difficulty in pushing his way through this dense throng. He felt dazed, what with the noise and with the smell of stale food and of unwashed humanity; at any rate he put his curious experience down to an addled state of his brain, for while he was being pushed and jostled, and only saw individual faces through a kind of haze made of dust and fumes, he suddenly felt as if a pair of eyes, one pair only, was looking at him out of the hundred that were there. Of course, it was only a hallucination: he was sure it was, and yet for some reason or other he felt a cold shiver running down his spine. He tried to recapture the glance of those eyes, but no one now in the crowd seemed to be looking at him. The musicians had finished playing, or rather they tried to finish playing, but their audience wouldn't allow them to. Everyone was shouting at the top of his voice:
"Il était une bergère."
They wanted the whole of the six verses all over again.
Chauvelin got as far as the door, was on the point of opening it when a sound — the sound he hated more than any on earth — reached his ear above the din: it was a loud, prolonged, rather inane burst of laughter. Chauvelin did not swear, nor did he shiver again: his nerves were suddenly quite steady and if he could have translated his thoughts into words, he would have said with a chuckle: "I was right, then! and you are here, my gallant friend, at your old tricks again. Well, since you wish it, à nous deux once more, and I think I may promise you some fun, as you would call it, at La Rodière."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The League
Although Choisy is only twelve or fifteen kilometres from Paris, it was in those days just a small provincial town with its Hôtel de Ville and its Committee of Public Safety sitting there, its Grand' Place, its ancient castle then used as a prison, and its famous bridge across the Seine. To the South and West of the Grand' Place there were two or three residential streets with a few substantial, stone-built houses, the homes of professional men, or of tradespeople who had retired on a competence, and farther along a few isolated, poorer-looking houses, such a one as old Levet's, lying back from the road behind a small grille and a tiny front garden. But all these features only covered a small area, round which stretched fields and spinneys, with here and there a cottage for the most part roofless and derelict.
It was in one of these dilapidated cottages which stood in a meadow about half-way between Choisy and the height on which was perched the Château de La Rodière, that what looked like a troupe of itinerant musicians had sought shelter against the cold. They had made up a fire in the wide open hearth; the smoke curled up the chimney, and they sat round with their knees drawn up to their chins and their arms encircling their knees. There were four of them altogether inside the cottage, and one sat outside on a broken-down stool propped against the wall, apparently on the watch. In a corner of the room a number of musical instruments were piled up, a miscellaneous collection of violin, guitar, trumpet and drum. Precariously perched on the top of this pile of rubbish sat Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart., the most fastidious dandy fashionable London had ever known, the arbiter of elegance, the friend of the Prince of Wales, the adored of every woman in England. He too was unwashed, unkempt, unshaved, his slender hands, those hands a queen had once termed exquisite, were covered with grime, his nails were in the deepest mourning. He wore a tattered blouse, on his head a Phrygian cap which had once been red. At the moment he was scraping a fiddle, drawing from it wailing sounds that provoked loud groans from his friends and an occasional missile hurled at his head.
"We are in for some fine sport, I imagine, what?" Lord Anthony Dewhurst remarked, and dug his teeth into a hard apple, which he had just extracted from his breeches' pocket.
"Tony," one of the others demanded — it was my Lord Hastings, "where did you get that apple?"
"My sweetheart gave it me. She stole it from her neighbour's garden ..."
My Lord Tony got no further. He was attacked all at once from three sides. Three pairs of hands were stretched out to wrest the apple from him.
"We are in for some fine sport!" Lord Tony had declared before the attack on his apple was launched. He held it up at arm's length, trying to rescue it from his assailants who made grabs at it and invariably got in one another's way, until a firm hand finally seized it and Blakeney's pleasant drawly voice was raised to say:
"I'll toss you all for this precious thing ... what there is left of it."
Sir Andrew Ffoulkes won the toss, and the apple, which had suffered wreckage during the fight, was finally hurled at the head of the revered chief, who had resumed his attempts at getting a tune out of his cracked fiddle. A distant church clock had struck eleven a few minutes ago. The man on the watch outside put his head in at the door and announced curtly:
"Here he comes."
And presently Devinne came in. He was dressed in his ordinary clothes with dark coat, riding breeches and boots. His face wore a sullen look and he scarcely glanced either at his friends or at his chief, just flung himself on the ground in front of the fire and muttered between his teeth:
"God! I'm tired!"
After a moment or two while no one else spoke he added as if grudgingly:
"I'm sorry I'm late, Percy. I had to put up my horse and..."
"Listen to this, you fellows," Blakeney said with a chuckle as he scraped his fiddle and extracted from it a wailing version of the Marseillaise.
Young Devinne jumped to his feet, strode across the floor and snatched the fiddle out of Blakeney's hand.
"Percy!" he cried hoarsely.
"You don't like it, my dear fellow? Well, I don't blame you, but —— "
"Percy," the young man rejoined, "you've got to be serious ... you have got to help me ... it is all damnable ... damnable ... I shall go mad if this goes on much longer ... and if you don't help me."
He was obviously beside himself with excitement, strode up and down the place, his hand pressed tightly against his forehead. The words came tumbling out through his lips, whilst his voice was raucous with agitation.
Blakeney watched him for a moment or two without speaking. His face through all the grime and disfigurement wore that expression of infinite sympathy and understanding of which he, of all men, appeared to hold the secret, the understanding of other people's troubles and difficulties, and that wordless sympathy which so endeared him to his friends.
"Help you, my dear fellow," he now said. "Of course, we'll all help you, if you want us. What are we here for but to help each other, as well as those poor wretches who are in trouble through no fault of their own?"
Then, as Devinne said nothing for the moment, just continued to pace up and down, up and down like a trapped feline, he went on:
"Tell us all about it, boy. It is this La Rodière business, isn't it?"
"It is. And a damnable business it will be, unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless you do something about it in double quick time. Those ruffians in Choisy are planning mischief. You knew that two days ago, and you have done nothing. I wanted to go up to La Rodière to warn them of what was in the wind. I could have done it yesterday, gone up there this morning. It wouldn't have interfered
