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

I fell. I tried to raise myself quickly, but I had not the time, for the next moment I felt a hand on my shoulder, and a voice⁠—oh, a voice I dread, citoyenne!⁠—called to me by name.”

“The voice of citizen Chauvelin?” Marguerite asked simply.

The woman looked up quickly.

“You knew⁠—?” she murmured.

“I knew his voice.”

“But you know him?” the other insisted.

“I know him⁠—yes,” Marguerite replied. “I am a compatriot of yours. Before I married, I was Marguerite St. Just.”

“St. Just?”

“We are cousins, my brother and I, of the young deputy, the friend of Robespierre.”

“God help you!” the woman murmured.

“He has done so already, by bringing us both to England. My brother is married, and I am Lady Blakeney now. You too will feel happy and safe now that you are here.”

“Happy?” the woman ejaculated, with a piteous sob. “And safe? Mon Dieu, if only I could think it!”

“But what have you to fear? Chauvelin may have retained some semblance of power over in France. He has none over here.”

“He hates me!” the other murmured. “Oh, how he hates me!”

“Why?”

The stranger made no immediate reply. Her eyes, dark as the night, glowing and searching, seemed to read the very soul behind Marguerite’s serene brow. Then after awhile she went on, with seeming irrelevance:

“It all began so foolishly!⁠ ⁠… mon Dieu, how foolishly! And I really meant nothing treacherous to my own country⁠—nothing unpatriotic, quoi?” she suddenly seized Marguerite’s two hands and exclaimed with childlike enthusiasm: “You have heard of the Scarlet Pimpernel, have you not?”

“Yes,” Marguerite replied. “I have heard of him.”

“You know then that he is the finest, bravest, most wonderful man in all the world?”

“Yes, I know that,” Marguerite assented with a smile.

“Of course, in France they hate him. Naturally! He is the enemy of the republic, quoi? He is against all those massacres, the persecution of the innocent. He saves them and helps them when he can. So they hate him. Naturally.”

“Naturally!”

“But I have always admired him,” the woman continued, enthusiasm glowing in her dark eyes. “Always; always! Ever since I heard what he had done, and how he saved the Comte de Tournay, and Juliette Marny, and Esther Vincent, and⁠—and countless others. Oh, I knew about them all! For I knew Chauvelin well, and one or two of the men on the Committee of Public Safety quite intimately, and I used to worm out of them all the true facts about the Scarlet Pimpernel. Can you wonder that with my whole soul I admired him? I worshipped him! I could have laid down my life to help him! He has been the guiding star of my dreary life⁠—my hero and my king!”

She paused, and those deep, dark eyes of her were fixed straight out before her, as if in truth she beheld the hero of her dreams. There was a glow now in her cheeks, and her marvellous hair fell like a sable mantle around her, framing the perfect oval of the face and enhancing by vivid contrast the creamy whiteness of chin and throat and the rose-like bloom that had spread over her face. Indeed, this was an exquisitely beautiful creature, and Marguerite, herself one of the loveliest women of her time, was carried away by genuine, wholehearted admiration for the stranger, as well as by her enthusiasm, which, in very truth, seeing its object, was a perfectly natural feeling.

“So now,” the woman concluded, coming back to the painful realities of life with a shudder, which extinguished the light in her eyes and took all the glow out of her cheeks, “so now you understand perhaps why Chauvelin hates me!”

“You must have been rather indiscreet,” Marguerite remarked with a smile.

“I was, I suppose. And Chauvelin is so vindictive. He hates the Scarlet Pimpernel. Out of a few words, foolishly spoken perhaps, he has made out a case against me. A friend gave me warning. My name was already in the hands of Foucquier-Tinville. You know what that means! Perquisition! Arrest! Judgment! Then the guillotine! Oh, mon Dieu! And I had done nothing!⁠—nothing! I fled out of Paris. An influential friend just contrived to arrange this for me. A faithful servant accompanied me. We reached Boulogne. How, I know not! I was so weak, so ill, so wretched, I hardly lived. I just allowed François⁠—that was my servant⁠—to take me whithersoever he wished. But we had no passports, no papers⁠—nothing! And Chauvelin was on our track. We had to hide⁠—in barns⁠ ⁠… in pig-styes⁠ ⁠… anywhere! But we reached Boulogne at last⁠ ⁠… I had some money, fortunately. We bribed a fisherman to let us have his boat. Only a small boat⁠—imagine! A rowing boat! And François and I alone in it! But it meant our lives if we didn’t go; and perhaps it meant our lives if we went! A rowing boat on the great, big sea!⁠ ⁠… Fortunately the weather was fine, and François lifted me into the boat. And I just remember seeing the coast of France receding, receding, receding⁠—farther and farther from me. I was so tired. It is possible that I slept. Then suddenly something woke me. I was wide awake. I had heard a cry. I knew I had heard a cry, and then a splash⁠—an awful splash! I was wet through. One oar hung in the rowlock; the other had gone. And François was not there. I was all alone.”

She spoke in hard, jerky sentences, as if every word hurt her physically as she uttered it. For the most part she was looking down on her hands, that twitched convulsively and twisted the tiny wet handkerchief into a ball. But now and again she looked up, not at Marguerite always, rather at Sir Percy. Her glowing, tear-wet eyes fastened themselves on him from time to time with an appealing or a defiant gaze. He appeared silent and sympathetic, and his glance rested on her the whole while that she spoke, with an expression of detached if