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

“Robespierre would not fail me, as this coward does!” she mused, even while Tallien, blind and obedient, was bidding her farewell at the very door of the charlatan to whom Theresia had turned in her ambition and her difficulties.

Something of the glamour which had originally surrounded Mother Théot’s incantations had vanished since sixty-two of her devotees had been sent to the guillotine on charge of conspiring for the overthrow of the Republic. Robespierre’s enemies, too cowardly to attack him in the Convention or in the Clubs, had seized upon the mystery which hung over the séances in the Rue de la Planchette in order to undermine his popularity in the one and his power in the other.

Spies were introduced into the witch’s lair. The names of its chief frequenters became known, and soon wholesale arrests were made, which were followed by the inevitable condemnations. Robespierre had not actually been named; but the identity of the sycophants who had proclaimed him the Messenger of the Most High, the Morning Star, or the Regenerator of Mankind, were hurled across from the tribune of the Convention, like poisoned arrows aimed at the tyrant himself.

But Robespierre had been too wary to allow himself to be dragged into the affair. His enemies tried to goad him into defending his worshippers, thus admitting his association with the gang; but he remained prudently silent, and with callous ruthlessness he sacrificed them to his own safety. He never raised his voice nor yet one finger to save them from death, and whilst he⁠—bloodthirsty autocrat⁠—remain firmly installed upon his self-constituted throne, those who had acclaimed him as second only to God, perished upon the scaffold.

Mother Théot, for some inexplicable reason, escaped this wholesale slaughter; but her séances were henceforth shorn of their slendour. Robespierre no longer dared frequent them even in disguise. The house in the Rue de la Planchette became a marked one to the agents of the Committee of Public Safety, and the witch herself was reduced to innumerable shifts to eke out a precarious livelihood and to keep herself in the good graces of those agents, by rendering them various unavowable services.

To those, however, who chose to defy public opinion and to disregard the dangers which attended the frequentation of Mother Théot’s sorceries, these latter had lost little or nothing of their pristine solemnity. There was the closely curtained room; the scented, heavy atmosphere; the chants, the coloured flames, the ghostlike neophytes. Draped in her grey veils, the old witch still wove her spells and called on the powers of light and of darkness to aid her in foretelling the future. The neophytes chanted and twisted their bodies in quaint contortions; alone, the small blackamoor grinned at what experience had taught him was nothing but quackery and charlatanism.

Theresia, sitting on the dais, with the heady fumes of Oriental scents blurring her sight and the clearness of her intellect, was drinking in the honeyed words and flattering prophecies of the old witch.

“Thy name will be the greatest in the land! Before thee will bow the mightiest thrones! At thy word heads will fall and diedems will totter!” Mother Théot announced in sepulchral tones, whilst gazing into the crystal before her.

“As the wife of citizen Tallien?” Theresia queried in an awed whisper.

“That the spirits do not say,” the old witch replied. “What is a name to them? I see a crown of glory, and thy head surrounded by a golden light; and at thy feet lies something which once was scarlet, and now is crimson and crushed.”

“What does it mean?” Theresia murmured.

“That is for thee to know,” the sybil replied sternly. “Commune with the spirits; lose thyself in their embrace; learn from them the great truths, and the future will be made clear to thee.”

With which cryptic utterance she gathered her veils around her, and with weird murmurs of, “Evohe! Evohe! Sammael! Zamiel! Evohe!” glided out of the room, mysterious and inscrutable, presumably in order to allow her bewildered client to meditate on the enigmatical prophecy in solitude.

But directly she had closed the door behind her, Mother Théot’s manner underwent a chance. Here the broad light of day appeared to divest her of all her sybilline attributes. She became just an ugly old woman, wrinkled and hook-nosed, dressed in shabby draperies that were grey with age and dirt, and with claw-like hands that looked like the talons of a bird of prey.

As she entered the room, a man who had been standing at the window opposite, staring out into the dismal street below, turned quickly to her.

“Art satisfied?” she asked at once.

“From what I could hear, yes!” he replied, “though I could have wished thy pronouncements had been more clear.”

The hag shrugged her lean shoulders and nodded in the direction of her lair.

“Oh!” she said. “The Spaniard understands well enough. She never consults me or invokes the spirits but they speak to her of that which is scarlet. She knows what it means. You need not fear, citizen Chauvelin, that in the pursuit of her vaulting ambition, she will forget that her primary duty is to you!”

“No,” Chauvelin asserted calmly, “she’ll not forget that. The Cabarrus is no fool. She knows well enough that when citizens of the State have been employed to work on its behalf, they are no longer free agents afterwards. The work must be carried through to the end.”

“You need not fear the Cabarrus, citizen,” the sybil rejoined dryly. “She’ll not fail you. Her vanity is immense. She believes that the Englishman insulted her by writing that flippant letter, and she’ll not leave him alone till she has had her revenge.”

“No!” Chauvelin assented. “She’ll not fail me. Nor thou either, citoyenne.”

The old hag shrugged her shoulders.

“I?” she exclaimed, with a quiet laugh. “Is that likely? You promised me ten thousand livres the day the Scarlet Pimpernel is captured!”

“And the guillotine,” Chauvelin broke in grimly, “if thou shouldst allow the woman