captain Boyer and his men came to my rescue. Yes, Sir Percy; for the moment you are a free man! Free to walk out of this house unharmed. But even now, you are not as free as you would wish to be, eh? You are free to despise me, to overwhelm me with lofty scorn, to sharpen your wits at my expense; but you are not free to indulge your desire to squeeze the life out of me, to shake me as you would a rat. And shall I tell you why? Because you know now that if at a certain hour of the day I do not pay my daily visit to Captain Boyer upstairs, he will shoot his prisoner without the least compunction."
Whereupon Blakeney threw up his head and laughed heartily.
"You are absolutely priceless, my dear M. Chambertin!" he said gaily. "But you really must put your cravat straight. It has once again become disarranged ... in the heat of your oratory, no doubt.... Allow me to offer you a pin."
And with inimitable affectation, he took a pin out of his own cravat and presented it to Chauvelin, who, unable to control his wrath, jumped to his feet.
"Sir Percy——!" he snarled.
But Blakeney placed a gentle, firm hand upon his shoulder, forcing him to sit down again.
"Easy, easy, my friend," he said. "Do not, I pray you, lose that composure for which you are so justly famous. There! Allow me to arrange your cravat for you. A gentle tug here," he added, suiting the action to the word, "a delicate flick there, and you are the most perfectly cravatted man in France!"
"Your insults leave me unmoved, Sir Percy," Chauvelin broke in savagely, and tried to free himself from the touch of those slender, strong hands that wandered so uncomfortably in the vicinity of his throat.
"No doubt," Blakeney riposted lightly, "that they are as futile as your threats. One does not insult a cur, any more than one threatens Sir Percy Blakeney—what?"
"You are right there, Sir Percy. The time for threats has gone by. And since you appear so vastly entertained——"
"I am vastly entertained, my dear M. Chambertin! How can I help it, when I see before me a miserable shred of humanity who does not even know how to keep his tie straight or his hair smooth, calmly—or almost calmly—talking of—— Let me see, what were you talking of, my amiable friend?"
"Of the hostage, Sir Percy, which we hold until the happy day when the gallant Scarlet Pimpernel is a prisoner in our hands."
"'M, yes! He was that once before, was he not, my good sir? Then, too, you laid down mighty schemes for his capture."
"And we succeeded."
"By your usual amiable methods—lies, deceit, forgery. The latter has been useful to you this time too, eh?"
"What do you mean, Sir Percy?"
"You had need of the assistance of a fair lady for your schemes. She appeared disinclined to help you. So when her inconvenient lover, Bertrand Moncrif, was happily dragged away from her path, you forged a letter, which the lady rightly looked upon as an insult. Because of that letter, she nourished a comfortable amount of spite against me, and lent you her aid in the fiendish outrage for which you are about to receive punishment." He had raised his voice slightly while he spoke, and Chauvelin cast an apprehensive glance in the direction of the door behind which he guessed that Theresia Cabarrus must be straining her ears to listen.
"A pretty story, Sir Percy," he said with affected coolness. "And one that does infinite credit to your imagination. It is mere surmise on your part."
"What, my friend? What is surmise? That you gave a letter to Madame de Fontenay which you had concocted, and which I had never written? Why, man," he added with a laugh, "I saw you do it!"
"You? Impossible!"
"More impossible things than that will happen within the next few days, my good sir. I was outside the window of Madame de Fontenay's apartment during the whole of your interview with her. And the shutters were not as closely fastened as you would have wished. But why argue about it, my dear M. Chambertin, when you know quite well that I have given you a perfectly accurate exposé of the means which you employed to make a pretty and spoilt woman help you in your nefarious work?"
"Why argue, indeed?" Chauvelin retorted dryly. "The past is past. I'll answer to my country, which you outrage by your machinations, for the methods which I employ to circumvent them. Your concern and mine, my gallant friend, is solely with the future—with the next four days, in fact... After which, either the Scarlet Pimpernel is in our hands, or Lady Blakeney will be put against the wall upstairs and summarily shot."
Then only did something of his habitual lazy nonchalance go out of Blakeney's attitude. Just for the space of a few seconds he drew himself up to his full magnificent height, and from the summit of his splendid audacity and the consciousness of his own power, he looked down at the mean, cringing figure of the enemy who had hurled this threat of death against the woman he worshipped. Chauvelin vainly tried to keep up some semblance of dignity; he tried to meet the glance which no longer mocked, and to close his ears to the voice which, sonorous and commanding, now threatened in its turn.
"And you really believe," Sir Percy Blakeney said slowly and deliberately, "that you have the power to carry through your infamous schemes? That I—yes, I!—would allow you to come within measurable distance of their execution? Bah! my dear friend. You have learned nothing by past experience—not even this: that when you dared to lay your filthy hands upon Lady Blakeney, you and the whole pack of assassins who have terrorized this beautiful country far too long, struck the knell of your ultimate doom. You have dared to measure your strength against mine by perpetrating an outrage so monstrous in my sight that, to punish you, I—even I!—will sweep you off the face of the earth and send you to join the pack of unclean ghouls who have aided you in your crimes. After which—thank the Lord!—the earth, being purged of your presence, will begin to smell sweetly again."
Chauvelin made a vain effort to laugh, to shrug his shoulders, to put on those airs of insolence which came so naturally to his opponent. No doubt the strain of this long interview with his enemy had told upon his nerves. Certain it is that at this moment, though he was conscious enough to rail inwardly at his own cowardice, he was utterly unable to move or to retort. His limbs felt heavy as lead, an icy shudder was coursing down his spine. It seemed in truth as if some uncanny ghoul had entered the dreary, dank apartment and with gaunt, invisible hand was tolling a silent passing bell—the death-knell of all his ambitions and all his hopes. He closed his eyes, for he felt giddy and sick. When he opened his eyes again he was alone.
A DREAM
§ 1
CHAUVELIN had not yet regained full possession of his faculties, when a few seconds later he saw Theresia Cabarrus glide swiftly across the antechamber. She appeared to him like a ghost—a pixie who had found her way through a keyhole. But she threw him a glance of contempt that was very human, very feminine indeed, and the next moment she was gone.
Outside on the landing she paused. Straining her ears, she caught the sound of a firm footfall slowly descending the stairs. She ran down a few steps, then called softly:
"Milor!"
The footsteps paused, and a pleasant voice gave quiet reply:
"At your service, fair lady!"
Theresia, shrewd as well as brave, continued to descend. She was not in the least afraid. Instinct had told her before now that no woman need ever have the slightest fear of that elegant milor with the quaint laugh and gently mocking mien, whom she had learned to know over in England.
Midway down the stairs she came face to face with him, and when she paused, panting, a little breathless with excitement, he said with perfect courtesy:
"You did me the honour to call me, Madame?"
"Yes, milor," she replied, in a quick, eager whisper. "I heard every word that passed between you and citizen Chauvelin."
"Of course you did, dear lady," he rejoined with a smile. "If a woman once resisted the temptation of putting a shell-like ear to a keyhole, the world would lose many a cause for entertainment."
"That letter, milor——" she broke in impatiently.
"Which letter, Madame?"
"That insulting letter to me ... when you took Moncrif away.... You never wrote it?"
"Did you really think that I did?" he retorted.
"No. I ought to have guessed ... the moment that I saw you in England...."
"And realized that I was not a cad—what?"
"Oh, milor!" she protested. "But why—why did you not tell me before?"
"It had escaped my memory. And if I remember rightly, you spent most of the time when I had the honour of walking with you, in giving me elaborate and interesting accounts of your difficulties, and I, in listening to them."
"Oh!" she exclaimed vehemently. "I hate that man! I hate him!"
"In truth, he is not a lovable personality. But, by your leave, I presume that you did not desire to speak with me so that we might discuss our friend Chauvelin's amiable qualities."
"No, no, milor!" she rejoined quickly. "I called to you because——"
Then she paused for a moment or two, as if to collect her thoughts. Her eager eyes strove to pierce the gloom that enveloped the figure of the bold adventurer. She could only see the dim outline of his powerful figure, the light from above striking on his smooth hair, the elegantly tied bow at the nape of his neck, the exquisite filmy lace at his throat and wrists. His head was slightly bent, one arm in a curve supported his chapeau-bras, his whole attitude was one befitting a salon rather than this dank hovel, where death was even now at his elbow; it was as cool and unperturbed as it had been on that May-day evening, in the hawthorn scented lanes of Kent.
"Milor," she said abruptly, "you told me one—you remember?—that you were what you English call a sportsman. Is that so?"
"I hope always to remain that, dead lady," he replied with a smile.
"Does that mean," she queried, with a pretty air of deference and hesitation, "does that mean a man who would under no circumstances harm a woman?"
"I think so."
"Now even if she—if she has sinned—transgressed against him?"
"I don't quite understand, Madame," he rejoined simply. "And, time being short—— Are you perchance speaking of yourself?"
"Yes. I have done you an injury, milor."
"A very great one indeed," he assented gravely.
"Could you," she pleaded, raising earnest, tear-filled eyes to his, "could you bring yourself to believe that I have been nothing but a miserable, innocent tool?"
"So was the lady upstairs innocent, Madame," he broke in quietly.
"I know," she retorted with a sigh. "I know. I would never dare to plead, as you must hate me so."
He shrugged his shoulders with an air of carelessness.
"Oh!" he said. "Does a man every hate a pretty woman?"
"He forgives her, milor," she entreated, "if he is a true sportsman."
"Indeed? You astonish me, dear lady. But in verity you all in this unhappy country are full of surprises for a plain, blunt-headed Britisher. Now what, I wonder," he added, with a light, good-humoured laugh, "would my forgiveness be worth to you?"
"Everything!" she replied earnestly. "I was deceived by that abominable liar, who knew how to play upon a woman's pique. I am ashamed, wretched.... Oh, cannot you believe me? And I would give worlds to atone!"
He laughed in his quiet, gently ironical way.
"You do not happen to possess worlds, dear lady. All that you have is youth and beauty and ambition, and life. You would forfeit all those treasures if you really tried to atone."
"But——"
"Lady Blakeney is a prisoner.... You are her jailer.... Her precious life is the hostage for yours."
"Milor-" she murmured.
"From my heart, I wish you well, fair one," he broke in lightly. "Believe me, the pagan gods that fashioned you did not design you for tragedy... And if you ran counter to your friend Chauvelin's desires, I fear me that that pretty neck of yours would suffer. A thing to be avoided at all costs! And now," he added, "have I your permission to go? My position here is somewhat precarious, and for the next four days I cannot afford the luxury of entertaining so fine a lady, by running my head into a noose."
He was on the point of going when she placed a restraining hand upon his arm.
"Milor!" she pleaded.
"At your service, dear lady!"
"Is there naught I can do for you?"
He looked at her for a moment or two, and even through the gloom she caught his quizzical look and the mocking lines around his firm lips.
"You can ask Lady Blakeney to forgive you," he said, with a thought more seriousness than was habitual to him. "She is an angel; she might do it."
"And if she does?"
"She will know what to do, to convey her thoughts to me."
"Nay! but I'll do more than that, milor," Theresia continued excitedly. "I will tell her that I shall pray night and day for your deliverance and hers. I will tell her that I have seen you, and that you are well."
"Ah, if you did that——" he exclaimed, almost involuntarily.
"You would forgive me, too?" she pleaded.
"I would do more than that, fair one. I would make you Queen of France, in all but name."
"What do you mean?" she murmured.
"That I would then redeem the promise which I made to you that evening, in the lane—outside Dover. Do you remember?"
She made no reply, closed her eyes; and her vivid fancy, rendered doubly keen by the mystery which seemed to encompass him as with a supernal mantle, conjured up the vision of that unforgettable evening: the moonlight, the scent of the hawthorn, the call of the thrush. She saw him stooping before her, and kissing her finger-tips, even whilst her ears recalled every word he had spoken and every inflexion of his mocking voice:
"Let me rather put it differently, dear lady," he had said then. "One day the exquisite Theresia Cabarrus, the Egeria of the Terrorists, the fiancée of the great Tallien, might need the help of the Scarlet Pimpernel."
And she, angered, piqued by his coolness, thirsting for revenge for the insult which she believed he had put upon her, had then protested earnestly:
"I would sooner die," she had boldly asserted, 'than seek your help, milor!"
And now, at this hour, here in this house where Death lurked in every corner, she could still hear his retort:
"Here in Dover, perhaps.... But in France?"
How right he had been!... How right! She—who had thought herself so strong, so powerful—what was she indeed but a miserable tool in the hands of men who would break her without scruple if she ran counter to their will? Remorse was not for her—atonement too great a luxury for a tool of Chauvelin to indulge in. The black, hideous taint, the sin of having dragged this splendid man and that innocent woman to their death, must rest upon her soul for ever. Even now she was jeopardizing his life, every moment that she kept him talking in this house. And yet the impulse to speak with him, to hear him say a word of forgiveness, had been unconquerable. One moment she longed for him to go; the next she would have sacrificed much to keep him by her side. When he wished to go, she held him back. Now that, with his wonted careless disregard of danger, he appeared willing to linger, she sought for the right words wherewith to bid him go.
He seemed to divine her thoughts, remained quite still while she stood there with eyes closed, in one brief second reviewing the past. All! All! It all came back to her: her challenge to him, his laughing retort.
"You mean," she said at parting, "that you would risk your life to save mine?"
"I should not risk my life, dear lady," he had said, with his puzzling smile; "But I should—God help me!—do my best, if the need arose, to save yours."
Then he had gone, and she had stood under the porch of the quaint old English inn and watched his splendid figure as it disappeared down the street. She had watched, puzzled, uncomprehending, her heart already stirred by that sweet, sad ache which at this hour brought tears to her eyes—the aching sorrow of that which could never, never be. Ah! if it had been her good fortune to have come across such a man, to have aroused in him that admiration for herself which she so scorned in others, how different, how very different would life have been! And she fell to envying the poor prisoner upstairs, who owned the most precious treasure life can offer to any woman: the love of a fine man. Two hot tears came slowly through her closed eyes, coursing down her cheeks.
