The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel (19 page)

The Rue Berthier is a long, narrow, ill-paved and ill-lighted street, composed of low and irregular houses, which abut on the line of fortifications at the back, and are therefore absolutely inaccessible save from the front.

Midway down the street a derelict house rears ghostly debris of roofs and chimney-stacks upward to the sky. A tiny square of yellow light, blinking like a giant eye through a curtainless window, pierced the wall of the house. Roger pointed to that light.

“That,” he said, “is the quarry where our fox has run to earth.”

No one said anything; but the dank night air seemed suddenly alive with all the passions of hate let loose by thirty beating hearts.

The Scarlet Pimpernel, who had tricked them, mocked them, fooled them so often, was there, not two hundred metres away; and they were thirty to one, and all determined and desperate.

The darkness was intense.

Silently now the party approached the house, then again they halted, within sixty metres of it.

“Hist!”

The whisper could scarce be heard, so low was it, like the sighing of the wind through a misty veil.

“Who is it?” came in quick challenge from Roger.

“I—Yvonne Lebeau!”

“Is he there?” was the eager whispered query.

“Not yet. But he may come at any moment. If he saw a crowd round the house, mayhap he would not come.”

“He cannot see a crowd. The night is as dark as pitch.”

“He can see in the darkest night,” and the girl’s voice sank to an awed whisper, “and he can hear through a stone wall.”

Instinctively, Roger shuddered. The superstitious fear which the mysterious personality of the Scarlet Pimpernel evoked in the heart of every Terrorist had suddenly seized this man in its grip.

Try as he would, he did not feel as valiant as he had done when first he emerged at the head of his party from under the portico of the Cordeliers Club, and it was with none too steady a voice that he ordered the girl roughly back to the house. Then he turned once more to his men.

The plan of action had been decided on in the Club, under the presidency of Robespierre; it only remained to carry the plans through with success.

From the side of the fortifications there was, of course, nothing to fear. In accordance with military regulations, the walls of the houses there rose sheer from the ground without doors or windows, whilst the broken-down parapets and dilapidated roofs towered forty feet above the ground.

The derelict itself was one of a row of houses, some inhabited, others quite abandoned. It was the front of that row of houses, therefore, that had to be kept in view. Marshalled by Roger, the men flattened their meagre bodies against the walls of the houses opposite, and after that there was nothing to do but wait.

To wait in the darkness of the night, with a thin, icy rain soaking through ragged shirts and tattered breeches, with bare feet frozen by the mud of the road—to wait in silence while turbulent hearts beat well-nigh to bursting—to wait for food whilst hunger gnaws the bowels— to wait for drink whilst the parched tongue cleaves to the roof of the mouth—to wait for revenge whilst the hours roll slowly by and the cries of the darkened city are stilled one by one!

Once—when a distant bell tolled the hour of ten—a loud prolonged laugh, almost impudent in its suggestion of merry insouciance, echoed through the weird silence of the night.

Roger felt that the man nearest to him shivered at that sound, and he heard a volley or two of muttered oaths.

“The fox seems somewhere near,” he whispered. “Come within. We’ll wait for him inside his hole.”

He led the way across the street, some of the men following him.

The door of the derelict house had been left on the latch. Roger pushed it open.

Silence and gloom here reigned supreme; utter darkness, too, save for a narrow streak of light which edged the framework of a door on the right. Not a sound stirred the quietude of this miserable hovel, only the creaking of boards beneath the men’s feet as they entered.

Roger crossed the passage and opened the door on the right. His friends pressed closely round to him and peeped over his shoulder into the room beyond.

A guttering piece of tallow candle, fixed to an old tin pot, stood in the middle of the floor, and its feeble, flickering light only served to accentuate the darkness that lay beyond its range. One or two rickety chairs and a rough deal table showed vaguely in the gloom, and in the far corner of the room there lay a bundle of what looked like heaped-up rags, but from which there now emerged the sound of heavy breathing and also a little cry of fear.

“Yvonne,” came in feeble, querulous accents from that same bundle of wretchedness, “are these the English milors come back at last?”

