“I should be churl, indeed,” said he to the lady, as he sat down at the table, “to decline your gracious courtesy. Nay, madam, pray take your seat; my servant will even pass the dishes. Natheless, if you will so honour me, a glass of wine from your fair hand?… I give you thanks.—Marcelin, you can feed the Señor Capitan.”
So the odd supper party began; the hostess unconsciously admiring; the Spaniard all a-frown; Rockhurst rattling his compliments with fascinating courtliness—his heart the while in the bare lodgings of the Quai Vert with his unprovided King; his brain intent upon turning the tide of events to the channels of his own purpose. He could see nothing thus far, but to await the moment when the Spaniard, sufficiently fuddled with wine after his blood-letting, might be conveyed back to the street by Marcelin and handed over to the next patrol. Then, thought Rockhurst, the gentle vrow would be left to the unhampered diplomacy of her uninvited guest (who felt prepared to wield it as profitably, and justify it as gallantly, as any Castilian in Bruges), and all would be plain sailing.
The astute valet seemed to have divined the scheme, and was plying the bottle sedulously upon his charge. Fate, however, upon which the wanderers had hitherto so blindly reckoned, again wielded the key.
Marcelin had hardly drawn the first sweep of the knife upon the goose’s breast when the house reverberated to the sound of distant knocking. The little dame went as white as the kerchief at her bosom; a far greater discomfiture fell upon her than she had manifested at sight of her gallant’s wound.
“Heaven’s mercy!” she gasped; “it is from the street!”
She ran to the inner door and listened in the passage; the knocking was resumed, from no patient or weakling hand, in peculiar cadence.
“It is my husband,” she said then, coming back into the room, with the calmness of despair. “It is my husband, and I am lost.”
The Spaniard rose to his feet and stood swaying, a look of dismay and helplessness upon his countenance. Instinctively she turned to Rockhurst, and pointing to the sorry figure, she cried:—
“My husband will never forgive me … no, Josse will never forgive me! He bought Ramon out when they had billeted him on us, last month. He bought him out and I was forbidden ever to speak to him again. I thought I was safe to-night … I am lost!”
The thunder of the husband’s rapping accompanied her lament with swelling rhythm.