CHAPTER XXV. PARIS ONCE MORE
Sir Andrew had just come in. He was trying to get a little warmth intohis half-frozen limbs, for the cold had set in again, and this time withrenewed vigour, and Marguerite was pouring out a cup of hot coffee whichshe had been brewing for him. She had not asked for news. She knew thathe had none to give her, else he had not worn that wearied, despondentlook in his kind face.
"I'll just try one more place this evening," he said as soon as he hadswallowed some of the hot coffee--"a restaurant in the Rue de la Harpe;the members of the Cordeliers' Club often go there for supper, and theyare usually well informed. I might glean something definite there."
"It seems very strange that they are so slow in bringing him to trial,"said Marguerite in that dull, toneless voice which had become habitualto her. "When you first brought me the awful news that... I made surethat they would bring him to trial at once, and was in terror lest wearrived here too late to--to see him."
She checked herself quickly, bravely trying to still the quiver of hervoice.
"And of Armand?" she asked.
He shook his head sadly.
"With regard to him I am at a still greater loss," he said: "I cannotfind his name on any of the prison registers, and I know that he is notin 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 forany of us; it was his first act of thoughtless disobedience that broughtall this misery upon our heads."
She spoke sadly but quietly. Sir Andrew noted that there was nobitterness in her tone. But her very quietude was heart-breaking; therewas such an infinity of despair in the calm of her eyes.
"Well! though we cannot understand it all, Lady Blakeney," he said withforced cheerfulness, "we must remember one thing--that whilst there islife there is hope."
"Hope!" she exclaimed with a world of pathos in her sigh, her large eyesdry and circled, fixed with indescribable sorrow on her friend's face.
Ffoulkes turned his head away, pretending to busy himself withthe coffee-making utensils. He could not bear to see that look ofhopelessness in her face, for in his heart he could not find thewherewithal to cheer her. Despair was beginning to seize on him too, andthis he would not let her see.
They had been in Paris three days now, and it was six days sinceBlakeney had been arrested. Sir Andrew and Marguerite had foundtemporary lodgings inside Paris, Tony and Hastings were just outside thegates, and all along the route between Paris and Calais, at St. Germain,at Mantes, in the villages between Beauvais and Amiens, wherever moneycould obtain friendly help, members of the devoted League of the ScarletPimpernel lay in hiding, waiting to aid their chief.
Ffoulkes had ascertained that Percy was kept a close prisoner in theConciergerie, in the very rooms occupied by Marie Antoinette during thelast months of her life. He left poor Marguerite to guess how closelythat elusive Scarlet Pimpernel was being guarded, the precautionssurrounding him being even more minute than those which bad made theunfortunate Queen's closing days a martyrdom for her.
But of Armand he could glean no satisfactory news, only the negativeprobability that he was not detained in any of the larger prisons ofParis, as no register which he, Ffoulkes, so laboriously consulted borerecord of the name of St. Just.
Haunting the restaurants and drinking booths where the most advancedJacobins and Terrorists were wont to meet, he had learned one or twodetails of Blakeney's incarceration which he could not possibly impartto Marguerite. The capture of the mysterious Englishman known as theScarlet Pimpernel had created a great deal of popular satisfaction;but it was obvious that not only was the public mind not allowed toassociate that capture with the escape of little Capet from the Temple,but it soon became clear to Ffoulkes that the news of that escape wasstill being kept a profound secret.
On one occasion he had succeeded in spying on the Chief Agent of theCommittee of General Security, whom he knew by sight, while the latterwas sitting at dinner in the company of a stout, florid man withpock-marked face and podgy hands covered with rings.
Sir Andrew marvelled who this man might be. Heron spoke to him inambiguous phrases that would have been unintelligible to any one who didnot know the circumstances of the Dauphin's escape and the part thatthe League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had played in it. But to Sir AndrewFfoulkes, who--cleverly disguised as a farrier, grimy after his day'swork--was straining his ears to listen whilst apparently consuming hugeslabs of boiled beef, it soon became clear that the chief agent and hisfat friend were talking of the Dauphin and of Blakeney.
"He won't hold out much longer, citizen," the chief agent was saying ina confident voice; "our men are absolutely unremitting in their task.Two of them watch him night and day; they look after him well, andpractically never lose sight of him, but the moment he tries to get anysleep one of them rushes into the cell with a loud banging of bayonetand sabre, and noisy tread on the flagstones, and shouts at the top ofhis voice: 'Now then, aristo, where's the brat? Tell us now, and youshall be down and go to sleep.' I have done it myself all through oneday just for the pleasure of it. It's a little tiring for you to have toshout a good deal now, and sometimes give the cursed Englishman a goodshake-up. He has had five days of it, and not one wink of sleep duringthat time--not one single minute of rest--and he only gets enough foodto keep him alive. I tell you he can't last. Citizen Chauvelin had asplendid idea there. It will all come right in a day or two."
