“This man Le Bourse,” he said, at the same time bending his bright eyes upon my face as if he would read me through and through, “this man, Le Bourse, was a man I wished to see. Alas the while! I wish he were yet alive.”
“A friend of yours?” I asked, mustering my voice as well as I could. I knew instinctively that I was under examination.
“No, hardly a friend; and yet I owed him some reparation for an injury. I wish he were here.”
“There is no fetching dead men back to life,” I said. And then I added: “At least in the flesh.”
“He will not haunt me, if that is what you mean.”
The patroon walked thoughtfully across the room, and stood for some time with his back towards me, looking out of the window across the broad terrace where I had seen Ronald Guy and the execution the night before. I could see his figure relax and droop a little.
“Alas, poor Guy,” I heard him mutter. He could afford to pity, now that it was all over.
Then his figure against the lighted window stiffened and he seemed to gather strength again. Two minutes later, when he turned to face us once more, he was quite himself. The night before I had asked myself a question; now I was ready to answer it. Yes, there were two actors in Van Volkenberg manor. I was one. The other was the patroon.
And from that moment I conceived a fair notion of how the ground lay between us. Perhaps he knew me, perhaps not; but, at any rate, he suspected me, and this was like to prove my ruin. I recalled just then one of the war cries of the English revolution that my father used to talk so much about. The King and the parliament were pitted one against the other till the bitter end. It was the great church hero, Cromwell, so my father used to say, who first foresaw what the end was going to be. Then grew up that motto, “Thy head or my head,” which neither Roundhead nor Cavalier forgot for many years.
Thus it was between Van Volkenberg and me. Disclaim superstition as I would, I could not resist the idea that fate had had a hand in our first meeting and had molded subsequent events. Van Volkenberg, as I learned later, regarded me with even greater superstition than I felt towards him. Though I managed to allay his suspicions for a while, he never seemed quite free in my presence, even when he took me into his confidence and made me his right hand man.