"Why so sad, dear lady?" he asked gently.
She could not speak for the moment, only murmured vaguely:
"Four days——"
"Four days," he retorted gaily, "as you say! In four days, either I or a pack of assassins will be dead."
"Oh, what will become of me?" she sighed.
"Whatever you choose."
"You are bold, milor," she rejoined more calmly. "And you are brave. Alas! what can you do, when the most powerful hands in France are against you?"
"Smite them, dear lady," he replied airily. "Smite them! Then turn my back upon this fair land. It will no longer have need of me." Then he made her a courteous bow. "May I have the honour of escorting you upstairs? Your friend M. Chauvelin will be awaiting you."
The name of her taskmaster brought Theresia back to the realities of life. Gone was the dream of a while ago, when subconsciously her mind had dwelt upon a sweet might-have-been. The man was nothing to her—less than nothing; a common spy, so her friends averred. Even if he had not presumed to write her an insulting letter, he was still the enemy—the foe whose hand was raised against her own country and against those with whose fortunes she had thrown in her lot. Even now, she ought to be calling loudly for help, rouse the house with her cries, so that this spy, this enemy, might be brought down before her eyes. Instead of which, she felt her heart beating with apprehension lest his quiet even voice be heard on the floor above, and he be caught in the snare which those who feared and hated him had laid for him.
Indeed, she appeared far more conscious of danger than he was; and while she chided herself for her folly in having called to him, he was standing before her as if he were in a drawing-room, holding out his arm to escort her in to dinner. His foot was on the step, ready to ascend, even whilst Theresia's straining ears caught the sound of other footsteps up above: footsteps of men—real men, those!—who were set up there to watch for the coming of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and whose vigilance had been spurred by promise of reward and by threat of death. She pushed his arm aside almost roughly.
"You are mad, milor!" she said, in a choked murmur. "Such foolhardiness, when your life is in deadly jeopardy, becomes criminal folly——"
"The best of life," he said airily, "is folly. I would not miss this moment for a kingdom!"
She felt like a creature under a spell. He took her hand and drew it through his arm. She went up the steps beside him.
Every moment she thought that one or more of the soldiers would be coming down, or that Chauvelin, impatient at her absence, might step out upon the landing. The dank, murky air seemed alive with ominous whisperings, of stealthy treads upon the stone. Theresia dared not look behind her, fearful lest the grim presence of Death itself be suddenly made manifest before her.
On the landing he took leave of her, stooped and kissed her hand.
"Why, how cold it is!" he remarked with a smile.
His was perfectly steady and warm. The very feel of it seemed to give her strength. She raised her eyes to his.
"Milor," she entreated, "on my knees I beg of you not to toy with your life any longer."
"Toy with my life?" he retorted gaily. "Nothing is further from my thoughts."
"You must know that every second which you spend in this house if fraught with the greatest possible danger."
"Danger? Ne'er a bit, dear lady! I am no longer in danger, now that you are my friend."
The next moment he was gone. For awhile, Theresia's straining ears still caught the sound of his firm footfall upon the stone steps. Then all was still; and she was left wondering if, in very truth, the last few minutes on the dark stairs had not all been part of a dream.
TERROR OR AMBITION
§ 1
CHAUVELIN had sufficiently recovered from the emotions of the past half-hour to speak coolly and naturally to Theresia. Whether he knew that she had waylaid Sir Percy Blakeney on the stairs or no, she could not conjecture. He made no reference to his interview with the Scarlet Pimpernel, nor did he question her directly as to whether she had overheard what passed between them.
Certainly his attitude was a more dictatorial one than it had been before. Some of his first words to her contained a veiled menace. Whether the sense of coming triumph gave him a fresh measure of that arrogance which past failures had never wholly subdued, or whether terror for the future caused him to bluster and to threaten, it were impossible to say.
"Vigilance!" he said to Theresia, after a curt greeting. "Incessant vigilance, night and day, is what your country demands of you now, citizeness! All our lives now depend upon our vigilance."
"Yours perhaps, citizen," she rejoined coolly. "You seem to forget that I am not bound——"
"You? Not bound?" he broke in roughly, and with a strident laugh. "Not bound to aid in bringing the most bitter enemy of your country to his knees? Not bound, now that success is in sight?"
"You only obtained my help by a subterfuge," she retorted; "by a forged letter and a villainous lie——"
"Bah! Are you going to tell me, citizeness, that all means are not justifiable when dealing with those whose hands are raised against France? Forgery?" he went on, with passionate earnestness. "Why not? Outrage? Murder? I would commit every crime in order to serve the country which I love, and hound her enemies to death. The only crime that is unjustifiable, citoyenne, is indifference. You? Not bound? Wait! Wait, I say! And if by your indifference or your apathy we fail once more to bring that elusive enemy to book, wait then until you stand at the bar of the people's tribunal, and in the face of France, who called to you for help, of France, who beset by a hundred foes, stretch appealing arms to you, her daughter, you turned a deaf ear to her entreaties, and, shrugging your fair shoulders, calmly pleaded, 'Bah! I was not bound!'"
He paused, carried away by his own enthusiasm, feeling perhaps that he had gone too far, or else had said enough to enforce the obedience which he exacted. After awhile, since Theresia remained silent too, he added more quietly:
"If we capture the Scarlet Pimpernel this time, citizeness, Robespierre shall know from my lips that it is to you and to you alone that he owes this triumph over the enemy whom he fears above all. Without you, I could not have set the trap out of which he cannot now escape."
"He can escape! He can!" she retorted defiantly. "The Scarlet Pimpernel is too clever, too astute, too audacious, to fall into your trap."
"Take care, citoyenne, take care! Your admiration for that elusive hero carries you beyond the bounds of prudence."
"Bah! If he escapes, 'tis you who will be blamed——"
"And 'tis you who will suffer, citoyenne," he riposted blandly. With which parting shaft he left her certain that she would ponder over his threats as well as over his bold promise of a rich reward.
Terror and ambition! Death, or the gratitude of Robespierre! How well did Chauvelin gauge the indecision, the shallowness of a fickle woman's heart! Theresia, left to herself, had only those two alternatives over which to ponder. Robespierre's gratitude, which meant that the admiration which already he felt for her would turn to stronger passion. He was still heart-whole, that she knew. The regard which he was supposed to feel for the humble cabinet-maker's daughter could only be a passing fancy. The dictator of France must choose a mate worthy of his power and of his ambition; his friends would see to that. Robespierre's gratitude! What a vista of triumphs and of glory did that eventuality open up before her, what dizzy heights of satisfied ambition! And what a contrast if Chauvelin's scheme failed in the end!
"Wait," he had cried, "until you stand at the bar of the people's tribunal and plead indifference!"
Theresia shuddered. Despite the close atmosphere of the apartment, she was shivering with cold. Her loneliness, her isolation, here in this house, where an appalling and grim tragedy was even now in preparation, filled her with sickening dread. Overhead she could hear the soldiers moving about, and in one of the rooms close by her sensitive ear caught the sound of Mother Théot's shuffling tread.
But the sound that was most insistent, that hammered away at her heart until she could have screamed with the pain, was the echo of a lazy, somewhat inane laugh and of a gently mocking voice that said lightly:
"The best of life is folly, dear lady. I would not miss this moment for a kingdom."
Her hand went up to her throat to smother the sobs that would rise up against her will. Then she called all her self-control, all her ambition, to her aid. This present mood was sentimental nonsense, an abyss created by an over-sensitive heart, into which she might be falling headlong. What was this Englishman to her that thought of his death should prove such mental agony? As for him, he only laughed at her; despised her still, probably; hated her for the injury she had done to that woman upstairs whom he loved.
Impatient to get away from this atmosphere of tragedy and of mysticism which was preying on her nerves, Theresia called peremptorily to Mother Théot, and when the old woman came shuffling out of her room, demanded her cloak and hood.
"Have you seen aught of citizen Moncrif?" she asked, just before going away.
"I caught sight of him over the way," Catherine Théot replied, "watching this house, as he always does when you, citoyenne, are in it."
"Ah!" the imperious beauty retorted, with a thought of spite in her mellow voice. "Would you could give him a potion, Mother, to cure him of his infatuation for me!"
"Despise no man's love, citoyenne," the witch retorted sententiously. "Even that poor vagabond's blind passion may yet prove thy salvation."
A moment or two later Theresia was once more on the dark stairs where she had dreamed of the handsome milor. She sighed as she ran swiftly down—sighed, and looked half-fearfully about her. She still felt his presence through the gloom; and in the ghostly light that feebly illumined the corner whereon he had stood, she still vaguely saw in spirit his tall straight figure, stooping whilst he kissed her hand. At one moment she was quite sure that she heard his voice and the echo of his pleasant laugh.
Down below, Bertrand Moncrif was waiting for her, silent, humble, with the look of a faithful watch-dog upon his pale, wan face.
"You make yourself ill, my poor Bertrand," Theresia said, not unkindly, seeing that he stood aside to let her pass, fearful of a rebuff if he dared speak to her. "I am in no danger, I assure you; and this constant dogging of my footsteps can do no good to you or to me."
"But it can do no harm," he pleaded earnestly. "Something tells me, Theresia, that danger does threaten you, unbeknown to you, from a quarter least expected."
"Bah!" she retorted lightly. "And if it did, you could not avert it."
He made a desperate effort to check the words of passionate protestations which rose to his lips. He longed to protect her from harm, how happy he would be if he might die for her. But obviously he dared not say what lay nearest to his heart. All he could do now was to talk silently by her side as far as her lodgings in the Rue Villedot, grateful for this small privilege, uncomplaining and almost happy because she tolerated his presence, and because while she walked the ends of her long scarf stirred by the breeze would now and again flutter against his cheek.
Miserable Bertrand! He had laden his soul with an abominable crime for this woman's sake; and he had not even the satisfaction of feeling that she gave him an infinitesimal measure of gratitude.
IN THE MEANWHILE
§ 1
CHAUVELIN, who, despite his many failures, was still one of the most conspicuous—since he was one of the most unscrupulous—members of the Committee of Public Saftey, had not attended its sittings for some days. He had been too deeply absorbed in his own schemes to trouble about those of his colleagues. In truth, the coup which he was preparing was so stupendous, and if it succeeded his triumph would be so magnificent, that he could well afford to hold himself aloof. Those who were still inclined to scorn and to scoff at him to-day would be his most cringing sycophants on the morrow.
He knew well enough—none better—that during this time the political atmosphere in the Committees and the Clubs was nothing short of electrical. He felt, as every one did, that something catastrophic was in the air, that death, more self-evident than ever before, lurked at every man's elbow, and stalked round the corner of every street.
Robespierre, the tyrant, the autocrat whose mere word swayed the multitude, remained silent and impenetrable, absent from every gathering. He only made brief appearances at the Convention, and there sat moody and self-absorbed. Every one knew that this man, dictator in all but name, was meditating a Titanic attack upon his enemies. His veiled threats, uttered during his rare appearances at the speaker's tribune, embraced even the most popular, the most prominent, amongst the representatives of the people. Every one, in fact, who was likely to stand in his way when he was ready to snatch the supreme power. His intimates—Couthon, St. Just, and the others—openly accused of planning a dictatorship for their chief, hardly took the trouble to deny the impeachment, even whilst Tallien and his friends, feeling that the tyrant had already decreed their doom, went about like ghostly shadows, not daring to raise their voice in the Convention lest the first word they uttered brought down the sword of his lustful wrath upon their heads.
The Committee of Public Safety—now renamed the Revolutionary Committee—strove on the other hand by a recrudescence of cruelty to ingratiate itself with the potential dictator and to pose before the people as alone pure and incorruptible, blind in justice, inexorable where the safety of the Republic was concerned. Thus an abominable emulation of vengeance and of persecution went on between the Committee and Robespierre's party, wherein neither side could afford to give in, for fear of being accused of apathy and of moderation.
Chauvelin, for the most part, had kept out of the turmoil. He felt that in his hands lay the destiny of either party. His one thought was of the Scarlet Pimpernel and of his imminent capture, knowing that, with the most inveterate opponent of revolutionary excesses in his hands, he would within an hour be in a position to link his triumph with one or the other of the parties—either with Robespierre and his herd of butchers, or with Tallien and the Moderates.
He was the mysterious and invisible deus ex machina, who anon, when it suited his purpose, would reveal himself in his full glory as the man who had tracked down and brought to the guillotine the most dangerous enemy of the revolutionary government. And, so easily is a multitude swayed, that that one fact would bring him popularity transcending that of every other man in France. He, Chauvelin, the despised, the derided, whose name had become synonymous with Failure, would then with a word sweep those aside who had mocked him, hurl his enemies from their pedestals, and name at will the rulers of France All within four days!
And of these, two had gone by.
§ 2
These days in mid-July had been more than usually sultry. It seemed almost as if Nature had linked herself with the passions of men, and hand in hand with Vengeance, Lust and Cruelty, had rendered the air hot and heavy with the presage of on-coming storm.
For Marguerite Blakeney these days had gone by like a nightmare. Cut off from all knowledge of the outside world, without news from her husband for the past forty-eight hours, she was enduring mental agony such as would have broken a weaker or less trusting spirit.
Two days ago she had received a message, a few lines hastily scribbled by an unknown hand, and brought to her by the old woman who waited upon her.
"I have seen him," the message said. "He is well and full of hope. I pray God for your deliverance and his, but help can only come by a miracle."
The message was written in a feminine hand, with no clue as to the writer.
Since then, nothing.
