“I wonder you care to stay here,” remarked Déroulède, with a momentary smile, as he contrasted in his mind the fastidious appearance of his friend with the dinginess and dirt of these surroundings.
Sir Percy deposited his large person in the capacious depths of a creaky chair, stretched his long limbs out before him, and said quietly:
“I am only staying in this demmed hole until the moment when I can drag you out of this murderous city.”
Déroulède shook his head.
“You’d best go back to England, then,” he said, “for I’ll never leave Paris now.”
“Not without Juliette Marny, shall we say?” rejoined Sir Percy placidly.
“And I fear me that she has placed herself beyond our reach,” said Déroulède sombrely.
“You know that she is in the Luxembourg Prison?” queried the Englishman suddenly.
“I guessed it, but could find no proof.”
“And that she will be tried tomorrow?”
“They never keep a prisoner pining too long,” replied Déroulède bitterly. “I guessed that too.”
“What do you mean to do?”
“Defend her with the last breath in my body.”
“You love her still, then?” asked Blakeney, with a smile.
“Still?” The look, the accent, the agony of a hopeless passion conveyed in that one word, told Sir Percy Blakeney all that he wished to know.
“Yet she betrayed you,” he said tentatively.
“And to atone for that sin—an oath, mind you, friend, sworn to her father—she is already to give her life for me.”
“And you are prepared to forgive?”
“To understand is to forgive,” rejoined Déroulède simply, “and I love her.”
“Your madonna!” said Blakeney, with a gently ironical smile.
“No; the woman I love, with all her weaknesses, all her sins; the woman to gain whom I would give my soul, to save whom I will give my life.”
“And she?”
“She does not love me—would she have betrayed me else?”
He sat beside the table, and buried his head in his hands. Not even his dearest friend should see how much he had suffered, how deeply his love had been wounded.
Sir Percy said nothing, a curious, pleasant smile lurked round the corners of his mobile mouth. Through his mind there flitted the vision of beautiful Marguerite, who had so much loved yet so deeply wronged him, and, looking at his friend, he thought that Déroulède too would soon learn all the contradictions, which wage a constant war in the innermost recesses of a feminine heart.
He made a movement as if he would say something more, something of grave import, then seemed to think better of it, and shrugged his broad shoulders, as if to say:
“Let time and chance take their course now.”
When Déroulède looked up again Sir Percy was sitting placidly in the armchair, with an absolutely blank expression on his face.
“Now that you know how much I love her, my friend,” said Déroulède as soon as he had mastered his emotions, “will you look after her when they have condemned me, and save her for my sake?”
A curious, enigmatic smile suddenly illumined Sir Percy’s earnest countenance.
“Save her? Do you attribute supernatural powers to me, then, or to The League of The Scarlet Pimpernel?”
“To you, I think,” rejoined Déroulède seriously.
Once more it seemed as if Sir Percy were about to reveal something of great importance to his friend, then once more he checked himself. The Scarlet Pimpernel was, above all, farseeing and practical, a man of action and not of impulse. The glowing eyes of his friend, his nervous, febrile movements, did not suggest that he was in a fit state to be entrusted with plans, the success of which hung on a mere thread.
Therefore Sir Percy only smiled, and said quietly:
“Well, I’ll do my best.”
XXIII
Justice
The day had been an unusually busy one.
Five and thirty prisoners, arraigned before the bar of the Committee of Public Safety, had been tried in the last eight hours—an average of rather more than four to the hour; twelve minutes and a half in which to send a human creature, full of life and health, to solve the great enigma which lies hidden beyond the waters of the Styx.
And Citizen-Deputy Foucquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, had surpassed himself. He seemed indefatigable.
Each of these five and thirty prisoners had been arraigned for treason against the Republic, for conspiracy with her enemies, and all had to have irrefutable proofs of their guilt brought before the Committee of Public Safety. Sometimes a few letters, written to friends abroad, and seized at the frontier; a word of condemnation of the measures of the extremists; and expression of horror at the massacres on the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine creaked incessantly—these were irrefutable proofs; or else perhaps a couple of pistols, or an old family sword seized in the house of a peaceful citizen, would be brought against a prisoner, as an irrefutable proof of his warlike dispositions against the Republic.
Oh! it was not difficult!
Out of five and thirty indictments, Foucquier-Tinville had obtained thirty convictions.
No wonder his friends declared that he had surpassed himself. It had indeed been a glorious day, and the glow of satisfaction as much as the heat, caused the Public Prosecutors to mop his high, bony cranium before he had adjourned for the much-needed respite for refreshment.
The day’s work was not yet done.
The “politicals” had been disposed of, and there had been such an accumulation of them recently that it was difficult to keep pace with the arrests.
And in the meanwhile the criminal record of the great city had not diminished. Because men butchered one another in the name of Equality, there were none the fewer among the Fraternity of thieves and petty pilferers, of ordinary cutthroats and public wantons.
And these too had to be dealt with by law. The guillotine was impartial, and fell with equal velocity on the neck of the proud duke and the gutter-born fille de joie, on a descendant of the Bourbons and the wastrel born in a brothel.
The ministerial decrees favoured the
