Of course, he must make light of the whole affair. Oh! above all make light of it. The child was silly, wilful and ignorant, but he would know how to protect her, and how to make her hold her tongue. Louise was a fool, but she was safe and these walls were solid, there was really no cause for this insane terror which had turned him giddy and faint, and at first paralysed his brain.
So he forced his quaking voice into tones of gentle banter, forced himself to smile, to tweak her cheek and to look gaily, almost incredulously into her eyes.
“Allons, allons,” he said lightly, “what story is this? My little Fleurette taking things that belong to others? I won’t believe it.”
“Only pour le bon motif, chéri Bibi,” she insisted; “because you see the soldiers were at the château, and they were ruining and stealing everything they could lay their hands on. … And also because—”
Once more she checked herself, loath to give away that one cherished little secret: The mysterious voice at which perhaps Bibi would scoff. But she did tell Bibi how with the precious burden under her shawl she had hurried homewards until, fearing that she would be overtaken by the soldiers on the road, she had sought refuge in the widow Tronchet’s cottage. She told him how she had watched him riding past, heading towards Lou Mas, and how she had become scared lest, if he spent the night at home, he would find out what it was that she was keeping so carefully hidden underneath her shawl.
And then she told him how she had thought of M’sieu’ Amédé and had asked Adèle to tell him to meet her outside the widow’s cottage, and how she had entrusted him with the precious treasure and he had undertaken to hide it in the shed outside his father’s shop. But how it came to pass that those other soldiers, who were as magnificently dressed as anything Fleurette had seen in all her life, how they had come to suspect M’sieu’ Amédé of the theft, she could not conjecture. All she knew was that M’sieu’ Amédé was innocent and that he must be proclaimed innocent at once. At once.
“I stole the things, Bibi,” she concluded, “not for a bad motive, I swear, but I did steal them and gave them to M’sieu’ Amédé to keep. If anyone is to be punished, then it must be I, not he.”
She was sitting on her heels, and looking up boldly, and with a little wilful air at her father. Her dear little hands were resting on her knees. She looked adorable. Chauvelin mutely put out his arms and she snuggled into them, pressing her cheek against his breast with a nervous little gesture, twiddling one of the buttons of his coat.
Old Louise sitting at the far end of the room had listened, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, to the tale. Her furrowed face was a mirror of all the different expressions with which Chauvelin regarded her from time to time. Terror and slow reassurance. “If that is all, then I can deal with it!” he seemed to be telling her now, when it was all over, and he knew the worst. He held the child very close to him, and there was a certain nervous terror still lurking in his eyes as he buried his face in the soft waves of her hair.
“Bibi chéri,” Fleurette insisted, “I must find those who are going to sit in judgment on M’sieu’ Amédé. And you will help me find them, won’t you? I must tell them the truth. Mustn’t I?”
“You shall, child, you shall,” he babbled incoherently. He was trying to steady his voice, so as not to let her know how scared he had been.
“When Adèle told us the next morning about the soldiers having found Madame’s valuables and arrested M’sieu’ Amédé, I knew at once that you would help me to put everything right. So Louise and I just started then and there, as I thought we would find you in Sisteron.”
“The child told me nothing,” Louise protested in answer to a mute challenge from Chauvelin. “I only thought she wanted to see you in order to plead for young Colombe.”
“There is no need,” he said steadily, “for me or anyone else to plead for him. Amédé Colombe is a free man at this hour.”
Fleurette’s little cry of rapture gave him a short, sharp pang of jealousy.
“Do you love him so much as all that, little one?” he asked almost involuntarily.
She blushed, and without replying, hung her head. For a second or two he debated within himself whether he would tell her the whole truth, then came to the conclusion that on the whole it would be best that she should know. Doubtless she would hear the story, anyhow, from others, and so he told it her just as he had had it the day before from Lieutenant Godet. The magnificent soldiers who had come that morning into Laragne were not real soldiers of the revolutionary army, they were a band of English spies, whose chief was known throughout France as the Scarlet Pimpernel: a cynical, impudent adventurer whose business it was to incite French men and women to desert their country in the hour of her greatest need, and who doubtless would incite Amédé Colombe to treachery and desertion. It was that chief, no doubt, who had spied on Fleurette and seen her that night hand over Madame’s valuables to Amédé Colombe. He had taken this means of obtaining possession of the valuables, as well as of the persons of the ci-devant Frontenac and Amédé. Both men and money he would use against France, for the English were great enemies of this glorious revolution, the friends of all the aristos and tyrants whom the people were determined to wipe off
