lend a hand in dragging the Abbé Edgeworth into this affair."
De Batz was striving to control his temper: under his breath he muttered the words "Poltroon! Coward!" once or twice. Aloud he said:
"You are afraid?"
"I am a man of peace," the Professor replied.
"I don't believe it," de Batz protested. "No man with decent feeling in him would refuse to render this service. Good God, man! you are not risking your life, not like I and my friends are willing to do. You can help us, I know. You must have a reason — a valid reason — for refusing to do so. As I say, you wouldn't be risking your life —— "
"Not mine, but that of an innocent and a good man."
"What the devil do you mean?"
"You are proposing to throw the Abbé Edgeworth to the wolves."
"I am not. I am proposing to give him the chance of doing his bit in the work of saving the life of his King. He will thank me on his knees for this."
"He probably would, for he is of the stuff that martyrs are made. But I will not help you to send him to his death."
With that he rose, ready to go, and reached for his hat and coat. They hung on a peg just above de Batz's head, and de Batz made no movement to get out of the way.
"Don't go, man," he said earnestly, "not yet. Listen to me. You don't understand. It is all perfectly easy. In less than an hour I shall know who the apostate priest is whom the Convention are sending to His Majesty. I know all those fellows. Most of them are in my pay. They are useful, if distinctly dirty, tool. To substitute our abbé for the man chosen by the Convention will entail no risk, present no difficulties, and will cost me less than the price of a good dinner. Now what do you say?"
"What I said before," the other rejoined firmly. "Whoever accompanies Louis XVI to the guillotine, if he be other than the one chosen by the Convention, will be a marked man. His life will not be worth twelve hours' purchase!"
"The guillotine? The guillotine?" de Batz retorted hotly. "Who talks of the guillotine and of Louis XVI in one breath? I tell you, man, that our King will never mount the steps of the guillotine. There are five hundred of us worth a hundred thousand of Santerre's armed men who will drag him out of the clutches of those assassins."
"May I have my coat?" was the Professor's quiet rejoinder.
His calmness brought de Batz's temper to boiling point. He jumped to his feet, snatched down the Professor's coat from its peg and threw it down with a vicious snarl on the nearest chair. The Professor, seemingly quite unperturbed, picked it up, put it on and with a polite "Au revoir, Monsieur le Baron!" to which the latter did not deign to respond, he walked quietly out of the restaurant.
CHAPTER THREE
The League
It was about an hour or two later. In a sparsely furnished room on the second floor of an apartment house in the Rue du Bac five men had met: four of them were sitting about on more or less rickety chairs, while the fifth stood by the window, gazing out into the dusk and on the gloomy outlook of the narrow street. He was tall above the average, was this individual, still dressed in the black, well-tailored suit which he had worn during his dinner in company with the Austrian Baron at Février's, and which suggested a professional man: a professor perhaps, at the university.
The outlook through the window was indeed gloomy. But outside depression did not apparently weigh on the spirits of the men. There was no look of despondency on their faces, rather the reverse, they looked eager and excited, and the back of the tall man in black with the broad shoulders and narrow hips suggested energy rather than dejection. After a time he turned away from the window and found a perch on the edge of a broken-down truckle bed that stood in a corner of the room.
"Well!" he began addressing the others collectively, "you heard what that madman said?"
"Most of it," one of them replied.
"He has a crack-brained scheme of stirring up five hundred madcaps into shouting and rushing the carriage in which the King will be driven from prison to the scaffold. Five hundred lunatics egged on by that candidate for Bedlam, trying to reach that carriage which will be escorted by eighty thousand armed men! It would be ludicrous if it were not so tragic."
"One wonders," remarked one of them, "who those wretched five hundred are."
"Young royalists," the other replied, "all of them known to the Committees. As a matter of fact I happen to know that most of them, if not all, will receive a visit from the police during the early hours of the morning, and will not be allowed to leave their apartments till after the execution of the King."
"Heavens, man!" the eldest of the four men exclaimed, "how did you know that?"
"It was quite simple, my dear fellow, and quite easy. The crowd filed out as you know directly the final verdict was proclaimed. It was three o'clock in the morning. Everybody there was almost delirious with excitement. No one took notice of anybody else. The President and the other judges went into the refreshment-room which is reserved for them. You know the one I mean. It is in the Tour de César, at the back of the Hall of Justice. It has no door, only an archway. There was still quite a crowd moving along the corridors. I got as near the archway as I could, and I heard Vergniaud give the order that every inhabitant of the city, known to have royalist or even moderate tendencies, must be under police surveillance in their own apartments until midday."
"Percy, you are wonderful!" the young man exclaimed fervently.
"Tony, you are an idiot!" the other retorted with a laugh.
"Then we may take it that our Austrian friend's scheme will just fizzle out like a damp squib?"
"You had never thought, had you, Blakeney, that we...."
"God forbid!" Sir Percy broke in emphatically. "I wouldn't risk your precious lives in what common sense tells me is an impossible scheme. It may be quixotic. I dare say it is; but what in Heaven's name does that megalomaniac hope to accomplish? To break through a cordon of troops ten deep? Folly, of course! But even supposing he and his five hundred did succeed in approaching the carriage, what do they hope to do afterwards! Do they propose to fight the entire garrison of the city which is a hundred and thirty thousand strong? Does he imagine for a moment that the entire population of Paris will rise as one man and suddenly take up the cause of kingship? Folly, of course! Folly of the worst type, because the first outcome of a hand-to-hand fight in the streets would be the murder of the King in the open street by some unknown hand. Isn't that so?"
They all agreed. Their chief was not in the habit of talking lengthily on any point. That he did so on this occasion was proof of how keenly he felt about the whole thing. Did he wish to justify before these devoted followers of his, his inaction with regard to the condemned King? I do not think so. He was accustomed to blind obedience — that was indeed the factor that held the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel so indissolubly together — and three of the four men who were here with him to-day, Lord Anthony Dewhurst, Sir Andrew Ffoulkes and Lord Hastings, were his most enthusiastic followers.
Be that as it may, he did speak lengthily on this occasion, and placed before his friends a clear exposé of the situation on the morrow as far as any attempt at rescuing the King was concerned. But there was something more. The others knew there was something else coming, or their chief would not have given them the almost imperceptible signal when he left the restaurant to wait for him in this squalid apartment, which had for some time been their accustomed meeting place. They waited in silence and presently Sir Percy spoke again:
"Putting, therefore, aside the question of the King whose fate, of course, horrifies us all, the man we have got to think of now is that unfortunate priest whom de Batz wants to drag forcibly into this scheme, and who will surely lose his head if our League does not intervene."
"The