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

that⁠ ⁠… I made sure that they would bring him to trial at once, and was in terror lest we arrived here too late to⁠—to see him.”

She checked herself quickly, bravely trying to still the quiver of her voice.

“And of Armand?” she asked.

He shook his head sadly.

“With regard to him I am at a still greater loss,” he said: “I cannot find his name on any of the prison registers, and I know that he is not in the Conciergerie. They have cleared out all the prisoners from there; there is only Percy⁠—”

“Poor Armand!” she sighed; “it must be almost worse for him than for any of us; it was his first act of thoughtless disobedience that brought all this misery upon our heads.”

She spoke sadly but quietly. Sir Andrew noted that there was no bitterness in her tone. But her very quietude was heartbreaking; there was such an infinity of despair in the calm of her eyes.

“Well! though we cannot understand it all, Lady Blakeney,” he said with forced cheerfulness, “we must remember one thing⁠—that whilst there is life there is hope.”

“Hope!” she exclaimed with a world of pathos in her sigh, her large eyes dry and circled, fixed with indescribable sorrow on her friend’s face.

Ffoulkes turned his head away, pretending to busy himself with the coffee-making utensils. He could not bear to see that look of hopelessness in her face, for in his heart he could not find the wherewithal to cheer her. Despair was beginning to seize on him too, and this he would not let her see.

They had been in Paris three days now, and it was six days since Blakeney had been arrested. Sir Andrew and Marguerite had found temporary lodgings inside Paris, Tony and Hastings were just outside the gates, and all along the route between Paris and Calais, at St. Germain, at Mantes, in the villages between Beauvais and Amiens, wherever money could obtain friendly help, members of the devoted League of the Scarlet Pimpernel lay in hiding, waiting to aid their chief.

Ffoulkes had ascertained that Percy was kept a close prisoner in the Conciergerie, in the very rooms occupied by Marie Antoinette during the last months of her life. He left poor Marguerite to guess how closely that elusive Scarlet Pimpernel was being guarded, the precautions surrounding him being even more minute than those which had made the unfortunate Queen’s closing days a martyrdom for her.

But of Armand he could glean no satisfactory news, only the negative probability that he was not detained in any of the larger prisons of Paris, as no register which he, Ffoulkes, so laboriously consulted bore record of the name of St. Just.

Haunting the restaurants and drinking booths where the most advanced Jacobins and Terrorists were wont to meet, he had learned one or two details of Blakeney’s incarceration which he could not possibly impart to Marguerite. The capture of the mysterious Englishman known as the Scarlet Pimpernel had created a great deal of popular satisfaction; but it was obvious that not only was the public mind not allowed to associate that capture with the escape of little Capet from the Temple, but it soon became clear to Ffoulkes that the news of that escape was still being kept a profound secret.

On one occasion he had succeeded in spying on the Chief Agent of the Committee of General Security, whom he knew by sight, while the latter was sitting at dinner in the company of a stout, florid man with pockmarked face and podgy hands covered with rings.

Sir Andrew marvelled who this man might be. Héron spoke to him in ambiguous phrases that would have been unintelligible to anyone who did not know the circumstances of the Dauphin’s escape and the part that the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had played in it. But to Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, who⁠—cleverly disguised as a farrier, grimy after his day’s work⁠—was straining his ears to listen whilst apparently consuming huge slabs of boiled beef, it soon became clear that the chief agent and his fat friend were talking of the Dauphin and of Blakeney.

“He won’t hold out much longer, citizen,” the chief agent was saying in a confident voice; “our men are absolutely unremitting in their task. Two of them watch him night and day; they look after him well, and practically never lose sight of him, but the moment he tries to get any sleep one of them rushes into the cell with a loud banging of bayonet and sabre, and noisy tread on the flagstones, and shouts at the top of his voice: ‘Now then, aristo, where’s the brat? Tell us now, and you shall be down and go to sleep.’ I have done it myself all through one day just for the pleasure of it. It’s a little tiring for you to have to shout a good deal now, and sometimes give the cursed Englishman a good shakeup. He has had five days of it, and not one wink of sleep during that time⁠—not one single minute of rest⁠—and he only gets enough food to keep him alive. I tell you he can’t last. Citizen Chauvelin had a splendid idea there. It will all come right in a day or two.”

“H’m!” grunted the other sulkily; “those Englishmen are tough.”

“Yes!” retorted Héron with a grim laugh and a leer of savagery that made his gaunt face look positively hideous⁠—“you would have given out after three days, friend de Batz, would you not? And I warned you, didn’t I? I told you if you tampered with the brat I would make you cry in mercy to me for death.”

“And I warned you,” said the other imperturbably, “not to worry so much about me, but to keep your eyes open for those cursed Englishmen.”

“I am keeping my eyes open for you, nevertheless, my friend. If I thought you knew where the vermin’s spawn was at this moment I would⁠—”

“You would put me on the same rack that you or your precious friend, Chauvelin,