"No use, Ffoulkes," said Sir Percy Blakeney to his friend half-an-hour
later, "the man's passions of hatred and desire are greater than his
greed."
The two men were sitting together in one of Sir Percy Blakeney's many
lodgings--the one in the Rue des Petits Peres--and Sir Percy had just
put Sir Andrew Ffoulkes au fait with the whole sad story of Arnould
Fabrice's danger and Agnes de Lucines' despair.
"You could do nothing with the brute, then?" queried Sir Andrew.
"Nothing," replied Blakeney. "He refused all bribes, and violence would
not have helped me, for what I wanted was not to knock him down, but to
get hold of the letters."
"Well, after all, he might have sold you the letters and then denounced
Fabrice just the same."
"No, without actual proofs he could not do that. Arnould Fabrice is not
a man against whom a mere denunciation would suffice. He has the
grudging respect of every faction in the National Assembly. Nothing but
irrefutable proof would prevail against him--and bring him to the
guillotine."
"Why not get Fabrice and Mlle. de Lucines safely over to England?"
"Fabrice would not come. He is not of the stuff that emigres are made
of. He is not an aristocrat; he is a republican by conviction, and a
demmed honest one at that. He would scorn to run away, and Agnes de
Lucines would not go without him."
"Then what can we do?"
"Filch those letters from that brute Heriot," said Blakeney calmly.
"House-breaking, you mean!" commented Sir Andrew Ffoulkes dryly.
"Petty theft, shall we say?" retorted Sir Percy. "I can bribe the lout
who has charge of Heriot's rooms to introduce us into his master's
sanctum this evening when the National Assembly is sitting and the
citizen-deputy safely out of the way."
And the two men--one of whom was the most intimate friend of the Prince
of Wales and the acknowledged darling of London society--thereupon fell
to discussing plans for surreptitiously entering a man's room and
committing larceny, which in normal times would entail, if discovered, a
long term of imprisonment, but which, in these days, in Paris, and
perpetrated against a member of the National Assembly, would certainly
be punished by death.