El Dorado by Baroness Orczy (if you liked this book .txt) 📕

thin little hand fumbled under the rags, but it reappeared again empty, whilst a faint blush spread over the hollow cheeks.

“The other citizen also gave me five livres,” he said humbly. “He lodges in the house where my mother is concierge. It is in the Rue de la Croix Blanche. He has been very kind to my mother. I would rather do as he bade me.”

“Bless the lad,” murmured Blakeney under his breath; “his loyalty redeems many a crime of this Godforsaken city. Now I suppose I shall have to bully him, after all.”

He took his hand out of his breeches pocket; between two very dirty fingers he held a piece of gold. The other hand he placed quite roughly on the lad’s chest.

“Give me the letter,” he said harshly, “or⁠—”

He pulled at the ragged blouse, and a scrap of soiled paper soon fell into his hand. The lad began to cry.

“Here,” said Blakeney, thrusting the piece of gold into the thin small palm, “take this home to your mother, and tell your lodger that a big, rough man took the letter away from you by force. Now run, before I kick you out of the way.”

The lad, terrified out of his poor wits, did not wait for further commands; he took to his heels and ran, his small hand clutching the piece of gold. Soon he had disappeared round the corner of the street.

Blakeney did not at once read the paper; he thrust it quickly into his breeches pocket and slouched away slowly down the street, and thence across the Place du Carrousel, in the direction of his new lodgings in the Rue de l’Arcade.

It was only when he found himself alone in the narrow, squalid room which he was occupying that he took the scrap of paper from his pocket and read it slowly through. It said:

Percy, you cannot forgive me, nor can I ever forgive myself, but if you only knew what I have suffered for the past two days you would, I think, try and forgive. I am free and yet a prisoner; my every footstep is dogged. What they ultimately mean to do with me I do not know. And when I think of Jeanne I long for the power to end mine own miserable existence. Percy! she is still in the hands of those fiends.⁠ ⁠… I saw the prison register; her name written there has been like a burning brand on my heart ever since. She was still in prison the day that you left Paris; tomorrow, tonight mayhap, they will try her, condemn her, torture her, and I dare not go to see you, for I would only be bringing spies to your door. But will you come to me, Percy? It should be safe in the hours of the night, and the concierge is devoted to me. Tonight at ten o’clock she will leave the porte-cochère unlatched. If you find it so, and if on the ledge of the window immediately on your left as you enter you find a candle alight, and beside it a scrap of paper with your initials S. P. traced on it, then it will be quite safe for you to come up to my room. It is on the second landing⁠—a door on your right⁠—that too I will leave on the latch. But in the name of the woman you love best in all the world come at once to me then, and bear in mind, Percy, that the woman I love is threatened with immediate death, and that I am powerless to save her. Indeed, believe me, I would gladly die even now but for the thought of Jeanne, whom I should be leaving in the hands of those fiends. For God’s sake, Percy, remember that Jeanne is all the world to me.

“Poor old Armand,” murmured Blakeney with a kindly smile directed at the absent friend, “he won’t trust me even now. He won’t trust his Jeanne in my hands. Well,” he added after a while, “after all, I would not entrust Marguerite to anybody else either.”

XXIII The Overwhelming Odds

At half-past ten that same evening, Blakeney, still clad in a workman’s tattered clothes, his feet bare so that he could tread the streets unheard, turned into the Rue de la Croix Blanche.

The porte-cochère of the house where Armand lodged had been left on the latch; not a soul was in sight. Peering cautiously round, he slipped into the house. On the ledge of the window, immediately on his left when he entered, a candle was left burning, and beside it there was a scrap of paper with the initials S. P. roughly traced in pencil. No one challenged him as he noiselessly glided past it, and up the narrow stairs that led to the upper floor. Here, too, on the second landing the door on the right had been left on the latch. He pushed it open and entered.

As is usual even in the meanest lodgings in Paris houses, a small antechamber gave between the front door and the main room. When Percy entered the antechamber was unlighted, but the door into the inner room beyond was ajar. Blakeney approached it with noiseless tread, and gently pushed it open.

That very instant he knew that the game was up; he heard the footsteps closing up behind him, saw Armand, deathly pale, leaning against the wall in the room in front of him, and Chauvelin and Héron standing guard over him.

The next moment the room and the antechamber were literally alive with soldiers⁠—twenty of them to arrest one man.

It was characteristic of that man that when hands were laid on him from every side he threw back his head and laughed⁠—laughed mirthfully, light-heartedly, and the first words that escaped his lips were:

“Well, I am d⁠⸺⁠d!”

“The odds are against you, Sir Percy,” said Chauvelin to him in English, whilst Héron at the further end of the room was growling like a