"H'm!" grunted the other sulkily; "those Englishmen are tough."
"Yes!" retorted Heron with a grim laugh and a leer of savagery that madehis gaunt face look positively hideous--"you would have given out afterthree days, friend de Batz, would you not? And I warned you, didn't I? Itold you if you tampered with the brat I would make you cry in mercy tome for death."
"And I warned you," said the other imperturbably, "not to worry so muchabout me, but to keep your eyes open for those cursed Englishmen."
"I am keeping my eyes open for you, nevertheless, my friend. If Ithought 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, have devised for the Englishman. But I don't know where thelad is. If I did I would not be in Paris."
"I know that," assented Heron with a sneer; "you would soon be after thereward--over in Austria, what?--but I have your movements tracked dayand night, my friend. I dare say you are as anxious as we are as to thewhereabouts of the child. Had he been taken over the frontier you wouldhave been the first to hear of it, eh? No," he added confidently, andas if anxious to reassure himself, "my firm belief is that the originalidea of these confounded Englishmen was to try and get the child overto England, and that they alone know where he is. I tell you it won'tbe many days before that very withered Scarlet Pimpernel will orderhis followers to give little Capet up to us. Oh! they are hanging aboutParis some of them, I know that; citizen Chauvelin is convinced that thewife isn't very far away. Give her a sight of her husband now, say I,and she'll make the others give the child up soon enough."
The man laughed like some hyena gloating over its prey. Sir Andrewnearly betrayed himself then. He had to dig his nails into his own fleshto prevent himself from springing then and there at the throat of thatwretch whose monstrous ingenuity had invented torture for the fallenenemy far worse than any that the cruelties of medieval Inquisitions haddevised.
So they would not let him sleep! A simple idea born in the brain of afiend. Heron had spoken of Chauvelin as the originator of the devilry;a man weakened deliberately day by day by insufficient food, and thehorrible process of denying him rest. It seemed inconceivable thathuman, sentient beings should have thought of such a thing. Perspirationstood up in beads on Sir Andrew's brow when he thought of his friend,brought down by want of sleep to--what? His physique was splendidlypowerful, but could it stand against such racking torment for long? Andthe clear, the alert mind, the scheming brain, the reckles
s daring--howsoon would these become enfeebled by the slow, steady torture of anutter want of rest?
Ffoulkes had to smother a cry of horror, which surely must have drawnthe attention of that fiend on himself had he not been so engrossed inthe enjoyment of his own devilry. As it is, he ran out of the stuffyeating-house, for he felt as if its fetid air must choke him.
For an hour after that he wandered about the streets, not daring to faceMarguerite, lest his eyes betrayed some of the horror which was shakinghis very soul.
That was twenty-four hours ago. To-day he had learnt little else. It wasgenerally known that the Englishman was in the Conciergerie prison, thathe was being closely watched, and that his trial would come on withinthe next few days; but no one seemed to know exactly when. The publicwas getting restive, demanding that trial and execution to which everyone seemed to look forward as to a holiday. In the meanwhile the escapeof the Dauphin had been kept from the knowledge of the public; Heron andhis gang, fearing for their lives, had still hopes of extracting fromthe Englishman the secret of the lad's hiding-place, and the means theyemployed for arriving at this end was worthy of Lucifer and his host ofdevils in hell.
From other fragments of conversation which Sir Andrew Ffoulkes hadgleaned that same evening, it seemed to him that in order to hide theirdefalcations Heron and the four commissaries in charge of little Capethad substituted a deaf and dumb child for the escaped little prisoner.This miserable small wreck of humanity was reputed to be sick and keptin a darkened room, in bed, and was in that condition exhibited to anymember of the Convention who had the right to see him. A partition hadbeen very hastily erected in the inner room once occupied by the Simons,and the child was kept behind that partition, and no one was allowed tocome too near to him. Thus the fraud was succeeding fairly well. Heronand his accomplices only cared to save their skins, and the wretchedlittle substitute being really ill, they firmly hoped that he wouldsoon die, when no doubt they would bruit abroad the news of the death ofCapet, which would relieve them of further responsibility.
That such ideas, such thoughts, such schemes should have engendered inhuman minds it is almost impossible to conceive, and yet we know fromno less important a witness than Madame Simon herself that the child whodied in the Temple a few weeks later was a poor little imbecile, a deafand dumb child brought hither from one of the asylums and left to die inpeace. There was nobody but kindly Death to take him out of his misery,for the giant intellect that had planned and carried out the rescue ofthe uncrowned King of France, and which alone might have had the powerto save him too, was being broken on the rack of enforced sleeplessness.