The First Sir Percy - Baroness Orczy (fastest ebook reader .txt) 📗

Jan laughed derisively. The men laughed openly. They thought this but another excellent joke on the part of the droll fellow.

“Bah!” Jan said, with a shrug of the shoulder. “How should a varlet like thee know aught of which his lordship hath not full cognisance already?”

“His lordship,” the other riposted quickly, even whilst a look of impish cunning overspread his face⁠—“his lordship never was in the confidence of the Stadtholder. I was!”

“What hath the Stadtholder to do with the matter?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing!” the blind man replied airily. “Thou art obstinate, my good Jan, and ’tis not I who would force thee to share a secret for the possession of which, let me assure thee, his lordship would repay me not only with a tankard of his best wine, but with my life! Ay, and with a yearly pension of one thousand guilders to boot.”

These last few words he had spoken quite slowly and with grave deliberation, his head nodding sagely while he spoke. The look of cunning in those spectral orbs had lent to his pale, wan face an air of elfin ghoulishness. He was swaying on his feet, and now and again the men had to hold him up, for he was on the very point of measuring his length on the hall floor.

Jan did not know what to make of it all. Obviously the man was drunk. But not so drunk that he did not know what he was talking about. And the air of cunning suggested that there was something alive in the fuddled brain. Jan looked across the hall in the direction of the banqueting-room.

The doors were wide open, and he could see that his lordship, who at first had paced up and down the long room like a caged beast, had paused quite close to the door, then advanced on tiptoe out into the hall, where he had remained for the last minute or two, intent and still, with eager, probing glance fixed upon the blind man. Now, when Jan questioned him with a look, he gave his faithful henchman a scarce perceptible sign, which the latter was quick enough to interpret correctly.

“Thou dost set my mouth to water,” he said to the blind man, with well-assumed carelessness, “by all this talk of yearly pensions and of guilders. I am a poor man, and not so young as I was. A thousand guilders a year would keep me in comfort for the rest of my life.”

“Yet art so obstinate,” Diogenes riposted with a quaint, inane laugh, “as to deny me a tankard of Spanish wine, which might put thee in possession of my secret⁠—a secret, good Jan, worth yearly pensions and more to his lordship.”

“How do I know thou’rt not a consummate liar?” Jan protested gruffly.

“I am!” the other riposted, wholly unruffled. “I am! Lying hath been my chief trade ever since I was breeched. Had I not lied to the Stadtholder he would not have entrusted his secrets to me, and I could not have bartered those secrets for a tankard of good Spanish wine.”

“Thy vaunted secrets may not be worth a tankard of wine.”

“They are, friend Jan, they are! Try them and see.”

“Well, let’s hear them and, if they are worth it, I’ll pay thee with a tankard of his lordship’s best Oporto.”

But the blind man shook his head with owlish solemnity.

“And then sell them to his lordship,” he retorted, “for pensions and whatnot, whilst thine own hand, mayhap, puts the rope around my neck. No, no, my good Jan, say no more about it. I’d as lief see his lordship and thee falling into the Stadtholder’s carefully laid trap, and getting murdered in your beds, even while I am on my journey to kingdom come.”

“Who is going to murder us?” Jan queried, frowning and puzzled, trying to get his cue once more from his master. “And how?”

“I’ll not tell thee,” the blind man replied, with a quick turn to that obstinacy which so oft pertains to the drunkard, “not if thou wert to plunge me in a bath of best Oporto.”

Some of the men began to murmur.

“We might all share?” one or two of them suggested.

“Let’s hear what it is,” others declared.

“I’ll tell thee, knave, what I’ll do,” Jan rejoined decisively. “I’ll bring thee a tankard of Oporto to loosen thy tongue. Then, if thy secret is indeed as important as thou dost pretend, I’ll see that the hangman is cheated of thy carcass.”

For awhile the blind man pondered.

“Loosen my hands then, friend Jan,” he said, “for, in truth, I am trussed like a fowl; then let’s feel the handle of that tankard. After that we’ll talk.”

The soldiers sat around the table, watching the blind man with grave attention. At a sign from Jan they soon loosened his bonds. There was something magnetic in the air just then, something that sent sensitive nerves aquiver, and of which these rough fellow were only vaguely conscious. They could not look on that drunken loon without laughing. He was more comical than ever now, with that air of bland beatitude upon his face as his slender fingers closed around the handle of the tankard which Jan had just placed in his hand.

“I would sell my soul for a butt of this nectar,” he said; and drank in the odour of the wine with every sign of delight, even before he raised the tankard to his lips.

The Lord of Stoutenburg watched the blind man, too. A deep furrow between his brows testified to the earnest concentration of his thoughts. The man knew something, or thought he knew, of that his lordship could not be in doubt. The question was, was that knowledge of such importance as the miserable wretch averred, or was he merely, like any rogue who sees the rope dangling before his eyes, trying to gain a respite, by proposing vain bargains or selling secrets that had only found birth in his own fuddled brain. Stoutenburg, remember, was no