The guard at the Maillot Gate would have stopped the party, but Roger, member of the Committee of Public Safety, armed with his papers and his tricolour scarf, overruled Robespierre"s former orders, and the party mached out of the gate.
They pressed on in silence, instinctively walking shoulder to shoulder, vaguely longing for the touch of another human hand, the sound of a voice that would not ring weirdly in the mysterious night.
There was something terrifying in this absolute silence, in such intense darkness, in this constant wandering towards a goal that seemed for ever distant, and in all this weary, weary fruitless waiting; and these men, who lived their life through, drunken with blood, deafened by the cries of their victims, satiated with the moans of the helpless and the innocent, hardly dared to look around them, lest they should see ghoulish forms flitting through the gloom.
Soon they reached the cross-roads, and in the dense blackness of the night the gaunt arms of the sign-post pointed ghostlike towards the north.
The men hung back, wrapped in the darkness as in a pall, while Roger advanced alone.
"Hola! Is anyone there?" he called softly.
Then, as no reply came, he added more loudly:
"Hola! A friend-with some clothes found in the Rue Berthier. Is anyone here? Hola! A friend!"
But only from the gently murmuring river far away the melancholy call of a waterfowl seemed to echo mockingly:
"A friend!"
Just then the clock of Courbevoie Church struck the midnight hour.
"It is too late," whispered the men.
They did not swear, nor did they curse their leader. Somehow it seemed as if they had expected all along that the Englishman would evade their vengeance yet again, that he would lure them out into the cold and into the darkness, and then that he would mock them, fool them, and finally disappear into the night.
It seemed futile to wait any longer. They were so sure that they had failed again.
"Who goes there?"
The sound of naked feet and of wooden sabots pattering on the distant footbridge had caused Roger to utter the quick challenge.
"Hola! Hola! Are you there?" was the loud, breathless response.
The next moment the darkness became alive with men moving quickly forward, and raucous shouts of "Where are they?" "Have you got them?" "Don"t let them go!" filled the air.
"Got whom?" "Who are they?" "What is it?" were the wild counter-cries.
"The man! The girl! The children! Where are they?"
"What? Which? The Lebeau family? They are here with us."
"Where?"
Where, indeed? To a call to them from Roger there came no answer, nor did a hasty search result in finding them-the old man, the two boys, and the girl carrying the bundle of clothes had vanished into the night.
"In the name of--, what does this mean?" cried hoa.r.s.e voices in the crowd.
The new-comers, breathless, terrified, shaking with superst.i.tious fear, tried to explain.
"The Lebeau family-the old man, the girl, the two boys-we discovered after your departure, locked up in the cellar of the house-prisoners."
"But, then-the others?" they gasped.
"The girl and the children whom you saw must have been some aristocrats in disguise. The old man who spoke to you was that cursed Englishman-the Scarlet Pimpernel!"
And as if in mocking confirmation of these words there suddenly rang, echoing from afar, a long and merry laugh.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel!" cried Roger. "In rags and barefooted! At him, citizens; he cannot have got far!"
"Hush! Listen!" whispered one of the men, suddenly gripping him by the arm.
And from the distance-though Heaven only knew from what direction-came the sound of horses" hoofs pawing the soft ground; the next moment they were heard galloping away at breakneck speed.
The men turned to run in every direction, blindly, aimlessly, in the dark, like bloodhounds that have lost the trail.
One man, as he ran, stumbled against a dark ma.s.s p.r.o.ne upon the ground.
With a curse on his lips, he recovered his balance.
"Hold! What is this?" he cried.
Some of his comrades gathered round him. No one could see anything, but the dark ma.s.s appeared to have human shape, and it was bound round and round with cords. And now feeble moans escaped from obviously human lips.
"What is it? Who is it?" asked the men.
"An Englishman," came in weak accents from the ground.
"Your name?"
"I am called Kulmsted."
"Bah! An aristocrat!"
"No! An enemy of the Scarlet Pimpernel, like yourselves. I would have delivered him into your hands. But you let him escape you. As for me, he would have been wiser if he had killed me."
They picked him up and undid the cords from round his body, and later on took him with them back into Paris.
But there, in the darkness of the night, in the mud of the road, and beneath the icy rain, knees were shaking that had long ago forgotten how to bend, and hasty prayers were muttered by lips that were far more accustomed to blaspheme.
IX
THE CABARET DE LA LIBERTE
I
"Eight!"
"Twelve!"
"Four!"