The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel

CHAPTER I - "FIE, SIR PERCY!"

I

"You really are impossible, Sir Percy! Here are we ladies raving, simply raving, about this latest exploit of the gallant Scarlet Pimpernel, and you do naught but belittle his prowess. Lady Blakeney, I entreat, will you not add your voice to our chorus of praise, and drown Sir Percy's scoffing in an ocean of eulogy?"

Lady Alicia Nugget was very arch. She tapped Sir Percy's arm with her fan. She put up a jewelled finger and shook it at him with a great air of severity in her fine dark eyes. She turned an entreating glance on Marguerite Blakeney, and as that lady appeared engrossed in conversation with His Grace of Flint, Lady Alicia turned the battery of her glances on His Royal Highness.

"Your Highness," she said appealingly.

The Prince laughed good-humouredly.

"Oh!" he said, "do not ask me to inculcate hero-worship into this mauvis sujet. If you ladies cannot convert him to your views, how can I...a mere man...?"

And His Highness shrugged his shoulders. There were few entertainments he enjoyed more than seeing his friend Sir Percy Blakeney badgered by the ladies on the subject of their popular and mysterious hero, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

"Your Highness," Lady Alicia retorted with the pertness of a spoilt child of Society. "Your Highness can command Sir Percy to give us a true--a true--account of how that wonderful Scarlet Pimpernel snatched Monsieur le Comte de Tournon-d'Agenay with Madame la Comtesse and their three children out of the clutches of those abominable murderers in Paris, and drove them triumphantly to Boulogne, where they embarked on board an English ship and were ultimately safely landed in Dover. Sir Percy vows that he knows all the facts..."

"And so I do, dear lady," Sir Percy now put in, with just a soupçon of impatience in his pleasant voice, "but, as I've already had the privilege to tell you, the facts are hardly worth retailing."

"The facts, Sir Percy," commanded the imperious beauty, "or we'll all think you are jealous."

"As usual you would be right, dear lady," Sir Percy rejoined blandly; "are not ladies always right in their estimate of us poor men? I am jealous of that demmed, elusive personage who monopolizes the thoughts and the conversation of these galaxies of beauty who would otherwise devote themselves exclusively to us. What says Your Highness? Will you deign to ban for this one night at least every reference to that begad shadow?"

"Not till we've had the facts," Lady Alicia protested.

"The facts! The facts!" the ladies cried in an insistent chorus.

"You'll have to do it, Blakeney," His Highness declared.

"Unless Sir Andrew Ffoulkes would oblige us with the tale," Marguerite Blakeney said, turning suddenly from His Grace of Flint, in order to give her lord an enigmatic smile, "he too knows the facts, I believe, and is an excellent raconteur."

"God forbid!" Sir Percy Blakeney exclaimed, with mock concern. "Once you start Ffoulkes on one of his interminable stories...Moreover," he added seriously, "Ffoulkes always get the facts wrong. He would tell you, for instance, that the demmed Pimpernel rescued those unfortunate Tournon-d'Agenays single-handed; now I happen to know for a fact that three of the bravest English gentlemen the world has ever known did all the work whilst he merely..."

"Well?" Lady Alicia queried eagerly. "What did that noble and gallant Scarlet Pimpernel merely do?"

"He merely climbed to the box-seat of the chaise which was conveying the Comte de Tournon-d'Agenay and his family under escort to Paris. And the chaise had been held up by three of the bravest..."