IV

Paul Mole had been to the offices of the Moniteur and to the printing

works of L'Ami du Peuple. He had seen the citizen Dufour at the Club

and, presumably, had spent the rest of his time wandering idly about the

streets of the quartier, for he did not return to the Rue des Cordeliers

until nearly nine o'clock.

As soon as he came to the top of the street, he fell in with the crowd

which had collected outside No. 30. With his habitual slouchy gait and

the steady pressure of his powerful elbows, he pushed his way to the

door, whilst gleaning whisperings and rumours on his way.

"The citizen Marat has been assassinated."

"By a woman."

"A mere girl."

"A wench from Caen. Her name is Corday."

"The people nearly tore her to pieces awhile ago."

"She is as much as guillotined already."

The latter remark went off with a loud guffaw and many a ribald joke.

Mole, despite his great height, succeeded in getting through

unperceived. He was of no account, and he knew his way inside the house.

It was full of people: journalists, gaffers, women and men--the usual

crowd that come to gape. The citizen Marat was a great personage. The

Friend of the People. An Incorruptible, if ever there was one. Just look

at the simplicity, almost the poverty, in which he lived! Only the

aristos hated him, and the fat bourgeois who battened on the people.

Citizen Marat had sent hundreds of them to the guillotine with a stroke

of his pen or a denunciation from his fearless tongue.

Mole did not pause to listen to these comments. He pushed his way

through the throng up the stairs, to his late employer's lodgings on the

first floor.

The anteroom was crowded, so were the other rooms; but the greatest

pressure was around the door immediately facing him, the one which gave

on the bathroom. In the kitchen on his right, where awhile ago he had

been chopping wood under a flood of abuse from Jeannette Marechal, he

caught sight of this woman, cowering by the hearth, her filthy apron

thrown over her head, and crying--yes! crying for the loathsome

creature, who had expiated some of his abominable crimes at the hands of

a poor, misguided girl, whom an infuriated mob was even now threatening

to tear to pieces in its rage.

The parlour and even Simonne's room were also filled with people: men,

most of whom Mole knew by sight; friends or enemies of the ranting

demagogue who lay murdered in the very bath which his casual servant had

prepared for him. Every one was discussing the details of the murder,

the punishment of the youthful assassin. Simonne Evrard was being loudly

blamed for having admitted the girl into citizen Marat's room. But the

wench had looked so simple, so innocent, and she said she was the bearer

of a message from Caen. She had called twice during the day, and in the

evening the citizen himself said that he would see her. Simonne had been

for sending her away. But the citizen was peremptory. And he was so

helpless ... in his bath ... name of a name, the pitiable affair!

No one paid much attention to Mole. He listened for a while to Simonne's

impassioned voice, giving her version of the affair; then he worked his

way stolidly into the bathroom.

It was some time before he succeeded in reaching the side of that awful

bath wherein lay the dead body of Jean Paul Marat. The small room was

densely packed--not with friends, for there was not a man or woman

living, except Simonne Evrard and her sisters, whom the bloodthirsty

demagogue would have called "friend"; but his powerful personality had

been a menace to many, and now they came in crowds to see that he was

really dead, that a girl's feeble hand had actually done the deed which

they themselves had only contemplated. They stood about whispering,

their heads averted from the ghastly spectacle of this miserable

creature, to whom even death had failed to lend his usual attribute of

tranquil dignity.

The tiny room was inexpressibly hot and stuffy. Hardly a breath of

outside air came in through the narrow window, which only gave on the

bedroom beyond. An evil-smelling oil-lamp swung from the low ceiling and

shed its feeble light on the upturned face of the murdered man.

Mole stood for a moment or two, silent and pensive, beside that hideous

form. There was the bath, just as he had prepared it: the board spread

over with a sheet and laid across the bath, above which only the head

and shoulders emerged, livid and stained. One hand, the left, grasped

the edge of the board with the last convulsive clutch of supreme agony.

