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

who had been drinking heavily. He rested his elbows on his knees and held his chin between his mud-stained hands.

“Socrates, you lumpish vagabond,” he exclaimed all of a sudden, “don’t stand gaping at me like that! Bring forth his Highness’s horse at once, and see that you accompany him to Utrecht without further mishap, or ’tis with us you’ll have to deal on your return!”

“But you, man!” the Stadtholder exclaimed once more.

He felt helpless and strangely disturbed in his mind, not understanding what all this meant; why this man, usually so alert, so keen, so full of vigour, appeared for the moment akin to a babbling imbecile.

“I’ll have a good sleep inside that hut, so please you,” the other replied more glibly. “These two ruffians will find me here after they have seen your gracious Highness safely inside your camp.”

Then, as the Stadtholder still appeared to hesitate, and neither of the others seemed to move, Diogenes added, with an almost desperate note of entreaty:

“To horse, your Highness, I beg! Every second is precious. Heaven knows what further devilry lies in wait for you, if you linger here.”

“Or for you, man,” the Stadtholder murmured involuntarily.

“Nay, not for me!” the other retorted quickly. “The Archduchess and her gang of vultures fly after higher game than a drunken wayfarer lost on the flats. To horse, I entreat!”

And once more he pressed his hands together, and so tightly that the knuckles shone like polished ivory, even through their covering of mud.

The Stadtholder then gave a sign to the two men. It was obviously futile to continue arguing here with a man who refused to move. He himself had very rightly said that every second was precious. And every second, too, was fraught with danger. Already his Highness had well-nigh been the victim of a diabolical ambuscade, might even at this hour have been a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, a hostage of incalculable value, even if his life had been spared, but for the audacious and timely interference of this man, who now appeared almost like one partially bereft of reason.

“We’ll see you safely inside the hut, at any rate,” was his Highness’s last word.

“And I’ll not move,” Diogenes retorted with a kind of savage obstinacy, “until the mist has swallowed up your gracious Highness on the road to Utrecht.”

After that there was nothing more to be said. And we may take it that the Stadtholder got to horse with unaccountable reluctance. Something in that solitary figure sitting there, with the plumed hat tilted over his eyes and the slender, mud-stained hands tightly locked together, gave him a strange feeling of nameless dismay, like a premonition of some obscure catastrophic tragedy.

But his time and his safety did not belong to himself alone. They were the inalienable property of a threatened country, that would be grasping in her death-throes if she were deprived of him at this hour of renewed and deadly danger. So he gathered the reins in his hands and set spurs to his horse, and once he had started he did not look behind him, lest his emotion got the better of his judgement.

The two gossoons immediately followed in his wake. This they did because the friend they had always been wont to obey had thus commanded, and his seeming helplessness rendered his orders doubly imperative at this hour. They rode a length or two behind the Stadtholder, who presently put his horse to a gallop. Utrecht now was only a couple of leagues away.

The three horsemen galloped on for a quarter of a league or less at the same even, rapid pace. Then Pythagoras slackened speed. The others did not even turn to look at him, he seemed to have done it by tacit unspoken consent. The Stadtholder and Socrates sped on in the direction of Utrecht and Pythagoras turned his horse’s head round toward the direction whence he had come.

VIII

The afternoon lay heavy and silent upon the plain. There was as yet no sign of the approach of the enemy from the south, and the low-lying land appeared momentarily hushed under its veil of mist, as if conscious of the guilty secret enshrined within its bosom. The fog, indeed, had thickened perceptibly. It lay like a wall around that lonely figure, still sitting there on the soft earth, with its head buried in its hands.

Far away, the gaunt-looking carcase of the dead horse appeared as the only witness of a hideous deed as yet unrecorded. Each a blurred and uncertain mass⁠—the dead horse and the lonely figure, equally motionless, equally pathetic⁠—were now the sole occupants of the vast and silent immensity.

Not far away, in the little town of Amersfoort, humanity, panic-stricken and terrorized, filled the air with clamour and with wails. Here, beneath the ghostly shroud of humid atmosphere, everything was stilled as if in ghoulish expectancy of something mysterious, indiscernible which was still to come. It was like the arrested breath before the tearing cry, the hush which precedes a storm.

Overhead, a flight of rooks sent their melancholy cawing through the air.

When Pythagoras was within fifty yards of his friend he dismounted, and, leading his horse by the bridle, he walked toward him. When he was quite near Diogenes put out a hand to him.

“I knew you would come back, you fat-witted nonny,” he said simply.

“Socrates had to go on with the Stadtholder,” the other remarked, “or he’d be here, too.” Then he added tentatively: “Will you lean on my arm?”

“Yes, I’ll have to do that now, old crony, shall I not?” Diogenes replied. “That devil,” he murmured under his breath, “has blinded me!”

IX Mala Fides I

Nicolaes Beresteyn, riding like one possessed had reached Stoutenburg’s encampment one hour before nightfall. He brought the news of the failure of his plan for the capture of the Stadtholder, spoke with many a muttered oath of the Englishman and his two familiars, and of how they had