Marguerite had not seen Chauvelin again, for which indeed she thanked Heaven on her knees. But every day at a given hour she was conscious of his presence outside her door. She heard his voice in the vestibule: there would be a word or two of command, the grounding of arms, then some whispered talking; and presently Chauvelin's stealthy footstep would slink up to her door. And Marguerite would remain still as a mouse that scents the presence of a cat, holding her breath, life almost at a standstill in this agony of expectation.
The remainder of the day time hung with a leaden weight on her hands. She was given no books to read, not a needle wherewith to busy herself. She had no one to speak to save old Mother Théot, who waited on her and brought her her meals, nearly always in silence, and with a dour mien which checked any attempt at conversation.
For company, the unfortunate woman had nothing but her own thoughts, her fears which grew in intensity, and her hopes which were rapidly dwindling, as hour followed hour and day succeeded day in dreary monotony. No sound around her save the incessant tramp, tramp of sentries at her door, and every two hours the changing of the guard in the vestibule outside; then the whispered colloquies, the soldiers playing at cards or throwing dice, the bibulous songs, the ribald laughter, the obscene words flung aloud like bits of filthy rag; the life, in fact, that revolved around her jailers and seemed at a standstill within her prison walls.
In the late afternoons the air would become insufferably hot, and Marguerite would throw open the window and sit beside it, her gaze fixed upon the horizon far away, her hands lying limp and moist upon her lap.
Then she would fall to dreaming. Her thoughts, swifter than flight of swallows, would cross the sea and go roaming across country to her stately home in Richmond, where at this house the moist, cool air was fragrant with the scent of late roses and of lime blossom, and the murmur of the river lapping the mossy bank whispered of love and of peace. In her dream she would see the tall figure of her beloved coming toward her. The sunset was playing upon his smooth hair and upon his strong, slender hands, always outstretched toward the innocent and the weak. She would hear his dear voice calling her name, feel his arms around her, and her senses swooning in the ecstasy of that perfect moment which comes just before a kiss.
She would dream ... only to wake up the next moment to hear the church clock of St. Antoine striking seven, and a minute or two later that ominous shuffling footstep outside her door, those whisperings, the grounding of arms, a burst of cruel laughter, which brought her from the dizzy heights of illusive happiness back to the hideous reality of her own horrible position, and of the deadly danger which lay in wait for her beloved.
THE CLOSE OF THE SECOND DAY
§ 1
SOON after seven o'clock that evening the storm which had threatened all day burst in its full fury. A raging gale tore at the dilapidated roofs of this squalid corner of the great city, and lashed the mud of the streets into miniature cascades. Soon the rain fell in torrents; one clap of thunder followed on another with appalling rapidity, and the dull, leaden sky was rent with vivid flashes of lightning.
Chauvelin, who had paid his daily visit to the Captain in charge of the prisoner in the Rue de la Planchette, was unable to proceed homewards. Wrapped in his cloak, he decided to wait in the disused storage-room below until it became possible for an unfortunate pedestrian to sally forth into the open.
There seems no doubt that at this time the man's very soul was on the rack. His nerves were stretched to breaking point, not only by incessant vigilance, by obsession of the one idea, the one aim, but also by multifarious incidents which his overwrought imagination magnified into attempts to rob him of his prey.
He trusted no one—not Mother Théot, not the men upstairs, not Theresia: least of all Theresia. And his tortured brain invented and elaborated schemes whereby he set one set of spies to watch another, one set of sleuthhounds to run after another, in a kind of vicious and demoniac circle of mistrust and denunciation. Nor did he trust himself any longer: neither his instinct nor his eyes, nor his ears. His intimates—and he had very few of these—said of him at that time that, if he had his way, he would have had every tatterdemalion in the city branded, like Rateau, lest they were bribed or tempted into changing identities with the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Whilst waiting for a lull in the storm, he was pacing up and down the dank and murky storage house, striving by febrile movements to calm his nerves. Shivering, despite the closeness of the atmosphere, he kept the folds of his mantle closely wrapped around his shoulders.
It was impossible to keep the outer doors open, because the rain beat in wildly on that side, and the place would have been in utter darkness but for an old grimy lanthorn which some prudent hand had set up on a barrel in the centre of the vast space, and which shed a feeble circle of light around. The latch of the wicket appeared to be broken, for the small door, driven by the wind, flapped backwards and forwards with irritating ceaselessness. At one time Chauvelin tried to improvise some means of fastening it, for the noise helped to exacerbate his nerves and, leaning out into the street in order to seize hold of the door, he saw the figure of a man, bent nearly double in the teeth of the gale, shuffling across the street from the direction of the Porte St. Antoine.
It was then nearly eight o'clock, and the light treacherous, but despite the veil of torrential rain which intervene between him and that shuffling figure, something in the gait, the stature, the stoop of the wide, bony shoulders, appeared unpleasantly familiar. The man's head and shoulders were wrapped in a tattered piece of sacking, which he held close to his chest. His arms were bare, as were his shins, and on his feet he had a pair of sabots stuffed with straw.
Midway across the street he paused, and a tearing fit of coughing seemed to render him momentarily helpless. Chauvelin's first instinct prompted him to run to the stairs and to call for assistance from the Captain Boyer. Indeed, he was half-way up to the first floor when, looking down, he saw that the man had entered the place through the wicket-door. Still coughing and spluttering, he had divested himself of his piece of sacking and was crouching down against the barrel in the centre of the room and trying to warm his hands by holding them against the glass sides of the old lanthorn.
From where he stood, Chauvelin could see the dim outline of the man's profile, the chin ornamented with a three-days' growth of beard, the lank hair plastered above the pallid forehead, the huge bones, coated with grime, that protruded through the rags that did duty for a shirt. The sleeves of this tattered garment hung away from the arm, displaying a fiery, inflamed weal, shaped like the letter "M," that had recently been burned into the flesh with a branding iron.
The sight of that mark upon the vagabond's arm caused Chauvelin to pause a moment, then to come down the stairs again.
"Citizen Rateau!" he called.
The man jumped as if he had been struck with a whip, tried to struggle to his feet, but collapsed on the floor, while a terrible fit of coughing took his breath away. Chauvelin, standing beside the barrel, looked down with a grim smile on this miserable wreckage of humanity whom he had so judiciously put out of the way of further mischief. The dim flicker of the lanthorn illumine the gaunt, bony arm, so that the charred flesh stood out like a crimson, fiery string against a coating of grime.
Rateau appeared terrified, scared by the sudden apparition of the man who had inflicted the shameful punishment upon him. Chauvelin's face, lighted from below by the lanthorn, did indeed appear grim and forbidding. Some few seconds elapsed before the coalheaver had recovered sufficiently to stand on his feet.
"I seem to have scared you, my friend," Chauvelin remarked dryly.
"I—I did not know," Rateau stammered with a painful wheeze, "that anyone was here... I came for shelter...."
"I am here for shelter, too," Chauvelin rejoined, "and did not see you enter."
"Mother Théot allows me to sleep here," Rateau went on mildly. "I have had no work for two days ... not since..." And he looked down ruefully upon his arm. "People think I am an escaped felon," he explained with snivelling timidity. "And as I have always lived just from hand to mouth..."
He paused, and cast an obsequious glance on the Terrorist, who retorted dryly:
"Better men than you, my friend, live from hand to mouth these days. Poverty," he continued with grim sarcasm, "exalts a man in this glorious revolution of ours. 'Tis riches that shame him."
Rateau's branded arm went up to his lanky hair, and he scratched his head dubiously.
"Aye," he nodded, obviously uncomprehending; "perhaps! But I'd like to taste some of that shame!"
Chauvelin shrugged his shoulders and turned on his heel. The thunder sounded a little more distant and the rain less violent for the moment, and he strode toward the door.
"The children run after me now," Rateau continued dolefully. "In my quartier, the concierge turned me out of my lodging. They keep asking me what I have done to be branded like a convict."
Chauvelin laughed.
"Tell them you've been punished for serving the English spy," he said.
"The Englishman paid me well, and I am very poor," Rateau retorted meekly. "I could serve the State now ... if it would pay me well."
"Indeed? How?"
"By telling you something, citizen, which you would like to know."
"What is it?"
At once the instinct of the informer, of the sleuthhound, was on the qui vive. The coalheaver's words, the expression of cunning on his ugly face, the cringing obsequiousness of his attitude, all suggested the spirit of intrigue, of underhand dealing, of lies and denunciations, which were as the breath of life to this master-spy. He retraced his steps, came and sat upon a pile of rubbish beside the barrel, and when Rateau, terrified apparently at what he had said, made a motion as if to slink away, Chauvelin called him back peremptorily.
"What is it, citizen Rateau," he said curtly, "that you could tell me, and that I would like to know?"
Rateau was cowering in the darkness, trying to efface his huge bulk and to smother his rasping cough.
"You have said too much already," Chauvelin went on harshly, "to hold your tongue. And you have nothing to fear ... everything to gain. What is it?"
For a moment Rateau leaned forward, struck the ground with his fist.
"Am I to be paid this time?" he asked.
"If you speak the truth—yes."
"How much?"
"That depends on what you tell me. And now, if you hold your tongue, I shall call to the citizen Captain upstairs and send you to jail."
The coalheaver appeared to crouch yet further into himself. He looked like a huge, shapeless mass in the gloom. His huge yellow teeth could be heard chattering.
"Citizen Tallien will send me to the guillotine," he murmured.
"What has citizen Tallien to do with it?"
"He pays great attention to the citoyenne Cabarrus."
"And it is about her?"
Rateau nodded.
"What is it?" Chauvelin reiterated harshly.
"She is playing you false, citizen," Rateau murmured in a hoarse breath, and crawled like a long, bulky worm a little closer to the Terrorist.
"How?"
"She is in league with the Englishman."
"How do you know?"
"I saw her here ... two days ago.... You remember, citizen ... after you..."
"Yes, yes!" Chauvelin cried impatiently.
"Sergeant Chazot took me to the cavalry barracks.... They gave me to drink ... and I don't remember much what happened. But when I was myself again, I know that my arm was very sore, and when I looked down I saw this awful mark on it.... I was just outside the Arsenal then.... How I got there I don't know.... I suppose Sergeant Chazot brought me back.... He says I was howling for Mother Théot.... She has marvellous salves, you know, citizen."
"Yes, yes!"
"I came in here.... My head still felt very strange ... and my arm felt like living fire. Then I heard voices ... they came from the stairs.... I looked about me, and saw them standing there...."
Rateau, leaning upon one arm, stretched out the other and pointed to the stairs, Chauvelin, with a violent gesture, seized him by the wrist.
"Who?" he queried harshly. "Who was standing there?"
His glance followed the direction in which the coalheaver was pointing, then instinctively wandered back and fastened on that fiery letter "M" which had been seared into the vagabond's flesh.
"The Englishman and citoyenne Cabarrus," Rateau replied feebly, for he had winced with pain under the excited grip of the Terrorist.
"You are certain?"
"I heard them talking——"
"What did they say?"
"I do not know.... But I saw the Englishman kiss the citoyenne's hand before they parted."
"And what happened after that?"
"The citoyenne went to Mother Théot's apartment and the Englishman came down the stairs. I had just time to hide behind that pile of rubbish. He did not see me."
Chauvelin uttered a savage curse of disappointment.
"Is that all?" he exclaimed.
"The State will pay me?" Rateau murmured vaguely.
"Not a sou!" Chauvelin retorted roughly. "And if citizen Tallien hears this pretty tale..."
"I can swear to it?"
"Bah! Citoyenne Cabarrus will swear that you lied. 'Twill be her word against that of a mudlark!"
"Nay!" Rateau retorted. "'Twill be more than that."
"What then?"
"Will you sweat to protect me, citizen, if citizen Tallien-"
"Yes, yes! I'll protect you.... And the guillotine has no time to trouble about suck muck-worms as you!"
"Well, then, citizen," Rateau went on in a hoarse murmur, "if you will go to the citoyenne's lodgings in the Rue Villedot, I can show you where the Englishman hides the clothes wherewith he disguises himself ... and the letters which he writes to the citoyenne when..."
He paused, obviously terrified at the awesome expression of the other man's face. Chauvelin had allowed the coalheaver's wrist to drop out of his grasp. He was sitting quite still, silent and grim, his thin, claw-like hands closely clasped together and held between his knees. The flickering light of the lanthorn distorted his narrow face, lengthened the shadows beneath the nose and chin, threw a high light just below the brows, so that the pale eyes appeared to gleam with an unnatural flame. Rateau hardly dared to move. He lay like a huge bundle of rags in the inky blackness beyond the circle of light projected by the lanthorn; his breath came and went with a dragging, hissing sound, now and then broken by a painful cough.
For a moment or two there was silence in the great disused store-room—a silence broken only by the thunder, dull and distant now, and the ceaseless, monotonous patter of the rain. Then Chauvelin murmured between his teeth:
"If I thought that she..." But he did not complete the sentence, jumped to his feet and approached the big mass of rags and humanity that coward in the gloom. "Get up, citizen Rateau!" he commanded.
The asthmatic giant struggled to his knees. His wooden shoes had slipped off his feet. He groped for them, and with trembling hands contrived to put them on again.
"Get up!" Chauvelin reiterated, with a snarl like an angry tiger.
He took a small tablet and a leaden point from his pocket, and stooping toward the light he scribbled a few words, and then handed the tablet to Rateau.
"Take this over to the Commissary of the Section in the Place du Carrousel. Half a dozen men and a captain will be detailed to go with you to the lodgings of the citoyenne Cabarrus in the Rue Villedot. You will find me there. Go!"
