The First Sir Percy, Baroness Orczy [most important books to read TXT] 📗

her a fragrance of youth and of purity, and withal of fervid passion, such as he had never dreamed of through the many vicissitudes of his adventurous life.

Still she did not speak, and he was content to look on her, satisfied that she was in truth too completely happy at this hour to give vent to her feelings in so many words. He loved to watch the play of emotions in her telltale face, the pursed-up little mouth, so ready to smile, and those violet-tinted eyes, now and then raised to him in perfect trust and abandonment of self, then veiled once more demurely under his provoking glance.

He loved to tease her, for then she blushed, and her long lashes drew a delicately pencilled shadow upon her cheeks. He loved to say things that frightened her, for then she would look up with a quick, inquiring glance, search his own with a palpitating expression that quickly melted again into one of bliss.

“You look so demure, ma donna,” he exclaimed whimsically, “that I vow I’ll create a scandal⁠—leap across the table and kiss Kaatje, for instance⁠—just to see if it would make you laugh!”

“Do not make fun of Kaatje, my lord,” Gilda admonished. “She hath more depth of feeling than you give her credit for.”

“I do not doubt her depth of feeling, dear heart,” he retorted with mock earnestness. “But, oh, good St. Bavon help me! Have you ever seen so solid a yokemate, or,” he added, and pointed to Nicolaes Beresteyn, who sat moody and sullen, toying with his food, beside his equally silent bride, “so ardent a bridegroom? Verily, the dear lady reminds me of those succulent fish pasties they make over in England, white and stodgy, and rather heavy on the stomach, but, oh, so splendidly nourishing!”

“Fie! Now you are mocking again.”

“How can I help it, dear heart, when you persist in looking so solemn⁠—so solemn, that, in the midst of all this hilarity, I am forcibly reminded of all the rude things you said to me that night at the inn in Leyden, and I am left to marvel how you ever came to change your opinion of me?”

“I changed my opinion of you,” she rejoined earnestly, “when I learned how you were ready to give your life to save the Stadtholder from those abominable murderers; and almost lost it,” she added under her breath, “to save my brother Nicolaes from the consequence of his own treachery.”

“Hush! That is all over and done with now, ma donna,” he retorted lightly. “Nicolaes has become a sober burgher, devoted to his solid Kaatje and to the cause of the Netherlands; and I have sold my liberty to the fairest tyrant that ever enslaved a man’s soul.”

“Do you regret it,” she queried shyly, “already?”

“Already!” he assented gravely. “I am kicking against my bonds, longing for that freedom which in the past kept my stomach empty and my head erect.”

“Will you never be serious?” she retorted.

“Never, while I live. My journey to England killed my only attempt at sobriety, for there I found that the stock to which I belonged was both irreproachable and grave, had been so all the while that I, the most recent scion of so noble a race, was roaming about the world, the most shiftless and thriftless vagabond it had ever seen. But in England”⁠—he sighed and raised his eyes and hands in mock solemnity⁠—“in England the climate is so atrocious that the people become grim-visaged and square-toed through constantly watching the rain coming down. Or else,” he added, with another suppressed ripple of that infectious laugh of his, “the climate in England has become so atrocious because there are so many square-toed folk about. I was such a very little while in England,” he concluded with utmost gravity, “I had not time to make up my mind which way it went.”

“Methinks you told me,” she rejoined, “that your home in England is beautiful and stately.”

“It is both, dear heart,” he replied more seriously; “and I shall learn to love it when you have dwelt therein. I should love it even now if it had ever been hallowed by the presence of my mother.”

“She never went there?”

“No, never. My father came to Holland in Leicester’s train. He married my mother in Haarlem, then deserted her and left her there to starve. My friend Frans Hals cared for me after she died. That is the whole of her history. It does not make for deep, filial affection, does it?”

“But you have seen your father now. Affection will come in time.”

“Yes; I have seen him, thanks to your father, who brought us together. I have seen my home in Sussex, where one day, please God, you’ll reign as its mistress.”

“I, the wife of an English lord!” she sighed. “I can scarcely credit it.”

“Nor can I, dear heart,” he answered lightly; “for that you’ll never be. Let me try and explain to you just how it all is, for, in truth, English honours are hard to understand. My father is an English gentleman with no handle to his name. Blake of Blakeney they call him over there; and I am his only son. It seems that he rendered signal services to his king of late, who thereupon desired to confer upon him one of those honours which we over here find it so difficult to apprise. My father, however, either because he is advanced in years or because he desired to show me some singular mark of favour, petitioned King James to bestow the proposed honour upon his only son. Thus am I Sir Percy Blakeney, it seems, without any merit on my part. Funny is it not? And I who, for years, was known by no name save Diogenes, one of three vagabonds, with perhaps more wits, but certainly no more worth, than my two compeers!”

“Then I should call you Sir Percy?” she concluded. “Yet I cannot get used to the name.”

“You might even call