The Scarlet Pimpernel Series – All 35 Titles in One Edition. Emma Orczy

      CHAPTER XXX

       A NOCTURNE

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      It was only natural that, though tired as he was and enjoying an unusually contented mind, Diogenes was nevertheless unable to get to sleep.

      He had had a very good supper and had parted at an early hour from his host. Ben Isaje had been amiable even deferential to the last, and indeed there had been nothing in the Jew's demeanour to arouse misgivings in the most suspicious mind.

      The lean and towzled serving woman had prepared a clean and comfortable bed in the narrow alcove within the wall panelling of the small room which adjoined the shop, but though the weary philosopher wooed sleep with utmost persistence, it resolutely refused to be lured to his pillow. At first the arrival of the night watchmen had kept him awake: for they made their entrance with much jangling of swords and loud and lusty talk. There was apparently a good solid partition between his room and the shop because as soon as the watchmen were settled at their post their voices only reached Diogenes' ear like a muffled murmur.

      A door gave from this room on the passage and this he had carefully locked; but it hung loosely on its hinges and the slightest noise in the house — a heavy footfall overhead or in the shop — would cause it to rattle with a weird, intermittent sound which sent sleep flying baffled away.

      There were thoughts too which crowded in upon him — pleasant thoughts as well as others that were a trifle sad — the immediate future with its promise of a possible fortune loomed brightly enough, but the means to that happy end was vaguely disturbing the light-hearted equanimity of this soldier of fortune accustomed hitherto to grip Chance by the hair whenever she rushed past him in her mad, whirling career, and without heeding those who stood in his way.

      But suddenly the whole thing seemed different, and Diogenes himself could not have told you why it was so. Thoughts of the future and of the promises which it held disturbed when they should have elated him: there was a feeling in him which he could not analyse, a feeling wherein a strange, sweet compassion seemed to form the main ingredient. The philosopher who had hitherto viewed life through the rosy glasses of unalterable good-humour, who had smiled at luck and ill-luck, laughed at misfortune and at hope, suddenly felt that there was something in life which could not be dismissed light-heartedly, something which really counted, though it was so intangible and so elusive that even now he could not give it a name.

      The adventurer, who had slept soundly and dreamlessly in camp and on the field, in the streets of a sacked town or the still smouldering battlements of a fortress, could find no rest in the comfortable bed so carefully prepared for him in the house of Ben Isaje the Jew. The murmur of voices from the shop, low and monotonous, irritated his nerves, the rattling of the door upon its hinges drove him well-nigh distracted.

      He heard every noise in the house as they died out one by one; the voice of the serving woman bidding the jongejuffrouw "good-night," the shuffling footsteps of the old Jew, the heavy tread of Maria overhead, and another, light and swift which — strangely enough — disturbed him more completely than the louder sounds had done.

      At last he could stand his present state no longer, he felt an unpleasant tingling to the very tips of his fingers and the very roots of his hair; it seemed to him as if soft noiseless steps wandered aimlessly outside his door; furtive tiny animals with feet of velvet must have run down the stairs and then halted, breathless and terrified, on the other side of those rattling wooden panels.

      He sat up in bed and groping for his tinder he struck a light; then he listened again. Not a sound now stirred inside the house, only the wind soughed through the loose tiles of the roof and found out the chinks and cracks of the ill-fitting window, through which it blew with a sharp, whistling sound. From the shop there came the faint murmur of some of the watchmen snoring at their post.

      Beyond that, nothing. And yet Diogenes, whose keen ear was trained to catch the flutter of every twig, the movement of every beast, could have sworn that someone was awake at this moment, in this house besides himself — someone who breathed and trembled on the other side of the door.

      Without a moment's hesitation he slipped on his clothes as quickly as he could, then he pulled the curtains across in front of the alcove and paused for one second longer in order to listen.

      He had certainly not been mistaken. Through the stillness of the house he heard the soughing of the wind, the snoring of the watchmen, and that faint, palpitating sound outside in the passage — that sound which was as the breathing of some living, frightened thing.

      Then he walked as noiselessly as he could up to the door, and with a sudden simultaneous turn of key and handle he opened it suddenly.

      It opened outwards, and the passage beyond was pitch dark, but there in front of him now, white as a ghost, white as the garment which she wore, white as the marble statue of the Madonna which he had seen in the cathedral at Prague, stood the jongejuffrouw.

      The candle which she carried flickered in the draught, and thus flickering it lit up her large blue eyes which she kept fixed upon him with an expression half defiant yet wholly terrified.

      Frankly he thought at first that this was an apparition, a vivid embodiment of the fevered fancies which had been haunting him. No wonder therefore that he made no movement toward her, or expressed the slightest astonishment at seeing her there, all alone, in the middle of the night, not five paces away from him.

      Thus they stood looking at one another for some time in absolute silence; she obviously very frightened, hesitating betwixt audacity and immediate flight, and he puzzled and with a vague sense of unreality upon him, a sense as of a dream which yet had in it the pulsating vividness of life.

      She was the first to break this silence which was beginning to be oppressive. Gilda Beresteyn was not a timid woman nor was hers a character which ever vacillated once her mind was made up. The step which she had taken this night — daring and unconventional as it was — had been well thought out: deliberately and seriously she had weighed every danger, every risk which she ran, even those which in her pure-minded innocence she was not able fully to appreciate. Now though she was scared momentarily, she had no thought of turning back.

      The old stiff-necked haughtiness of her race did not desert her for a moment, even though she was obviously at a disadvantage in this instance, and had come here as a suppliant.

      "I wished to speak with you, sir," she said, and her voice had scarce a tremor in it, "my woman was too timorous to come down and summon you to my presence, as I had ordered her to do; so I was forced to come myself."

      Though she looked very helpless, very childlike in her innocence, she had contrived to speak to him like a princess addressing a menial, holding her tiny head very high and making visible efforts to still the quivering of her lips.

      There was something so quaint in this proud attitude of hers under the present circumstances,