“No, no, father,” was the quick whispered reply.

Roger swore a loud oath, and two puny voices began to whimper piteously.

“It strikes me the wench has been fooling us,” muttered one of the men savagely.

The girl had struggled to her feet. She crouched in the darkness, and two little boys, half-naked and shivering, were clinging to her skirts. The rest of the human bundle seemed to consist of an oldish man, with long, gaunt legs and arms blue with the cold. He turned vague, wide-open eyes in the direction whence had come the harsh voices.

“Are they friends, Yvonne?” he asked anxiously.

The girl did her best to reassure him.

“Yes, yes, father,” she whispered close to his ear, her voice scarce above her breath; “they are good citizens who hoped to find the English milor here. They are disappointed that he has not yet come.”

“Ah! but he will come, of a surety,” said the old man in that querulous voice of his. “He left his beautiful clothes here this morning, and surely he will come to fetch them.” And his long, thin hand pointed towards a distant corner of the room.

Roger and his friends, looking to where he was pointing, saw a parcel of clothes, neatly folded, lying on one of the chairs. Like so many wild cats snarling at sight of prey, they threw themselves upon those clothes, tearing them out from one another’s hands, turning them over and over as if to force the cloth and satin to yield up the secret that lay within their folds.

In the skirmish a scrap of paper fluttered to the ground. Roger seized it with avidity, and, crouching on the floor, smoothed the paper out against his knee.

It contained a few hastily scrawled words, and by the feeble light of the fast-dying candle Roger spelt them out laboriously:

“If the finder of these clothes will take them to the cross-roads opposite the footbridge which leads straight to Courbevoie, and will do so before the clock of Courbevoie Church has struck the hour of midnight, he will be rewarded with the sum of five hundred francs.”

“There is something more, citizen Roger,” said a raucous voice close to his ear.

“Look! Look, citizen—in the bottom corner of the paper!”

“The signature.”

“A scrawl done in red,” said Roger, trying to decipher it.

“It looks like a small flower.”

“That accursed Scarlet Pimpernel!”

And even as he spoke the guttering tallow candle, swaying in its socket, suddenly went out with a loud splutter and a sizzle that echoed through the desolate room like the mocking laugh of ghouls.

Once more the tramp through the dark and deserted streets, with the drizzle—turned now to sleet—beating on thinly clad shoulders. Fifteen men only on this tramp. The others remained behind to watch the house. Fifteen men, led by Roger, and with a blind old man, a young girl carrying a bundle of clothes, and two half-naked children dragged as camp-followers in the rear.

Their destination now was the signpost which stands at the cross-roads, past the footbridge that leads to Courbevoie.

The guard at the Maillot Gate would have stopped the party, but Roger, member of the Committee of Public Safety, armed with his papers and his tricolour scarf, overruled Robespierre’s former orders, and the party mached out of the gate.

They pressed on in silence, instinctively walking shoulder to shoulder, vaguely longing for the touch of another human hand, the sound of a voice that would not ring weirdly in the mysterious night.

There was something terrifying in this absolute silence, in such intense darkness, in this constant wandering towards a goal that seemed for ever distant, and in all this weary, weary fruitless waiting; and these men, who lived their life through, drunken with blood, deafened by the cries of their victims, satiated with the moans of the helpless and the innocent, hardly dared to look around them, lest they should see ghoulish forms flitting through the gloom.

Soon they reached the cross-roads, and in the dense blackness of the night the gaunt arms of the signpost pointed ghostlike towards the north.

The men hung back, wrapped in the darkness as in a pall, while Roger advanced alone.

“Hola! Is anyone there?” he called softly.

Then, as no reply came, he added more loudly:

“Hola! A friend—with some clothes found in the Rue Berthier. Is anyone here? Hola! A friend!”

But only from the gently murmuring river far away the melancholy call of a waterfowl seemed to echo mockingly:

“A friend!”

Just then the clock of Courbevoie Church struck the midnight hour.

“It is too late,” whispered the men.

They did not swear, nor did they curse their leader. Somehow it seemed as if they had expected all along that the Englishman would evade their vengeance yet again, that he would lure them out into the cold and into the darkness, and then that he would mock them, fool them, and finally disappear into the night.

