Sir Percy Hits Back · Chapter 17 (1/2)

XVII

The Hôtel de Ville at Orange still stands, as it did then, in the newly-named Place de la République; and if the tourist of today mounts its steps, enters the building through its central portal, crosses the wide vestibule and finally turns down a long corridor on his right, he will, almost at the end of this, come to a door which bears the legend: “Travaux Publics.”

Should he be bold enough to push open the door, he will find himself in a perfectly banal room, with whitewashed walls covered with maps and plans that are of no interest to him, a large desk at one end, and a few wooden chairs. There is a thin carpet in the middle of the red-tiled floor and faded green rep curtains temper the glaring light of the afternoon sun. But on this day of May 1794 there were no curtains to the window, and not even a strip of carpet on the floor. There was no desk either, only a long trestle table covered with a tattered green cloth, behind which, on wooden chairs, sat three men, dressed alike in dark blue coats tightly buttoned across the chest, drab breeches and high topped boots, and wearing tricolour sashes around their waist.

The one who sat in the centre and who appeared to be in supreme authority rested his elbow on the table, and his chin was supported in his hand. He was gazing intently on a man who stood before him, in the centre of the room, the other side of the table; a man who looked footsore and weary and who wore a military uniform all tattered and covered with slime and dust.

The two others also kept their eyes fixed on this man. They were listening with rapt interest to the story which he was relating. Early this morning he and a dozen others also attired in tattered uniforms had come into Orange in a state bordering on collapse. They had made their way to the barracks where the officer in command had mercifully given them food and drink. As soon as they had eaten and drunk, they tried to tell their story; but this was so amazing, not to say incredible, that the officer in command had thought it prudent to send for the superintendent of gendarmerie, who in turn had the men conveyed to the Hôtel de Ville, there to be brought before the Representative of the Convention on special mission who sat with the Committee of Public Safety. And now Lieutenant Godet stood alone to face the Committee; the others had been handed back to the gendarmerie to be dealt with later on. The representative on special mission who sat with the two other Members of the Committee at the table covered with the tattered green cloth, had questioned Godet, and he thereupon embarked upon the story of this amazing adventure. He began by relating the events which three days ago had set the quiet little commune of Laragne seething with excitement. He told of the arrival of the squad of soldiers in magnificent uniforms, under the command of an officer more superb than anything that had ever been seen in the countryside before. He told of the perquisition in the house of Citizen Colombe the grocer, by those magnificent soldiers, of the finding there by them of certain valuables belonging to the ci-devant Frontenacs, valuables which he himself had vainly searched for in the château, the evening before. He told of the arrest of young Colombe: of the high-handed manner in which the superb officer had relieved him, Godet, of his command, and ordered him and his men, together with the ci-devant Frontenac, to join his squad, and to march with him out of Laragne. He had told it all with a wealth of detail, and the members of the Committee had listened in silence and with rapt interest.

But now the man at the table who was the representative on special mission, and who appeared chief in authority, broke in with an exclamation that was almost one of rage.

“And do you mean to tell me, citizen lieutenant,” he said in a harsh, rasping voice, “that you could mistake a lot of English spies⁠—for that is what they were, you may take it from me⁠—that you could mistake them, I say, for soldiers of our army. Where were your eyes?”

Lieutenant Godet gave a shrug which he hoped would pass for unconcern. In reality he felt physically sick; a prey to overwhelming terror. At first, when he and his men had come in sight of the city, they had felt nothing but relief to see the end of what had been almost martyrdom. It was only afterwards, when he found himself in this narrow room, with its whitewashed walls and its silence, and face to face with those three men, that fear had entered his heart. He felt like an animal in a cage⁠—a mouse looking into the pale, piercing eyes of a cat. He passed his tongue once or twice over his parched lips before he gave reply.

“I was not the only one, citizen,” he said sullenly, “who was deceived. The whole commune of Laragne was at the heels of those soldiers. My own men were mustered before the pseudo-captain and heard him give words of command.”

“But Englishmen, citizen lieutenant,” the man at the table argued; “Englishmen! Their appearance! Their speech!”

“They spoke as you and I would, Citizen Chauvelin,” Godet retorted, still sullenly, “As for appearance, one man is like another. I could not be expected to know every officer of our army by sight.”

“But you said they were splendidly dressed!”

“They were. I knew the uniform well enough. Had there been a doubtful button or a galloon wanting I should have spotted it.