Rateau's hand trembled visibly as he took the tablets. He was obviously terrified at what he had done. But Chauvelin paid no further heed to him. He had given him his orders, knowing well that they would be obeyed. The man had gone too far to draw back. It never entered Chauvelin's head that the coalheaver might have lied. He had no cause for spite against the citoyenne Cabarrus, and the fair Spaniard stood on too high a pinnacle of influence for false denunciations to touch her. The Terrorist waited until Rateau had quietly slunk out by the wicket door; then he turned on his heel and quickly went up the stairs.
§ 2
In the vestibule on the top floor he called to Capitaine Boyer.
"Citizen Captain," he said at the top of his voice, "You remember that to-morrow eve is the end of the third day?"
"Pardi!" the Captain retorted gruffly. "Is anything changed?"
"No."
"Then, unless by the eve of the fourth day that cursed Englishman is not in our hands, my orders are the same."
"Your orders are," Chauvelin rejoined loudly, and pointed with grim intention at the door behind which he felt Marguerite Blakeney to be listening for every sound, "unless the English spy is in our hands on the evening of the fourth day, to shoot your prisoner."
"It shall be done, citizen!" Captain Boyer gave reply.
Then he grinned maliciously, because from behind the closed door there had come a sound like a quickly smothered cry.
After which, Chauvelin nodded to the Captain and once more descended the stairs. A few seconds later he went out of the house into the stormy night.
WHEN THE STORM BURST
§ 1
FORTUNATELY the storm only broke after the bulk of the audience was inside the theatre. The performance was timed to commence at seven, and a quarter of an hour before that time the citizens of Paris who had come to applaud citoyenne Vestris, citoyen Talma, and their colleagues, in Chénier's tragedy, Henri VIII, were in their seats.
The theatre in the Rue de Richelieu was crowded. Talma and Vestris had always been great favourites with the public, and more so perhaps since their secession from the old and reactionary Comédie Française. Citizen Chénier's tragedy was in truth of a very poor order; but the audience was not disposed to be critical, and there was quite an excited hush in the house when citoyenne Vestris, in the part of "Anne de Boulen," rolled off the meretricious verses:
"Trop longtemps j'ai gardé le silence;
Le poids qui m'accablait tombe avec violence."
But little was heard of the storm which raged outside; only at times the patter of the rain on the domed roof became unpleasantly apparent as an inharmonious accompaniment to the declamation of the actors.
It was a brilliant evening, not only because citoyenne Vestris was in magnificent form, but also because of the number of well-known people who sat in the various boxed and in the parterre and who thronged the foyer during the entr'actes.
It seemed as if the members of the Convention and those who sat upon the Revolutionary Committees, as well as the more prominent speakers in the various Clubs, had made a point of showing themselves to the public, gay, unconcerned, interested in the stage and in the audience, at this moment when every man's head was insecure upon his shoulders and no man knew whether on reaching home he would not find a possee of the National Guard waiting to convey him to the nearest prison.
Death indeed lurked everywhere.
The evening before, at a supper party given in the house of deputy Barrère, a paper was said to have dropped out of Robespierre's coat pocket, and been found by one of the guests. The paper contained nothing but just forty names. What those names were the general public did not know, nor for what purpose the dictator carried the list about in his pocket; but during the representation of Henri VIII, the more obscure citizens of Pairs—happy in their own insignificance—noted that in the foyer during the entr'actes, citizen Tallien and his friends appeared obsequious, whilst those who fawned upon Robespierre were more than usually arrogant.
§ 2
In one of the proscenium boxes, citizeness Cabarrus attracted a great deal of attention. Indeed, her beauty to-night was in the opinion of most men positively dazzling. Dressed with almost ostentatious simplicity, she drew all eyes upon her by her merry, ringing laughter, the ripple of conversation which flowed almost incessantly from her lips, and the graceful, provocative gestures of her bare hands and arms as she toyed with a miniature fan.
Indeed, Theresia Cabarrus was unusually light-hearted to-night. Sitting during the first two acts of the tragedy in her box, in the company of citizen Tallien, she became the cynosure of all eyes, proud and happy when, during the third interval, she received the visit of Robespierre.
He only stayed with her a few moments, and kept himself concealed for the most part at the back of the box; but he had been seen to enter, and Theresia's exclamation, "Ah, citizen Robespierre! What a pleasant surprise! 'Tis not often you grace the theatre with your presence!" had been heard all over the house.
Indeed, with the exception of Eleonore Duplay, whose passionate admiration he rather accepted than reciprocated, the incorruptible and feline tyrant had never been known to pay attention to any woman. Great therefore was Theresia's triumph. Visions of that grandeur which she had always coveted and to which she had always felt herself predestined, danced before her eyes; and remembering Chauvelin's prophecies and Mother Théot's incantations, she allowed the dream-picture of the magnificent English milor to fade slowly from her ken, bidding it a reluctant adieu.
Though in her heart she still prayed for his deliverance—and did it with a passionate earnestness—some impish demon would hover at her elbow and repeat in her unwilling ear Chauvelin's inspired words: "Bring the Scarlet Pimpernel to his knees at the chariot-wheel of Robespierre, and the crown of the Bourbons will be yours for the asking." And if, when she thought of that splendid head falling under the guillotine, a pang of remorse and regret shot through her heart, she turned with a seductive smile to the only man who could place that crown at her feet. His popularity was still at its zenith. To-night, whenever the audience caught sigh of him in the Cabarrus' box, a wild cheer rang out from gallery to pit of the house. Then Theresia would lean over to him and whisper insinuatingly:
"You can do anything with that crowd, citizen! You hold the people by the magnetism of your presence and of your voice. There is no height to which you cannot aspire."
"The greater the height," he murmured moodily, "the dizzier the fall...."
"'Tis on the summit you should gaze," she retorted; "not on the abyss below."
"I prefer to gaze into the loveliest eyes in Paris," he replied with a clumsy attempt at gallantry; "and remain blind to the summits as well as to the depths."
She tapped her daintily shod foot against the ground and gave an impatient little sigh. It seemed as if at every turn of fortune she was confronted with pusillanimity and indecision. Tallien fawning on Robespierre; Robespierre afraid of Tallien; Chauvelin a prey to nerves. How different to them all was that cool, self-possessed Englishman with the easy good-humour and splendid self-assurance!
"I would make you Queen of France in all but name!" He said this as easily, as unconcernedly as if he were promising an invitation to a rout.
When, a moment or two later, Robespierre took leave of her and she was left for a while alone with her thoughts, Theresia no longer tried to brush away from her mental vision the picture on which her mind loved to dwell. The tall, magnificent figure; the lazy, laughing eyes; the slender hand that looked so firm and strong amidst the billows of exquisite lace.
Ah, well! The dream was over! It would never come again. He himself had wakened her; he himself had cast the die which must end his splendid life, even at the hour when love and fortune smiled at him through the lips and eyes of beautiful Cabarrus.
Fate, in the guise of the one man she could have loved, was throwing Theresia into the arms of Robespierre.
§ 3
The next moment she was rudely awakened from her dreams. The door of her box was torn open by a violent hand, and turning, she saw Bertrand Moncrif, hatless, with hair dishevelled, clothes dripping and mud-stained, and linen soaked through. She was only just in time to arrest with a peremptory gesture the cry which was obviously hovering on his lips.
"Hush—sh—sh!" came at once from every portion of the audience, angered by this disturbing noise.
Tallien jumped to his feet.
"What is it?" he demanded in a quick whisper.
"A perquisition," Moncrif replied hurriedly, "in the house of the citoyenne!"
"Impossible!" she broke in harshly.
"Hush!... Silence!" the audience muttered audibly.
"I come from there," Moncrif murmured. "I have seen ... heard..."
"Come outside," Theresia interjected. "We cannot talk here."
She led the way out, and Tallien and Moncrif followed.
The corridor fortunately was deserted. only a couple of ouvreuses stood gossiping in a corner. Theresia, white to the lips—but more from anger than fear—dragged Moncrif with her to the foyer. Here there was no one.
"Now, tell me!" she commanded.
Bertrand passed his trembling hand through his soaking hair. His clothes were wet through. He was shaking from head to foot and appeared to have run till now he could scarcely stand.
"Tell me!" Theresia reiterated impatiently.
Tallien stood by, half paralysed with terror. He did not question the younger man, but gazed on him with compelling, horror-filled eyes, as if he would wrench the words out of him before they reached his throat.
"I was in the Rue Villedot," Moncrif stammered breathlessly at last, "when the storm broke. I sough shelter under the portico of a house opposite the citoyenne's lodgings.... I was there a long time. Then the storm subsided.... Men in uniform came along.... They were soldiers of the National Guard ... I could see that, though the street was pitch-dark.... They passed quite close to me.... They were talking of the citoyenne.... Then they crossed over to her lodgings.... I saw them enter the house.... I saw citizen Chauvelin in the doorway.... He chided them for being late.... There was a captain, and there were six soldiers, and that asthmatic coalheaver was with them."
"What!" Theresia exclaimed. "Rateau?"
"What in Satan's name does it all mean?" Tallien exclaimed with a savage curse.
"They went into the house," Moncrif went on, his voice rasping through his parched throat. "I followed at a little distance, to make quite sure before I came to warn you. Fortunately I knew where you were ... fortunately I always know..."
"You are sure they went up to my rooms?" Theresia broke in quickly.
"Yes. Two minutes later I saw a light in your apartment."
She turned abruptly to Tallien.
"My cloak!" she commanded. "I left it in the box."
He tried to protest.
"I am going," she rejoined firmly. "This is some ghastly mistake, for which that fiend Chauvelin shall answer with his life. My cloak!"
It was Bertrand who went back for the cloak and wrapped her in it. He knew—none better—that if his divinity desired to go, no power on earth would keep her back. She did not appear in the least afraid, but her wrath was terrible to see, and boded ill to those who had dared provoke it. Indeed, Theresia, flushed with her recent triumph and with Robespierre's rare if clumsy gallantries still ringing in her ear, felt ready to dare anything, to brave anyone—even Chauvelin and his threats. She even succeeded in reassuring Tallien, ordered him to remain in the theatre, and to show himself to the public as utterly unconcerned.
"In case a rumour of this outrage penetrates to the audience," she said, "you must appear to make light of it.... Nay! you must at once threaten reprisals against its perpetrators."
Then she wrapped her cloak about her and, taking Bertrand's arm, she hurried out of the theatre.
OUR LADY OR PITY
§ 1
TT was like an outraged divinity in the face of sacrilege that Theresia Cabarrus appeared in the antechamber of her apartment, ten minutes later.
Her rooms were full of men; sentries were at the door; the furniture was overturned, the upholstery ripped up, cupboard doors swung open; even her bed and bedding lay in a tangled heap upon the floor. The lights in the rooms were dim, one single lamp shedding its feeble rays from the antechamber into the living-room, whilst another flickered on a wall-bracket in the passage. In the bedroom the maid Pepita, guarded by a soldier, was loudly lamenting and cursing in voluble Spanish.
Citizen Chauvelin was standing in the centre of the living-room, intent on examining some papers. In a corner of the antechamber cowered the ungainly figure of Rateau the coalheaver.
Theresia took in the whole tragic picture at a glance; then with a proud, defiant toss of the head she swept past the soldiers in the antechamber and confronted Chauvelin, before he had time to notice her approach.
"Something has turned your brain, citizen Chauvelin," she said coolly. "What is it?"
He looked up, encountered her furious glance, and at once made her a profound, ironical bow.
"How wise was our young friend there to tell you of our visit, citoyenne," he said suavely.
And he looked with mild approval in the direction where Bertrand Moncrif stood between two soldiers, who had quickly barred his progress and were holding him tightly by the wrists.
"I came," Theresia retorted harshly, "as the forerunner of those who will know how to punish this outrage, citizen Chauvelin."
Once more he bowed, smiling blandly.
"I shall be as ready to receive them," he said quietly, "as I am gratified to see the citoyenne Cabarrus. When they come, shall I direct them to call and see their beautiful Egeria at the Conciergerie, whither we shall have the honour to convey her immediately?"
Theresia threw back her head and laughed; but her voice sounded hard and forced.
"At the Conciergerie?" she exclaimed. "I?"
"Even you, citoyenne," Chauvelin replied.
"On what charge, I pray you?" she demanded, with biting sarcasm.
"Of trafficking with the enemies of the Republic."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"You are mad, citizen Chauvelin!" she riposted with perfect sang-froid. "I pray you, order your men to re-establish order to my apartment; and remember that I will hold you responsible for any damage that has been done."
"Shall I also," Chauvelin rejoined with equally perfect equanimity, "replace these letters and other interesting objects, there where we found them?"
"Letters?" she retorted, frowning. "What letters?"
"These, citoyenne," he replied, and held up to her gaze the papers which he had in his hand.
"What are they? I have never seen them before."
"Nevertheless, we found them in that bureau." And Chauvelin pointed to a small piece of furniture which stood against the wall, and the drawers of which had obviously been forcibly torn open. Then as Theresia remained silent, apparently ununderstanding, he went on suavely: "They are letters written at different times to Mme de Fontenay, née Cabarrus—Our Lady of Pity, as she was called by grateful Bordeaux."
"By whom?" she asked.
"By the interesting hero of romance who is known to the world as the Scarlet Pimpernel."
"It is false!" she retorted firmly. "I have never received a letter from him in my life!"
"His handwriting is all too familiar to me, citoyenne; and the letters are addressed to you."
"It is false!" she reiterated with unabated firmness. "This is some devilish trick you have devised in order to ruin me. But take care, citizen Chauvelin, take care! If this is a trial of strength 'twixt you and me, the next few hours will show who will gain the day."
"If it were a trail of strength 'twixt you and me, citoyenne," he rejoined blandly, "I would already be a vanquished man. But it is France this time who has challenged a traitor. That traitor is Theresia Fontenay, née Cabarrus. The trial of strength is between her and France."
