Lord Tony’s Wife Baroness Orczy (story read aloud .TXT) 📖

“Oh! for the power,” he muttered to himself, “which I had a year ago! for the power to deal with mine enemy myself. So you have come to Nantes, my valiant Sir Percy Blakeney?” he added while a short, sardonic laugh escaped his thin, set lips: “and you are determined that I shall know how and why you came! Do you reckon, I wonder, that I have no longer the power to deal with you? Well!⁠ ⁠…”

He sighed again but with more satisfaction this time.

“Well!⁠ ⁠…” he reiterated with obvious complacency. “Unless that oaf Carrier is a bigger fool than I imagine him to be I think I have you this time, my elusive Scarlet Pimpernel.”

It was not an easy thing to obtain an audience of the great proconsul at this hour of the night, nor was Chauvelin, the disgraced servant of the Committee of Public Safety, a man to be considered. Carrier, with his love of ostentation and of tyranny, found great delight in keeping his colleagues waiting upon his pleasure, and he knew that he could trust young Jacques Lalouët to be as insolent as any tyrant’s flunkey of yore.

“I must speak with the proconsul at once,” had been Chauvelin’s urgent request of Fleury, the commandant of the great man’s bodyguard.

“The proconsul dines at this hour,” had been Fleury’s curt reply.

“ ’Tis a matter which concerns the welfare and the safety of the State!”

“The proconsul’s health is the concern of the State too, and he dines at this hour and must not be disturbed.”

“Commandant Fleury!” urged Chauvelin, “you risk being implicated in a disaster. Danger and disgrace threaten the proconsul and all his adherents. I must speak with citizen Carrier at once.”

Fortunately for Chauvelin there were two keys which, when all else failed, were apt to open the doors of Carrier’s stronghold: the key of fear and that of cupidity. He tried both and succeeded. He bribed and he threatened: he endured Fleury’s brutality and Lalouët’s impertinence but he got his way. After an hour’s weary waiting and ceaseless parleyings he was once more ushered into the antechamber where he had sat earlier in the day. The doors leading to the inner sanctuary were open. Young Jacques Lalouët stood by them on guard. Carrier, fuming and raging at having been disturbed, vented his spleen and ill-temper on Chauvelin.

“If the news that you bring me is not worth my consideration,” he cried savagely, “I’ll send you to moulder in Le Bouffay or to drink the waters of the Loire.”

Chauvelin silent, self-effaced, allowed the flood of the great man’s wrath to spend itself in threats. Then he said quietly:

“Citizen proconsul I have come to tell you that the English spy, who is called the Scarlet Pimpernel, is now in Nantes. There is a reward of twenty thousand francs for his capture and I want your help to lay him by the heels.”

Carrier suddenly paused in his ravings. He sank into a chair and a livid hue spread over his face.

“It’s not true!” he murmured hoarsely.

“I saw him⁠—not an hour ago.⁠ ⁠…”

“What proof have you?”

“I’ll show them to you⁠—but not across this threshold. Let me enter, citizen proconsul, and close your sanctuary doors behind me rather than before. What I have come hither to tell you, can only be said between four walls.”

“I’ll make you tell me,” broke in Carrier in a raucous voice, which excitement and fear caused almost to choke in his throat. “I’ll make you⁠ ⁠… curse you for the traitor that you are.⁠ ⁠… Curse you!” he cried more vigorously, “I’ll make you speak. Will you shield a spy by your silence, you miserable traitor? If you do I’ll send you to rot in the mud of the Loire with other traitors less accursed than yourself.”

“If you only knew,” was Chauvelin’s calm rejoinder to the other’s ravings, “how little I care for life. I only live to be even one day with an enemy whom I hate. That enemy is now in Nantes, but I am like a bird of prey whose wings have been clipped. If you do not help me mine enemy will again go free⁠—and death in that case matters little or nothing to me.”

For a moment longer Carrier hesitated. Fear had gripped him by the throat. Chauvelin’s earnestness seemed to vouch for the truth of his assertion, and if this were so⁠—if those English spies were indeed in Nantes⁠—then his own life was in deadly danger. He⁠—like every one of those bloodthirsty tyrants who had misused the sacred names of Fraternity and of Equality⁠—had learned to dread the machinations of those mysterious Englishmen and of their unconquerable leader. Popular superstition had it that they were spies of the English Government and that they were not only bent on saving traitors from well-merited punishment but that they were hired assassins paid by Mr. Pitt to murder every faithful servant of the Republic. The name of the Scarlet Pimpernel, so significantly uttered by Chauvelin, had turned Carrier’s sallow cheeks to a livid hue. Sick with terror now he called Lalouët to him. He clung to the boy with both arms as to the one being in this world whom he trusted.

“What shall we do, Jacques?” he murmured hoarsely, “shall we let him in?”

The boy roughly shook himself free from the embrace of the great proconsul.

“If you want twenty thousand francs,” he said with a dry laugh, “I should listen quietly to what citizen Chauvelin has to say.”

Terror and rapacity were ranged on one side against inordinate vanity. The thought of twenty thousand francs made Carrier’s ugly mouth water. Money was ever scarce these days: also the fear of assassination was a spectre which haunted him at all hours of the day and night. On the other hand he positively worshipped the mystery wherewith he surrounded himself. It had been his boast for some time now that no one save the chosen few had crossed