The Laughing Cavalier, Baroness Orczy [the beginning after the end read novel TXT] 📗

born of intense bodily and mental fatigue, betrayed itself in the absent expression in her eyes, for Stoutenburg reiterated impatiently:

“I can give you a quarter of an hour wherein to make ready.”

“A quarter of an hour,” she murmured vaguely, “to make ready?⁠ ⁠… for what?”

“For immediate departure with me and your brother for Belgium.”

Still she did not understand. A deep frown of puzzlement appeared between her brows.

“Departure?⁠—with you?⁠—what do you mean, my lord?” she asked.

“I mean,” he replied roughly, “that out of the wreckage of all my ambitions, my desires and my hopes I will at least save something that will compensate me for all that I have lost. You said just now that life could only end in death. Well! next to mine ambition and my desire for vengeance, you, Gilda, as you know, do fill my entire soul. With you beside me I may try to begin life anew. I leave for the coast in less than half an hour; Nicolaes will be with us and he will care for you. But I will not go without you, so you must come with us.”

“Never!” she said firmly.

But Stoutenburg only laughed with careless mockery.

“Who will protect you?” he said, “when I take you in my arms and carry you to the sledge, which in a quarter of an hour will be ready for you? Who will protect you when I carry you in my arms from the sledge to the boat which awaits us at Scheveningen?”

“Nicolaes,” she rejoined calmly, “is my brother⁠—he would not permit such an outrage.”

An ironical smile curled the corners of his cruel lips. “Do you really think, Gilda,” he said, “that Nicolaes will run counter to my will? I have but to persuade him that your presence in Holland will be a perpetual menace to our safety. Besides, you heard what he said just now; that you, of course, would come with us.”

“My dead body you can take with you,” she retorted, “but I⁠—alive⁠—will never follow you.”

“Then ’tis your dead body I’ll take, Gilda,” he said with a sneer, “I will be here to fetch you in a quarter of an hour, so I pray you make ready while I go to deal with that meddlesome instrument of God.”

She was spent now, and had no strength for more; a great numbness, an overpowering fatigue seemed to creep into her limbs. She even allowed him to take her hand and to raise it to his lips, for she was quite powerless to resist him; only when she felt those burning lips against her flesh a shudder of infinite loathing went right through her body.

Soon he turned on his heel and strode out of the room. She heard the thin wooden door fall to with a bang behind him; but she could no longer see, a kind of darkness had fallen over her eyes, a darkness, in which only one figure appeared clearly⁠—the figure of a man upon a gibbet. All else was blackness around her, impenetrable blackness, almost tangible in its intensity, and out of the blackness which seemed like that of a dungeon there came cries as of human creatures in hell.

“Lord have mercy upon him!” her lips, cold and white, murmured vaguely and insistently, “Lord have mercy upon him! Lord have mercy upon us all!”

XLI “Vengeance Is Mine”

It was like a man possessed of devils that the Lord of Stoutenburg ran out through the mist toward the molens.

The grey light of this winter’s morning had only vaguely pierced the surrounding gloom, and the basement beneath the molens still looked impenetrably dark. Dark and silent! the soldiers⁠—foreign mercenaries and louts⁠—had vanished in the fog, arms hastily thrown down littered the mud-covered ground, swords, pistols, muskets, torn clothing, here and there a neckcloth, a steel bonnet, a bright coloured sash. Stoutenburg saw it all, right through the gloom, and he ground his teeth together to smother a cry of agonised impotence.

Only now and then a ghostly form flitted swift and silent among the intricate maze of beams, a laggard left behind in the general scramble for safety, or a human scavenger on the prowl for loot. Now and then a groan or a curse came from out the darkness, and a weird, shapeless, moving thing would crawl along in the mud like some creeping reptile seeking its lair. But Stoutenburg looked neither to right nor left. He paid no heed to these swiftly fleeting ghostlike forms. He knew well enough that he would find silence here, that three dozen men⁠—cowards and mercenaries all⁠—had been scattered like locusts before a gale. Overhead he heard the tramping of feet, his friends⁠—Beresteyn, Heemskerk, van Does⁠—were making ready for flight. His one scheme of vengeance⁠—that for which he had thirsted and plotted and sinned⁠—had come to nought, but he had yet another in his mind⁠—one which, if successful, would give him no small measure of satisfaction for the failure of the other.

And ahead the outline of the hastily improvised gallows detached itself out of the misty shroud, and from the Lord of Stoutenburg’s throat there came a fierce cry of joy which surely must have delighted all the demons in hell.

He hurried on, covering with swift eager steps the short distance that separated him from the gibbet.

He called loudly to Jan, for it seemed to him as if the place was unaccountably deserted. He could not see Jan nor yet the prisoner, and surely Piet the Red had not proved a coward.

The solid beams above and around him threw back his call in reverberating echoes. He called again, and from far away a mocking laugh seemed alone to answer him.

Like a frightened beast now he bounded forward. There were the gallows not five paces away from him; the planks hastily hammered together awhile ago were creaking weirdly, buffeted by the wind, and up aloft the rope was swinging, beating itself with a dull, eerie sound against the wood.

The Lord of Stoutenburg⁠—dazed