"You are mad, citizen Chauvelin! If there were letters writ by the Scarlet Pimpernel found in my rooms, 'tis you who put them there!"
"That statement you will be at liberty to substantiate to-morrow, citoyenne," he retorted coldly, "at the bar of the revolutionary tribunal. There, no doubt, you can explain away how citizen Rateau knew of the existence of those letters, and led me straight to their discovery. I have an officer of the National Guard, the commissary of the section, and half a dozen men, to prove the truth of what I say, and to add that in a wall-cupboard in your antechamber we also found this interesting collection, the use of which you, citoyenne, will no doubt be able to explain."
He stepped aside and pointed to a curious heap which littered the floor—rags for the most part: a tattered shirt, frayed breeches, a grimy cap, a wig made up of lank, colourless hair, the counterpart of that which adorned the head of the coalheaver Rateau.
Theresia looked on those rags for a moment in a kind of horrified puzzlement. Her cheeks and lips became the colour of ashes. She put her hand up to her forehead, as if to chase a hideous, ghoulish vision away, and smothered a cry of horror. Puzzlement had given place to a kind of superstitious dread. The room, the rags, the faces of the soldiers began to whirl around her—impish shapes to dance a wild saraband before her eyes. And in the midst of this witch's cauldron the figure of Chauvelin, like a weird hobgoblin, was executing elf-like contortions and brandishing a packet of letters writ upon scarlet paper.
She tried to laugh, to speak defiant words; but her throat felt as if it were held in a vice, and losing momentary consciousness she tottered, and only saved herself from measuring her length upon the floor by clinging with both hands to a a table immediately behind her.
As to what happened after that, she only had a blurred impression. Chauvelin gave a curt word of command, and a couple of soldiers came and stood to right and left of her. Then a piercing cry rang through the narrow rooms, and she saw Bertrand Moncrif for one moment between herself and the soldiers, fighting desperately, shielding her with his body, tearing and raging like a wild animal defending its young. The whole room appeared full of deafening noise: cries and more cries—words of command—calls of rage and of entreaty. Then suddenly the word "Fire!" and the detonation of a pistol at close range, and the body of Bertrand Moncrif sliding down lip and impotent to the floor.
After that, everything became dark around her. Theresia felt as if she were looking down an immeasurable abyss of inky blackness, and that she was falling, falling....
A thin, dry laugh brought her back to her senses, her pride to the fore, her vanity up in arms. She drew her statuesque figure up to its full height and once more confronted Chauvelin like an august and outraged divinity.
"And at whose word," she demanded, "is this monstrous charge to be brought against me?"
"At the word of a free citizen of the State," Chauvelin replied coldly.
"Bring him before me."
Chauvelin shrugged his shoulders and smiled indulgently, like one who is ready to humour a wayward child.
"Citizen Rateau!" he called.
From the anteroom there came the sound of much shuffling, spluttering, and wheezing; then the dull clatter of wooden shoes upon the carpeted floor; and presently the ungainly, grime-covered figure of the coalheaver appeared in the doorway.
Theresia looked on him for a few seconds in silence, then she gave a ringing laugh, and with exquisite bare arm outstretched she pointed to the scrubby apparition.
"That man's word against mine!" she called, with well-assumed mockery. "Rateau, the caitiff against Theresia Cabarrus, the intimate friend of citizen Robespierre! What a subject for a lampoon!"
Then her laughter broke. She turned once more on Chauvelin like an angry goddess.
"That vermin!" she exclaimed, her voice hoarse with indignation. "That sorry knave with a felon's brand! In truth, citizen Chauvelin, your spite must be hard put to it to bring up such a witness against me!"
Then suddenly her glance fell upon the lifeless body of Bertrand Moncrif, and on the horrible crimson stain which discoloured his coat. She gave a shudder of horror, and for a moment her eyes closed and her head fell back, as if she were about to swoon. But she quickly recovered herself. Her will-power at this moment was unconquerable. She looked with unutterable contempt on Chauvelin; then she raised her cloak, which had slipped down from her shoulders, and wrapped it with a queen-like gesture around her, and without another word led the way out of the apartment.
Chauvelin remained standing in the middle of the room, his face quite expressionless, his clawlike hands still fingering the fateful letters. Two soldiers remained with him beside the body of Bertrand Moncrif. The maid Pepita, still shrieking and gesticulating violently, had to be dragged away in the wake of her mistress.
In the doorway between the living-room and the antechamber, Rateau, humble, snivelling, more than a little frightened, stood aside in order to allow the guard and their imperious prisoner to pass. Theresia did not condescend to look at him again; and he, shuffling and stumbling in his clumsy wooden shoes, followed the soldiers down the stairs.
§ 2
It was still raining hard. The captain who was in charge of Theresia told her that he had a chaise ready for her. It was waiting out in the street. Theresia ordered him to send for it; she would not, she said, offer herself as a spectacle to the riff-raff who happened to be passing by. The captain had probably received orders to humour the prisoner as far as was compatible with safety. Certain it is that he sent one of his men to fetch the coach and to order the concierge to throw open the porte-cochère.
Theresia remained standing in the narrow vestibule at the foot of the stairs. Two soldiers stood on guard over the maid, whilst another stood beside Theresia. The captain, muttering with impatience, paced up and down the stone-paved floor. Rateau had paused on the stairs, a step or two just above where Theresia was standing. On the wall opposite, supported by an iron bracket, a smoky oil-lamp shed a feeble, yellowish flicker around.
A few minutes went by; then a loud clatter woke the echoes of the dreary old house, and a coach drawn by two ancient, half-starved nags, lumbered into the courtyard and came to a halt in front of the open doorway. The captain gave a sigh of relief, and called out: "Now then, citoyenne!" whilst the soldier who had gone to fetch the coach jumped down from the box-seat and, with his comrades, stood at attention. The maid was summarily bundled into the coach, and Theresia was ready to follow.
Just then the draught through the open door blew her velvet cloak against the filthy rags of the miserable ruffian behind her. An unexplainable impulse caused her to look up, and she encountered his eyes fixed upon her. A dull cry rose to her throat, and instinctively she put up her hand to her mouth, striving to smother the sound. Horror dilated her eyes, and through her lips one word escaped like a hoarse murmur:
"You!"
He put a grimy finger to his lips. But already she had recovered herself. Here then was the explanation of the mystery which surrounded this monstrous denunciation. The English milor had planned it as revenge for the injury done to his wife.
"Captain!" she cried out shrilly. "Beware! The English spy is at your heels!"
But apparently the captain's complaisance did not go to the length of listening to the ravings of his fair prisoner. He was impatient to get this unpleasant business over.
"Now then, citoyenne!" was his gruff retort. "En voiture!"
"You fool!" she cried, bracing herself against the grip of the soldiers who were on the point of seizing her. "'Tis the Scarlet Pimpernel! If you let him escape-"
"The Scarlet Pimpernel?" the Captain retorted with a laugh. "Where?"
"The coalheaver! Rateau! 'Tis he, I tell you!" And Theresia's cries became more frantic as she felt herself unceremoniously lifted off the ground. "You fool! You fool! You are letter him escape——"
"Rateau, the coalheaver?" the captain exclaimed. "We have heard that pretty story before. Here, citizen Rateau!" he went on, and shouted at the top of his voice. "Go and report yourself to citizen Chauvelin. Tell him you are the Scarlet Pimpernel! As for you, citoyenne, enough of this shouting—what? My orders are to take you to the Conciergerie, and not to run after spies—English, German, or Dutch. Now then, citizen soldiers!..."
Theresia, throwing her dignity to the winds, did indeed raise a shout that brought the other lodgers of the house to their door. But her screams had become inarticulate, as the soldiers, in obedience to the captains impatient orders, had wrapped her cloak about her head. Thus the inhabitants of the dreary old house in the Rue Villedot could only ascertain that the citoyenne Cabarrus who lodged on the third floor had been taken to prison, screaming and fighting, in a manner that no self-respecting aristo had ever done.
Theresia Cabarrus was ignominiously lifted into the coach and deposited by the side of equally noisy Pepita. Through the folds of the cloak her reiterated cry could still faintly be heard:
"You fool! You traitor! You cursed, miserable fool!"
One of the lodgers on the second floor—a young woman who was on good terms with every male creature that wore uniform—leaned over the balustrade of the balcony and shouted gaily down:
"Hey, citizen captain! Why is the aristo screaming so?"
One of the soldiers looked up, and shouted back:
"She has hold of the story that citizen Rateau is an English milor in disguise, and she wants to run after him!"
Loud laughter greeted this tale, and a lusty cheer was set up as the coach swung clumsily out of the courtyard.
A moment or two later, Chauvelin, followed by the two soldiers, came quickly down the stairs. The noise from below had at last reached his ears. At first he too through that it was only the proud Spaniard who was throwing her dignity to the winds. Then a word or two sounded clearly above the din:
"The Scarlet Pimpernel! The English spy!"
The words acted like a sorcerer's charm—a call from the vasty deep. In an instant the rest of the world ceased to have any importance in his sight. One thing and one alone mattered; his enemy.
Calling to the soldiers to follow him, he was out of the apartment and down in the vestibule below in a trice. The coach at that moment was turning out of the porte-cochère. The courtyard, wrapped in gloom, was alive with chattering and laughter which proceeded from the windows and balconies around. It was raining fast, and from the balconies the water was pouring down in torrents.
Chauvelin stood in the doorway and sent one of the soldiers to ascertain what the disturbance had all been about. The man returned with an account of how the aristo had screamed and raved like a mad-woman, and tried to escape by sending the citizen captain on a fool's errand, vowing that poor old Rateau was an English spy in disguise.
Chauvelin gave a sigh of relief. He certainly need not rack his nerves or break his head over that! He had good cause to know that Rateau, with the branded arm, could not possibly be the Scarlet Pimpernel!
GREY DAWN
§ 1
TEN minutes later the courtyard and approach of the old house in the Rue Villedot were once more wrapped in silence and in darkness. Chauvelin had with his own hands affixed the official seals on the doors which led to the apartments of citoyenne Cabarrus. In the living room, the body of the unfortunate Moncrif still lay uncovered and unwatched, awaiting what hasty burial the commissary of the section would be pleased to order for it. Chauvelin dismissed the soldiers at the door, and himself went his way.
The storm was gradually dying away. By the time that the audience filed out of the theatre, it was scarcely raining. Only from afar, dull rumblings of thunder could still faintly be heard. Citizen Tallien hurried along on foot to the Rue Villedot. The last hour had been positive torture for him. Although his reason told him that no man would be fool enough to trump up an accusation against Theresia Cabarrus, who was the friend, the Egeria of every influential man in the Convention or the Clubs, and that she herself had always been far too prudent to allow herself to be compromised in any way—although he knew all that, his overwrought fancy conjured up vision which made him sick with dread. His Theresia in the hands of rough soldiery—dragged to prison—he himself unable to ascertain what had become of her—until he saw her at the bar of that awful tribunal, from which there was no issue save the guillotine!
And with this dread came unendurable, gnawing remorse. He himself was one of the men who had helped to set up the machinery of wild accusations, monstrous tribunals and wholesale condemnations which had been set in motion now by an unknown hand against the woman he loved. He—Tallien—the ardent lover, the future husband of Theresia, had aided in the constitution of that abominable Revolutionary Committee, which could strike at the innocent as readily and as ruthlessly as at the guilty.
Indeed at this hour, this man, who long since had forgotten how to pray, when he heard the tower-clock of a neighbouring church striking the hour, turned his eyes that were blurred with tears towards the sacred edifice which he had helped to desecrate, and found in his heart a half-remembered prayer which he murmured to the Fount of all Mercy and of Pardon
§ 2
Citizen Tallien turned into the Rue Villedot, the street where lodged his beloved. A minute or so later, he was making his way up the back staircase of the dingy house where his divinity had dwelt until now. On the second-floor landing two women stood gossiping. One of them recognized the influential Representative.
"It is citizen Tallien," she said.
And the other woman at once volunteered the information:
"They have arrested the citoyenne Cabarrus," she said; "and the soldiers did not know whither they were taking her."
Tallien did not wait to listen further. He stumbled up the stairs to the third floor, to the door which he knew so well. His trembling fingers wandered over the painted panels. They encountered the official seals, which told their own mute tale.
The whole thing, then, was not a dream. Those assassins had taken his Theresia and dragged her to prison, would drag her on the morrow to an outrageous mockery of a tribunal first, and then to death! Who shall say what wild thoughts of retrospection and of remorse coursed through the brain of this man—himself one of the makers of a bloody revolution? What visions of past ideals, good intentions, of honest purpose and incessant labour, passed before his mind? That glorious revolution, which was to mark the regeneration of mankind, which was to have given liberty to the oppressed, equality to the meek, fraternity in one vast human family! And what did it lead to but to oppression far more cruel than all that had gone before, to fratricide and to arrogance on the one side, servility on the other, to constant terror of death, to discouragement and sloth?
For hours citizen Tallien sat in the dark, on the staircase outside Theresia's door, his head buried in his hands. The grey dawn, living and chill, which came peeping in through the skylight overhead, found him still sitting there, stiff and numb with cold.
Whether what happened after that was part of a dream, he never knew. Certain it is that presently something extraneous appeared to rouse him. he sat up and listened, leaned his back against the wall, for he was very tired. Then he heard—or thought he heard—firm, swift steps on the stairs, and soon after saw the figure of two men coming up the stairs. Both the men were very tall, one of them unusually so, and the ghostly light of dawn made him appear unreal and mysterious. He was dressed with marvellous elegance; his smooth, fair hair was tied at the nape of the neck with a satin bow; soft, billowy lace gleamed at his wrists and throat, and his hands were exquisitely white and slender. Both the men wore huge coats of fine cloth, adorned with many capes, and boots of fine leather, perfectly cut.
