CHAPTER XL

       THE LOSER PAYS

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      Nicolaes Beresteyn had not gone far when Lucas of Sparendam came running with the news. He heard it all, he saw the confusion, the first signs of sauve qui peut.

      At first he was like one paralyzed with horror and with fear; he could not move, his limbs refused him service. Then he thought of his friends — some up in the molens, others at various posts on the road and by the bridge — they might not hear the confusion and the tumult, they might not see the coming sauve qui peut; they might not hear that the Stadtholder's spies are on the alert, and that his bodyguard might be here at any time.

      Just then the disbanding began. Nicolaes Beresteyn pushed his way through the fighting, quarrelling crowd to where Lucas of Sparendam, still exhausted and weak, was leaning up against a beam.

      "Their lordships up in the molens," he said in a voice still choked with fear, "and the Lord of Stoutenburg in the hut with the jongejuffrouw.... Come and tell them at once all that you know."

      And he dragged Lucas of Sparendam in his wake.

      The Lord of Stoutenburg was at Gilda's feet when Beresteyn ran in with Lucas to tell him the news.

      After he had given Jan the orders to prepare the gallows for the summary execution of the prisoner he had resumed his wild, restless pacing up and down the room. There was no remorse in him for his inhuman and cowardly act, but his nerves were all on the jar, and that perpetual hammering which went on in the distance drove him to frantic exasperation.

      A picture of the happenings in the basement down below would obtrude itself upon his mental vision; he saw the prisoner — careless, contemptuous, ready for death; Jan sullen but obedient; the men murmuring and disaffected. He felt as if the hammering was now directed against his own head, he could have screamed aloud with the agony of this weary, expectant hour.

      Then he thought of Gilda. Slowly the dawn was breaking, the hammering had ceased momentarily; silence reigned in the basement after the turbulence of the past hour. The Lord of Stoutenburg did not dare conjecture what this silence meant.

      The thought of Gilda became more insistent. He snatched up a cloak and wrapping it closely round him, he ran out into the mist. Quickly descending the steps, he at once turned his back on the basement where the last act of the supreme tragedy would be enacted presently. He felt like a man pursued, with the angel of Nemesis close to his heels, hour-glass in hand to mark the hour of retribution.

      He hoped to find rest and peace beside Gilda; he would not tell her that he had condemned the man to death. Let her forget him peaceably and naturally; the events of to-day would surely obliterate other matters from her mind. What was the life of a foreign vagabond beside the destinies of Holland which an avenging God would help to settle to-day?

      The Lord of Stoutenburg had walked rapidly to the hut where he hoped to find Gilda ready to receive him. He knocked at the door and Maria opened it to him. To his infinite relief she told him that the jongejuffrouw had broken her fast and would gladly speak with him.

      Gilda, he thought, looked very pale and fragile in the dim light of two or three tallow candles placed in sconces about the room. There were dark circles round her eyes, and a pathetic trembling of her lips proclaimed the near presence of tears.

      But there was an atmosphere of peace in the tiny room, with its humble little bits of furniture and the huge earthenware stove from which the pleasing glow of a wood fire emanated and shed a cheerful radiance around.

      The Lord of Stoutenburg felt that here in Gilda's presence he could forget his ambitions and his crimes, the man whom he was so foully putting to death, his jealousies and even his revenge.

      He drew a low chair close to her and half-sitting, half-kneeling, began speaking to her as gently, as simply as his harsh voice and impatient temperament would allow. He spoke mostly about the future, only touching very casually on the pain which she had caused him by her unjust suspicions of him.

      Gilda listened to him in silence for awhile. She was collecting all her will-power, all her strength of purpose for the task which lay before her — the task of softening a hardened and treacherous heart, of rousing in it a spark of chivalry and of honour so that it showed mercy there where it now threatened injustice, cruelty and almost inhuman cowardice.

      A brave man's life was in the hands of this man, who professed love for her; and though Gilda rejected that love with contempt, she meant, womanlike, to use that love as a mainspring for the softened mood which she wished to call forth.

      The first thought that had broken in upon her after a brief and troubled sleep was that a brave young life would be sacrificed to-day to gratify the petty spite of a fiend. She had been persuaded yesterday that the man who — though helpless and pinioned — stood before her in all the splendour of manhood and of a magnificent personality was nothing but a common criminal — a liar, a forger and a thief.

      Though this thought should have made her contented, since by bringing guilt home to a man who was nothing to her, it exonerated her brother whom she loved, she had felt all night, right through the disturbing dreams which had floated through her consciousness, a leaden weight sitting upon her heart, like the sense of the committal of some great and irreparable wrong. Indeed, she felt that if here in this very place which he had filled last night with his exuberant vitality, she had to think of him as silent and cold for all eternity, such a thought would drive her mad.

      The