“Better tighten the strap than lose the helmet,” Rollmar observed with grim sententiousness, and took his leave.
In his cabinet he heard that the peccant Captain von Ompertz had been caught and clapped into jail. “That is well,” he commented in a tone that promised scant mercy for the rollicking sabreur.
Doubtless it was because his chief thoughts just then were concentrated on the alliance he had determined to bring about, that when a scrawled note from the newly caged one was apologetically laid before him in which the prisoner insisted that if an interview were granted him he could lay before the Chancellor a certain fact that had come to his knowledge which might have an important bearing on the projected marriage, he, after tossing the message aside contemptuously, astonished his subordinate by ordering Captain von Ompertz to be brought to him. Presently the jovial swashbuckler was ushered in and, at a sign from the Minister, left alone with him.
“Well, Captain, so you are caught at last. What have you to say?”
Rollmar had lifted his head from the writing before him and, leaning back, regarded the prisoner with a careless but none the less searching look. A greater contrast between two men could hardly have been found. The standing figure, big, brawny, workmanlike, with the round, weather-tanned face crowned by a mass of thick fair hair, the shabby half-military dress with the empty scabbard eloquent of duress, the air jaunty with its suggestion of an unquenchable spirit; then the other personality, mind, as it were, confronting matter, small, wizened almost, the dress neat but scrupulously simple, the face seamed with a lifetime of deep thought and restless ambition, placid now as he surveyed the rough man at his ease, save for the suggestion of energy and power in the fierce, inscrutable eyes fixed on his visitor. To do von Ompertz justice it must be said that he never for a moment seemed to quail under the glance in which could be read life or death with the chances all inclining towards the latter.
“Yes, Excellency; I have been caught, unfortunately,” the soldier replied bluffly. “My own fault. I was fool enough to come back like a fox to my hole when I might easily have scampered across the frontier.”
“The law,” observed Rollmar, with his characteristic trick of sententiousness, “is ever ready to acknowledge its indebtedness to a criminal’s own want of common-sense.”
A shadow of sternness fell over the prisoner’s face as he said, “Your pardon, Excellency, I am no criminal.”
“You are a law-breaker,” Rollmar returned coldly. “A brawler, a manslayer.”
“I drew in self-defence,” von Ompertz protested hotly.