They paused on the vestibule outside the door of Theresia's apartment, and appeared to be studying the official seals affixed upon the door. Then one of them—the taller of the two—took a knife out of his pocket and cut through the tapes which held the seals together. Then together they stepped coolly into the apartment.
Tallien had watched them, dazed and fascinated. He was so numb and weary that his tongue—just like it does in dreams—refused him service when he tried to call. But now he struggled to his feet and followed in the wake of the two mysterious strangers. With him, the instinct of the official, the respect due to regulations and laws framed by his colleagues and himself, had been to strong to allow him to tamper with the seals, and there was something mysterious and awesome about that tall figure of a man, dressed with supreme elegance, whose slender, firm hands had so unconcernedly committed this flagrant breach of the law. It did not occur to Tallien to call for help. Somehow, the whole incident—the two men—were so ghostlike, that he felt that at a word they would vanish into thin air.
He stepped cautiously into the familiar little antechamber. The strangers had gone through to the living-room. One of them was kneeling on the floor. Tallien, who knew nothing of the tragedy which had been enacted inside the apartment of his beloved, marvelled what the men were doing. He crept stealthily forward and craned his neck to see. The window at the end of the room had been left unfastened. A weird grey streak of light came peeping in and illumined the awesome scene: the overturned furniture, the torn hangings; and on the ground, the body of a man, with the stranger kneeling beside it.
Tallien, weary and dazed, always of a delicate constitution, felt nigh to swooning. His knees were shaking, a cold dread of the supernatural held his heart with an icy grip and caused his hair to tingle at the roots. His tongue felt huge and as if paralysed, his teeth were chattering together. It was as much as he could do not to measure his length on the ground; and the vague desire to remain unobserved kept him crouching in the gloom.
He just could see the tall stranger pass his hands over the body on the floor, and could hear the other ask him a question in English.
A few moments went by. The strangers conversed in a low tone of voice. From one or two words which came clearly to his ear, Tallien gathered that they spoke in English—a language with which he himself was familiar. The taller man of the two appeared to be giving his friend some orders, which the latter promised to obey. Then, with utmost precaution, he took the body in his arms and lifted it from the floor.
"Let me help you, Blakeney," the other said in a whisper.
"No, no!" the mysterious stranger replied quickly. "The poor worm is as light as a feather! 'Tis better he died as he did. His unfortunate infatuation was killing him."
"Poor little Régine!" the younger man sighed.
"It is better so," his friend rejoined. "We'll be able to tell her that he died nobly, and that we've given him Christian burial."
No wonder that Tallien thought that he was dreaming! These English were strange folk indeed! Heaven alone knew what they risked by coming here, at this hour, and into this house, in order to fetch away the body of their friend. They certainly were wholly unconscious of danger.
Tallien held his breath. He saw the splendid figure of the mysterious adventurer step across the threshold, bearing the lifeless body in his arms with as much ease as if he were carrying a child. The pale grey light of morning was behind him, and his fine head with its smooth fair hair was silhouetted against the neutral-tinted background. His friend came immediately behind him.
In the dark antechamber he paused, and called abruptly:
"Citizen Tallien!"
A cry rose to Tallien's throat. He had thought himself entirely unobserved, and the stranger a mere vision which he was watching in a dream. Now he felt that compelling eyes were gazing straight at him, piercing the darkness for a clearer sight of his face.
But the spell was still on him, and he only moved in order to straighten himself out and to force his trembling knees to be still.
"They have taken the citoyenne Cabarrus to the Conciergerie," the stranger went on simply. "To-morrow she will be charged before the Revolutionary Tribunal..... You know what is the inevitable end——"
It seemed as if some subtle magic was in the man's voice, in his very presence, in the glance wherewith he challenged that of the unfortunate Tallien. The latter felt a wave of shame sweep over him. There was something so splendid in these two men—exquisitely dressed, and perfectly deliberate and cool in all their movements—who were braving and daring death in order to give Christian burial to their friend; whilst he, in face of the outrage put upon his beloved, had only sat on her desecrated doorstep like a dumb animal pining for its master. He felt a hot flush rush to his cheeks. With quick, nervy movements he readjusted the set of his coat, passed his thin hands over his rumpled hair; whilst the stranger reiterated with solemn significance:
"You know what is the inevitable end.... The citoyenne Cabarrus will be condemned...."
Tallien this time met the stranger's eyes fearlessly. It was the magic of strength and of courage that flowed into him from them. He drew up his meagre stature to its full height and threw up his head with an air of defiance and of conscious power.
"Not while I live!" he said firmly.
"Theresia Cabarrus will be condemned to-morrow," the stranger went on calmly. "Then the next day, the guillotine——"
"Never!"
"Inevitably!... Unless——"
"Unless what?" Tallien queried, and hung breathless on the man's lips as he would on those of an oracle.
"Theresia Cabarrus, or Robespierre and his herd of assassins. Which shall it be, citizen Tallien?"
"By Heaven!——" Tallien exclaimed forcefully.
But he got no further. The stranger, bearing his burden, had already gone out of the room, closely followed by his friend.
Tallien was alone in the deserted apartment, where every broken piece of furniture, every torn curtain, cried out for vengeance in the name of his beloved. He said nothing. He neither protested nor swore. But he tip-toed into the apartment and knelt down upon the floor close beside the small sofa on which she was wont to sit. Here he remained quite still for a minute or two, his eyes closed, his hands tightly clasped together. Then he stooped very low and pressed his lips against the spot where her pretty, sandalled foot was wont to rest.
After that he rose, strode with a firm step out of the apartment, carefully closing the doors behind him.
The strangers had vanished into the night; and citizen Tallien went quietly back to his own lodgings.
THE CATACLYSM
§ 1
FORTY names! Found on a list in the pocket of Robespierre's coat!
Forty names! And every one of these that of a known opponent of Robespierre's schemes of dictatorship: Tallien, Barrère, Vadier, Cambon, and the rest. Men powerful to-day, prominent Members of the Convention, leaders of the people, too—but opponents!
The inference was obvious, the panic general. That night—it was the 8th Thermidor, July the 26th of the old calendar—men talked of flight, of abject surrender, of appeal—save the mark!—to friendship, camaraderie, humanity! Friendship, camaraderie, humanity? An appeal to a heart of stone! They talked of everything, in face, save of defying the tyrant; for such talk would have been folly.
Defying the tyrant? Ye gods! When with a word he could sway the Convention, the Committees, the multitude, bend them to his will, bring them to heel like any tamer of beasts when he cracks his whip?
So men talked and trembled. All night they talked and trembled; for they did not sleep, those forty whose names were on Robespierre's list. But Tallien, their chief, was nowhere to be found. 'Twas known that his fiancée, the beautiful Theresia Cabarrus, had been summarily arrested. Since then he had disappeared; and they—the others—were leaderless. But, even so, he was no loss. Tallien was ever pusillanimous, a temporizer—what?
And now the hour for temporizing is past. Robespierre then is to be dictator of France. He will be dictator of France, in spite of any opposition led by those forty whose names are on his list! He will be dictator of France! He has not said it; but his friends have shouted it form the house-tops, and have murmured under their breath that those who oppose Robespierre's dictatorship are traitors to the land. Death then must be their fate.
When then, ye gods? What then?
§ 2
And so the day broke—smiling, mark you! It was a beautiful warm July morning. It broke on what is perhaps the most stupendous cataclysm—save one—the world has ever known.
Behold the picture! A medley. A confusion. A whirl of everything that is passionate and cruel, defiant and desperate. Heavens, how desperate! Men who have thrown lives away as if lives were in truth grains of sand; men who have juggled with death dealt it and tossed it about like cards upon a gaming table. They are desperate now, because their own lives are at stake; and they find now that life can be very dear.
So, having greeted their leader, the forty draw together, watching the moment when humility will be most opportune.
Robespierre mounts the tribune. The hour has struck. His speech is one long, impassioned, involved tirade, full at first on vague accusations against the enemies of the Republic and the people, and is full of protestations of his own patriotism and selflessness. Then he warms to his own oratory; his words are prophetic of death, his voice becomes harsh—like a screech owl's, so we're told. His accusations are no longer vague. He begins to strike.
Corruption! Backsliding! Treachery! Moderatism!—oh, moderatism above all! Moderatism is treachery to the glorious revolution. Every victim spared form the guillotine is a traitor let loose against the people! A traitor, he who robs the guillotine of her prey! Robespierre stands alone incorruptible, true, faithful unto death!
And for all that treachery, what remedy is there? Why, death of course! Death! The guillotine! New power to the sovereign guillotine! Death to all the traitors!
And seven hundred faces became paler still with dread, and the sweat of terror rises on seven hundred brows. There were only forty names on that list... but there might be others somewhere else!
And still the voice of Robespierre thunders on. His words fall of seven hundred pairs of ears like on a sounding-board; his friends, his sycophants, echo them; they applaud, rise in wild enthusiasm. 'Tis the applause that is thundering now!
One of the tyrant's most abject slaves has put forward the motion that the great speech just delivered shall forthwith be printed, and distributed to every township, every village, throughout France, as a monument to the lofty patriotism of her greatest citizen.
The motion at one moment looks as if it would be carried with acclamations; after which, Robespierre's triumph would have risen to the height of deification. Then suddenly the note of dissension; the hush; the silence. The great Assembly is like a sounding-board that has ceased to respond. Something had turned the acclamations to mutterings, and then to silence. The sounding-board has given forth a dissonance. Citizen Tallien has demanded "delay in printing that speech," and asked pertinently:
"What has become of the Liberty of Opinion in this Convention?"
His face is the colour of ashes, and his eyes, ringed with purple, gleam with an unnatural fire. The coward has become bold; the sheep has donned the lion's skin.
There is a flutter in the Convention, a moment's hesitation. But the question is put to the vote, and the speech is not to be printed. A small matter, in truth—printing or not printing.... Does the Destiny of France hang on so small a peg?
It is a small matter; and yet how full of portent! Like the breath of mutiny blowing across a ship. But nothing more occurs just then. Robespierre, lofty in his scorn, puts the notes of his speech into his pocket. He does not condescend to argue. He, the master of France, will not deign to bandy words with his slaves. And he stalks out of the Hall surrounded by his friends.
There has been a breath of mutiny; but his is still the iron heel, powerful enough to crush a raging revolt. His withdrawal—proud, silent, menacing—is in keeping with his character and with the pose which he has assumed of late. But he is still the Chosen of the People; and the multitude is there, thronging the streets of Paris—there, to avenge the insult put upon their idol by a pack of slinking wolves.
§ 3
And now the picture becomes still more poignant. It is painted in colours more vivid, more glowing than and again the Hall of the Convention is crowded to the roof, with Tallien and his friends, in a close phalanx, early at their post!
Tallien is there, pale, resolute, the fire of his hatred kept up by anxiety for his beloved. The night before, at the corner of a dark street, a surreptitious hand slipped a scrap of paper into the pocket of his coat. It was a message written by Theresia in prison, and written with her own blood. How it ever came into his pocket Tallien never know; but the few impassioned, agonized words, seared his very soul and whipped up his courage:
"The Commissary of Police has just left me," Theresia wrote. "He came to tell me that to-morrow I must appear before the tribunal. This means the guillotine. And I, who thought that you were a man....!"
Not only is his own head in peril, not only that of his friends; but the life of the woman whom he worships hangs now upon the thread of his own audacity and of his courage.
St. Just on this occasion is the first to mount the tribune; and Robespierre, the very incarnation of lustful and deadly Vengeance, stands silently by. He has spent the afternoon and evening with his friends at the Jacobins' Club, where deafening applause greeted his every word, and wild fury raged against his enemies.
It is then to be a fight to the finish To your tents, O Israel!
To the guillotine all those who have dared to say one word against the Chosen of the People! St. Just shall thunder Vengeance from the tribune at the Convention, whilst Henriot, the drunken and dissolute Commandant of the Municipal Guard, shall, but the might of the sword and fire, proclaim the sovereignty of Robespierre through the streets of Paris. That is the picture as it has been painted in the minds of the tyrant and of his sycophants: a picture of death paramount, and of Robespierre rising like a new Phoenix from out the fire of calumny and revolt, greater, more unassailable than before.
And lo! One sweep of the brush, and the picture is changed.
Ten minutes ... less ... and the whole course of the world's history is altered. No sooner had St. Just mounted the tribune than Tallien jumped to his feet. His voice, usually meek and cultured, rises in a harsh crescendo, until it drowns that of the younger orator.
"Citizens," he exclaims, "I ask for truth! Let us tear aside the curtain behind which lurk concealed the real conspirators and the traitors!"
"Yes, yes! Truth! Let us have the truth!" One hundred voices—not forty—have raised the echo.
The mutiny is on the verge of becoming open revolt, is that already, perhaps. It is like a spark fallen—who knows where?—into a powder magazine. Robespierre feels it, sees the spark. He knows that one movement, one word, one plunge into that magazine, foredoomed though it be to destruction, on stamp with a sure foot, may yet quench the spark, may yet smother the mutiny. He rushes to the tribune, tries to mount. But Tallien has forestalled him, elbows him out of the way, and turns to the seven hundred with a cry that rings far beyond the Hall, out into the streets.
"Citizens!" he thunders in his turn. "I begged of you just now to tear aside the curtains behind which lurk the traitors. Well, the curtain is already rent. And if you dare not strike at the tyrant now, then 'tis I who will dare!" And from beneath his coat he draws a dagger and raises it above his head. "And I will plunge this into his heart," he cries, "if you have not the courage to smite!"
His words, that gleaming bit of steal, fan the spark into a flame. Within a few seconds, seven hundred voices are shouting, "Down with the tyrant!" Arms are waving, hands gesticulate wildly, excitedly. Only a very few shout: "Behold the dagger of Brutus!" All the others retort with "Tyranny!" and "Conspiracy!" and with cries of "Vive la Liberté!"
