“Where can they be kept, captain?” asked the sergeant sulkily.
“I observed, friend, that the house which my son and I have taken as our quarters has excellent cellars; they can be imprisoned there for the present—that is, except the young lady, whom the Señor Adrian will look after. As it chances, she is his wife.”
At this the soldiers laughed openly.
“I repeat—his wife, for whom he has been searching these many months,” said Ramiro, “and, therefore, to be respected. Do you understand, men?”
Apparently they did understand, at least no one made any answer. Their captain, as they had found, was not a man who loved argument.
“Now, then, you fellows,” went on Ramiro, “give up your arms.”
Martin thought a while. Evidently he was wondering whether it would not be best to rush at them and die fighting. At that moment, as he said afterwards indeed, the old saying came into his mind, “A game is not lost until it is won,” and remembering that dead men can never have another chance of winning games, he gave up the sword.
“Hand that to me,” said Ramiro. “It is a curious weapon to which I have taken a fancy.”
So sword Silence was handed to him, and he slung it over his shoulder. Foy looked at the kneeling Elsa, and he looked at his sword. Then an idea struck him, and he looked at the face of Adrian, his brother, whom he had last seen when the said Adrian ran to warn him and Martin at the factory, for though he knew that he was fighting with his father among the Spaniards, during the siege they had never met. Even then, in that dire extremity, with a sudden flash of thought he wondered how it happened that Adrian, being the villain that he was, had taken the trouble to come and warn them yonder in Leyden, thereby giving them time to make a very good defence in the shot tower.
Foy looked up at his brother. Adrian was dressed in the uniform of a Spanish officer, with a breast-plate over his quilted doublet, and a steel cap, from the front of which rose a frayed and weather-worn plume of feathers. The face had changed; there was none of the old pomposity about those handsome features; it looked worn and cowed, like that of an animal which has been trained to do tricks by hunger and the use of the whip. Yet, through all the shame and degradation, Foy seemed to catch the glint of some kind of light, a light of good desire shining behind that piteous mask, as the sun sometimes shines through a sullen cloud. Could it be that Adrian was not quite so bad after all? That he was, in fact, the Adrian that he, Foy, had always believed him to be, vain, silly, passionate, exaggerated, born to be a tool and think himself the master, but beneath everything, well-meaning? Who could say? At the worst, too, was it not better that Elsa should become the wife of Adrian than that her life should cease there and then, and by her lover’s hand?