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

But her eyes she could not control, nor yet her thoughts, and they were fixed upon the crowd down below, just as were those of her brother Nicolaes. She thought that every moment she must catch sight of that plumed hat, towering above the throng, of those sturdy shoulders, forging their way to her. But all that she saw was the surging mass of people. A medley of colour. Horses, carts, the masts of ships. People running. And children. Numberless children, in arms or on their tiny feet; the sweet, heavy burdens that made the present disaster more utterly catastrophic.

Then suddenly she gave a loud cry.

“My lord!” she called, at the top of her voice. Then something appeared to break in her throat, and it was with a heartrending sob that she murmured almost inaudibly: “Thank God! It is my lord!”

The Stadtholder turned, was across the hall and out in the open in a trice.

“Where?” he demanded.

She ran after him, seized his surcoat with a trembling hand, and with the other pointed in the direction of the Koppel-poort.

“A plumed hat!” she murmured vaguely, for her teeth were chattering so that she could scarcely speak. “All broken and battered with wind and weather⁠—a torn jerkin⁠—a mud-stained cloak. He is leading his horse. He has a three days’ growth of beard on his chin, and looks spent with fatigue. There! Do you not see him?”

But Nicolaes already had interposed.

“To horse, your Highness!” he cried.

He would have given worlds for the privilege to seize the Stadtholder then and there by the arm, and to drag him down the steps and set him on his horse before the meeting which he dreaded could take place. But Maurice of Nassau, torn between his desire to get out of the threatened city as quickly as possible and his wish to speak with the messenger whom an inalienable instinct assured him that he could trust, was lingering on the steps trying in his turn to catch sight of Diogenes.

“Beware of the assassin’s dagger, your Highness!” Nicolaes whispered hoarsely in his ear. “In this crowd who can tell? Who knows what deathly trap is being laid for you?”

“Not by that man, I’ll swear!” the Stadtholder affirmed.

“Nay, if he is loyal he can follow you to the camp and report to you there. But for God’s sake remember your father and the miscreant Gérard. There too, a crowd; the hustling, the hurry! In the name of your country, come away!”

There was no denying the prudence of this advice. Another instant’s hesitation, the obstinacy of an arbitrary temperament that abhors being dictated to, the Stadtholder was ready to go. Gilda, on the top of the steps, was more like a stone statue of expectancy than like a living woman. Nay, all that she had alive in her were just her eyes, and they had spied her beloved. He was then by the Koppel-poort, some hundred yards or more on the other side of the quay, with a seething mass of panic-stricken humanity between him and the steps of Mynheer Beresteyn’s house.

He had dismounted and was leading his horse. The poor beast, spent with fatigue, looked ready to drop, and, indeed, appeared too dazed to pick his own way through the crowd. As it was, he was more than a handful for his equally wearied master, whose difficulties were increased a hundredfold by the number of small children who were forever getting in the way of the horse’s legs, and were in constant danger of being kicked or trampled on.

But Gilda never lost sight of him now that she had seen him. With every beat of her heart she was measuring the footsteps that separated him from the Stadtholder. And the more Nicolaes fretted to hurry his Highness away, the more she longed and yearned for the quick approach of her beloved.

IV

Amongst all those here present, Gilda was the only one who scented some unseen danger for them all in Nicolaes’ strangely feverish haste. What the others took for zeal, she knew by instinct was naught but treachery. What form this would take she could not guess; but this she knew, that for some motive as sinister as it was unexplainable, Nicolaes did not wish the Stadtholder and his messenger to meet. That same motive had caused him to utter all those venomous accusations against her husband, and was even now wearing him into a state of fretfulness which bordered on dementia.

“My lord!” she cried out to her beloved at one time; and felt that even through all the din and clatter her voice had reached his ear, for he raised his head, and it even seemed to her as if his eyes met hers above the intervening crowd and as if the supernal longing for him which was in her heart had drawn him with its mystic power over every obtruding obstacle.

For, indeed, the next moment he was right at the foot of the steps, not five paces from the Stadtholder.

Nicolaes spied him in a moment, and a loud curse broke from his lips.

“That skulking assassin!” he cried; and with a magnificent gesture covered the Stadtholder with his body. “To horse, your Highness, and leave me to deal with him!”

Maurice of Nassau, indeed was one of the bravest men of his time, but the word “assassin” was bound to ring unpleasantly in the ears of a man whose father had met his death at a murderer’s hand. Half-ashamed of his fears, he nevertheless did take advantage of Nicolaes’ theatrical attitude to slip behind him and mount his horse as quickly as he could. But with his foot already in the stirrup compunction appeared to seize him. Wishing to palliate the gross insult which was being hurled at the man who had once saved his life at imminent peril of his own, he now turned and called to him in gracious, matter-of-fact tones:

“Why, man, what made you tarry so long? Come with us to Utrecht now. We