As soon as the door had closed behind Marguerite, there came from
somewhere in the room the sound of a yawn, a grunt and a volley of
oaths.
The flickering light of the tallow candles had failed to penetrate into
all the corners, and now from out one of these dark depths, a certain
something began to detach itself, and to move forward towards the table
at which Chauvelin had once more resumed his seat.
“Has the damned aristocrat gone at last?” queried a hoarse voice, as a
burly body clad in loose-fitting coat and mud-stained boots and breeches
appeared within the narrow circle of light.
“Yes,” replied Chauvelin curtly.
“And a cursed long time you have been with the baggage,” grunted the
other surlily. “Another five minutes and I'd have taken the matter in my
own hands.
“An assumption of authority,” commented Chauvelin quietly, “to which
your position here does not entitle you, Citizen Collot.”
Collot d'Herbois lounged lazily forward, and presently he threw his
ill-knit figure into the chair lately vacated by Marguerite. His heavy,
square face bore distinct traces of the fatigue endured in the past
twenty-four hours on horseback or in jolting market waggons. His temper
too appeared to have suffered on the way, and, at Chauvelin's curt and
dictatorial replies, he looked as surly as a chained dog.
“You were wasting your breath over that woman,” he muttered, bringing a
large and grimy fist heavily down on the table, “and your measures are
not quite so sound as your fondly imagine, Citizen Chauvelin.”
“They were mostly of your imagining, Citizen Collot,” rejoined the other
quietly, “and of your suggestion.”
“I added a touch of strength and determination to your mild
milk-and-water notions, Citizen,” snarled Collot spitefully. “I'd have
knocked that intriguing woman's brains out at the very first possible
opportunity, had I been consulted earlier than this.”
“Quite regardless of the fact that such violent measures would
completely damn all our chances of success as far as the capture of
the Scarlet Pimpernel is concerned,” remarked Chauvelin drily, with
a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders. “Once his wife is dead, the
Englishman will never run his head into the noose which I have so
carefully prepared for him.”
“So you say, Chauvelin; and therefore I suggested to you certain
measures to prevent the woman escaping which you will find adequate, I
hope.”
“You need have no fear, Citizen Collot,” said Chauvelin curtly, “this
woman will make no attempt at escape now.”
“If she does...” and Collot d'Herbois swore an obscene oath.
“I think she understands that we mean to put our threat in execution.”
“Threat?... It was no empty threat, Citizen.... Sacre tonnerre! if that
woman escapes now, by all the devils in hell I swear that I'll wield the
guillotine myself and cut off the head of every able-bodied man or woman
in Boulogne, with my own hands.”
As he said this his face assumed such an expression of inhuman cruelty,
such a desire to kill, such a savage lust for blood, that instinctively
Chauvelin shuddered and shrank away from his colleague. All through
his career there is no doubt that this man, who was of gentle birth,
of gentle breeding, and who had once been called M. le Marquis de
Chauvelin, must have suffered in his susceptibilities and in his pride
when in contact with the revolutionaries with whom he had chosen to cast
his lot. He could not have thrown off all his old ideas of refinement
quite so easily, as to feel happy in the presence of such men as Collot
d'Herbois, or Marat in his day--men who had become brute beasts, more
ferocious far than any wild animal, more scientifically cruel than any
feline prowler in jungle or desert.
One look in Collot's distorted face was sufficient at this moment to
convince Chauvelin that it were useless for him to view the proclamation
against the citizens of Boulogne merely as an idle threat, even if he
had wished to do so. That Marguerite would not, under the circumstances,
attempt to escape, that Sir Percy Blakeney himself would be forced
to give up all thoughts of rescuing her, was a foregone conclusion
in Chauvelin's mind, but if this high-born English gentleman had not
happened to be the selfless hero that he was, if Marguerite Blakeney
were cast in a different, a rougher mould--if, in short, the Scarlet
Pimpernel in the face of the proclamation did succeed in dragging his
wife out of the clutches of the Terrorists, then it was equally certain
that Collot d'Herbois would carry out his rabid and cruel reprisals
to the full. And if in the course of the wholesale butchery of the
able-bodied and wage-earning inhabitants of Boulogne, the headsman
should sink worn out, then would this ferocious sucker of blood put his
own hand to the guillotine, with the same joy and lust which he had
felt when he ordered one hundred and thirty-eight women of Nantes to
be stripped naked by the soldiery before they were flung helter-skelter
into the river.
A touch of strength and determination! Aye! Citizen Collot d'Herbois had
plenty of that. Was it he, or Carriere who at Arras commanded mothers to
stand by while their children were being guillotined? And surely it was
Maignet, Collot's friend and colleague, who at Bedouin, because the Red
Flag of the Republic had been mysteriously torn down over night, burnt
the entire little village down to the last hovel and guillotined every
one of the three hundred and fifty inhabitants.
