time before he could continue.
"`After them, my men,' shouts the captain," he said after a while,
"`remember the
reward; after them, they cannot have gone far!'
And with that he rushes through the gate followed by his dozen soldiers."
"But it was too late!" shouted the crowd, excitedly.
"They never got them!"
"Curse that Grospierre for his folly!"
"He deserved his fate!"
"Fancy not examining those casks properly!"
But these sallies seemed to amuse Citoyen Bibot exceedingly;
he laughed until his sides ached, and the tears streamed down his
cheeks.
"Nay, nay!" he said at last, "those aristos weren't in the
cart; the driver was not the Scarlet Pimpernel!"
"What?"
"No! The captain of the guard was that
damned Englishman
in
disguise, and
everyone of his soldiers aristos!"
The crowd this time said nothing: the story certainly savoured
of the supernatural, and though the Republic had abolished God, it had
not quite succeeded in killing the fear of the supernatural in the
hearts of the people. Truly that Englishman must be the devil himself.
The sun was sinking low down in the west. Bibot prepared himself
to close the gates.
"EN AVANT The carts," he said.
Some dozen covered carts were drawn up in a row, ready to
leave town, in order to fetch the produce from the country close by,
for market the next morning. They were
mostly well known to Bibot,
as they went through his gate twice every day on their way to and from
the town. He spoke to one or two of their drivers--
mostly women--and
was at great pains to examine the inside of the carts.
"You never know," he would say, "and I'm not going to be
caught like that fool Grospierre."
The women who drove the carts usually spent their day on the
Place de la Greve, beneath the
platform of the guillotine,
knittingand gossiping,
whilst they watched the rows of tumbrils arriving with
the victims the Reign of Terror claimed every day. It was great fun
to see the aristos arriving for the
reception of Madame la Guillotine,
and the places close by the
platform were very much sought after.
Bibot, during the day, had been on duty on the Place. He recognized
most of the old hats, "tricotteuses," as they were called, who sat there
and knitted,
whilst head after head fell beneath the knife, and they
themselves got quite bespattered with the blood of those cursed aristos.
"He! la mere!" said Bibot to one of these
horrible hags,
"what have you got there?"
He had seen her earlier in the day, with her
knitting and the
whip of her cart close beside her. Now she had fastened a row of
curly locks to the whip handle, all colours, from gold to silver, fair
to dark, and she stroked them with her huge, bony fingers as she
laughed at Bibot.
"I made friends with Madame Guillotine's lover," she said with
a
coarse laugh, "he cut these off for me from the heads as they rolled
down. He has promised me some more to-morrow, but I don't know if I
shall be at my usual place."
"Ah! how is that, la mere?" asked Bibot, who, hardened soldier that
he was, could not help shuddering at the awful loathsomeness of this
semblance of a woman, with her
ghastlytrophy on the handle of her whip.
"My
grandson has got the small-pox," she said with a jerk of
her thumb towards the inside of her cart, "some say it's the
plague!
If it is, I sha'n't be allowed to come into Paris to-morrow."
At the first mention of the word small-pox, Bibot had stepped
hastilybackwards, and when the old hag spoke of the
plague,
he retreated from her as fast as he could.
"Curse you!" he muttered,
whilst the whole crowd
hastilyavoided the cart, leaving it
standing all alone in the midst of the
place.
The old hag laughed.
"Curse you, citoyen, for being a coward," she said. "Bah!
what a man to be afraid of sickness."
"MORBLEU! the
plague!"
Everyone was awe-struck and silent, filled with
horror for the
loathsome
malady, the one thing which still had the power to arouse
terror and
disgust in these
savage, brutalised creatures.
"Get out with you and with your
plague-stricken brood!"
shouted Bibot, hoarsely.
And with another rough laugh and
coarse jest, the old hag
whipped up her lean nag and drove her cart out of the gate.
This
incident had spoilt the afternoon. The people were
terrified of these two
horrible curses, the two maladies which nothing
could cure, and which were the precursors of an awful and lonely
death. They hung about the barricades, silent and
sullen for a while,
eyeing one another suspiciously, avoiding each other as if by
instinct, lest the
plague lurked already in their midst. Presently,
as in the case of Grospierre, a captain of the guard appeared
suddenly. But he was known to Bibot, and there was no fear of his
turning out to be a sly Englishman in
disguise.
"A cart,. . ." he shouted
breathlessly, even before he had
reached the gates.
"What cart?" asked Bibot, roughly.
"Driven by an old hag. . . . A covered cart. . ."
"There were a dozen. . ."
"An old hag who said her son had the
plague?"
"Yes. . ."
"You have not let them go?"
"MORBLEU!" said Bibot, whose
purple cheeks had suddenly
become white with fear.
"The cart contained the CI-DEVANT Comtesse de Tourney and
her two children, all of them traitors and condemned to death."
"And their driver?" muttered Bibot, as a
superstitious shudder
ran down his spine.
"SACRE TONNERRE," said the captain, "but it is feared that
it was that
accursed Englishman himself--the Scarlet Pimpernel."
CHAPTER II DOVER: "THE FISHERMAN'S REST"
In the kitchen Sally was
extremely busy--saucepans and
frying-pans were
standing in rows on the
gigantichearth, the huge
stock-pot stood in a corner, and the jack turned with slow
deliberation, and presented
alternately to the glow every side of a
noble sirloin of beef. The two little kitchen-maids
bustled around,
eager to help, hot and panting, with cotton sleeves well tucked up
above the dimpled elbows, and giggling over some private jokes of
their own,
whenever Miss Sally's back was turned for a moment. And
old Jemima, stolid in
temper and solid in bulk, kept up a long and
subdued
grumble, while she stirred the stock-pot methodically over the
fire.
"What ho! Sally!" came in
cheerful if none too melodious
accents from the coffee-room close by.
"Lud bless my soul!" exclaimed Sally, with a good-humoured
laugh, "what be they all
wanting now, I wonder!"
"Beer, of course,"
grumbled Jemima, "you don't `xpect Jimmy
Pitkin to `ave done with one tankard, do ye?"
"Mr. `Arry, `e looked
uncommon thirsty too," simpered Martha,
one of the little kitchen-maids; and her beady black eyes twinkled as
they met those of her
companion,
whereupon both started on a round of
short and suppressed giggles.
Sally looked cross for a moment, and
thoughtfully rubbed her
hands against her shapely hips; her palms were itching,
evidently, to
come in
contact with Martha's rosy cheeks--but
inherent good-humour
prevailed, and with a pout and a shrug of the shoulders, she turned
her attention to the fried potatoes.