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

The blind man winked and blinked, tried to collect his thoughts, which apparently had all wandered off toward the Land of Nod. Then he said:

“The plan was to leave the bulk of that force to menace Amersfoort. But the Stadtholder himself meant to push on as far as the molen, with but a few hundred of his picked men. He thought to seize the stores of arms and ammunition there and then to await the coming of the Lord of Stoutenburg, who, driven out of Amersfoort and cut off from Ede, would make of necessity for his headquarters.”

“Ah!”

The exclamation, deep and prolonged, came from three pairs of lips. Stoutenburg, Nicolaes and Jan looked at one another, and there was triumph and satisfaction depicted in their glance. The same thought had occurred simultaneously to these three traitors; the Stadtholder, with a comparatively small force, pushing on to the lonely molen on the Veluwe, not knowing that some of De Berg’s troops were holding the Ijssel beyond.

He would be caught like a rat in a trap; and the question was whether it would not be better to allow him to carry out his plan, not to oppose him on his way, to let him reach the molen and then close in behind him, so that he would have but two alternatives before him⁠—to surrender in the molen or to turn his small force in the direction of the Zuider Zee, and therein seek a watery grave.

“I must have a little time to think,” Stoutenburg muttered to himself, after a while.

The blind man had apparently dropped off to sleep again. His head had once more fallen forward on his chest. Jan was prepared to give him another rude awakening, but his lordship stopped him with a sign.

“Let the muckworm sleep,” he said. “I must think out the whole position. If what the knave says is true⁠—”

“I am inclined to believe it true,” Nicolaes interposed. “The man is too fuddled to have invented so circumstantial a story. And I have it in my mind,” he added reflectively, “that when the Stadtholder visited Amersfoort yesterday he said something to my father about devising a plan later on if the city were seriously threatened.”

“Then, by Satan! all would be well indeed!” And Stoutenburg drew up his gaunt figure to its full height, looked every inch a conqueror, with heel set upon the neck of his foes. Jan alone looked dubious.

“I wouldn’t trust the rogue,” he said grimly.

“Would you hang him now?” Stoutenburg retorted.

“No; I would wait to make sure. Let him sleep awhile now. When he wakes out of his booze, he might be able to give us further details.”

“In the meanwhile,” his lordship rejoined, “keep the men under arms, Jan. I have not yet thought the matter over; but this I know⁠—that I’ll start for the molen with a few hundred musketeers and pikemen as soon as I am sure that this rascallion hath not spun a tissue of lies. Do you send out spies at once in every direction, with orders to bring back information immediately. We must hear if an attack hath indeed been made on Ede, and if the Stadtholder is moving out of Utrecht. Have you some men you can trust?”

“Oh, yes, so please your lordship,” Jan replied. “I can send Piet Walleren in the direction of Ede, and I myself will push on toward Utrecht. We’d both be back long before dawn.”

“And ’tis not you who could be nousled, eh, good Jan?” his lordship was pleased to say.

“If we have been tricked by this tosspot,” Jan riposted gruffly, “I’ll see him burnt alive, and ’tis mine own hand will set the brand to the stake.”

He paused, and drew in his breath with a shudder; for he had turned to look on the blind man whom he was threatening with so dire a fate and whom he had thought asleep, and encountered those sightless orbs fixed upon him as if they could see something through and beyond him, some ghoul or spectre lurking in a distant corner of the room. So uncanny and terrifying did the rascal look, indeed, that instinctively Jan, who believed neither in God nor the devil, remembered his mother’s early teachings, and made sundry and vague signs of the Cross upon his breast, with a view to exorcising those evil spirits which must be somewhere lurking about, unseen by all save by the man who had lost his sight.

“What is it now?” Stoutenburg queried with a scowl.

The blind man indeed appeared to be listening⁠—listening so intently, with head now craned forward and eyes fixed into vacancy⁠—that instinctively the three recreants listened too. To what, they could not have told. Through the open casement the sound of life⁠—camp life, of sentries’ challenging call, of bivouac fires, and rowdy soldiery⁠—came in as before. A little less roisterous, perhaps, seeing that most of the men, tired after long days of marching and hours of carousing, had settled themselves down to sleep.

Inside the room, the monumental clock up against the wall ticked off each succeeding second with tranquil monotony. It was now close upon midnight. Nothing had happened. Nothing could have happened, to disturb the wonted tenor of the life of an army in temporary occupation of an unresisting city. Nothing, in fact, unless that blind tatterdemalion over there had indeed spoken the truth.

And still he listened. A vague anxiety seemed to have completely banished sleep, even momentarily to have dissipated the potent effect of that excellent Oporto; and on his face there was that strained look peculiar to those who have been robbed of one sense and are at pains to exert the others to their utmost power. It seemed as if his sightless orbs must pierce some hidden veil which kept vital secrets hidden from ordinary human gaze. And these three men⁠—traitors all⁠—whose craven hearts, weighted with crime, were