El Dorado: An Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy [reading books for 7 year olds txt] 📗
- Author: Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy
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“Percy!” she exclaimed with tender and passionate reproach.
“I know—I know, dear,” he murmured, “what a brute I am! Ah, God did a cruel thing the day that He threw me in your path. To think that once—not so very long ago—we were drifting apart, you and I. You would have suffered less, dear heart, if we had continued to drift.”
Then as he saw that his bantering tone pained her, he covered her hands with kisses, entreating her forgiveness.
“Dear heart,” he said merrily, “I deserve that you should leave me to rot in this abominable cage. They haven’t got me yet, little woman, you know; I am not yet dead—only d—d sleepy at times. But I’ll cheat them even now, never fear.”
“How, Percy—how?” she moaned, for her heart was aching with intolerable pain; she knew better than he did the precautions which were being taken against his escape, and she saw more clearly than he realised it himself the terrible barrier set up against that escape by ever encroaching physical weakness.
“Well, dear,” he said simply, “to tell you the truth I have not yet thought of that all-important ‘how.’ I had to wait, you see, until you came. I was so sure that you would come! I have succeeded in putting on paper all my instructions for Ffoulkes and the others. I will give them to you anon. I knew that you would come, and that I could give them to you; until then I had but to think of one thing, and that was of keeping body and soul together. My chance of seeing you was to let them have their will with me. Those brutes were sure, sooner or later, to bring you to me, that you might see the caged fox worn down to imbecility, eh? That you might add your tears to their persuasion, and succeed where they have failed.”
He laughed lightly with an unstrained note of gaiety, only Marguerite’s sensitive ears caught the faint tone of bitterness which rang through the laugh.
“Once I know that the little King of France is safe,” he said, “I can think of how best to rob those d—d murderers of my skin.”
Then suddenly his manner changed. He still held her with one arm closely to, him, but the other now lay across the table, and the slender, emaciated hand was tightly clutched. He did not look at her, but straight ahead; the eyes, unnaturally large now, with their deep purple rims, looked far ahead beyond the stone walls of this grim, cruel prison.
The passionate lover, hungering for his beloved, had vanished; there sat the man with a purpose, the man whose firm hand had snatched men and women and children from death, the reckless enthusiast who tossed his life against an ideal.
For a while he sat thus, while in his drawn and haggard face she could trace every line formed by his thoughts—the frown of anxiety, the resolute setting of the lips, the obstinate look of will around the firm jaw. Then he turned again to her.
“My beautiful one,” he said softly, “the moments are very precious. God knows I could spend eternity thus with your dear form nestling against my heart. But those d—d murderers will only give us half an hour, and I want your help, my beloved, now that I am a helpless cur caught in their trap. Will you listen attentively, dear heart, to what I am going to say?
“Yes, Percy, I will listen,” she replied.
“And have you the courage to do just what I tell you, dear?”
“I would not have courage to do aught else,” she said simply.
“It means going from hence to-day, dear heart, and perhaps not meeting again. Hush-sh-sh, my beloved,” he said, tenderly placing his thin hand over her mouth, from which a sharp cry of pain had well-nigh escaped; “your exquisite soul will be with me always. Try—try not to give way to despair. Why! your love alone, which I see shining from your dear eyes, is enough to make a man cling to life with all his might. Tell me! will you do as I ask you?”
And she replied firmly and courageously:
“I will do just what you ask, Percy.”
“God bless you for your courage, dear. You will have need of it.”
CHAPTER XXIX. FOR THE SAKE OF THAT HELPLESS INNOCENT
The next instant he was kneeling on the floor and his hands were wandering over the small, irregular flagstones immediately underneath the table. Marguerite had risen to her feet; she watched her husband with intent and puzzled eyes; she saw him suddenly pass his slender fingers along a crevice between two flagstones, then raise one of these slightly and from beneath it extract a small bundle of papers, each carefully folded and sealed. Then he replaced the stone and once more rose to his knees.
He gave a quick glance toward the doorway. That corner of his cell, the recess wherein stood the table, was invisible to any one who had not actually crossed the threshold. Reassured that his movements could not have been and were not watched, he drew Marguerite closer to him.
“Dear heart,” he whispered, “I want to place these papers in your care. Look upon them as my last will and testament. I succeeded in fooling those brutes one day by pretending to be willing to accede to their will. They gave me pen and ink and paper and wax, and I was to write out an order to my followers to bring the Dauphin hither. They left me in peace for one quarter of an hour, which gave me time to write three letters—one for Armand and the other two for Ffoulkes, and to hide them under the flooring of my cell. You see, dear, I knew that you would come and that I could give them to you then.”
He paused, and that ghost of a smile once more hovered round his lips. He was thinking of that day when he had fooled Heron and Chauvelin into the belief that their devilry had succeeded, and that they had brought the reckless adventurer to his knees. He smiled at the recollection of their wrath when they knew that they had been tricked, and after a quarter of an hour’s anxious waiting found a few sheets of paper scribbled over with incoherent words or satirical verse, and the prisoner having apparently snatched ten minutes’ sleep, which seemingly had restored to him quite a modicum of his strength.
But of this he told Marguerite nothing, nor of the insults and the humiliation which he had had to bear in consequence of that trick. He did not tell her that directly afterwards the order went forth that the prisoner was to be kept on bread and water in the future, nor that Chauvelin had stood by laughing and jeering while...
No! he did not tell her all that; the recollection of it all had still the
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