El Dorado - Baroness Orczy (best ebook reader for surface pro TXT) 📗

hand will strike you where you stand?”

“No,” he said lightly; “I am not afraid, Lady Blakeney. You see, I do not happen to believe in God. Come!” he added more seriously, “have I not proved to you that my offer is disinterested? Yet I repeat it even now. If you desire to see Sir Percy in prison, command me, and the doors shall be open to you.”

She waited a moment, looking him straight and quite dispassionately in the face; then she said coldly:

“Very well! I will go.”

“When?” he asked.

“This evening.”

“Just as you wish. I would have to go and see my friend Héron first, and arrange with him for your visit.”

“Then go. I will follow in half an hour.”

“C’est entendu. Will you be at the main entrance of the Conciergerie at half-past nine? You know it, perhaps⁠—no? It is in the Rue de la Barillerie, immediately on the right at the foot of the great staircase of the house of Justice.”

“Of the house of Justice!” she exclaimed involuntarily, a world of bitter contempt in her cry. Then she added in her former matter-of-fact tones:

“Very good, citizen. At half-past nine I will be at the entrance you name.”

“And I will be at the door prepared to escort you.”

He took up his hat and coat and bowed ceremoniously to her. Then he turned to go. At the door a cry from her⁠—involuntarily enough, God knows!⁠—made him pause.

“My interview with the prisoner,” she said, vainly trying, poor soul! to repress that quiver of anxiety in her voice, “it will be private?”

“Oh, yes! Of course,” he replied with a reassuring smile. “Au revoir, Lady Blakeney! Half-past nine, remember⁠—”

She could no longer trust herself to look on him as he finally took his departure. She was afraid⁠—yes, absolutely afraid that her fortitude would give way⁠—meanly, despicably, uselessly give way; that she would suddenly fling herself at the feet of that sneering, inhuman wretch, that she would pray, implore⁠—Heaven above! what might she not do in the face of this awful reality, if the last lingering shred of vanishing reason, of pride, and of courage did not hold her in check?

Therefore she forced herself not to look on that departing, sable-clad figure, on that evil face, and those hands that held Percy’s fate in their cruel grip; but her ears caught the welcome sound of his departure⁠—the opening and shutting of the door, his light footstep echoing down the stone stairs.

When at last she felt that she was really alone she uttered a loud cry like a wounded doe, and falling on her knees she buried her face in her hands in a passionate fit of weeping. Violent sobs shook her entire frame; it seemed as if an overwhelming anguish was tearing at her heart⁠—the physical pain of it was almost unendurable. And yet even through this paroxysm of tears her mind clung to one root idea: when she saw Percy she must be brave and calm, be able to help him if he wanted her, to do his bidding if there was anything that she could do, or any message that she could take to the others. Of hope she had none. The last lingering ray of it had been extinguished by that fiend when he said, “We need not fear that he will escape. I doubt if he could walk very steadily across this room now.”

XXVII In the Conciergerie

Marguerite, accompanied by Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, walked rapidly along the quay. It lacked ten minutes to the half hour; the night was dark and bitterly cold. Snow was still falling in sparse, thin flakes, and lay like a crisp and glittering mantle over the parapets of the bridges and the grim towers of the Châtelet prison.

They walked on silently now. All that they had wanted to say to one another had been said inside the squalid room of their lodgings when Sir Andrew Ffoulkes had come home and learned that Chauvelin had been.

“They are killing him by inches, Sir Andrew,” had been the heartrending cry which burst from Marguerite’s oppressed heart as soon as her hands rested in the kindly ones of her best friend. “Is there aught that we can do?”

There was, of course, very little that could be done. One or two fine steel files which Sir Andrew gave her to conceal beneath the folds of her kerchief; also a tiny dagger with sharp, poisoned blade, which for a moment she held in her hand hesitating, her eyes filling with tears, her heart throbbing with unspeakable sorrow.

Then slowly⁠—very slowly⁠—she raised the small, death-dealing instrument to her lips, and reverently kissed the narrow blade.

“If it must be!” she murmured, “God in His mercy will forgive!”

She sheathed the dagger, and this, too, she hid in the folds of her gown.

“Can you think of anything else, Sir Andrew, that he might want?” she asked. “I have money in plenty, in case those soldiers⁠—”

Sir Andrew sighed, and turned away from her so as to hide the hopelessness which he felt. Since three days now he had been exhausting every conceivable means of getting at the prison guard with bribery and corruption. But Chauvelin and his friends had taken excellent precautions. The prison of the Conciergerie, situated as it was in the very heart of the labyrinthine and complicated structure of the Châtelet and the house of Justice, and isolated from every other group of cells in the building, was inaccessible save from one narrow doorway which gave on the guardroom first, and thence on the inner cell beyond. Just as all attempts to rescue the late unfortunate Queen from that prison had failed, so now every attempt to reach the imprisoned Scarlet Pimpernel was equally doomed to bitter disappointment.

The guardroom was filled with soldiers day and night; the windows of the inner cell, heavily barred, were too small to admit of the passage of a human body, and they were raised twenty feet from the corridor below. Sir Andrew had stood in