The Laughing Cavalier - Baroness Orczy (chapter books to read to 5 year olds .txt) 📗

and more insistently. Still no response. At the other door on the opposite side of the landing a female figure appeared wrapped in a worsted rag, and a head half hidden by a linen coif was thrust forward out of the darkness behind it.

“They’s won’t answer you,” said the apparition curtly. “They are strangers⁠ ⁠… only came last night, but all this morning when the landlord or his wife knocked at the door, they simply would not open it.”

“But I am a friend,” said Diogenes, “the best I fancy that these poor folk have.”

“You used to lodge here until last night.”

“Why yes. The lodgings are mine, I gave them up to these poor people who had nowhere else to go.”

“They won’t answer you,” reiterated the female apparition dolefully and once more retired into its burrow.

The situation was becoming irritating. Diogenes put his mouth against the keyhole and shouted “What ho, there! Open!” as lustily as his powerful lungs would allow.

“Dondersteen!” he exclaimed, when even then he received no response.

But strange to relate no sooner was this expletive out of his mouth, than there came a cry like that of a frightened small animal, followed by a patter of naked feet upon a naked floor; the next moment the door was thrown invitingly open, and Diogenes was able to step across its thresh-hold.

“Dondersteen!” he ejaculated again, “hadst thou not opened, wench, I would within the next few seconds have battered in the door.”

The woman stood looking at him with great, dark eyes in which joy, surprise and fear struggled for mastery. Her hair though still unruly was coiled around her head, her shift and kirtle were neatly fastened, but her legs and feet were bare and above the shift her neck and shoulders appeared colourless and attenuated. Eyes and hair were dark, and her skin had the olive tint of the south, but her lips at this moment looked bloodless, and there was the look of starvation in her wan face.

Diogenes walked past her into the inner room. The old man was lying on the bed, and on the coverlet close to him a much fingered prayerbook lay open. The woman slipped noiselessly past the visitor and quietly put the prayerbook away.

“You have come to tell us that we must go,” she said in an undertone as she suddenly faced the newcomer.

“Indeed, that was not my purpose,” he replied gaily, “I have come on the contrary to bring you good news, and it was foolish of you to keep me dangling on your doorstep for so long.”

“The landlord hates us,” she murmured, “because you forced him last night to take us in. He came thundering at the door early this morning, and threatened to eject us as vagabonds or to denounce us as Spanish spies. I would not open the door to him, and he shouted his threats at us through the keyhole. When you knocked just now I was frightened. I thought that he had come back.”

Her voice was low and though she spoke Dutch fluently her throat had in it the guttural notes of her native land. A touch of the gipsy there must be in her, thought Diogenes as he looked with suddenly aroused interest on the woman before him, her dark skin, the long, supple limbs, the velvety eyes with their submissive, terrified look.

With embarrassed movements she offered the only chair in the room to her visitor, then cast shy, timorous glances on him as he refused to sit, preferring to lean his tall figure against the whitewashed wall. She thought that never in her life had she seen any man so splendid and her look of bold admiration told him so without disguise.

“Well!” he said with his quaint smile, “I am not the landlord, nor yet an enemy. Art thou convinced of that?”

“Yes, I am!” she said with a little sigh, as she turned away from him in order to attend to the old man, who was moaning peevishly in bed.

“He has lost the use of speech,” she said to Diogenes as soon as she had seen to the old man’s wants, “and today he is so crippled that he can scarcely move. We ought never to have come to this horrible cold part of the country,” she added with a sudden tone of fierce resentment. “I think that we shall both die of misery before we leave it again.”

“Why did you come here then at all?” asked Diogenes.

“We wandered hither, because we heard that the people in this city were so rich. I was born not far from here, and so was my mother, but my father is a native of Spain. In France, in Brabant where we wandered before, we always earned a good living by begging at the church doors, but here the people are so hard.⁠ ⁠…”

“You will have to wander back to Spain.”

“Yes,” she said sullenly, “as soon as I have earned a little money and father is able to move, neither of which seems very likely just now.”

“Ah!” he said cheerily, “that is, wench, where I proclaim thee wrong! I do not know when thy father will be able to move, but I can tell thee at this very moment where and how thou canst earn fifty guilders which should take thee quite a long way toward Spain.”

She looked up at him and once more that glance of joy and of surprise crept into her eyes which had seemed so full of vindictive anger just now. With the surprise and the joy there also mingled the admiration, the sense of well-being in his presence.

Already he had filled the bare, squalid room with his breezy personality, with his swagger and with his laughter; his ringing voice had roused the echoes that slept in the mouldy rafters and frightened the mice that dwelt in the wainscotting and now scampered hurriedly away.

“I,” she said with obvious incredulity, “I to earn fifty guilders! I have not earned so much in any six