And Chauvelin knew all that. Nay, more! he was himself a member of that
so-called government which had countenanced these butcheries, by giving
unlimited powers to men like Collot, like Maignet and Carriere. He
was at one with them in their republican ideas and he believed in the
regeneration and the purification of France, through the medium of the
guillotine, but he propounded his theories and carried out his most
bloodthirsty schemes with physically clean hands and in an immaculately
cut coat.
Even now when Collot d'Herbois lounged before him, with mud-bespattered
legs stretched out before him, with dubious linen at neck and wrists,
and an odour of rank tobacco and stale, cheap wine pervading his whole
personality, the more fastidious man of the world, who had consorted
with the dandies of London and Brighton, winced at the enforced
proximity.
But it was the joint characteristic of all these men who had turned
France into a vast butchery and charnel-house, that they all feared
and hated one another, even more whole-heartedly than they hated the
aristocrats and so-called traitors whom they sent to the guillotine.
Citizen Lebon is said to have dipped his sword into the blood which
flowed from the guillotine, whilst exclaiming: “Comme je l'aime ce sang
coule de traitre!” but he and Collot and Danton and Robespierre, all of
them in fact would have regarded with more delight still the blood of
any one of their colleagues.
At this very moment Collot d'Herbois and Chauvelin would with utmost
satisfaction have denounced, one the other, to the tender mercies of the
Public Prosecutor. Collot made no secret of his hatred for Chauvelin,
and the latter disguised it but thinly under the veneer of contemptuous
indifference.
“As for that dammed Englishman,” added Collot now, after a slight pause,
and with another savage oath, “if 'tis my good fortune to lay hands on
him, I'd shoot him then and there like a mad dog, and rid France once
and forever of this accursed spy.”
“And think you, Citizen Collot,” rejoined Chauvelin with a shrug of the
shoulders, “that France would be rid of all English adventurers by the
summary death of this one man?”
“He is the ringleader, at any rate...”
“And has at least nineteen disciples to continue his traditions of
conspiracy and intrigue. None perhaps so ingenuous as himself, none
with the same daring and good luck perhaps, but still a number of ardent
fools only too ready to follow in the footsteps of their chief. Then
there's the halo of martyrdom around the murdered hero, the enthusiasm
created by his noble death... Nay! nay, Citizen, you have not lived
among these English people, you do not understand them, or you would not
talk of sending their popular hero to an honoured grave.”
But Collot d'Herbois only shook his powerful frame like some big, sulky
dog, and spat upon the floor to express his contempt of this wild talk
which seemed to have no real tangible purpose.
“You have not caught your Scarlet Pimpernel yet, Citizen,” he said with
a snort.
“No, but I will, after sundown to-morrow.”
“How do you know?”
“I have ordered the Angelus to be rung at one of the closed churches,
and he agreed to fight a duel with me on the southern ramparts at that
hour and on that day,” said Chauvelin simply.
“You take him for a fool?” sneered Collot.
“No, only for a foolhardy adventurer.”
“You imagine that with his wife as hostage in our hands, and the whole
city of Boulogne on the lookout for him for the sake of the amnesty,
that the man would be fool enough to walk on those ramparts at a given
hour, for the express purpose of getting himself caught by you and your
men?”
“I am quite sure that if we do not lay hands on him before that given
hour, that he will be on the ramparts at the Angelus to-morrow,” said
Chauvelin emphatically.
Collot shrugged his broad shoulders.
“Is the man mad?” he asked with an incredulous laugh.
“Yes, I think so,” rejoined the other with a smile.
“And having caught your hare,” queried Collot, “how do you propose to
cook him?”
“Twelve picked men will be on the ramparts ready to seize him the moment
he appears.”
“And to shoot him at sight, I hope.”
“Only as a last resource, for the Englishman is powerful and may cause
our half-famished men a good deal of trouble. But I want him alive, if
possible...”
“Why? a dead lion is safer than a live one any day.”
“Oh! we'll kill him right enough, Citizen. I pray you have no fear. I
hold a weapon ready for that meddlesome Scarlet Pimpernel, which will be
a thousand times more deadly and more effectual than a chance shot, or
even a guillotine.”
“What weapon is that, Citizen Chauvelin?”