On the fourth finger of that hand glistened the shoddy ring which Marat

had said was not worth stealing. Yet, apparently, it roused the cupidity

of the poor wretch who had served him faithfully for these last few

days, and who now would once more be thrown, starving and friendless,

upon the streets of Paris.

Mole threw a quick, furtive glance around him. The crowd which had come

to gloat over the murdered Terrorist stood about whispering, with heads

averted, engrossed in their own affairs. He slid his hand

surreptitiously over that of the dead man. With dexterous manipulation

he lifted the finger round which glistened the metal ring. Death

appeared to have shrivelled the flesh still more upon the bones, to have

contracted the knuckles and shrunk the tendons. The ring slid off quite

easily. Mole had it in his hand, when suddenly a rough blow struck him

on the shoulder.

"Trying to rob the dead?" a stern voice shouted in his ear. "Are you a

disguised aristo, or what?"

At once the whispering ceased. A wave of excitement went round the room.

Some people shouted, others pressed forward to gaze on the abandoned

wretch who had been caught in the act of committing a gruesome deed.

"Robbing the dead!"

They were experts in evil, most of these men here. Their hands were

indelibly stained with some of the foulest crimes ever recorded in

history. But there was something ghoulish in this attempt to plunder

that awful thing lying there, helpless, in the water. There was also a

great relief to nerve-tension in shouting Horror and Anathema with

self-righteous indignation; and additional excitement in the suggested

"aristo in disguise."

Mole struggled vigorously. He was powerful and his fists were heavy. But

he was soon surrounded, held fast by both arms, whilst half a dozen

hands tore at his tattered clothes, searched him to his very skin, for

the booty which he was thought to have taken from the dead.

"Leave me alone, curse you!" he shouted, louder than his aggressors. "My

name is Paul Mole, I tell you. Ask the citizeness Evrard. I waited on

citizen Marat. I prepared his bath. I was the only friend who did not

turn away from him in his sickness and his poverty. Leave me alone, I

say! Why," he added, with a hoarse laugh, "Jean Paul in his bath was as

naked as on the day he was born!"

"'Tis true," said one of those who had been most active in rummaging

through Mole's grimy rags. "There's nothing to be found on him."

But suspicion once aroused was not easily allayed. Mole's protestations

became more and more vigorous and emphatic. His papers were all in

order, he vowed. He had them on him: his own identity papers, clear for

anyone to see. Someone had dragged them out of his pocket; they were

dank and covered with splashes of mud--hardly legible. They were handed

over to a man who stood in the immediate circle of light projected by

the lamp. He seized them and examined them carefully. This man was short

and slight, was dressed in well-made cloth clothes; his hair was held in

at the nape of the next in a modish manner with a black taffeta bow. His

hands were clean, slender, and claw-like, and he wore the tricolour

scarf of office round his waist which proclaimed him to be a member of

one of the numerous Committees which tyrannised over the people.

The papers appeared to be in order, and proclaimed the bearer to be Paul

Mole, a native of Besancon, a carpenter by trade. The identity book had

recently been signed by Jean Paul Marat, the man's latest employer, and

been counter-signed by the Commissary of the section.

The man in the tricolour scarf turned with some acerbity on the crowd

who was still pressing round the prisoner.

"Which of you here," he queried roughly, "levelled an unjust accusation

against an honest citizen?"

But, as usual in such cases, no one replied directly to the charge. It

was not safe these days to come into conflict with men like Mole. The

Committees were all on their side, against the bourgeois as well as

against the aristos. This was the reign of the proletariat, and the

sans-culotte always emerged triumphant in a conflict against the

well-to-do. Nor was it good to rouse the ire of citizen Chauvelin, one

of the most powerful, as he was the most pitiless members of the

Committee of Public Safety. Quiet, sarcastic rather than aggressive,

something of the aristo, too, in his clean linen and well-cut clothes,

he had not even yielded to the defunct Marat in cruelty and relentless

persecution of aristocrats.