It seemed futile to wait any longer. They were so sure that they had failed again.

“Who goes there?”

The sound of naked feet and of wooden sabots pattering on the distant footbridge had caused Roger to utter the quick challenge.

“Hola! Hola! Are you there?” was the loud, breathless response.

The next moment the darkness became alive with men moving quickly forward, and raucous shouts of “Where are they?” “Have you got them?” “Don’t let them go!” filled the air.

“Got whom?” “Who are they?” “What is it?” were the wild counter-cries.

“The man! The girl! The children! Where are they?”

“What? Which? The Lebeau family? They are here with us.”

“Where?”

Where, indeed? To a call to them from Roger there came no answer, nor did a hasty search result in finding them—the old man, the two boys, and the girl carrying the bundle of clothes had vanished into the night.

“In the name of–, what does this mean?” cried hoarse voices in the crowd.

The newcomers, breathless, terrified, shaking with superstitious fear, tried to explain.

“The Lebeau family—the old man, the girl, the two boys—we discovered after your departure, locked up in the cellar of the house—prisoners.”

“But, then—the others?” they gasped.

“The girl and the children whom you saw must have been some aristocrats in disguise. The old man who spoke to you was that cursed Englishman— the Scarlet Pimpernel!”

And as if in mocking confirmation of these words there suddenly rang, echoing from afar, a long and merry laugh.

“The Scarlet Pimpernel!” cried Roger. “In rags and barefooted! At him, citizens; he cannot have got far!”

“Hush! Listen!” whispered one of the men, suddenly gripping him by the arm.

And from the distance—though Heaven only knew from what direction—came the sound of horses’ hoofs pawing the soft ground; the next moment they were heard galloping away at breakneck speed.

The men turned to run in every direction, blindly, aimlessly, in the dark, like bloodhounds that have lost the trail.

One man, as he ran, stumbled against a dark mass prone upon the ground. With a curse on his lips, he recovered his balance.

“Hold! What is this?” he cried.

Some of his comrades gathered round him. No one could see anything, but the dark mass appeared to have human shape, and it was bound round and round with cords. And now feeble moans escaped from obviously human lips.

“What is it? Who is it?” asked the men.

“An Englishman,” came in weak accents from the ground.

“Your name?”

“I am called Kulmsted.”

“Bah! An aristocrat!”

“No! An enemy of the Scarlet Pimpernel, like yourselves. I would have delivered him into your hands. But you let him escape you. As for me, he would have been wiser if he had killed me.”

They picked him up and undid the cords from round his body, and later on took him with them back into Paris.

But there, in the darkness of the night, in the mud of the road, and beneath the icy rain, knees were shaking that had long ago forgotten how to bend, and hasty prayers were muttered by lips that were far more accustomed to blaspheme.

“Eight!”

“Twelve!”

“Four!”

A loud curse accompanied this last throw, and shouts of ribald laughter greeted it.

“No luck, Guidal!”

“Always at the tail end of the cart, eh, citizen?”

“Do not despair yet, good old Guidal! Bad beginnings oft make splendid ends!”

Then once again the dice rattled in the boxes; those who stood around pressed closer round the gamesters; hot, avid faces, covered with sweat and grime, peered eagerly down upon the table.

“Eight and eleven—nineteen!”

“Twelve and zero! By Satan! Curse him! Just my luck!”

“Four and nine—thirteen! Unlucky number!”

“Now then—once more! I’ll back Merri! Ten assignats of the most worthless kind! Who’ll take me that Merri gets the wench in the end?”

This from one of the lookers-on, a tall, cadaverous-looking creature, with sunken eyes and broad, hunched-up shoulders, which were perpetually shaken by a dry, rasping cough that proclaimed the ravages of some mortal disease, left him trembling as with ague and brought beads of perspiration to the roots of his lank hair. A recrudescence of excitement went the round of the spectators. The gamblers sitting round a narrow deal table, on which past libations had left marks of sticky rings, had scarce room to move their elbows.