The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy [most popular novels .TXT] 📗

In answer to his last threatening words, the lovely Theresia rejoined, more seriously:

“So as to make sure I do not escape either!” And a flash of withering anger shot from her dark eyes on the unromantic figure of her adorer. “Or you, mon ami! You are determined that Mme. Roland’s fate shall overtake me, eh? And no doubt you will be thrilled to the marrow when you see my head fall into your precious salad-bowl. Will yours follow mine, think you? Or will you prefer to emulate citizen Roland’s more romantic ending?”

Even while she spoke, Tallien had been unable to repress a shudder.

“Theresia, in heaven’s name⁠—!” he murmured.

“Bah, mon ami! There is no longer a heaven these days. You and your party have carefully abolished the Hereafter. So, after you and I have taken our walk up the steps of the scaffold⁠—”

“Theresia!”

“Eh, what?” she went on coolly. “Is that not perchance what you have in contemplation? Moncrif, you say, is an avowed traitor. Has openly vilified and insulted your demigod. He has been seen coming to my apartments. Good! I tell you that he is no longer here. But let that pass. He is denounced. Good! Sent to the guillotine. Good again! And Theresia Cabarrus in whose house he tried to seek refuge, much against her will, goes to the guillotine in his company. The prospect may please you, mon ami, because for the moment you are suffering from a senseless attack of jealousy. But I confess that it does not appeal to me.”

The man was silent now; awed against his will. His curiously restless eyes swept over the graceful apparition before him. Insane jealousy was fighting a grim fight in his heart with terror for his beloved. Her argument was a sound one. Even he was bound to admit that. Powerful though he was in the Convention, his influence was as nothing compared with that of Robespierre. And he knew his redoubtable colleague well enough that an insult such as Moncrif had put upon in the Rue St. Honoré this night would never be forgiven, neither in the young hothead himself nor in any of his friends, adherents, or mere pitying sympathisers.

Theresia Cabarrus was clever enough and quick enough to see that she had gained one point.

“Come and kiss my hand,” she said, with a little sight of satisfaction.

This time the man obeyed, without an instant’s hesitation. Already he was down on his knees, repentant and humiliated. She gave him her small, sandalled foot to kiss. After that, Tallien became abject.

“You know that I would die for you, Theresia!” he murmured passionately.

This is the second time tonight that such an assertion had been made in this room. And both had been made in deadly earnest, whilst the fair listener had remained equally indifferent to both. And for the second time tonight, Theresia passed her cool white hand over the bent head of an ardent worshipper, whilst her lips murmured vaguely:

“Foolish! Oh, how foolish! Why do men torture themselves, I wonder, with senseless jealousy?”

Instinctively she turned her small head in the direction of the passage and the little kitchen, where Bertrand Moncrif had found temporary and precarious shelter. Self-pity and a kind of fierce helplessness not untinged with remorse made her eyes appear resentful and hard.

There, in the stuffy little kitchen at the end of the dark, dank passage, love in its pure sense, happiness, brief perhaps but unalloyed, and certainly obscure, lay in wait for her. Here, at her feet, was security in the present turmoil, power, and a fitting background for her beauty and her talents. She did not want to lose Bertrand; indeed, she did not intend to lose him. She sighed a little regretfully as she thought of his good looks, his enthusiasm, his selfless ardour. Then she looked down once more on the narrow shoulders, the lank, colourless hair, the bony hands of the erstwhile lawyer’s clerk to whom she had already promised marriage, and she shuddered a little when she remembered that those same hands into which she had promised to place her own and which now grasped hers in passionate adoration had, of a certainty, signed the order for those execrable massacres which had forever sullied the early days of the Revolution. For a moment⁠—a brief one, in truth⁠—she marvelled if union with such a man was not too heavy a price to pay for immunity and for power.

But the hesitancy only lasted a few seconds. The next, she had thrown back her head as if in defiance of the whisperings of conscience and of heart. She need not lose her youthful lover at all. He was satisfied with so little! A few kind words here, an occasional kiss, a promise or two, and he would always remain her willing slave.

It were foolish indeed, and far, far too late, to give way to sentiment at this hour, when Tallien’s influence in the Convention was second only to that of Robespierre, whilst Bertrand Moncrif was a fugitive, a suspect, a poor miserable fanatic, whose hotheadedness was forever landing him from one dangerous situation into another.

So, after indulging in the faintest little sigh of yearning for the might-have-been, she met her latest adorer’s worshipping glance with coquettish air of womanly submission, which completed his subjugation, and said lightly:

“And now give me my orders for tonight, mon ami.”

She settled herself down more comfortably upon the settee, and graciously allowed him to sit on a low chair beside her.

The turbulent little incident was closed. Theresia had her way, and poor, harassed Tallien succeeded in shutting away in the innermost recesses of his heart the pangs of jealousy which still tortured him. His goddess was now all smiles, and the subtle flattery implied by her preference for him above his many rivals warmed his atrophied heart and soothed his boundless vanity.

We must accept the verdict of history that Theresia Cabarrus never loved Tallien. The truth appears