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

There seems no doubt that at this time the man’s very soul was on the rack. His nerves were stretched to breaking point, not only by incessant vigilance, by obsession of the one idea, the one aim, but also by multifarious incidents which his overwrought imagination magnified into attempts to rob him of his prey.

He trusted no one⁠—not Mother Théot, not the men upstairs, not Theresia: least of all Theresia. And his tortured brain invented and elaborated schemes whereby he set one set of spies to watch another, one set of sleuthhounds to run after another, in a kind of vicious and demoniac circle of mistrust and denunciation. Nor did he trust himself any longer: neither his instinct nor his eyes, nor his ears. His intimates⁠—and he had very few of these⁠—said of him at that time that, if he had his way, he would have had every tatterdemalion in the city branded, like Rateau, lest they were bribed or tempted into changing identities with the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Whilst waiting for a lull in the storm, he was pacing up and down the dank and murky storage house, striving by febrile movements to calm his nerves. Shivering, despite the closeness of the atmosphere, he kept the folds of his mantle closely wrapped around his shoulders.

It was impossible to keep the outer doors open, because the rain beat in wildly on that side, and the place would have been in utter darkness but for an old grimy lantern which some prudent hand had set up on a barrel in the centre of the vast space, and which shed a feeble circle of light around. The latch of the wicket appeared to be broken, for the small door, driven by the wind, flapped backwards and forwards with irritating ceaselessness. At one time Chauvelin tried to improvise some means of fastening it, for the noise helped to exacerbate his nerves and, leaning out into the street in order to seize hold of the door, he saw the figure of a man, bent nearly double in the teeth of the gale, shuffling across the street from the direction of the Porte St. Antoine.

It was then nearly eight o’clock, and the light treacherous, but despite the veil of torrential rain which intervened between him and that shuffling figure, something in the gait, the stature, the stoop of the wide, bony shoulders, appeared unpleasantly familiar. The man’s head and shoulders were wrapped in a tattered piece of sacking, which he held close to his chest. His arms were bare, as were his shins, and on his feet he had a pair of sabots stuffed with straw.

Midway across the street he paused, and a tearing fit of coughing seemed to render him momentarily helpless. Chauvelin’s first instinct prompted him to run to the stairs and to call for assistance from the Captain Boyer. Indeed, he was halfway up to the first floor when, looking down, he saw that the man had entered the place through the wicket-door. Still coughing and spluttering, he had divested himself of his piece of sacking and was crouching down against the barrel in the centre of the room and trying to warm his hands by holding them against the glass sides of the old lantern.

From where he stood, Chauvelin could see the dim outline of the man’s profile, the chin ornamented with a three-days’ growth of beard, the lank hair plastered above the pallid forehead, the huge bones, coated with grime, that protruded through the rags that did duty for a shirt. The sleeves of this tattered garment hung away from the arm, displaying a fiery, inflamed weal, shaped like the letter M that had recently been burned into the flesh with a branding iron.

The sight of that mark upon the vagabond’s arm caused Chauvelin to pause a moment, then to come down the stairs again.

“Citizen Rateau!” he called.

The man jumped as if he had been struck with a whip, tried to struggle to his feet, but collapsed on the floor, while a terrible fit of coughing took his breath away. Chauvelin, standing beside the barrel, looked down with a grim smile on this miserable wreckage of humanity whom he had so judiciously put out of the way of further mischief. The dim flicker of the lantern illumine the gaunt, bony arm, so that the charred flesh stood out like a crimson, fiery string against a coating of grime.

Rateau appeared terrified, scared by the sudden apparition of the man who had inflicted the shameful punishment upon him. Chauvelin’s face, lighted from below by the lantern, did indeed appear grim and forbidding. Some few seconds elapsed before the coalheaver had recovered sufficiently to stand on his feet.

“I seem to have scared you, my friend,” Chauvelin remarked dryly.

“I⁠—I did not know,” Rateau stammered with a painful wheeze, “that anyone was here⁠ ⁠… I came for shelter⁠ ⁠…”

“I am here for shelter, too,” Chauvelin rejoined, “and did not see you enter.”

“Mother Théot allows me to sleep here,” Rateau went on mildly. “I have had no work for two days⁠ ⁠… not since⁠ ⁠…” And he looked down ruefully upon his arm. “People think I am an escaped felon,” he explained with snivelling timidity. “And as I have always lived just from hand to mouth⁠ ⁠…”

He paused, and cast an obsequious glance on the Terrorist, who retorted dryly:

“Better men than you, my friend, live from hand to mouth these days. Poverty,” he continued with grim sarcasm, “exalts a man in this glorious revolution of ours. ’Tis riches that shame him.”

Rateau’s branded arm went up to his lanky hair, and he scratched his head dubiously.

“Aye,” he nodded, obviously uncomprehending; “perhaps! But I’d like to taste some of that shame!”

Chauvelin shrugged his shoulders and turned on his heel. The thunder sounded a little more distant and the rain less violent for the moment, and he strode toward the door.

“The children run after me now,” Rateau continued dolefully. “In my quartier, the concierge