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

a callous conspiracy, the aim of which was the destruction of that gang of English spies who were the enemies of France, and the first stage of which was the heartless abduction of Lady Blakeney and her incarceration as a decoy for the ultimate capture of her own husband.

A cruel, abominable act! Theresia, who had plunged headlong into this shameful crime, would a few days later have given much to undo the harm she had wrought. But she had yet to learn that, once used as a tool by the Committee of Public Safety and by Chauvelin, its most unscrupulous agent, no man or woman could hope to become free again until the work demanded had been accomplished to the end. There was no freedom from that taskmaster save in death; and Theresia’s fit of compunction did not carry her to the lengths of self-sacrifice. Marguerite Blakeney was her prisoner, the decoy which would bring the English milor inevitably to the spot where his wife was incarcerated; and Theresia, who had helped to bring this state of things about, did her best to smother remorse, and having done Chauvelin’s dirty work for him she set to to see what personal advantage she could derive from it.

Firstly, the satisfaction of her petty revenge: the Scarlet Pimpernel caught in a trap, would surely regret his interference in Theresia’s love affairs. Theresia cared less than nothing about Bertrand Moncrif, and would have been quite grateful to the English milor for having spirited that embarrassing lover of hers away but for that letter which had wounded the beautiful Spaniard’s vanity to the quick, and still rankled sufficiently to ease her conscience on the score of her subsequent actions. That the letter was a bogus one, concocted and written by Chauvelin himself in order to spur her on to a mean revenge, Theresia did not know.

But far stronger than thoughts of revenge where Theresia’s schemes for her own future. She had begun to dream of Robespierre’s gratitude, of her triumph over all those who had striven for over two years to bring that gang of English spies to book. She saw her name writ largely on the roll of fame; she even saw in her mind, the tyrant himself as her willing slave⁠ ⁠… and something more than that.

For her tool Bertrand she had no further use. By way of a reward for the abominable abduction of Lady Blakeney, he had been allowed to follow the woman he worshipped like a lackey attached to her train. Dejected, already spurned, he returned to Paris with her, here to resume the life of humiliation and of despised ardour which had broken his spirit and warped his nature, before his gallant rescuer had snatched him out of the toils of the beautiful Spaniard.

Within an hour of setting his foot on French soil, Bertrand had realised that he had been nothing in Theresia’s sight but a lump of malleable wax, which she had moulded to her own design and now threw aside as cumbersome and useless. He had realised that her ambition soared far above linking her fate to an obscure and penniless lover, when the coming man of the hour⁠—citizen Tallien⁠—was already at her feet.

II

Thus Theresia had attained one of her great desires: the Scarlet Pimpernel was as good as captured, and when he finally succumbed he could not fail to know whence came the blow that struck him.

With regard to her future, matters were more doubtful. She had not yet subjugated Robespierre sufficiently to cause him to give up his more humble love and to lay down his power and popularity at her feet; whilst the man who had offered her his hand and name⁠—citizen Tallien⁠—was forever putting a check upon her ambition and his own advancement by his pusillanimity and lack of enterprise.

Whilst she was aching to push him into decisive action, into seizing the supreme power before Robespierre and his friends had irrevocably established theirs, Tallien was for temporising, fear that in trying to snatch a dictatorship he and his beloved with him would lose their heads.

“While Robespierre lives,” Theresia would argue passionately, “no man’s head is safe. Every rival, sooner or later, becomes a victim. St. Just and Couthon aim at a dictatorship for him. Sooner or later they will succeed; then death to every man who has ever dared oppose them.”

“Therefore ’tis wiser not to oppose,” the prudent Tallien would retort. “The time will come⁠—”

“Never!” she riposted hotly. “While you plot, and argue and ponder, Robespierre acts or signs your death-warrant.”

“Robespierre is the idol of the people; he sways the Convention with a word. His eloquence would drag an army of enemies to the guillotine!”

“Robespierre!” Theresia retorted with sublime contempt. “Ah, when you have said that, you think you have said everything! France, humanity, the people, sovereign power!⁠—all that, you assert, is embodied in that one man. But, my friend, listen to me!” she went on earnestly. “Listen, when I assert that Robespierre is only a name, a fetish, a manikin set up on a pedestal! By whom? By you, and the Convention; by the Clubs and the Committees. And the pedestal is composed of that elusive entity which you call the people and which will disintegrate from beneath his feet as soon as the people have realised that those feet are less than clay. One touch of a firm finger against that manikin, I tell you, and he will fall as dust before you; and you can rise upon that same elusive pedestal⁠—popularity, to the heights which he hath so easily attained.”

But, though Tallien was at times carried away by her vehemence, he would always shake his head and counsel prudence, and assure her that the time was not yet. Theresia, impatient and dictatorial, had more than once hinted at rupture.

“I could not love a weakling,” she would aver; and at the back of her mind there would rise schemes, which aimed at transferring her favours to the other man,