ELDORADO. Emma Orczy
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brilliant life in abject shame, sorrow, and degradation. The memory had swiftly surged up before him of that night when he all but rescued King Louis and his family from this same miserable prison: the guard had been bribed, the keeper corrupted, everything had been prepared, save the reckoning with the one irresponsible factor — chance!
He had failed then and had tried again, and again had failed; a fortune had been his reward if he had succeeded. He had failed, but even now, when his footsteps echoed along the flagged courtyard, over which an unfortunate King and Queen had walked on their way to their last ignominious Calvary, he hugged himself with the satisfying thought that where he had failed at least no one else had succeeded.
Whether that meddlesome English adventurer, who called himself the Scarlet Pimpernel, had planned the rescue of King Louis or of Queen Marie Antoinette at any time or not — that he did not know; but on one point at least he was more than ever determined, and that was that no power on earth should snatch from him the golden prize offered by Austria for the rescue of the little Dauphin.
“I would sooner see the child perish, if I cannot save him myself,” was the burning thought in this man’s tortuous brain. “And let that accursed Englishman look to himself and to his d — — d confederates,” he added, muttering a fierce oath beneath his breath.
A winding, narrow stone stair, another length or two of corridor, and his guide’s shuffling footsteps paused beside a low iron-studded door let into the solid stone. De Batz dismissed his ill-clothed guide and pulled the iron bell-handle which hung beside the door.
The bell gave forth a dull and broken clang, which seemed like an echo of the wails of sorrow that peopled the huge building with their weird and monotonous sounds.
De Batz — a thoroughly unimaginative person — waited patiently beside the door until it was opened from within, and he was confronted by a tall stooping figure, wearing a greasy coat of snuff-brown cloth, and holding high above his head a lanthorn that threw its feeble light on de Batz’ jovial face and form.
“It is even I, citizen Heron,” he said, breaking in swiftly on the other’s ejaculation of astonishment, which threatened to send his name echoing the whole length of corridors and passages, until round every corner of the labyrinthine house of sorrow the murmur would be borne on the wings of the cold night breeze: “Citizen Heron is in parley with ci-devant Baron de Batz!”
A fact which would have been equally unpleasant for both these worthies.
“Enter!” said Heron curtly.
He banged the heavy door to behind his visitor; and de Batz, who seemed to know his way about the place, walked straight across the narrow landing to where a smaller door stood invitingly open.
He stepped boldly in, the while citizen Heron put the lanthorn down on the floor of the couloir, and then followed his nocturnal visitor into the room.
CHAPTER VI
THE COMMITTEE’S AGENT
It was a narrow, ill-ventilated place, with but one barred window that gave on the courtyard. An evil-smelling lamp hung by a chain from the grimy ceiling, and in a corner of the room a tiny iron stove shed more unpleasant vapour than warm glow around.
There was but little furniture: two or three chairs, a table which was littered with papers, and a corner-cupboard — the open doors of which revealed a miscellaneous collection — bundles of papers, a tin saucepan, a piece of cold sausage, and a couple of pistols. The fumes of stale tobacco-smoke hovered in the air, and mingled most unpleasantly with those of the lamp above, and of the mildew that penetrated through the walls just below the roof.
Heron pointed to one of the chairs, and then sat down on the other, close to the table, on which he rested his elbow. He picked up a short-stemmed pipe, which he had evidently laid aside at the sound of the bell, and having taken several deliberate long-drawn puffs from it, he said abruptly:
“Well, what is it now?”
In the meanwhile de Batz had made himself as much at home in this uncomfortable room as he possibly could. He had deposited his hat and cloak on one rickety rush-bottomed chair, and drawn another close to the fire. He sat down with one leg crossed over the other, his podgy be-ringed hand wandering with loving gentleness down the length of his shapely calf.
He was nothing if not complacent, and his complacency seemed highly to irritate his friend Heron.
“Well, what is it?” reiterated the latter, drawing his visitor’s attention roughly to himself by banging his fist on the table. “Out with it! What do you want? Why have you come at this hour of the night to compromise me, I suppose — bring your own d — d neck and mine into the same noose — what?”
“Easy, easy, my friend,” responded de Batz imperturbably; “waste not so much time in idle talk. Why do I usually come to see you? Surely you have had no cause to complain hitherto of the unprofitableness of my visits to you?”
“They will have to be still more profitable to me in the future,” growled the other across the table. “I have more power now.”
“I know you have,” said de Batz suavely. “The new decree? What? You may denounce whom you please, search whom you please, arrest whom you please, and send whom you please to the Supreme Tribunal without giving them the slightest chance of escape.”
“Is it in order to tell me all this that you have come to see me at this hour of the night?” queried Heron with a sneer.
“No; I came at this hour of the night because I surmised that in the future you and your hell-hounds would be so busy all day ‘beating up game for the guillotine’ that the only time you would have at the disposal of your friends would be the late hours of the night. I saw you at the theatre a couple of hours ago, friend Heron; I didn’t think to find you yet abed.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“Rather,” retorted de Batz blandly, “shall we say, what do YOU want, citizen Heron?”
“For what?
“For my continued immunity at the hands of yourself and your pack?”
Heron pushed his chair brusquely aside and strode across the narrow room deliberately facing the portly figure of de Batz, who with head slightly inclined on one side, his small eyes narrowed till they appeared mere slits in his pockmarked face, was steadily and quite placidly contemplating this inhuman monster who had this very day been given uncontrolled power over hundreds of thousands of human lives.
Heron was one of those tall men who look mean in spite of their height. His head was small and narrow, and his hair, which was sparse and lank, fell in untidy strands across his forehead. He stooped slightly from the neck, and his chest, though wide, was hollow between the shoulders. But his legs were big and bony, slightly bent at the knees, like those of an ill-conditioned horse.
The face was thin and the cheeks sunken; the eyes, very large and prominent, had a look in them of cold and ferocious cruelty, a look which contrasted strangely with the weakness and petty greed apparent in the mouth, which was flabby, with full, very red lips, and chin that sloped away to the long thin neck.
Even at this moment as he gazed on de Batz the greed and the cruelty in him were fighting one of those battles the issue of which is always uncertain in men of his stamp.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, “that I am prepared to treat with you any longer. You are an intolerable bit of vermin that has annoyed the Committee of General Security for over two years now. It would be excessively pleasant to crush you once and for all, as one would a buzzing fly.”
“Pleasant, perhaps, but immeasurably foolish,” rejoined de Batz coolly; “you would only get thirty-five livres for my head, and I offer you ten times that amount for the self-same commodity.”
“I