'"A land that rides at anchor, and is moored;
In which they do not live, but go aboard."'
These remarks referred to the growing discontent between the regiments of the Brigade and the States-General—matters to which we may have to refer elsewhere, and which led to the former abandoning the service of the latter for that of Great Britain.
And now Lewie Baronald, after thanking his friends for their intervention and advice, took the road to the residence of the Countess van Renslaer, whither, unknown to him, Morganstjern had preceded him, and was, at that very moment, engaged with Dolores.
CHAPTER IV.
DOLORES.
The villa occupied by the Countess van Renslaer stood a little distance from the Hague, on the Ryswick road, amid a large pleasure-garden in the old Dutch style, a marvel of prettiness, with its meandering walks, fantastically-cut parterres, box borders, pyramids of flower-pots, and tiny fish-pond where the carp and perch were often fed by the white hands of Dolores.
It had more than one rose-bowered zomerhuis hidden among the shrubbery, and admirably adapted for contemplation or flirtation. It was the month of May now, when the tulips and hyacinths, potted in jardinières full of light sand, were in all their beauty—flowers for which, in the days of the tulip-mania, a hundred florins had been paid for a single bulb.
Around, the country was intersected in every direction by canals and trees in long straight avenues, the level surface dotted with farms and summer-houses; an occasional steeple, the old castle where the famous Treaty of Ryswick was signed, and the sails of many windmills whirling slowly in the evening breeze, alone broke the flat monotony of the Dutch horizon.
In the deep recess of a window that opened to the garden sat Dolores, watching and expectant. But only that morning, after parade, Lewie Baronold had talked to her of love—his love and hers—in the recess of that window—talked so sweetly of his adoration of her own charming self. So Dolores had thought to sit there again, with eyes half closed and smiling lips, to think it all over once more, while fanning herself with one of the large fans of green silk then in fashion, while the Countess, her mother, had fallen asleep over 'Clélia,' one of Monsieur de Scudery's five-volume folio novels, in the drawing-room beyond.
Dolores was taller, more lithe and slender, than Dutch girls usually are, for she had in her veins the blood of more than one ancestor who had come with that scourge of the Low Countries, Ferdinand of Toledo, el castigador del Flamencas; hence her graceful figure, the stately carriage of her beautiful head, her rather aquiline and oval features, her dark hair, and the darker lashes that shaded her soft eyes that were 'like violets bathed in dew,' and hence her peculiar name of Dolores.