“But so clean!” one of the others at the table remarked with a sigh, that might have been of envy, “so magnificent!”

“I knew that there were some compagnies d’élite,” the lieutenant rejoined, “attached to certain regiments. How could I guess?”

“It might have been better for you, if you had,” the man in the centre remarked dryly.

Godet’s wan face took on a more ashen hue; again he passed his tongue over his parched lips.

“Haven’t we had enough of this?” one of the others at the table now put in impatiently. “We are satisfied that those English spies, or whatever they were, acted with amazing effrontery, which makes me think that perhaps they are a part of that gang that we all know of, and of which Citizen Chauvelin spoke just now. We are also satisfied that Citizen Lieutenant Godet did not show that acumen which an officer in his responsible position should have done. What we want to know now is, what happened after the pseudo-captain of the so-called 33rd division had arrested that young Colombe and marched out of Laragne?”

“And in your interest, citizen lieutenant,” the man in the centre rejoined sternly, “I advise you to make a statement that is truthful in every detail.”

“Had I wished to tell lies,” the soldier retorted sullenly, “I shouldn’t be here now. I should have⁠—”

“No matter,” the other broke in curtly, “what you would have done. The State desires to know what you did.”

“Well!” Lieutenant Godet began after a moment or two during which he appeared to collect his thoughts. “We marched out of Laragne in the direction of Serres. The captain⁠—I still, of course, looked upon him as a captain⁠—had so disposed us that I and my own men were between two squads of his. We were footsore, all of us, because we had had three days’ tramping in the dust, one day battling against hard wind, another with long hours spent in scouring the château of those traitors Frontenacs; we were also very hungry. Remember that we had been dragged out of our beds in the early morning, and not given a chance of getting a bite or drink before starting on the march. But they, the others, were fresh as if they had just come out of barracks with their bellies full.⁠ ⁠… They marched along at a swinging pace, and it was as much as we could do to keep step with them.”

The man’s voice became somewhat more steady as he talked. The note of terror which had been so conspicuous in it at first had given place to one of dull resentment. Encouraged by the obvious interest which his story had evoked in his hearers, he resumed more glibly:

“About half a league north of Laragne, a bridle-path branches off the high road; into this the captain ordered his company to turn, and we continued to plod along through the dust and in the midday heat, till we came to a tumbledown cottage by the roadside; a cottage flanked by a dilapidated shed, and a bit of garden all overgrown with weeds. Here a halt was called, and the prisoners were ordered out of the wagon. A moment or two later a woman appeared at the cottage door, some words were exchanged between her and the captain, and subsequently, when order to march was given, the prisoners marched along with us; the wagon and horses having been left behind at the cottage.”

“Didn’t you think this very strange, citizen lieutenant?” one of the men at the table asked; “a wagon and horses which you would naturally presume belonged to the State, being thus left at a tumbledown roadside cottage?”

“Whatever I may have thought,” the lieutenant replied, “it was not my place to make observations to my superior officer.”

“Superior officer!” the man in the centre remarked, with a gesture of contemptuous wrath.

“I think, Citizen Chauvelin,” the accused now put in a little more firmly, “that you are unnecessarily hard on me. There was really nothing to indicate⁠—”

But the other broke in with a vicious snarl:

“Nothing to indicate⁠—? Nothing? The eyes of a patriot should be sharp enough to detect a spy or a traitor through any disguise⁠—”

He paused abruptly, and cast a quick, inquisitorial glance at his two colleagues first, then at the soldier before him. Had he detected a trace, a sign, a flicker of the eyelid that betrayed knowledge of his own past? of the times⁠—numberless now⁠—that he too had been hoodwinked by those bold adventurers who called themselves the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and by their chief whose prowess in the art of disguise had marked some of the most humiliating hours in Chauvelin’s career? Calais, Boulogne, Nantes, Paris; each of those great cities had a record of the Terrorist’s discomfiture when brought face to face with that mysterious and elusive Scarlet Pimpernel. Even, now crushed in the hot palm of his hand, he held a scrap of paper which had revealed the author of the plot to which that fool Lieutenant Godet had fallen a victim⁠—just as he, himself, Chauvelin, had done⁠—just like that⁠—and so many times⁠—. The penalty for him had always been more humiliation, a further fall from the original high place which he had once occupied in Paris: and with it the knowledge that one day the masters of France would tire of his failures. Ah! he knew that well enough, he knew that they would tire, and then they would crush him as they had crushed others, whose only crime, like his, had been failure.

