The Laughing Cavalier by Baroness Orczy (best 7 inch ereader .TXT) 📕

and stupefied⁠—looked on this desolate picture like a man in a dream.

“My lord!”

The voice came feebly from somewhere close by.

“My lord! for pity’s sake!”

It was Jan’s voice of course. The Lord of Stoutenburg turned mechanically in the direction from whence it came. Not far from where he was standing he saw Jan lying on the ground against a beam, with a scarf wound loosely round his mouth and his arms held with a cord behind his back. Stoutenburg unwound the scarf and untied the cord, then he murmured dully:

“Jan? What does this mean?”

“The men all threw down their arms, my lord,” said Jan as soon as he had struggled to his feet, “they ran like cowards when Lucas of Sparendam brought the news.”

“I knew that,” said Stoutenburg hoarsely, “curse them all for their miserable cowardice. But the prisoner, man, the prisoner? What have you done with him? Did I not order you to guard him with your life?”

“Then is mine own life forfeit, my lord,” said Jan simply, “for I did fail in guarding the prisoner.”

A violent oath broke from Stoutenburg’s trembling lips. He raised his clenched fist, ready to strike in his blind, unreasoning fury the one man who had remained faithful to him to the last.

Jan slowly bent the knee.

“Kill me, my lord,” he said calmly, “I could not guard the prisoner.”

Stoutenburg was silent for a moment, then his upraised arm fell nervelessly by his side.

“How did it happen?” he asked.

“I scarce can tell you, my lord,” replied Jan, “the attack on us was so quick and sudden. Piet and I did remain at our post, but in the rush and the panic we presently were left alone beside the prisoner. Two men⁠—who were his friends⁠—must have been on the watch for this opportunity, they fell on us from behind and caught us unawares. We called in vain for assistance; it was a case of sauve qui peut and every one for himself, in a trice the cords that bound the prisoner were cut, and three men had very quickly the best of us. Piet, though wounded in the leg, contrived to escape, but it almost seemed as if those three demons were determined to spare me. Though by God,” added Jan fervently, “I would gladly have died rather than have seen all this shame! When they had brought me down they wound a scarf round my mouth and left me here tied to a beam, while they disappeared in the fog.”

Stoutenburg made no comment on this brief narrative, even the power of cursing seemed to have deserted him. He left Jan kneeling there on the frozen ground, and without a word he turned on his heel and made his way once more between the beams under the molens back toward the hut.

Vengeance indeed had eluded his grasp. The two men whom on earth he hated most had remained triumphant while he himself had been brought down to the lowest depths of loneliness and misery. Friendless, kinless now, life indeed, as he had told Gilda, was at an end for him. Baffled vengeance would henceforth make him a perpetual exile and a fugitive with every man’s hand raised against him, a price once more upon his head.

The world doth at times allow a man to fail in the task of his life, it will forgive that one failure and allow the man to try again. But a second failure is unforgivable, men turn away from the blunderer in contempt. Who would risk life, honour and liberty in a cause that has twice failed?

Stoutenburg knew this. He knew that within the next hour his friends would already have practically deserted him. Panic-stricken now they would accompany him as far as the coast, they would avail themselves of all the measures which he had devised for their mutual safety, but in their innermost hearts they would already have detached themselves from his future ill-fortunes; and anon, in a few months mayhap, when the Stadtholder had succumbed to the disease which was threatening his life, they would all return to their homes and to their kindred and forget this brief episode wherein their leader’s future had been so completely and so irretrievably wrecked.

They would forget, only he⁠—Stoutenburg⁠—would remain the pariah, the exile, that carries the brand of traitor forever upon the pages of his life.

And now the hut is once more in sight, and for one brief instant an inward light flickers up in Stoutenburg’s dulled eyes. Gilda is there, Gilda whom he loves, and whose presence in the sorrow-laden years that are to come would be a perpetual compensation for all the humiliation and all the shame which he had endured.

Today mayhap she would follow him unwillingly, but Stoutenburg’s passion was proof against her coldness. He felt that he could conquer her, that he could win her love, when once he had her all to himself in a distant land, when she⁠—kinless too and forlorn⁠—would naturally turn to him for protection and for love. He had little doubt that he would succeed, and vaguely in his mind there rose the pale ray of hope that her love would then bring him luck, or at any rate put renewed energy in him to begin his life anew.

XLII The Fight in the Doorway

It seemed to Stoutenburg that from the back of the hut there came the sound of bustle and activity: he thought that mayhap Beresteyn had had the good idea of making the sledge ready for departure, and he called out loudly to his friend.

It was a mocking voice, however, that rose in response:

“Was your Magnificence perchance looking for me?”

Out of the mist which still hung round the small building Diogenes’ tall figure suddenly loomed before the Lord of Stoutenburg. He was standing in the doorway of the hut, with his back to it; one hand⁠—the right one⁠—was thrust inside his doublet, the left was on the hilt of his sword; his battered