The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel | Page 9

For two or
three minutes the din was quite deafening. Simonne Evrard pushed her
way up to the forefront of the crowd.
"What is this I hear?" she queried peremptorily. "Who is accusing
citizen Mole? And of what, I should like to know? I am responsible for
everyone inside these apartments...and if citizen Marat were still
alive--"
Chauvelin appeared unaware of all the confusion and of the woman's
protestations. He pushed his way through the crowd to the corner of the
anteroom where Mole stood, crouching and hunched up, his grimy
hands idly fingering the papers which Chauvelin had returned to him a
moment ago. Otherwise he did not move.
He stood, silent and sullen; and when Chauvelin, who had succeeded in
mastering his emotion, gave the peremptory command: "Take this man
to the depot at once. And do not allow him one instant out of your
sight!" he made no attempt at escape.
He allowed Hebert and the men to seize him, to lead him away. He
followed without a word, without a struggle. His massive figure was
hunched up like that of an old man; his hands, which still clung to his
identity papers, trembled slightly like those of a man who is very
frightened and very helpless. The men of the Surete handled him very
roughly, but he made no protest. The woman Evrard did all the
protesting, vowing that the people would not long tolerate such tyranny.
She even forced her way up to Hebert. With a gesture of fury she tried
to strike him in the face, and continued, with a loud voice, her insults
and objurgations, until, with a movement of his bayonet, he pushed her
roughly out of the way.

After that Paul Mole, surrounded by the guard, was led without
ceremony out of the house. Chauvelin gazed after him as if he had been
brought face to face with a ghoul.
V
Chauvelin hurried to the depot. After those few seconds wherein he had
felt dazed, incredulous, almost under a spell, he had quickly regained
the mastery of his nerves, and regained, too, that intense joy which
anticipated triumph is wont to give.
In the out-at-elbows, half-starved servant of the murdered Terrorist,
citizen Chauvelin, of the Committee of Public Safety, had recognised
his arch enemy, that meddlesome and adventurous Englishman who
chose to hide his identity under the pseudonym of the Scarlet
Pimpernel. He knew that he could reckon on Hebert; his orders not to
allow the prisoner one moment out of sight would of a certainty be
strictly obeyed.
Hebert, indeed, a few moments later, greeted his chief outside the doors
of the depot with the welcome news that Paul Mole was safely under
lock and key.
"You had no trouble with him?" Chauvelin queried, with ill-concealed
eagerness.
"No, no! citizen, no trouble," was Hebert's quick reply. "He seems to be
a well-known rogue in these parts," he continued with a complacent
guffaw; "and some of his friends tried to hustle us at the corner of the
Rue de Tourraine; no doubt with a view to getting the prisoner away.
But we were too strong for them, and Paul Mole is now sulking in his
cell and still protesting that his arrest is an outrage against the liberty of
the people."
Chauvelin made no further remark. He was obviously too excited to
speak. Pushing past Hebert and the men of the Surete who stood about
the dark and narrow passages of the depot, he sought the Commissary
of the Section in the latter's office.

It was now close upon ten o'clock. The citizen Commissary Cuisinier
had finished his work for the day and was preparing to go home and to
bed. He was a family man, had been a respectable bourgeois in his day,
and though he was a rank opportunist and had sacrificed not only his
political convictions but also his conscience to the exigencies of the
time, he still nourished in his innermost heart a secret contempt for the
revolutionary brigands who ruled over France at this hour.
To any other man than citizen Chauvelin, the citizen Commissary
would, no doubt, have given a curt refusal to a request to see a prisoner
at this late hour of the evening. But Chauvelin was not a man to be
denied, and whilst muttering various objections in his ill-kempt beard,
Cuisinier, nevertheless, gave orders that the citizen was to be conducted
at once to the cells.
Paul Mole had in truth turned sulky. The turnkey vowed that the
prisoner had hardly stirred since first he had been locked up in the
common cell. He sat in a corner at the end of the bench, with his face
turned to the wall, and paid no heed either to his fellow-prisoners or to
the facetious