The Laughing Cavalier Part 57

"While that man lives," whispered the demon of jealousy more insistently than did the other evil spirits, "Gilda will not cease to think of him, she will plead for him, she will try mayhap to save him and then----"

And the Lord of Stoutenburg groaned aloud in the silence of the night, and paused in his restless walk. He drew a chair close to the table, and sat down; then resting his elbows upon the table, he buried his head in his hands, and remained thus motionless but breathing heavily like one whose soul is fighting a losing battle.

The minutes sped on. He had no means of gauging the time. It was just night, black impenetrable night. From down below came the murmur of all the bustle that was going on, the clang of arms, the measured footsteps which told of other alert human creatures who were waiting in excitement and tense expectancy for that dawn which still was far distant.

The minutes sped on, on the leaden feet of time. How long the Lord of Stoutenburg had sat thus, silent and absorbed, he could not afterwards have said. Perhaps after all he had fallen asleep, overcome with fatigue and with the constant sleeplessness of the past few days. But anon he was wide awake, slightly shivering with the cold. The tallow candle was spluttering, almost dying out. With a steady hand the Lord of Stoutenburg snuffed the smouldering wick, the candle flickered up again.

Then he rose and quietly walked across the room. He pulled open the door and loudly called for Jan.

A few minutes later Jan was at the door, silent, sullen, obedient as usual.

"My lord called?" he asked.

"Yes," replied Stoutenburg, "what hour is it?"

"Somewhere near six I should say, my lord. I heard the tower-clock at Ryswyk strike five some time ago."

"How long is it before the dawn?"

"Two hours, my lord."

"Time to put up a gibbet, Jan? and to hang a man?"

"Plenty of time for that, my lord," replied Jan quietly.

"Then see to it, Jan, as speedily as you can. I feel that that man down below is our evil genius. While he lives Chance will be against us, of that I am as convinced as I am of the justice of our cause. If that man lives, Jan, the Stadtholder will escape us; I feel it in my bones: something must have told me this in the night--it is a premonition that comes from above."

"Then the man must not live, my lord," said Jan coldly.

"You recognize that too, Jan, do you not?" rejoined Stoutenburg eagerly.

"I am compelled in this--I won't say against my will, but compelled by a higher, a supernatural power. You, too, believe in the supernatural, do you not, my faithful Jan?"

"I believe, my lord, first and foremost in the justice of our cause. I hate the Stadtholder and would see him dead. Nothing in the world must place that great aim of ours in jeopardy."

Stoutenburg drew a deep breath of satisfaction.

"Then see to the gibbet, my good Jan," he said in a firm almost l.u.s.ty voice, "have it erected on the further side of the molens so that the jongejuffrouw's eyes are not scandalized by the sight. When everything is ready come and let me know, and guard him well until then, Jan, guard him with your very life; I want to see him hang, remember that! Come and tell me when the gallows are ready and I'll go to see him hang ... I want to see him hang...."

And Jan without another word salutes the Lord of Stoutenburg and then goes out.

And thus it is that a quarter of an hour later the silence of the night is broken by loud and vigorous hammering. Jan sees to it all and a gibbet is not difficult to erect.

Then men grumble of course; they are soldiers and not executioners, and their hearts for the most have gone out to that merry compeer--the Laughing Cavalier--with his quaint jokes and his cheerful laugh. He has been sleeping soundly too for several hours, but now he is awake. Jan has told him that his last hour has come: time to put up a gibbet with a few stiff planks taken from the store-room of the molens and a length of rope.

He looks round him quite carelessly. Bah! death has no terrors for such a splendid soldier as he is. How many times hath he faced death ere this?--why he was at Prague and at Madgeburg where few escaped with their lives. He bears many a fine scar on that broad chest of his and none upon his back. A splendid fighter, if ever there was one!

But hanging? Bah!

The men murmur audibly as plank upon plank is nailed. Jan directs operations whilst Piet the Red keeps guard over the prisoner. Two or three of the country louts know something of carpentering. They do the work under Jan's watchful eye. They grumble but they work, for no one has been paid yet, and if you rebel you are like to be shot, and in any case you lose your pay.

