El Dorado: An Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

Sir Percy laughed—despite himself—at the young man’s eagerness.

“Next time we meet, Tony,” he begged; “I am so demmed fatigued, and there’s this beastly rain—”

“No, no—now! while Hastings sees to the horses. I could not exist long without knowing, and we are well sheltered from the rain under this tree.”

“Well, then, since you will have it,” he began with a laugh, which despite the weariness and anxiety of the past twenty-four hours had forced itself to his lips, “I have been sweeper and man-of-all-work at the Temple for the past few weeks, you must know—”

“No!” ejaculated my Lord Tony lustily. “By gum!”

“Indeed, you old sybarite, whilst you were enjoying yourself heaving coal on the canal wharf, I was scrubbing floors, lighting fires, and doing a number of odd jobs for a lot of demmed murdering villains, and”—he added under his breath—“incidentally, too, for our league. Whenever I had an hour or two off duty I spent them in my lodgings, and asked you all to come and meet me there.”

“By Gad, Blakeney! Then the day before yesterday?—when we all met—”

“I had just had a bath—sorely needed, I can tell you. I had been cleaning boots half the day, but I had heard that the Simons were removing from the Temple on the Sunday, and had obtained an order from them to help them shift their furniture.”

“Cleaning boots!” murmured my Lord Tony with a chuckle. “Well! and then?”

“Well, then everything worked out splendidly. You see by that time I was a well-known figure in the Temple. Heron knew me well. I used to be his lanthorn-bearer when at nights he visited that poor mite in his prison. It was ‘Dupont, here! Dupont there!’ all day long. ‘Light the fire in the office, Dupont! Dupont, brush my coat! Dupont, fetch me a light!’ When the Simons wanted to move their household goods they called loudly for Dupont. I got a covered laundry cart, and I brought a dummy with me to substitute for the child. Simon himself knew nothing of this, but Madame was in my pay. The dummy was just splendid, with real hair on its head; Madame helped me to substitute it for the child; we laid it on the sofa and covered it over with a rug, even while those brutes Heron and Cochefer were on the landing outside, and we stuffed His Majesty the King of France into a linen basket. The room was badly lighted, and any one would have been deceived. No one was suspicious of that type of trickery, so it went off splendidly. I moved the furniture of the Simons out of the Tower. His Majesty King Louis XVII was still concealed in the linen basket. I drove the Simons to their new lodgings—the man still suspects nothing—and there I helped them to unload the furniture—with the exception of the linen basket, of course. After that I drove my laundry cart to a house I knew of and collected a number of linen baskets, which I had arranged should be in readiness for me. Thus loaded up I left Paris by the Vincennes gate, and drove as far as Bagnolet, where there is no road except past the octroi, where the officials might have proved unpleasant. So I lifted His Majesty out of the basket and we walked on hand in hand in the darkness and the rain until the poor little feet gave out. Then the little fellow—who has been wonderfully plucky throughout, indeed, more a Capet than a Bourbon—snuggled up in my arms and went fast asleep, and—and—well, I think that’s all, for here we are, you see.”

“But if Madame Simon had not been amenable to bribery?” suggested Lord Tony after a moment’s silence.

“Then I should have had to think of something else.”

“If during the removal of the furniture Heron had remained resolutely in the room?”

“Then, again, I should have had to think of something else; but remember that in life there is always one supreme moment when Chance—who is credited to have but one hair on her head—stands by you for a brief space of time; sometimes that space is infinitesimal—one minute, a few seconds—just the time to seize Chance by that one hair. So I pray you all give me no credit in this or any other matter in which we all work together, but the quickness of seizing Chance by the hair during the brief moment when she stands by my side. If Madame Simon had been un-amenable, if Heron had remained in the room all the time, if Cochefer had had two looks at the dummy instead of one—well, then, something else would have helped me, something would have occurred; something—I know not what—but surely something which Chance meant to be on our side, if only we were quick enough to seize it—and so you see how simple it all is.”

So simple, in fact, that it was sublime. The daring, the pluck, the ingenuity and, above all, the super-human heroism and endurance which rendered the hearers of this simple narrative, simply told, dumb with admiration.

Their thoughts now were beyond verbal expression.

“How soon was the hue and cry for the child about the streets?” asked Tony, after a moment’s silence.

“It was not out when I left the gates of Paris,” said Blakeney meditatively; “so quietly has the news of the escape been kept, that I am wondering what devilry that brute Heron can be after. And now no more chattering,” he continued lightly; “all to horse, and you, Hastings, have a care. The destinies of France, mayhap, will be lying asleep in your arms.”

“But you, Blakeney?” exclaimed the three men almost simultaneously.

“I am not going with you. I entrust the child to you. For God’s sake guard him well! Ride with him to Mantes. You should arrive there at about ten o’clock. One of you then go straight to No.9 Rue la Tour. Ring the bell; an old man will answer it. Say the one word to him, ‘Enfant’; he will reply, ‘De roi!’ Give him the child, and may Heaven bless you all for the help you have given me this night!”

“But you, Blakeney?” reiterated Tony with a note of deep anxiety in his fresh young voice.

“I am straight for Paris,” he said quietly.

“Impossible!”

“Therefore feasible.”

“But why? Percy, in the name of Heaven, do you realise what you are doing?”

“Perfectly.”

“They’ll not leave a stone unturned to find you—they know by now, believe me, that your hand did this trick.”

“I know that.”

“And yet you mean to go back?”

“And yet I am going back.”

“Blakeney!”

“It’s no use, Tony. Armand is in Paris. I saw him in the corridor of the Temple prison in the company of Chauvelin.”

“Great God!” exclaimed Lord Hastings.