The Laughing Cavalier | Page 3

her chin in her hands. The moon was not yet up
and yet it was not dark; a mysterious light stil lingered on the horizon
far away where earth and sea met in a haze of purple and indigo.
From the little garden down below there rose the subtle fragrance of
early spring--of wet earth and budding trees, and the dim veiled
distance was full of strange sweet sounds, the call of night-birds, the
shriek of sea-gulls astray ffrom their usual haunts.
Gilda looked out and listened--unable to understand this vague sense of
oppression and foreboding: when she put her finger up to her eyes, she
found them wet with tears.
Memories rose from out the past, sad phantoms that hovered in the
scent of the spring. Gilda had never wholly forgotten the man who had
once filled her heart with his personality, much less could she chase
away his image frim her mind now that a future of misery and disgrace
was all that was left to him.
She did not know what had become of him, and dared not ask for news.
Mynheer Beresteyn, loyal to the House of Nassau and to its prince, had
cast out of his heart the sons of John of Barneveld whom he had once
loved. Assassins and traitors, he would with his own lips have
condemned them to the block, or denounced them to the vengence of
the Stadtholder for their treachery against him.
The feeling of uncertainty as to Stoutenburg's fate softened Gilda's
heart toward him. She knew that he had become a wanderer on the face
of the earth, Cain-like, homeless, friendless, practically kinless; she
pitied him far more than she did Groeneveld or the others who were
looking death quite closely in the face.
She was infinitely sorry for him, for him and for his wife, for whose
sake he had been false to his first love. The gentle murmur of the

breeze, the distant call of the waterfowl, seemed to bring back to
Gilda's ears those whisperings of ardent passion which had come from
Stoutenburg's lips years ago. She had listened to them with joy then,
with glowing eyes cast down and cheeks that flamed up at his words.
And as she listened to these dream-sounds others more concrete
mingled with the mystic ones far away: the sound of stealthy footsteps
upon the flagged path of the garden, and of a human being breathing
and panting somewhere close by, still hidden by the gathering shadows
of the night.
She held her breath to listen--not at all frightened, for the sound of
those footsteps, the presence of that human creature close by, were in
tune with her mood of expectancy of something that was foredoomed
to come.
Suddenly the breeze brought to her ear the murmur of her name,
whispered as if in an agony of pleading:
"Gilda!"

The Prologue
Part 2
She leaned right out of the window. Her eyes, better accustomed to the
dim evening light, perceived a human figure that crouched against the
yew hedge, in the fantastic shadow cast by the quaintly shaped peacock
at the corner close to the house.
"Gilda!" came the murmur again, more insistent this time.
"Who goes there?" she called in response: and it was an undefinable
instinct stronger than her will that caused her to drop her own voice
also to a whisper.
"A fugitive hunted to his death," came the response scarce louder than

the breeze. "Give me shelter, Gilda--human bloodhounds are on my
track."
Gilda's heart seemed to stop its beating; the human figure out there in
the shadows had crept stealthily nearer. The window out of which she
leaned was only a few feet from the ground; she stretched out her hand
into the night.
"There is a projection in the wall just there," she whispered hurriedly,
"and the ivy stems will help you...Come!"
The fugitive grasped the hand that was stretched out to him in pitying
helpfulness. With the aid of the projection in the wall and of the stems
of the century-old ivy, he soon cleared the distance which separated
him from the windowsill. The next moment he had jumped into the
room.
Gilda in this impulsive act of mercy had not paused to consider either
the risks or the cost. She had recognised the voice of the man
whom she had once loved, that voice called to her out of the depths of
boundless misery; it was the call of a man at bay, a human quarry
hunted and exhausted, with the hunters close upon his heels. She could
not have resisted that call even if she had allowed her reason to fight
her instinct then.
But now that he stood before her in rough fisherman's clothes, stained
and torn, his face covered with