And Diogenes leaning up against the beam watches with lazy quaintly smiling eyes the preparations that are going on not a hundred paces away from him. After a while the darkness all around is beginning to yield to the slow insistence of dawn. It rises slowly behind the veils of mist which still envelop the distant East. Gradually an impalpable greyness creeps around the molens, objects begin to detach themselves one by one out of the gloom, the moving figures of the mercenaries, the piles of arms heaped up here and there out of the damp, the ma.s.sive beams slimy and green which support the molens, and a little further on the tall erection with a projecting arm round which great activity reigns.

Diogenes watches it all with those same lazy eyes, and that same good-humoured smile lingering round his lips. That tall erection over there which still looks ghostlike through the mist is for him. The game of life is done and he has lost. Death is there at the end of the projecting arm on which even now Jan is fixing a rope.

"Death in itself matters but little," mused the philosopher with his gently ironical smile. "I would have chosen another mode than hanging ... but after all 'tis swift and sure; and of course now she will never know."

Know what, O philosopher? What is it that she--Gilda--with the fair curls and the blue eyes, the proud firm mouth and round chin--what is it that she will never know?

She will never know that a nameless, penniless soldier of fortune has loved her with every beat of his heart, every thought of his brain, with every sinew and every aspiration. She will never know that just in order to remain near her, when she was dragged away out of Rotterdam he affronted deliberately the trap into which he fell. She will never know that for her dear sake, he has borne humiliation against which every nerve of his splendid nature did inwardly rebel, owning to guilt and shame lest her blue eyes shed tears for a brother's sin. She will never know that the warning to the Stadtholder came from him, and that he was neither a forger nor a thief, only just a soldier of fortune with a contempt for death, and an unspoken adoration for the one woman who seemed to him as distant from him as the stars.

But there were no vain regrets in him now; no regret of life, for this he always held in his own hand ready to toss it away for a fancy of an ideal--no regret of the might-have-been because he was a philosopher, and the very moment that love for the unattainable was born in his heart he had already realized that love to him could only mean a memory.

Therefore when he watched the preparations out there in the mist, and heard the heavy blows upon the wooden planks and the murmurs of his sympathizers at their work, he only smiled gently, self-deprecatingly, but always good-humouredly.

If the Lord of Stoutenburg only knew how little he really cared.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

THE HOUR

A curiously timid voice roused the philosopher from his dreams.

"Is there aught I can do for you, sir? Alas! my friend the Lord Stoutenburg is deeply angered against you. I could do nothing with him on your behalf."

Diogenes turned his head in the direction whence had come the voice. He saw Nicolaes Beresteyn standing there in the cold grey mist, with his fur cloak wrapped closely up to his chin, and his face showing above the cloak, white and drawn.

The situation was not likely to escape Diogenes' irrepressible sense of humour.

"Mynheer Beresteyn," he exclaimed; "Dondersteen! what brings your Mightiness here at this hour? A man on the point of death, sir, has no call for so pitiable a sight as is your face just now."

"I heard from my Lord Stoutenburg what happened in the hut last night,"

said Beresteyn in a faltering voice, and determined not to heed the other's bantering tone. "You exonerated me before my sister ... sir, this was a n.o.ble act ... I would wish to thank you...."

"And do so with quaking voice and shaking knees," quoth Diogenes with unalterable good-humour, through which there pierced however an obvious undercurrent of contempt. "Ye G.o.ds!" he added with a quaint sigh, "these men have not even the courage of their infamy!"

The words, the tone, the shrug of the shoulders which accompanied these, stung Nicolaes Beresteyn's dormant dignity to the quick.

"I do not wonder," he said more firmly, "that you feel bitter contempt for me now. Your generosity for which I did not crave hath placed me momentarily at a disadvantage before you. Yet believe me I would not be outdone by you in generosity; were it not for my allegiance to the Lord Stoutenburg I would go straight to my sister now and confess my guilt to her.... You believe me I trust," he added, seeing that Diogenes' merry eyes were fixed mockingly upon him, "did fate allow it I would gladly change places with you even now."

"I am about to hang, sir," quoth Diogenes lightly.

"Alas!"

"And you are forced, you say, to play a craven's part; believe me, sir, I would not change places with you for a kingdom."

"I do believe you, sir," rejoined Beresteyn earnestly, "yet I would have you think of me as something less of a coward than I seem. Were I to make full confession to my sister now, I should break her heart--but it would not save your neck from the gallows."