All at once the crowd saw him. Dr. Pradel! Simon! their Simon! The hero of the hour! A lusty cheer roused the echo of the vast hall at sight of him. Now indeed would the fun be fast and furious! Pradel, in the meanwhile, had reached the centre of the room, he broke through the cordon that surrounded Cécile, quite good-naturedly but very firmly he thrust Jacques the butcher's son on one side, took hold of the girl's trembling hand and put his strong arms round her waist.
"Allons," he shouted to the musicians, "put some verve into your playing. 'Tis I will dance the rigaudon with the aristo!"
Nothing loth, the musicians blew their trumpets and beat their drums with renewed vigour:
"Sur le pont d'Avignon,
On y danse, on y danse,
Sur le pont d'Avignon,
On y danse tout en rond!"
A hundred couples were formed and soon they were all of them dancing and singing, not hoarsely or stridently, but just with immense gusto, as if they desired nothing else but enjoy a real jollity.
"Try to smile," Pradel whispered in Cécile's ear. "Be brave! don't show that you are afraid!"
Cécile said: "I am not afraid." And indeed, with her hand in his, she tripped the rigaudon step by step and was no longer afraid. It seemed to her as if with Pradel's nearness the nightmare had become just a dream. Everything now was gay, almost happy. Cruelty and mockery, the desire to humiliate had faded from the faces of the crowd. Every one was smiling at everybody else. One woman called out loudly across the room to Cécile: "Well chosen, my pretty! Our Simon will make you a fine husband! And you will give France some splendid sons!"
"Smile!" Pradel commanded. "Smile to them and nod! For God's sake, smile!"
And Cécile smiled and nodded while the cry was taken up. "Our Simon and the aristo! And a quiverful of handsome sons! Hurrah! Hurrah!"
In this wild saturnalia even François de la Rodière was forgotten. He was pushed on one side like a useless piece of furniture and collapsed into the nearest chair, half fainting with the exertion of keeping some semblance of control over himself. What he had suffered in the way of humiliation during the past quarter of an hour was unbelievable, and now to see his sister Mademoiselle de la Rodière made to demean herself by dancing with that purveyor of pills and purges, whom François would gladly have strangled, and to be forced to hear name coupled with that of this impudent upstart, seemed more than he could endure.
It was he who suddenly became aware of a curiously incongruous figure of a man who at this point was working his way unobtrusively through the throng. Short, spare, dressed in sober black from head to foot, he had the tricolour scarf round his waist. No one in the crowd took any notice of him. Only François saw him, and in spite of the tell-tale tricolour scarf which proclaimed the man to be in the service of the revolutionary government, he felt that some sort of rescue from this devil's carnival could be effected through one who at any rate looked as if he had washed and brushed his clothes. François tried to attract his attention, but the man walked quietly on, till he was quite close to the spot where Cécile was trying bravely to keep up the rôle of good-humour and even gaiety which Pradel had enjoined her to assume. She continued to step it, wondering how all this would end. She saw the little man in black wind his way in and out among the dancers, and she saw the leader of the musicians, the unkempt, unshaved, toothless fiddler step down from the platform and always playing his fiddle, follow on the heels of the little man in black. She was so fascinated by the sight of those two figures in such strange contrast one to the other, one so spruce and trim, the other so grimy, one so stern and the other grinning all over his face, that she lost step and had to cling with both hands to her partner's arm.
Then it was that there occurred the strangest of all the strange events of this memorable day. The little man in black was now quite close to her, and the fiddler was immediately behind him and Cécile watched them both, fascinated. All of a sudden the fiddler threw back his head and laughed. Such curious laughter it was, quite merry, but somehow it suggested the merriment of a fool. Cécile stared at the man, for there was something almost eerie about him now, and Pradel too stared at him as amazed, as fascinated as was the girl herself, for the fiddler had thrown down his fiddle.
He straightened his back and stretched out his arms till he appeared preternaturally tall, like a Titan or like a Samson about to shatter the marble pillars of the old château, and to hurl them down with a thunderous crash in the midst of the revellers.
The little man in black also stared at the fiddler, and very slowly the whole expression of his face underwent a change, from surprise to horror and thence to triumph mixed with a kind of awe. His thin lips curled into a mocking smile and through them there came words spoken in English, a language which Cécile understood. What he said was:
"So, my valiant Scarlet Pimpernel, we meet again at last!" and at the same time he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and drew out what looked like an ordinary whistle which he was about to put to his mouth when the fiddler, with another outburst of inane laughter, knocked it out of his hand.
For the space of less than two seconds, breathless hush fell on the merry-making throng. The crashing of the fiddle as it was hurled to the floor, the strange outburst of laughter, the rattle of the whistle as it fell, had reduced everyone to silence. But now a wild shout broke in on this chastened mood.
"A spy! a spy!" the fiddler cried in a stentorian voice. "We are betrayed. We shall be massacred! Sauve qui peut!"
And with a sudden stretch of his powerful arms he picked up the little man in black and threw him over his shoulder as if he were a bale of goods and ran with his struggling and kicking burden across the room towards the door. And all the time he continued to shout: "A spy! a spy! We shall be massacred! Remember Paris last September!" And the crowd took up the cry as a crowd will, for are not one hundred humans the counterpart of one hundred sheep? They took up the cry and shouted: "A spy! A spy!" and ran in a body helter-skelter on the heels of the fiddler and his sable-clad load, out of the room across the marble vestibule, down the grand staircase and down below that, through the servants' old quarters, through the kitchen and the pantry, the wash-house and the buttery, and down by the winding staircase which led to the cellar. And behind him there was the crowd, no longer good-tempered now, or intent on holiday-making, but a real rabble this time, and a frightened crowd at that, jostling, pushing, tumbling over one another. An angry crowd is fearsome, but a frightened crowd is worse, for it is ready for anything-bloodshed, carnage, butchery. No one knew that better than the victim of this amazing aggression. He, Chauvelin, had often himself provoked a crowd into committing murder. Now he was utterly helpless; struggle and kick as he might, he was held as in a steel vice over those powerful shoulders, head down, with the blood hammering away in his temples, a wounded fox with a pack of hounds on his trail. What was going to happen to him? Would this enemy throw him to those hounds, who would surely tear him to pieces. At the top of the stairs, outside the grand salon, he had caught sight, but only dimly, of the sergeant flattened against the wall, as scared as any hunted animal. He had tried to shout to him: "The signal! the signal!" but he felt that his voice never reached the soldier's ears.