Evidently his sympathies now were all with Mole, the out-at-elbows,

miserable servant of an equally miserable master. His pale-coloured,

deep-set eyes challenged the crowd, which gave way before him, slunk

back into the corners, away from his coldly threatening glance. Thus he

found himself suddenly face to face with Mole, somewhat isolated from

the rest, and close to the tin bath with its grim contents. Chauvelin

had the papers in his hand.

"Take these, citizen," he said curtly to the other. "They are all in

order."

He looked up at Mole as he said this, for the latter, though his

shoulders were bent, was unusually tall, and Mole took the papers from

him. Thus for the space of a few seconds the two men looked into one

another's face, eyes to eyes--and suddenly Chauvelin felt an icy sweat

coursing down his spine. The eyes into which he gazed had a strange,

ironical twinkle in them, a kind of good-humoured arrogance, whilst

through the firm, clear-cut lips, half hidden by a dirty and ill-kempt

beard, there came the sound--oh! a mere echo--of a quaint and inane

laugh.

The whole thing--it seemed like a vision--was over in a second.

Chauvelin, sick and faint with the sudden rush of blood to his head,

closed his eyes for one brief instant. The next, the crowd had closed

round him; anxious inquiries reached his re-awakened senses.

But he uttered one quick, hoarse cry:

"Hebert! A moi! Are you there?"

"Present, citizen!" came in immediate response. And a tall figure in the

tattered uniform affected by the revolutionary guard stepped briskly out

of the crowd. Chauvelin's claw-like hand was shaking visibly.

"The man Mole," he called in a voice husky with excitement. "Seize him

at once! And, name of a dog! do not allow a living soul in or out of the

house!"

Hebert turned on his heel. The next moment his harsh voice was heard

above the din and the general hubbub around:

"Quite safe, citizen!" he called to his chief. "We have the rogue right

enough!"

There was much shouting and much cursing, a great deal of bustle and

confusion, as the men of the Surete closed the doors of the defunct

demagogue's lodgings. Some two score men, a dozen or so women, were

locked in, inside the few rooms which reeked of dirt and of disease.

They jostled and pushed, screamed and protested. For two or three

minutes the din was quite deafening. Simonne Evrard pushed her way up to

the forefront of the crowd.

"What is this I hear?" she queried peremptorily. "Who is accusing

citizen Mole? And of what, I should like to know? I am responsible for

everyone inside these apartments ... and if citizen Marat were still

alive--"

Chauvelin appeared unaware of all the confusion and of the woman's

protestations. He pushed his way through the crowd to the corner of the

anteroom where Mole stood, crouching and hunched up, his grimy hands

idly fingering the papers which Chauvelin had returned to him a moment

ago. Otherwise he did not move.

He stood, silent and sullen; and when Chauvelin, who had succeeded in

mastering his emotion, gave the peremptory command: "Take this man to

the depot at once. And do not allow him one instant out of your sight!"

he made no attempt at escape.

He allowed Hebert and the men to seize him, to lead him away. He

followed without a word, without a struggle. His massive figure was

hunched up like that of an old man; his hands, which still clung to his

identity papers, trembled slightly like those of a man who is very

frightened and very helpless. The men of the Surete handled him very

roughly, but he made no protest. The woman Evrard did all the

protesting, vowing that the people would not long tolerate such tyranny.

She even forced her way up to Hebert. With a gesture of fury she tried

to strike him in the face, and continued, with a loud voice, her insults

and objurgations, until, with a movement of his bayonet, he pushed her

roughly out of the way.

After that Paul Mole, surrounded by the guard, was led without ceremony

out of the house. Chauvelin gazed after him as if he had been brought

face to face with a ghoul.

V

Chauvelin hurried to the depot. After those few seconds wherein he had

felt dazed, incredulous, almost under a spell, he had quickly regained

the mastery of his nerves, and regained, too, that intense joy which

anticipated triumph is wont to give.

