THE BIRTH OF HATE
Here the three men parted; Beresteyn and Jan to go to the "Lame Cow" where the latter was to begin his work of keeping track of Diogenes, and Stoutenburg to find his way to that squalid lodging house which was situate at the bottom of the Kleine Hout Straat where it abuts on the Oude Gracht.
It had been somewhat impulsively that he had suggested to Beresteyn that he would endeavour to obtain some information from the Spanish wench as to Diogenes' plans and movements and the whereabouts of Gilda, and now that he was alone with more sober thoughts he realised that the suggestion had not been over-backed by reason. Still as Beresteyn had said: there could be no harm in seeking out the girl. Stoutenburg was quite satisfied in his mind that she must be the rascal's sweetheart, else she had not lent him an helping hand in the abduction of Gilda, and since he himself was well supplied with money through the generosity of his rich friends in Haarlem, he had no doubt that if the wench knew anything at all about the rogue, she could easily be threatened first, then bribed and cajoled into telling all that she knew.
Luck in this chose to favour the Lord of Stoutenburg, for the girl was on the doorstep when he finally reached the house where two nights ago a young soldier of fortune had so generously given up his lodgings to a miserable pair of beggars. He had just been vaguely wondering how best he could—without endangering his own safety—obtain information as to which particular warren in the house she and her father inhabited, when he saw her standing under the lintel of the door, her meagre figure faintly lit up by the glimmer of a street-lamp fixed in the wall just above her head.
"I would have speech with thee," he said in his usual peremptory manner as soon as he had approached her, "show me the way to thy room."
Then as, like a frightened rabbit, she made ready to run away to her burrow as quickly as she could, he seized hold of her arm and reiterated roughly:
"I would have speech of thee, dost hear? Show me the way to thy room at once. Thy safety and that of thy father depend on thy obedience. There is close search in the city just now for Spanish spies."
The girl's pale cheeks took on a more ashen hue, her lips parted with a quickly smothered cry of terror. She knew—as did every stranger in these Dutch cities just now—that the words "Spanish spy" had a magical effect on the placid tempers of their inhabitants, and that many a harmless foreign wayfarer had suffered imprisonment, aye and torture too, on the mere suspicion of being a "Spanish spy."
"I have nothing to fear," she murmured under her breath.
"Perhaps not," he rejoined, "but the man who shelters and protects thee is under suspicion of abetting Spanish spies. For his sake 'twere wiser if thou didst obey me."