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"Just now I find it more interesting," went on Adrian loftily and disregardful of his brother, "to study those whom the cannon may shoot than to make the cannon which is to shoot them." "Hope you won't be one of them," interrupted Foy again. "Where have you been this evening, son?" asked Lysbeth hastily, fearing a quarrel.
"I will do nothing of the sort; the prison here is over-full already. Untie her arms and let her go." The soldiers obeyed, wondering somewhat, and the Mare scrambled to her feet. For a moment she stood looking at her deliverer. Then crying, "We shall met again, Lysbeth van Hout!" suddenly she turned and sped up a dyke at extraordinary speed.
"I fear that it is worse; it is the plague," said Lysbeth, startled into candour. The poor girl laughed hoarsely. "Oh! I hoped it," she said. "I am glad, I am glad, for now I shall die and go to join him. But I wish that I had caught it before," she rambled on to herself, "for then I would have taken it to him in prison and they couldn't have treated him as they did."
Then Black Meg stood forward, and, with the rapidity and unction of a spy, poured out her tale. She identified the woman with one whom she had known who was sentenced to death by the Inquisition and escaped, and, after giving other evidence, ended by repeating the conversation which she had overheard between the accused and Lysbeth that afternoon.
"Poetry, mother," said Adrian sententiously, "is a great consoler; it lifts the mind from the contemplation of petty and sordid cares." "Petty and sordid cares!" repeated Lysbeth wonderingly, then she added with a kind of cry: "Oh! Adrian, have you no heart that you can watch a saint burn and come home to philosophise about his agonies? Will you never understand?
Then, sooner or later, might come the informer, that dreadful informer whose shadow already lay heavy upon thousands of homes in the Netherlands, and after the informer the officer, and after the officer the priest, and after the priest the judge, and after the judge the executioner and the stake. In this case, what would happen to Lysbeth?
Indeed, of a sudden Lysbeth seemed to be smitten into stone, for there she stood staring with a blanched and meaningless face at the face of the man opposite to her. Well might she stare, for she also knew him.
If a glance could have withered him, without doubt Dirk would immediately have been shrivelled to nothing. To say that Lysbeth was angry is too little, for in truth she was absolutely furious. She did not like this Spaniard, and hated the idea of a long interview with him alone.
His character was bad, and it was said, moreover, that because of his cruelties and the shame she had suffered at his hands, Lysbeth van Hout had committed suicide. At least, this was certain, that she was seen running at night towards the Haarlemer Meer, and that after this, search as her friends would, nothing more could be heard of her.
"Pardon, Excellency," he said when he had inspected him with a lantern, "but I did not think that you would be going the rounds with a lady in your sledge," and holding up the light the man took a long look at Lysbeth, grinning visibly as he recognised her.
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