At this hour all is confusion and deafening uproar. In vain Robespierre tries to speak. He demands to speak. He hurls insults, anathema, upon the President, who relentless refuses him speech and jingles his bell against him.
"President of Assassins," the falling tyrant cries, "I demand speech of thee!"
But the bell goes jingling on, and Robespierre, choked with rage and terror, "turns blue" we are told, and his hand goes up to his throat.
"The blood of Danton chokes thee!" cries one man. And these words seem like the last blow dealt to the fallen foe. The next moment the voice of an obscure Deputy is raised, in order to speak the words that have been hovering on every lip:
"I demand a decree of accusation against Robespierre!"
"Accusation!" comes from seven hundred throats. "The decree of accusation!"
The President jingles his bell, puts the question, and the motion is passed unanimously.
Maximilien Robespierre—erstwhile master of France—is decreed accused.
THE WHIRLWIND
§ 1
IT was then noon. Five minutes later, the Chosen of the People, the fallen idol, is hustled out of the Hall into one of the Committee rooms close by, and with his friends—St. Just, Couthon, Lebas, his brother Augustin, and the others—all decreed accused and the order of arrest launched against them. As for the rest, 'tis the work of the Public Prosecutor—and of the guillotine.
At five o'clock the Convention adjourns. The deputies have earned food and rest. They rush to their homes, there to relate what has happened; Tallien to the Conciergerie, to get a sight of Theresia. This is denied him. He is not dictator yet; and Robespierre, though apparently vanquished, still dominates—and lives.
But from every church steeple the tocsin bursts; and a prolonged roll of drums ushers in the momentous evening.
In the city all is hopeless confusion. Men are running in every direction, shouting, brandishing pistols and swords. Henriot, Commandant of the Municipal Guard, rides through the streets at the head of his gendarmes like one possessed, bent on delivering Robespierre. Women and children fly screaming in every direction; the churches, so long deserted, are packed with people who, terror-stricken, are trying to remember long-forgotton prayers.
Proclamations are read at street corners; there are rumours of a general massacre of all the prisoners. At one moment—the usual hour—the familiar tumbril with its load of victims for the guillotine rattles along the cobblestones of the Rue St., Antoine. The populace, vaguely conscious of something stupendous in the air—even though the decree of accusation against Robespierre has not yet transpired—loudly demand the release of the victims. They surround the tumbrils, crying, "Let them be free!"
But Henriot at the head of his gendarmes comes riding down the street, and while the populace shouts, "It shall not be! Let them be free!" he threatens with pistols and sabre, and retorts, bellowing: "It shall be! To the guillotine!" And the tumbrils, which for a moment had halted, lumber on, on their way.
§ 2
Up in the attic of the lonely house in the Rue de la Planchette, Marguerite Blakeney heard but a mere faint echo of the confusion and of the uproar.
During the previous long, sultry afternoon, it had seemed to her as if her jailers had been unwontedly agitated. There was much more moving to and fro on the landing outside her door than there had been in the last three days. Men talked, mostly in whispers; but at times a word, a phrase here and there, a voice raised above the others, reached her straining ears. She glued her ear tot he keyhole and listened; but what she heard was all confusion, sentences that conveyed but little meaning to her. She distinguished the voice of the Captain of the Guard. He appeared impatient about something, and talked about "missing all the fun." The other soldiers seemed to agree with him. Obviously they were all drinking heavily, for their voices sounded hoarse and thick, and often would break into bibulous song. From time to time, too, she would hear the patter of wooden shoes, together with a wheezy cough, as from a man troubled with asthma.
But it was all very vague, for her nerves by this time were on the rack. She had lost count of time, of place; she knew nothing. She was unable even to think. All her instincts were merged in the dead of that silent evening hour, when Chauvelin's furtive footsteps would once more resound upon the stone floor outside her door, when she would hear the quick word of command that heralded his approach, the grounding of arms, the sharp query and quick answer, and when she would feel again the presence of the relentless enemy who lay in wait to trap her beloved.
At one moment that evening he had raised his voice, obviously so that she might hear.
"To-morrow is the fourth day, citizen Captain," she had heard him say. "I may not be able to come."
"Then," the voice of the Captain had said in reply, "if the Englishman is not here by seven o'clock——"
Chauvelin had given a harsh, dry laugh, and retorted:
"Your orders are as they were, citizen. But I think that the Englishman will come."
What it all meant Marguerite could not fail to conjecture. It meant death to her or to her husband—to both, in fact. And all to-day she had sat by the open window, her hands clasped in silent, constant prayer, her eyes fixed upon the horizon far away, longing with all her might for one last sight of her beloved, fighting against despair, striving for trust in him and for hope.
§ 3
At this hour, the centre of interest is the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, where Robespierre and his friends sit entrenched and—for the moment—safe. The prisons have refused one by one to close their gates upon the Chosen of the People; governors and jailers alike have quaked in the face of so monstrous a sacrilege. And the same gendarmes who have been told off to escort the fallen tyrant to his penultimate resting-place, have had a touch of the same kind of scruple—or dread—and at his command have conveyed him to the Hôtel de Ville.
In vain does the Convention hastily reassemble. In vain—apparently—does Tallien demand that the traitor Robespierre and his friends be put outside the pale of the law. They are for the moment safe, redacting proclamations, sending out messengers in every direction; whilst Henriot and his gendarmes, having struck terror in the hearts of all peaceable citizens, hold the place outside the Town Hall and proclaim Robespierre dictator of France.
The sun sinks towards the west behind a veil of mist. Ferment and confusion are at their height. All around the city there is an invisible barrier that seems to confine agitation within it's walls. Outside this barrier, no one knows what is happening. Only a vague dread has filtrated through and gripped every heart. The guard at the several gates appear slack and undisciplined. Sentries are accosted by passers-by, eager for news. And, from time to time, from every direction, troops of the Municipal gendarmes ride furiously by, with shouts of "Robespierre! Robespierre! Death to the traitors! Long live Robespierre!"
They raise a cloud of dust around them, trample unheedingly over every obstacle, human or otherwise, that happens to be in their way. They threaten peaceable citizens with their pistols and strike and women and children with the flat of their sabres.
As soon as they have gone by, excited groups close up in their wake.
"Name of a name, what is happening?" every one queries in affright.
And gossip, conjectures, rumours, hold undisputed sway.
"Robespierre is dictator of France!"
"He has ordered the arrest of all the Members of the Convention."
"And the massacre of all the prisoners."
"Pardi, a wise decree! As for me, I am sick of the eternal tumbrils and the guillotine!"
"Better finish with the lot, say I!"
"Robespierre! Robespierre!" comes as a far-off echo, to the accompaniment of thundering hoofs upon the cobble-stones.
And so, from mouth to mouth! The meek and the peace-loving magnify these rumours into approaching cataclysm; the opportunists hold their tongue, ready to fall in with this party or that; the cowards lie in hiding and shout "Robespierre!" with Henriot's horde or "Tallien!" in the neighbourhood of the Tuileries.
Here the Convention has reassembled, and here they are threatened presently by Henriot and his artillery. The members of the great Assembly remain at their post. The President has harangued them.
"Citizen deputies!" he calls aloud. "The moment has come to die at our posts!"
As they sit waiting for Henriot's cannonade, and calmly decree all the rebels "outside the pale of the law."
Tallien, moved by a spirit of lofty courage, goes, followed by a few intimates, to meet Henriot's gunners boldly face to face.
"Citizen soldiers!" he calls aloud, and his voice has the resonance of undaunted courage. "After covering yourselves with glory on the fields of honour, are you going to disgrace your country?" He points a scornful finger at Henriot who, bloated, purple in the face, grunting and spluttering like an old seal, is reeling in his saddle. "Look at him, citizen soldiers!" Tallien commands. "He is drunk and besotted! What man is there who, being sober, would dare to order fire against the representatives of the people?"
The gunners are moved, frightened too by the decree which has placed them "outside the pale of the law." Henriot, fearing mutiny if he persisted in the monstrous order to fire, withdraws his troops back to the Hôtel de Ville.
Some follow him; some do not. And Tallien goes back to the Hall of the Convention covered with glory.
Citizen Barras is promoted Commandant of the National Guard and of al forces at the disposal of the Convention, and ordered to recruit loyal troops that will stand up to the traitor Henriot and his ruffianly gendarmes. The latter are in open revolt against the Government; but, name of a name! Citizen Barras, with a few hundred patriots, will soon put reason—and a few charges of gun-powder—into them!
§ 4
So, at five o'clock in the afternoon, whilst Henriot has once more collected his gendarmes and the remnants of his artillery outside the Hôtel de Ville, citizen Barras, accompanied by two aides-de-camp, goes forth on his recruiting mission. He makes the round of the city gates, wishing to find out what loyal soldiers amongst the National Guard the Convention can rely upon.
Chauvelin, on his way to the Rue de la Planchette, meets Barras at the Porte St. Antoine; and Barras is full of the news.
"Why were you not at your place at the Assembly, citizen Chauvelin?" he asks of his colleague. "It was the grandest moment I have ever witnessed! Tallien was superb, and Robespierre ignoble! And if we succeed in crushing that bloodthirsty monster once and for all, it will be a new era of civilization and liberty!"
He halts, and continues with a fretful sigh:
"But we want soldiers—loyal soldiers! All the troops that we can get! Henriot has the whole of the Municipal Gendarmerie at his command, with muskets and guns; and Robespierre can always sway that rabble with a word. We want men!... Men!..."
But Chauvelin is in no mood to listen. Robespierre's fall or his triumph, what are they to him at this hour, when the curtain is about to fall on the final act of his own stupendous drama of revenge? Whatever happens, whoever remains in power, vengeance is his! The English spy in any event is sure of the guillotine. He is not the enemy of a party, but of the people of France. And the sovereignty of the people is not in question yet. Then, what matters if the wild beasts in the Convention are at one another's throat?
So Chauvelin listens unmoved to Barras' passionate tirades, and when the latter, puzzle at his colleague's indifference, reiterates frowning:
"I must have all the troops I can get. You have some capable soldiers at your command always, citizen Chauvelin. Where are they now?"
Chauvelin retorts drily:
"At work. On business at least as important as taking side in a quarrel between Robespierre and Tallien."
"Pardi!..." Barras protests hotly.
But Chauvelin pays no further attention to him. A neighbouring church clock has just struck six. Within the hour and his arch enemy will be in his hands! Never for a moment does he doubt that the bold adventurer will come to the lonely house in the Rue de la Planchette. Even hating the Englishman as he does, he knows that the latter would not endanger his wife's safety by securing his own.
So Chauvelin turns on his heel, leaving Barras to fume and to threaten. At the angle of the Porte St. Antoine, he stumbles against and nearly knocks over a man who sits on the ground, with his back to the wall, munching a straw, his knees drawn up to his nose, a crimson cap pulled over his eyes, and his two long arms encircling his shins.
Chauvelin swore impatiently. His nerves were on the rack, and he was in no pleasant mood. The man, taken unawares, had uttered an oath, which died away in a racking fit of coughing. Chauvelin looked town, and saw the one long arm branded with the letter "M," the flesh still swollen and purple with the fire of the searing iron.
"Rateau!" he ejaculated roughly. "What are you doing here?"
Meek and servile, Rateau struggled with some difficulty to his feet.
"I have finished my work at Mother Théot's, citizen," he said humbly. "I was resting."
Chauvelin kicked at him with the toe of his boot.
"Then go and rest elsewhere," he muttered. "The gates of the city are not refuges for vagabonds."
After which act of unnecessary brutality, his temper momentarily soothed, he turned on his heel and walked rapidly through the gate.
Barras had stood by during this brief interlude, vaguely interested in the little scene. But now, when the coalheaver lurched past him, one of his aides-de-camp remarked audibly:
"An unpleasant customer, citizen Chauvelin! Eh, friend?"
"I believe you!" Rateau replied readily enough. Then, with the mulish persistence of a gaby who is smarting under a wrong, he thrust out his branded arm right under citizen Barras' nose. "See what he has done to me!"
Barras frowned.
"A convict, what? Then, how is it you are at large?"
"I am not a convict," Rateau protested with sullen emphasis. "I am an innocent man, and a free citizen of the Republic. But I got in citizen Chauvelin's way, what? He is always full of schemes——"
"You are right there!" Barras retorted grimly. But the subject was not sufficiently interesting to engross his attention further. He had so many and such momentous things to do. Already he had nodded to his men and turned his back on the grimy coalheaver, who, shaken by a fit of coughing, unable to speak for the moment, had put out his grimy hand and gripped the deputy firmly by the sleeve.
"What is it now?" Barras ejaculated roughly.
"If you will but listen, citizen," Rateau wheezed painfully, "I can tell you——"
"What?"
"You were asking citizen Chauvelin where you could find some soldiers of the Republic to do you service."
"Yes; I did."
"Well," Rateau rejoined, and an expression of malicious cunning distorted his ugly face. "I can tell you."
"What do you mean?"
"I lodge in an empty warehouse over yonder," Rateau went on eagerly, and pointed in the direction where Chauvelin's spare figure had disappeared a while ago. "The floor above is inhabited by Mother Théot, the witch. you know her, citizen?"
"Yes, yes! I thought she had been sent to the guillotine along with——"
"She was let out of prison, and has been doing some of citizen Chauvelin's spying for him."
Barras frowned. This was none of his business, and the dirty coalheaver inspired him with an unpleasant sense of loathing.
"To the point, citizen!" he said curtly.
"Citizen Chauvelin has a dozen or more soldiers under his command, in that house," Rateau went on with a leer. "They are trained troops of the National Guard——"
"How do you know?" Barras broke in harshly.
"Pardi!" was the coalheaver's dry reply. "I clean their boots for them."