Chauvelin leaned forward across the table and rested his chin in his
hands; instinctively Collot too leaned towards him, and both men peered
furtively round them as if wondering if prying eyes happened to be
lurking round. It was Chauvelin's pale eyes which now gleamed with
hatred and with an insatiable lust for revenge at least as powerful as
Collot's lust for blood; the unsteady light of the tallow candles threw
grotesque shadows across his brows, and his mouth was set in such rigid
lines of implacable cruelty that the brutish sot beside him gazed on him
amazed, vaguely scenting here a depth of feeling which was beyond his
power to comprehend. He repeated his question under his breath:
“What weapon do you mean to use against that accursed spy, Citizen
Chauvelin?”
“Dishonour and ridicule!” replied the other quietly.
“Bah!”
“In exchange for his life and that of his wife.”
“As the woman told you just now... he will refuse.”
“We shall see, Citizen.”
“You are mad to think such things, Citizen, and ill serve the Republic
by sparing her bitterest foe.”
A long, sarcastic laugh broke from Chauvelin's parted lips.
“Spare him?--spare the Scarlet Pimpernel!...” he ejaculated. “Nay,
Citizen, you need have no fear of that. But believe me, I have schemes
in my head by which the man whom we all hate will be more truly
destroyed than your guillotine could ever accomplish: schemes, whereby
the hero who is now worshipped in England as a demi-god will suddenly
become an object of loathing and of contempt.... Ah! I see you
understand me now... I wish to so cover him with ridicule that the very
name of the small wayside flower will become a term of derision and of
scorn. Only then shall we be rid of these pestilential English spies,
only then will the entire League of the Scarlet Pimpernel become a thing
of the past when its whilom leader, now thought akin to a god, will have
found refuge in a suicide's grave, from the withering contempt of the
entire world.”
Chauvelin had spoken low, hardly above a whisper, and the echo of his
last words died away in the great, squalid room like a long-drawn-out
sigh. There was dead silence for a while save for the murmur in the
wind outside and from the floor above the measured tread of the sentinel
guarding the precious hostage in No. 6.
Both men were staring straight in front of them. Collot d'Herbois
incredulous, half-contemptuous, did not altogether approve of these
schemes which seemed to him wild and uncanny: he liked the direct
simplicity of a summary trial, of the guillotine, or of his own well
stage-managed “Noyades.” He did not feel that any ridicule or dishonour
would necessarily paralyze a man in his efforts at intrigue, and would
have liked to set Chauvelin's authority aside, to behead the woman
upstairs and then to take his chances of capturing the man later on.
But the orders of the Committee of Public Safety had been peremptory: he
was to be Chauvelin's help--not his master, and to obey in all things.
He did not dare to take any initiative in the matter, for in that case,
if he failed, the reprisals against him would indeed be terrible.
He was fairly satisfied now that Chauvelin had accepted his suggestion
of summarily sending to the guillotine one member of every family
resident in Boulogne, if Marguerite succeeded in effecting an escape,
and, of a truth, Chauvelin had hailed the fiendish suggestion with
delight. The old abbe with his nephew and niece were undoubtedly
not sufficient deterrents against the daring schemes of the Scarlet
Pimpernel, who, as a matter of fact, could spirit them out of Boulogne
just as easily as he would his own wife.
Collot's plan tied Marguerite to her own prison cell more completely
than any other measure could have done, more so indeed than the
originator thereof knew or believed.... A man like this d'Herbois--born
in the gutter, imbued with every brutish tradition, which generations of
jail-birds had bequeathed to him,--would not perhaps fully realize the
fact that neither Sir Percy nor Marguerite Blakeney would ever save
themselves at the expense of others. He had merely made the suggestion,
because he felt that Chauvelin's plans were complicated and obscure,
and above all insufficient, and that perhaps after all the English
adventurer and his wife would succeed in once more outwitting him, when
there would remain the grand and bloody compensation of a wholesale
butchery in Boulogne.
But Chauvelin was quite satisfied. He knew that under present
circumstances neither Sir Percy nor Marguerite would make any attempt to
escape. The ex-ambassador had lived in England: he understood the class
to which these two belonged, and was quite convinced that no attempt
would be made on either side to get Lady Blakeney away whilst the
present ferocious order against the bread-winner of every family in the
town held good.
Aye! the measures were sound enough. Chauvelin was easy in his
mind about that. In another twenty-four hours he would hold the man
completely in his power who had so boldly outwitted him last year;
to-night he would sleep in peace: an entire city was guarding the
precious hostage.
“We'll go to bed now, Citizen,” he said to Collot, who, tired and sulky,
was moodily fingering the papers on the table. The scraping sound which
he made thereby grated on Chauvelin's overstrung nerves. He wanted to
be alone, and the sleepy brute's presence here jarred on his own solemn
mood.
To his satisfaction, Collot grunted a surly assent. Very leisurely he
rose from his chair, stretched out his loose limbs, shook himself like
a shaggy cur, and without uttering another word he gave his colleague a
curt nod, and slowly lounged out of the room.