The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy (the little red hen read aloud .txt) 📗

had an equally swift pang of remorse as the faces of his companions⁠—of Régine and Mme. de Serval, of Joséphine and Jacques⁠—whom he dragged with him into this mad and purposeless outburst, rose prophetically before him fro out the gloom, with wide-eyed, scared faces and arms uplifted to ward off vengeful blows.

But the next moment these lightning-like visions faded into complete oblivion. He felt something hard and heavy hitting him in the back. All the lights, the faces, the outstretched hands, danced wildly before his eyes, and he sank like a log on the greasy pavement, dragging pewter plates, mugs and bottles down with him in his fall.

VI One Crowded Hour of Glorious Life I

And all the while, the people were shouting:

“Le violà!”

“Robespierre!”

The Fraternal Supper was interrupted. Men and women pushed and jostled and screamed, the while a small, spare figure in dark cloth coat and immaculate breeches, with smooth brown hair and pale-ascetic face, stood for a moment under the lintel of a gaping porte-cochère. He had two friends with him; handsome, enthusiastic St. Just, the right hand and the spur of the bloodthirsty monster, own kinsman to Armand St. Just the renegade, whose sister was married to a rich English millor; and Couthon, delicate, half-paralysed, wheeled about in a chair, with one foot in the grave, whose devotion to the tyrant was partly made up of ambition, and wholly of genuine admiration.

At the uproarious cheering which greeted his appearance, Robespierre advanced into the open, whilst a sudden swift light of triumph darted from his narrow, pale eyes.

“And you still hesitate!” St. Just whispered excitedly in his ear. “Why, you hold the people absolutely in the hollow of your hand!”

“Have patience, friend!” Couthon remonstrated quietly. “Robespierre’s hour is about to strike. To hasten it now, might be courting disaster.”

Robespierre himself would, in the meanwhile, have been in serious danger through the exuberant welcome of his admirers. Their thoughtless crowding around his person would easily have given some lurking enemy or hotheaded, would-be martyr the chance of wielding an assassin’s knife with success, but for the presence amongst the crowd of his “tappe-durs”⁠—hit-hards⁠—a magnificent bodyguard composed of picked giants from the mining districts of Eastern France, who rallied around the great man, and with their weighted sticks kept the enthusiastic crowd at bay.

He walked a few steps down the street, keeping close to the houses on his left; his two friends, St. Just and Couthon in his carrying chair, were immediately behind him, and between these three and the mob, the tappe-durs, striding two abreast, formed a solid phalanx.

Then, all of a sudden, the great man came to a halt, faced the crowd, and with an impressive gesture imposed silence and attention. His bodyguard cleared a space for him and he stood in the midst of them, with the light of a resin torch striking full upon his spare figure and bringing into bold relief that thin face so full of sinister expression, the cruel mouth and the coldly glittering eyes. He was looking straight across the table, on which the debris of Fraternal Suppers lay in unsavoury confusion.

On the other side of the table, Mme. de Serval with her three children sat, or rather crouched, closely huddled against one another. Joséphine was clinging to her mother, Jacques to Régine. Gone was the eagerness out of their attitude now, gone the enthusiasm that had reviled the bloodthirsty tyrant in the teeth of a threatening crowd. It seemed as if, with that terrific blow dealt by a giant hand to Bertrand who was their leader in this mad adventure, the awesome fear of death had descended upon their souls. The two young faces as well as that of Mme. de Serval appeared distorted and haggard, whilst Régine’s eyes, dilated with terror, strove to meet Robespierre’s steady gaze, which was charged with sinister mockery.

And for one short interval of time the crowd was silent; and the everlasting stars looked down from above on the doings of men. To these trembling, terrified young creatures, suddenly possessed with youth’s passionate desire to live, with a passionate horror of death, these few seconds of tense silence must have seemed like an eternity of suffering. Then Robespierre’s thin face lighted up in a portentous smile⁠—a smile that caused those pale cheeks yonder to take on a still more ashen hue.

“And where is our eloquent orator of a while ago?” the great man asked quietly. “I heard my name, for I sat at my window looking with joy on the fraternisation of the people of France. I caught sight of the speaker, and came down to hear more clearly what he had to say. But where is he?”

His pale eyes wandered slowly along the crowd; and such was the power exercised by the extraordinary man, so great the terror that he inspired, that everyone there⁠—men, women and children, workers and vagabonds⁠—turned their eyes away, dared not meet his glance lest in it they read an accusation or a threat.

Indeed, no one dared to speak. The young rhetorician had disappeared, and everyone trembled lest they should be implicated in his escape. He had evidently got away under cover of the confusion and the noise. But his companions were still there⁠—four of them; the woman and the boy and the two girls, crouching like frightened beasts before the obvious fury, the certain vengeance of the people. The murmurs were ominous. “Death! Guillotine! Traitors!” were words easily distinguishable in the confused babbling of the sullen crowd.

Robespierre’s cruel, appraising glance rested on those four pathetic forms, so helpless, so desperate, so terrified.

“Citizens,” he said coldly, “did you not hear me ask where your eloquent companion is at this moment?”

Régine alone knew that he lay like a log under the table, close to her feet. She had seen him fall, struck by that awful blow from a brutal fist; but at the ominous query she instinctively pressed her trembling lips close together, whilst Joséphine