BARONESS ORCZY Ultimate Collection: 130+ Action-Adventure Novels, Thrillers & Detective Stories. Emma Orczy
could not gainsay the fact that his son was right.
The most urgent thing at the present juncture was to get the Stadtholder safely back to his camp at Utrecht. Every minute spent in this garrisonless city was fraught with danger for the most precious life in the United Provinces.
"Where is his Highness's horse?" he asked.
"Just outside," Nicolaes replied glibly; "in charge of a man I know. Mine is ready too. Indeed, we should get to horse at once."
The Stadtholder did not demur.
"Have the horses brought to," he said quickly. "I'll be with you in a trice."
2
Nicolaes hurried out of the room, his Highness remaining behind for a moment or two, in order to give his final instructions, a last admonition or two to the burghers.
"Do not resist," he said earnestly. "You have not the means to do aught but to resign yourselves to the inevitable. As soon as I can, I will come to your relief. In the meanwhile, conciliate De Berg by every means in your power. He is not a harsh man, and the Archduchess has learnt a salutary lesson from the discomfiture of Alva. She knows by now that we are a stiff-necked race, whom it is easier to cajole than to coerce. If only you will be patient! Can you reckon on your citizens not to do anything rash or foolish that might bring reprisals upon your heads?"
"Yes," the burgomaster replied. "I think we can rely on them for that. When your Highness has gone we'll assemble on the market place, and I will speak to them. We'll do our best to stay the present panic and bring some semblance of order into the town."
Their hearts were heavy. 'Twas no use trying to minimize the deadly peril which confronted them. There was a century of oppression, of ravage, and pillage, and bloodshed to the credit of the Spanish armies. It was difficult to imagine that the spirit of an entire nation should have changed suddenly into something more tolerant and less cruel.
However, for the moment, there was nothing more to be said, and alas! it was not as if the whole terrible situation was a novel one. They had all been through it before, at Leyden and Bergen-op-Zoom, at Haarlem and Delft, when they were weeping their land free from the foreign tyrant; and it was useless at this hour to add to the Stadtholder's difficulties by futile lamentations. All the more as Nicolaes had now returned with the welcome news that the horses were there, and everything ready for his Highness's departure. He appeared more excited than before, anxious to get away as quickly as may be.
"There is a rumour in the town," he said, "that Spanish vedettes have been spied less than a league away."
"And have you heard any rumour as to the arrival of our Diogenes?" the Stadtholder asked casually.
Nicolaes hesitated a moment ere he replied: "I have heard nothing definite."
3
A minute later the Stadtholder was in the hall. The doors were open and the horses down below in the charge of an equerry.
Nicolaes, half way down the outside stone steps, looked the picture of fretful impatience. With a dark frown upon his brow, he was scanning the crowd, and now and again a curse broke through his set lips when he saw the Stadtholder still delayed by futile leave-takings.
"In the name of heaven, let us to horse!" he exclaimed almost savagely.
Just at that moment his Highness was taking a kindly farewell of Gilda.
"I wish, mejuffrouw," he was saying, "that you had thought of taking shelter in our camp."
Gilda forced herself to listen to him, her lips tried to frame the respectful words which convention demanded. 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 heart-rending 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 Gerard. 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 for ever 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.
4
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,