"Are we too late? Jan Meert works quickly, and these mishaps of yours have cost us half an hour."
"Jan Meert works quickly," he echoed; then, though he never looked at me, but straight before him, his face wrinkled, and he broke into a relishing chuckle for which his words gave no warrant till he added, "He'll have gone by this time, curse him, for a thieving Hollander, and these mishaps of mine, as you call them, have saved more than they cost."
Then I understood. He had been playing some of his old campaigner's tricks upon me, and I, like the innocent he knew me for, had never found him out. Thank God! it has always been my way to believe men honest until they show themselves rogues. That was not the King's way; yet of this I am sure, in my humble life I won to myself more love than he did, and more faithful service. Even now love and service were at the root of Martin's trickery, and knowing it was so, I did not turn and strike him. For that control, and remembering what happened so shortly after at Poictiers, I gratefully give God thanks.
"You make a coward of me," was all my reproach.
But when I pressed Roland to a gallop, he leaned forward and caught my rein.
"No, Monsieur Gaspard, no, no," he said, almost crying; "what sense is there in that? Better a burnt Solignac than a dead Hellewyl."
"We may save it. Leave go my rein, Martin, or—or—I'll draw my dagger on you."
"Not you—or I'll risk it, though a man's life is worth more any day than a dry roof. Hear reason. Save Solignac? Save it from Jan Meert and his twenty devils? We two? Curse away if it pleases you, the leather's round my wrist and I won't leave go. Listen now," he went on coaxingly, "what good can you do? What's Solignac but a shell and you the kernel? Why fling away the kernel after the shell? And how could we two face Jan Meert and his twenty brutes, sons of the devil every one of them? Are we to splash water from the Heyst with our palms, or carry it in our bonnets, to drown that roaring furnace? Listen now, listen; this was the way of it. Up he rode at a soft trot, in no haste at all, so safe and sure was he, and when I saw him coming I slammed-to the bolt of the great door, ran out old Babette to the woods behind, she in one hand and Ninus, here, in the other, tied up Ninus out of sight, hid Babette in the oak copse behind the trout pool—not that the wizened old fool had anything to fear but—well—she was part of Solignac, and if once she let loose her tongue upon Jan Meert as she does upon me, he might—Be quiet now, Monsieur Gaspard, don't I tell you she's safe enough? Then I stole back, I, Martin the liar and the maker of cowards—like makes like, Monsieur Gaspard, and a coward makes cowards—I stole back. Hard words are a fine wage to give a man who risks his life—one amongst twenty, and such a twenty as follow Jan Meert! They had the door down of course—all right, Monsieur Gaspard, if it hurts you I'll say no more. D'you think each ripped panel and split jamb wasn't as bad to me as a cracked rib, a cowardly maker of cowards and liar though I am? It was then—for I love the house that bore me as well as you can, but I had sense enough to see that if broken ribs followed stove panels, there was an end to something better than Solignac; there was an end to Hellewyl, there was an end to love, an end to hate, an end to the throttling of Jan Meert. What? Are these not something to live for? Something better than two fools dead before a burnt door? There's your rein loose, Monsieur Gaspard, for it's a loose rein we must have, you and I; a loose rein to ride away from Solignac till we are strong enough to ride back again, and when that day comes we'll shake a looser rein yet, see if we don't. When the time is ripe may God have mercy on Jan Meert's soul. Honestly, now, and man to man—though I am only a servant who would die to pleasure you, only dirt under your feet when it pleases your feet to trample on me, that and no better. I humbly ask your pardon for daring to so much as touch your bridle, Monsieur Gaspard, but I love you as a son, and when all's said it's natural I should have more sense than half my age. As man to man, now, am I liar and cur and all the rest of it? And did I not serve Solignac as well as if I had been kissing and—and—clucking a beggar girl under the beech-trees, a round-faced, bold-eyed herdsman's wench who—be angry if you will, be angry if you will, but the truth's the truth—a wench who might well cook my dinner but never share eating it, and yet I am no Hellewyl of Solignac!"
That he was talking as much against time as to ease his mind I knew, but there was so much sense in what he said that when he dropped my rein and sat back in the saddle I did not ride on. Of all the many leeches who sucked our Flanders' blood, none was bolder, greedier, more ruthless and more reckless than Jan Meert. Even into our remote life, stories drifted at which men cursed, but cursed softly, lest Jan Meert should catch and resent the echo; stories that for shame's sake we dared not tell our women, so wanton were they in cruelty, so brutal in destructiveness, and with such a wading in wickedness for very love of the thing.
A Christian country? A fraction of the Empire? Bah! The Emperor was busy elsewhere, and there was neither law nor justice in the land, nothing but the naked arm of the strong. Those who had the conscience and the power to rob robbed, none making them afraid for this world or the next; in the war of factions the great were striving to grow yet greater, or, if might be, were hard put to it to hold their own, and had no leisure to hold Jan Meert and his like in check. He burned, he plundered, he ravaged, but always with circumspection, preying on the weaker, and who was I that I might hope to outface him even in defence of the house of my fathers?