The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (good romance books to read .txt) 📕

allowed to use against him the cowardly and stolen weapon which you possess.”

Hériot laughed⁠—a low, cynical laugh and shrugged his thin shoulders:

“And who will prevent me, I pray you?” he asked sarcastically.

The old man made no immediate reply, but he came just a step or two closer to the citizen-deputy and, suddenly drawing himself up to his full height, he looked for one brief moment down upon the mean and sordid figure of the ex-valet. To Hériot it seemed as if the whole man had become transfigured; the shabby old scarecrow looked all of a sudden like a brilliant and powerful personality; from his eyes there flashed down a look of supreme contempt and of supreme pride, and Hériot⁠—unable to understand this metamorphosis which was more apparent to his inner consciousness than to his outward sight, felt his knees shake under him and all the blood rush back to his heart in an agony of superstitious terror.

From somewhere there came to his ear the sound of two words: “I will!” in reply to his own defiant query. Surely those words uttered by a man conscious of power and of strength could never have been spoken by the dilapidated old scarecrow who earned a precarious living by writing letters for ignorant folk.

But before he could recover some semblance of presence of mind citizen Lépine had gone, and only a loud and merry laugh seemed to echo through the squalid room.

Hériot shook off the remnant of his own senseless terror; he tore open the door of the bedroom and shouted to Rondeau, who truly was thinking that the citizen-deputy had gone mad:

“After him!⁠—after him! Quick! curse you!” he cried.

“After whom?” gasped the man.

“The man who was here just now⁠—an aristo.”

“I saw no one⁠—but the Public Letter-Writer, old Lépine⁠—I know him well⁠—”

“Curse you for a fool!” shouted Hériot savagely, “the man who was here was that cursed Englishman⁠—the one whom they call the Scarlet Pimpernel. Run after him⁠—stop him, I say!”

“Too late, citizen,” said the other placidly; “whoever was here before is certainly halfway down the street by now.”

III

“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 Pères⁠—and Sir Percy had just put Sir Andrew Ffoulkes au fait with the whole sad story of Arnould Fabrice’s danger and Agnès 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 émigrés 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 Agnès de Lucines would not go without him.”

“Then what can we do?”

“Filch those letters from that brute Hériot,” said Blakeney calmly.

“Housebreaking, you mean!” commented Sir Andrew Ffoulkes dryly.

“Petty theft, shall we say?” retorted Sir Percy. “I can bribe the lout who has charge of Hériot’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.

IV

Citizen Rondeau, whose business it was to look after the creature comforts of deputy Hériot, was standing in the antechamber facing the two visitors whom he had just introduced into his master’s apartments, and idly turning a couple of gold coins over and over between his grimy fingers.

“And mind, you are to see nothing and hear nothing of what goes on in the next room,” said the taller of the two strangers; “and when we go there’ll be another couple of louis for you. Is that understood?”

“Yes! it’s understood,” grunted Rondeau sullenly; “but I am running great risks. The citizen-deputy sometimes returns at ten o’clock, but sometimes at nine.⁠ ⁠… I never know.”

“It is now seven,” rejoined the other; “we’ll be gone long before nine.”

“Well,” said Rondeau surlily, “I go out now for my supper. I’ll return in half an hour, but at half-past eight you must clear out.”

Then he added with a sneer:

“Citizens Legros and Desgas usually come back with deputy Hériot of nights, and citizens Jeanniot and Bompard come in from next door for a game of cards. You wouldn’t stand much chance if you were caught here.”

“Not with you to back up so formidable a quintette of stalwarts,” assented the tall visitor gaily. “But we won’t trouble about that just now. We have a couple of hours before us in which to do all that we want. So au revoir, friend Rondeau⁠ ⁠… two more louis for your complaisance, remember, when we have accomplished our purpose.”

Rondeau muttered something more, but the two strangers paid no further heed to him; they had already walked to the next room, leaving Rondeau in the antechamber.

Sir Percy Blakeney did not pause in the sitting-room where an oil lamp suspended from the ceiling threw