"Where is the house?"
"In the Rue de la Planchette. But there is an entrance into the warehouse at the back of it."
"Allons!" was Barras' curt word of command, to the two men who accompanied him.
He strode up the street toward the gate, not caring whether Rateau came along or no. But the coalheaver followed in the wake of the three men. He had buried his grimy fists once more in the pocket of his tattered breeches; but not before he had shaken them, each in turn, in the direction of the Rue de la Planchette.
§ 5
Chauvelin in the meanwhile had turned into Mother Théot's house, and without speaking to the old charlatan, who was watching for him in the vestibule, he mounted to the top floor. Here he called peremptorily to Captain Boyer.
"There is half an hour yet," the latter murmured gruffly; "and I am sick of all this waiting! Let me finish with that cursed aristo in there. My comrades and I want to see what is going on in the city, and join in the fun, if there is any."
"Half an hour, citizen," Chauvelin rejoined drily. "You'll lose little of the fun, and you'll certainly lose your share of the ten thousand livres if you shoot the woman and fail to capture the Scarlet Pimpernel."
"Bah! He'll not come now," Boyer riposted. "It is too late. He is looking after his own skin, pardi!"
"He will come, I swear!" Chauvelin said firmly, as if in answer to his own thoughts.
Inside the room, Marguerite has heard every word of this colloquy. Its meaning is clear enough. Clear and horrible! Death awaits her at the hands of those abominable ruffians—here—within half an hour—unless... Her thoughts are becoming confused; she cannot concentrate. Frightened? No, she is not frightened. She has looked death in the face before now. That time in Boulogne. And there are worse things than death.... There is, for instance, the fear that she might never see her husband again ... in this life.... There is only half an hour or less than that ... and ... and he might not come.... She prays that he might not come. But, if he does, then what chance has he? My God, what chance?
And her tortured mind conjures up visions of his courage, his coolness, his amazing audacity and luck.... She thinks and thinks... if he does not come... and if he does....
A distant church clock strikes the half-hour... a short half-hour now...
The evening is sultry. Another storm is threatening, and the sun has tinged the heat-mist with red. The air smells foul, as in the midst of a huge, perspiring crowd. And through the heat, the lull, above the hideous sounds of those ruffians outside her door, there is a rumbling noise as of distant, unceasing thunder. The city is in travail.
Then suddenly Boyer, the Captain of the ruffians, exclaims loudly:
"Let me finish with the aristo, citizen Chauvelin! I want to join in the fun."
And the door of her room is torn open by a savage, violent hand.
The window behind Marguerite is open, and she, facing the door, clings with both hands to the sill. Her cheeks bloodless, her eyes glowing, her head erect, she waits, praying with all her might for courage... only courage.
The ruffianly captain, in his tattered, mud-stained uniform, stands in the doorway—for one moment only. The next, Chauvelin has elbowed him out of the way, and in his turn faces the prisoner—the innocent woman whom he has pursued with such relentless hatred. Marguerite prays with all her might, and does not flinch. Not for one second. Death stands there before her in the guise of this man's vengeful lust, which gleams in his pale eyes. Death is there waiting for her, under the guise of the ignoble soldiers in the scrubby rags, with their muskets held in stained, filthy hands.
Courage—only courage! The power to die as he would wish her to ... could he but know!
Chauvelin speaks to her; she does not hear. There is a mighty buzzing in her ears as of men shouting—shouting what, she does not know, for she is still praying for courage. Chauvelin has ceased talking. Then it must be the end. Thank God! she has had the courage not to speak and not to flinch. Now she closes her eyes, for there is a red mist before her and she feels that she might fall into it—straight into that mist.
§ 6
With closed eyes, Marguerite suddenly seems able to hear. She hears shouts which come from below—quite close, and coming nearer every moment. Shouts, and the tramp, the scurry of many feet; and now and then that wheezing, asthmatic cough, that strange, strange cough, and the click of wooden shoes. Then a voice, harsh and peremptory:
"Citizen soldiers, your country needs you! Rebels have defied her laws. To arms! Every man who hangs back is a deserter and a traitor!"
After this, Chauvelin's sharp, dictatorial voice raised in protest:
"in the name of the Republic, citizen Barras!——"
But the other breaks in more peremptorily still:
"Ah, ça, citizen Chauvelin! Do you presume to stand between me and my duty? By order of the Convention now assembled, every soldier must report at once at his section. Are you perchance on the side of the rebels?"
At this point, Marguerite opens her eyes. Through the widely open door she sees the small, sable-clad figure of Chauvelin, his pale face distorted with rage to which he obviously dare not give rein; and beside him a short, stoutish man in cloth coat and cord breeches, and with the tricolour scarf around his waist. His round face appears crimson with choler and in his right hand he grasps a heavy malacca stick, with a grip that proclaims the desire to strike. The two men appear to be defying one another; and all around them are the vague forms of the soldiers silhouetted against a distant window, through which the crimson afternoon glow comes peeping in on a cloud of flickering dust.
"Now then, citizen soldiers!" Barras resumes, and incontinently turns his back on Chauvelin, who, white to the lips, raises a final and menacing word of warning.
"I warn you, citizen Barras," he says firmly, "that by taking these men away from their post, you place yourself in league with the enemy of your country, and will have to answer to her for this crime."
His accent is so convinced, so firm, and fraught with such dire menace, that for one instant Barras hesitates.
"Eh bien!" he exclaims. "I will humour you thus far, citizen Chauvelin. I will leave you a couple of men to wait on your pleasure until sundown. But, after that...."
For a second or two there was silence. Chauvelin stands there, with his thin lips pressed tightly together. Then Barras adds, with a shrug of his wide shoulders:
"I am contravening my duty in doing even so much; and the responsibility must rest with you, citizen Chauvelin. Allons, my men!" he says once more; and without another glance on his discomfited colleague, he strides down the stairs, followed by Captain Boyer and the soldiers.
For a while the house is still filled with confusion and sounds: men tramping down the stone stairs, words of command, click of sabres and muskets, opening and slamming of doors. Then the sounds slowly die away, out in the street in the direction of the Porte St. Antoine. After which, there is silence.
Chauvelin stands in the doorway with his back to the room and to Marguerite, his claw-like hands intertwined convulsively behind him. The silhouette of the two remaining soldiers are still visible; they stand silently and at attention with their muskets in their hands. Between them and Chauvelin hovers the tall, ungainly figure of a man, clothed in rags and covered in soot and coal-dust. His feet are thrust into wooden shoes, his grimy hands are stretched out each side of him; and on his left arm, just above the wrist, there is an ugly mark like the brand seared into the flesh of a convict.
Just now he looks terribly distressed with a tearing fit of coughing. Chauvelin curtly bids him stand aside; and at the same moment the church clock of St. Louis, close by, strikes seven.
"Now then, citizen soldiers!" Chauvelin commands.
The soldiers grasp their muskets more firmly, and Chauvelin raises his hand. The next instant he is thrust violently back into the room, loses his balance, and falls backward against a table, whilst the door is slammed to between him and the soldiers. From the other side of the door there comes the sound of a short, sharp scuffle. Then silence.
Marguerite, holding her breath, hardly realized that she lived. A second ago she was facing death; and now....
Chauvelin struggled painfully to his feet. With a mighty effort and a hoarse cry of rage, he threw himself against the door. The impetus carried him further than he intended, no doubt; for at that same moment the door was opened, and he fell up against the massive form of the grimy coalheaver, whose long arms closed round him, lifted him off the floor, and carried him like a bundle of straw to the nearest chair.
"There, my dear Mr. Chambertin!" the coalheaver said, in exceedingly light and pleasant tones. "Let me make you quite comfortable!"
Marguerite watched—dumb and fascinated—the dexterous hands that twined the length of rope round the arms and legs of her helpless enemy, and wound his own tricolour scarf around that snarling mouth.
She scarcely dared trust her eyes and ears.
There was the hideous, dust-covered mudlark with bare feet thrust into sabots, with ragged breeches and tattered shirt; there was the cruel, mud-stained face, the purple lips, the toothless mouth; and those huge, muscular arms, one of them branded like the arm of a convict, the flesh still swollen with the searing of the iron.
"I must indeed crave your ladyship's forgiveness. In very truth, I am a disgusting object!"
Ah, there was the voice!—the dear, dear, merry voice! A little weary perhaps, but oh! so full of laughter and of boyish shame-facedness! To Marguerite it seemed as if God's own angels had opened to her the gates of Paradise. She did not speak; she scarce could move. All that she could do was to put out her arms.
He did not approach her, for in truth he looked a dusty object; but he dragged his ugly cap off his head, then slowly, and keeping his eyes fixed upon her, he put one knee to the ground.
"You did not doubt, m'dear, that I would come?" he asked quaintly.
She shook her head. The last days were like a nightmare now; and in truth she ought never to have been afraid.
"Will you ever forgive me?" he continued.
"Forgive? What?" she murmured.
"These last few days. I could not come before. You were safe for the time being.... That fiend was waiting for me...."
She gave a shudder and closed her eyes.
"Where is he?"
He laughed his gay, irresponsible laugh, and with a slender hand, still covered with coal-dust, he point to the helpless figure of Chauvelin.
"Look at him!" he said. "Doth he not look a picture?"
Marguerite ventured to look. Even at sight of her enemy bound tightly with ropes to a chair, his own tricolour scarf wound loosely round his mouth, she could not altogether suppress a cry of horror.
"What is to become of him?"
He shrugged his broad shoulders.
"I wonder!" he said lightly.
Then he rose to his feet, and went on with quaint bashfulness:
"I wonder," he said, "how I dare stand thus before your ladyship!"
And in a moment she was in his arms, laughing, crying, covered herself now with coal-dust and with grime.
"My beloved!" she exclaimed with a shudder of horror. "What you must have gone through!"
He only laughed like a schoolboy who had come through some impish adventure without much harm.
"Very little, I swear!" he asserted gaily. "But for thoughts of you, I have never enjoyed anything so much as this last phase of a glorious adventure. After our clever friend here ordered the real Rateau to be branded, so that he might know him again wherever he say him, I had to bribe the veterinary who had done the deed, to do the same thing for me. It was not difficult. For a thousand livres the man would have branded his own mother on the nose; and I appeared before him as a man of science, eager for an experiment. He asked no questions. And, since then, whenever Chauvelin gazed contentedly on my arm, I could have screamed for joy!"
"For the love of Heaven, my lady!" he added quickly, for he felt her soft, warm lips against his branded flesh; "don't shame me over such a trifle! I shall always love that scar, for the exciting time it recalls and because it happens to be the initial of your dear name."
He stooped down to the ground and kissed the hem of her gown.
After which he had to tell her as quickly and as briefly as he could, all that had happened in the past few days.
"It was only by risking the fair Theresia's life," he said, "that I could save your own. No other spur would have goaded Tallien into open revolt."
He turned and looked down for a moment on his enemy, who lay pinioned and helpless, with hatred and baffled revenge writ plainly on the contorted face and pale, rolling eyes.
And Sir Percy Blakeney sighed, a quaint sigh of regret.
"I only regret one thing, my dear M. Chambertin," he said after a while. "And that is, that you and I will never measure wits again after this. Your damnable revolution is dead... I am glad I was never tempted to kill you. I might have succumbed, and in very truth robbed the guillotine of an interesting prey. Without any doubt, they will guillotine the lot of you, my good M. Chambertin. Robespierre to-morrow; then his friends, his sycophants, his imitators—you amongst the rest.... 'Tis a pity! You have so often amused me. Especially after you had put a brand on Rateau's arm, and thought you would always know him after that. Think it all out, my dear sir! Remember our happy conversation in the warehouse down below, and my denunciation of citoyenne Cabarrus.... You gazed upon my branded arm then and were quite satisfied. My denunciation was a false one, of course! 'Tis I who put the letters and the rags in the beautiful Theresia's apartments. But she will bear me no malice, I dare swear; for I shall have redeemed my promise. To-morrow, after Robespierre's head has fallen, Tallien will be the greatest man in France and his Theresia a virtual queen. Think it all out, my dear Monsieur Chambertin! You have plenty of time. Some one is sure to drift up here presently, and will free you and the two soldiers, whom I left out on the landing. But no one will free you from the guillotine when the time comes, unless I myself...."
He did not finish; the rest of the sentence was merged in a merry laugh.
"A pleasant conceit—what?" he said lightly. "I'll think on it, I promise you!"
§ 7
And the next day Paris went crazy with joy. Never had the streets looked more gay, more crowded. The windows were filled with spectators; the very roofs were crowded with an eager, shouting throng.
The seventeen hours of agony were ended. The tyrant was a fallen, broken man, maimed, dumb, bullied and insulted. Aye! He, how yesterday was the Chosen of the People, the Messenger of the Most High, now sat, or rather lay, in the tumbril, with broken jaw, eyes closed, spirit already wandering on the shores of the Styx; insulted, railed at, cursed—aye, cursed!—by every woman, reviled by every child.
The end came at four in the afternoon, in the midst of acclamations from a populace drunk with gladness—acclamations which found their echo in the whole of France, and have never ceased to re-echo to this day.
But of all that tumult, Marguerite and her husband heard but little. They lay snugly concealed the whole of that day in the quiet lodgings in the Rue de l'Anier, which Sir Percy had occupied during these terribly anxious times. Here they were waited on by that asthmatic reprobate Rateau and his mother, both of whom were now rich for the rest of their days.
When the shades of evening gathered in over the jubilant city, whilst the church bells were ringing and the cannons booming, a market gardener's cart, driven by a worthy farmer and his wife, rattled out of the Porte St. Antoine. It created no excitement, and suspicion was far from everybody's mind. The passports appeared in order; but even if they were not, who cared, on this day of all days, when tyranny was crushed and men dared to be men again?
THE END
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