His only claim to immunity, so far, had been the fact that he alone, of all the members of the National Assembly, of all the members of Committees, or of the Executive, knew who the Scarlet Pimpernel really was; he had seen him without disguise; he knew him by name, not only him but some of his more important followers; and when some of the ferocious tyrants, who for the time being were the masters of France, did at times loudly demand the suppression of Citizen Chauvelin, for incompetence that amounted to treason, there were always others who pleaded for him because of that knowledge. Many felt that with the death of Chauvelin, the last hope of capturing that band of English spies would have to be abandoned; and so they pleaded for his retention and their fellow-tyrants allowed him another few months’ grace so that he might accomplish that which they knew was the great purpose of his life. And whenever in the opinion of those bloodthirsty tigers, who held France under their domination, some outlying provincial districts had need of what they called “purging from the pestilence of traitors,” whenever wholesale arrests, perquisitions, wholesale death-sentences or brutal massacres were the order of the day, Citizen Chauvelin was sent down with special powers, always in the vain hope that the Scarlet Pimpernel, emboldened by success, would fall into the trap perpetually set for him. The English spy’s predilection for aristos, his sympathies so quickly aroused when traitors happened to be women or young children, was sure to draw his activities to any region where prisons were full and the guillotine kept busy.

Thus it was that Citizen Chauvelin had been sent to Orange. The Southern provinces of France had been left far too long to welter in a morass of treason; there were veritable nests of traitors in the châteaux and farms of Provence and Dauphiné. The country had to be purged: the traitors extirpated; the magnificent Law of the Suspect be set in motion to do this cleansing process. Any man who ventured to criticize the government, who complained of taxation or restrictions was a traitor; any man or woman who owned more than they needed for bare subsistence, who refused to pour of their surplus into the lap of patriots, was a traitor; and the country must be purged of them, until the dictatorship of the proletariat was firmly established, until every man, woman and child in the whole of France had been dragged down to the same level of mental and physical wreckage.

There had been a dramatic pause after Chauvelin’s outburst of contemptuous wrath; for a minute or two, while the old clock up on the wall ticked away with slow monotony a strange silence remained hanging over the scene. Whatever the other three men may have known or remembered of the noted Terrorist’s past history, they thought it wiser to say nothing. In these days of universal brotherhood and Liberty, every man in France was frightened of his neighbour. The time had come when the lustful tigers, satiated with the blood of those whom they deemed their enemies, had turned, thirsting, for that of their whilom friends. The makers of the Terror had started digging their fangs into each other’s throats. The victory now was to the most ferocious. After the Girondins, Danton, he, who had ordered the September massacres, two and a half years ago, had had to yield to a more vengeful, more merciless power than his own.

Chauvelin knew that. The victory today was to the most ferocious. He who would sacrifice friends, brother, sister, child, was the true patriot; the man who stayed his hand in face of a revolting crime that would put a wild beast to the blush, was unworthy the name of citizen of France. Therefore death to him. Death to the weakling. To the Moderate. This was the era of the Universal Brotherhood of Death.

What chance then had this unfortunate Lieutenant Godet now? brought to justice⁠—save the mark!⁠—before a man who knew that to show weakness was to court death. No wonder that all the swagger and the arrogance which made him but a day or two ago the terror of a lot of peasants at Sisteron or Laragne, was knocked out of him, by a mere glance from those pale, piercing eyes. And he⁠—a mere notary’s clerk born and bred in the depth of Dauphiné, and thrust into the army, as a mule is thrust into harness⁠—knew nothing of Paris save from hearsay, and nothing of the men whose word had even sent a king and a queen to the scaffold. He knew nothing of Citizen Chauvelin, save that he was a man of power, before whose piercing glance and tricolour sash, every man instinctively cringed and trembled. He knew nothing of Chauvelin’s tussles with those same English spies who had so effectually led him, Godet, by the nose; nothing of Citizen Chauvelin’s past life, very little of the present. He was just a mouse in the power of a cat; allowed a little freedom just now, while he told his tale of failure.

“Continue, citizen lieutenant,” Chauvelin now said more calmly. “We are listening.”

“Let me see,” Godet rejoined vaguely, “where was I?”