counter-revolutionaries, who believe you to be one of themselves. Your service to me at Coblentz was really a service to the revolutionary party. I published it in Committee on my return, and it will serve now as a guarantee of your good faith. It would be readily believed that your presence here, your association with certain counter-revolutionaries, results from an arrangement made between us at Coblentz. Do you understand?'
'Oh, perfectly. And I thank you.' André-Louis was ironical. 'But, on the whole, I think the guillotine will be cleaner.'
'I see that you don't understand at all. I am not asking you to do anything more than accept enrolment. It is merely so as to enable you to get away.'
André-Louis frowned as he stared. 'But you, Isaac? What, then, of you? If you sponsor me, and I fail to perform the duties of the office; if I use it to make my escape? What, then, of you?'
'Do not let that concern you.'
'But it must. You will endanger your own neck.'
Slowly Le Chapelier shook his head. He smiled with tight lips. 'I shall not be here to answer. I shall have ceased to count.' Instinctively he lowered his voice. 'I am about to start for England on a secret mission to Pitt, in an endeavour to detach the English from the Coalition. It is the last reputable service which in the present pass a man of decency may render this unfortunate country. When it is done, whether it succeeds or not, I do not think that I shall return. For here,' he added bitterly, 'there will be nothing more that an honest man can do. That is another secret, André. I disclose it, so that you may know precisely what I offer.'
André-Louis took only a moment to consider.
'In the circumstances, I should be worse than a fool if I refused, or if I forgot to count myself lucky in your friendship, Isaac.'
Le Chapelier shrugged aside the commendation. 'I pay my debts where I can.' He returned to his writing-table. 'I have here your civic card. I'll prepare your commission as an agent of the Public Safety, and have it countersigned as soon as the Committee sits, which will be within the next two hours. You will wait in the antechamber until I send it to you. Armed with it, you must protect yourself.' He held out his hand. 'This time, André, it is good-bye, I think.'
The handclasp between them was firm and tight for a long moment, during which they looked into each other's eyes. Then Le Chapelier took up a bell from the table, and tinkled it.
The usher came in. Le Chapelier, calm and dry of manner, gave his instructions.
'The Citizen Moreau will await my orders in the antechamber. Reconduct him, and send the Citizen Simon to me at once.'
The bow-legged Simon, still deep in bewilderment, entered to receive the belated thanks of the President of the Committee of Public Safety for his diligence in the service of the Nation. Instead, he was offered a cold lecture upon the errors into which a man may be led by acting with excessive zeal upon unreliable information. He was assured that he had perpetrated a series of blunders in the course of discovering a conspiracy which had never existed and in the pursuit of a conspirator who had never been present, and he was warned that any further scaremongering on the subject would be attended by the gravest consequences to himself.
The Citizen Simon, going red and white by turns under that incisive admonition, demanded at the end of it to know if he were to reject the evidence of his own senses. There was a certain feeble attempt at truculence in the posing of the question.
'Undoubtedly,' the President answered him without hesitation, 'since those senses have proved so entirely unreliable. You have maligned two valued servants of the Nation in the persons of Michonis and Cortey, against whom you are unable to make good your accusations, and you have assaulted yet another in the person of the Citizen Moreau. These are grave matters, Citizen Simon. I will remind you that we are no longer in the days of the despots when the lives and liberties of men were at the mercy of any functionary, and I recommend you in future to exercise more circumspection. You are fortunate to be at liberty to go, Citizen Simon.'
The ardent champion of liberty, equality, and fraternity stumbled out of the room as if he had been bludgeoned.
CHAPTER XX
MAMMON
An ironical spice is added to the facts when it is considered how few were the hours that elapsed between the departure of Monsieur de Langéac from Charonne to bear the news of Moreau's end to Hamm and the arrival at Charonne of Monsieur Moreau himself, and how narrow was the margin of time by which so much of what followed might have been averted.
Monsieur de Langéac had set out provided with a forged passport, which was the competent work of Balthazar Roussel, whose accomplishments in penmanship, engraving and other kindred arts rendered him one of the most valuable members of the Baron's little army of underground workers. It was Balthazar Roussel who was responsible for the activities of the little printing-press installed in a cellar of that country house at Charonne, which provided by far the most perfect of all the false paper money of the Republic with which France was flooded to the embarrassment of the Government and the constant depreciation of the currency. That, however, is by the way.
Monsieur de Langéac had been gone not more than six hours and the June twilight was deepening when to that quiet, lonely house at Charonne came at last André-Louis Moreau whom they were mourning.
They were assembled—de Batz, Devaux, Boissancourt, Roussel, and the Marquis de la Guiche—in the library: a long, low chamber, communicating with the dining-room, and with windows opening upon the lawn, beyond which rose the trees of the woods of Bagnolet. They sat there in the gloaming with few words passing, a little band of men too dejected and depressed by failure to address themselves to the conception of any future plans.
Babette de Grandmaison came in to light the candles and draw the curtains.
She had scarcely completed the task when the door opened abruptly, and André-Louis, hat in hand, appeared upon the threshold. There was a general gasp, a moment's astonished pause, then a sudden rising, and Babette ran to fling her arms about the newcomer's neck, kissing him resonantly on one cheek after the other.
'This is to make sure that he is not a ghost,' she informed the company.
The Baron was wringing André-Louis's hand as if he would tear it from the wrist, his dark eyes preternaturally bright. He was dragged forward, bombarded with questions, laughed over, almost wept over, by those men whose gloom had been suddenly cast off.
He explained his escape, made possible by his old friend and associate Le Chapelier and by the fortunate circumstance that the Committee of Public Safety desired no publication of any attempt to rescue the Queen. They were consoled for their failure when they learnt that her deliverance was as good as assured without any exertion of their own. But there were reticences on both sides. André-Louis said nothing of his enrolment as an agent of the Committee of Public Safety; this chiefly because he attached no importance to it. De Batz, in deploring now that Langéac should already have set out for Hamm, said nothing of the conviction in which he had departed. But even as it was, that departure was sufficiently alarming to André-Louis.
'He will inform them that I have been arrested!'
And upon that he vowed that unless a messenger could be found upon the morrow who would so ride as to reach Hamm if possible ahead of Langéac, he would set out himself to return to Westphalia.
From this it followed that early next morning de Batz accompanied him back to Paris, in quest of the necessary messenger. They began by paying a visit to Pomelles at Bourg Égalité—the old Bourg La Reine—and here, providentially, as it seemed, they found a courier from d'Entragues on the point of setting out to return to Hamm. His departure was delayed no longer than it took André-Louis to write a letter to reassure Aline and his godfather on the subject of his fate.
This done, he remained with de Batz in Paris so as to keep an appointment on the morrow with the Representative Delaunay