In the out-at-elbows, half-starved servant of the murdered Terrorist,

citizen Chauvelin, of the Committee of Public Safety, had recognised his

arch enemy, that meddlesome and adventurous Englishman who chose to hide

his identity under the pseudonym of the Scarlet Pimpernel. He knew that

he could reckon on Hebert; his orders not to allow the prisoner one

moment out of sight would of a certainty be strictly obeyed.

Hebert, indeed, a few moments later, greeted his chief outside the doors

of the depot with the welcome news that Paul Mole was safely under lock

and key.

"You had no trouble with him?" Chauvelin queried, with ill-concealed

eagerness.

"No, no! citizen, no trouble," was Hebert's quick reply. "He seems to be

a well-known rogue in these parts," he continued with a complacent

guffaw; "and some of his friends tried to hustle us at the corner of the

Rue de Tourraine; no doubt with a view to getting the prisoner away. But

we were too strong for them, and Paul Mole is now sulking in his cell

and still protesting that his arrest is an outrage against the liberty

of the people."

Chauvelin made no further remark. He was obviously too excited to speak.

Pushing past Hebert and the men of the Surete who stood about the dark

and narrow passages of the depot, he sought the Commissary of the

Section in the latter's office.

It was now close upon ten o'clock. The citizen Commissary Cuisinier had

finished his work for the day and was preparing to go home and to bed.

He was a family man, had been a respectable bourgeois in his day, and

though he was a rank opportunist and had sacrificed not only his

political convictions but also his conscience to the exigencies of the

time, he still nourished in his innermost heart a secret contempt for

the revolutionary brigands who ruled over France at this hour.

To any other man than citizen Chauvelin, the citizen Commissary would,

no doubt, have given a curt refusal to a request to see a prisoner at

this late hour of the evening. But Chauvelin was not a man to be denied,

and whilst muttering various objections in his ill-kempt beard,

Cuisinier, nevertheless, gave orders that the citizen was to be

conducted at once to the cells.

Paul Mole had in truth turned sulky. The turnkey vowed that the prisoner

had hardly stirred since first he had been locked up in the common cell.

He sat in a corner at the end of the bench, with his face turned to the

wall, and paid no heed either to his fellow-prisoners or to the

facetious remarks of the warder.

Chauvelin went up to him, made some curt remark. Mole kept an obstinate

shoulder turned towards him--a grimy shoulder, which showed naked

through a wide rent in his blouse. This portion of the cell was

well-nigh in total darkness; the feeble shaft of light which came

through the open door hardly penetrated to this remote angle of the

squalid burrow. The same sense of mystery and unreality overcame

Chauvelin again as he looked on the miserable creature in whom, an hour

ago, he had recognised the super-exquisite Sir Percy Blakeney. Now he

could only see a vague outline in the gloom: the stooping shoulders, the

long limbs, that naked piece of shoulder which caught a feeble reflex

from the distant light. Nor did any amount of none too gentle prodding

on the part of the warder induce him to change his position.

"Leave him alone," said Chauvelin curly at last. "I have seen all that I

wished to see."

The cell was insufferably hot and stuffy. Chauvelin, finical and queasy,

turned away with a shudder of disgust. There was nothing to be got now

out of a prolonged interview with his captured foe. He had seen him:

that was sufficient. He had seen the super-exquisite Sir Percy Blakeney

locked up in a common cell with some of the most scrubby and abject

rogues which the slums of indigent Paris could yield, having apparently

failed in some undertaking which had demanded for its fulfilment not

only tattered clothes and grimy hands, but menial service with a

beggarly and disease-ridden employer, whose very propinquity must have

been positive torture to the fastidious dandy.

Of a truth this was sufficient for the gratification of any revenge.

Chauvelin felt that he could now go contentedly to rest after an

evening's work excellently done.

He gave order that Mole should be put in a separate cell, denied all

intercourse with anyone outside or in the depot, and that he should be

guarded on sight day and night. After that he went his way.