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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Greatest Works of Emma Orczy', readers are transported to a world of mystery, romance, and adventure through a collection of Orczy's most renowned novels and short stories. Known for her captivating storytelling and vivid historical settings, Orczy's works are characterized by strong female protagonists, intricate plots, and themes of justice and redemption. This anthology showcases Orczy's literary style, which blends elements of suspense, drama, and romanticism, making her a prominent figure in early 20th-century literature. Emma Orczy, a prolific writer and playwright, drew inspiration from her own experiences and observations of society, particularly themes of heroism and sacrifice. Her background as a Hungarian noblewoman and her deep involvement in the suffragette movement influenced her portrayal of complex characters and social issues in her works. Through her writing, Orczy aimed to entertain and provoke thought, leaving a lasting impact on readers and fellow writers alike. I highly recommend 'The Greatest Works of Emma Orczy' to fans of historical fiction, mystery, and classic literature. Orczy's timeless tales of courage, love, and betrayal are sure to captivate readers of all ages and backgrounds, providing a literary experience that is both engaging and thought-provoking. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Greatest Works of Emma Orczy
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Table of Contents
Introduction
The Greatest Works of Emma Orczy gathers, in one authoritative collection, the principal fictions that defined a career synonymous with historical adventure and ingenious crime solving. It centers on the Scarlet Pimpernel series and extends to stand‑alone historical novels and signature short‑story cycles, together with a reflective volume associated with Sir Percy. The aim is twofold: to present the narratives that shaped Orczy’s popular reputation in their full reach, and to illuminate the breadth of her craft across forms. Readers will find complete novels and complete story collections, arranged to showcase recurring motifs, evolving character types, and the durable narrative designs that made these works enduring fixtures of popular literature.
The genres represented are deliberately varied yet coherent. Historical romance and adventure dominate the novels, from the Scarlet Pimpernel sequence to independent narratives of intrigue and peril. Parallel to these stand a suite of short‑story collections that established Orczy as a formative voice in crime and detection, including armchair solutions, pioneering female investigation, and atmospheric historical mysteries. Finally, The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World offers a set of reflective pieces linked to Orczy’s most famous creation, bridging fiction and commentary. There are no plays, poems, or diaries here; instead, this volume concentrates on novels, linked story cycles, and a single essayistic companion.
At the heart of the collection lies The Scarlet Pimpernel series, a landmark in popular fiction. Its premise is immediately gripping: a seemingly frivolous English aristocrat leads a secret life, rescuing the threatened and the innocent from the upheavals of revolutionary France. From the foundational novel The Scarlet Pimpernel through sequels and companion volumes, the sequence blends daring rescues, coded identities, and romantic tests of loyalty. The books gathered here trace the hero’s resourcefulness across shifting threats and alliances, balancing suspense with a distinctive lightness of touch. They also establish a template for the masked, double‑life protagonist that has resonated far beyond the historical settings in which the tales unfold.
Prequels such as The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy widen the imaginative scope of the Pimpernel’s world, turning back to earlier generations and offering an origin for the chivalric ethos that informs the later adventures. Their narratives share the essential Orczy signatures: flamboyant courage, audacious stratagems, and a relish for theatrical reversals. By reaching back in time, they underscore a recurring Orczy proposition—that bravery, wit, and gallantry are not accidents of a single era but a tradition, renewed by circumstance and character. Read alongside the central sequence, these books deepen the series’ sense of lineage and broaden its historical compass.
The series proper advances in varied modes: full‑length novels of peril and rescue, linked collections such as The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel and Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and later volumes that revisit familiar antagonists or widen the cast of allies. Titles including Sir Percy Leads the Band, I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, Lord Tony’s Wife, The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Eldorado, Mam’zelle Guillotine, Sir Percy Hits Back, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, A Child of the Revolution, In the Rue Monge, and Pimpernel and Rosemary demonstrate the sequence’s breadth. The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World, associated with this canon, adds a distinctive reflective counterpoint.
Throughout, Orczy’s unifying themes are clear. Identity is masked and revealed; wit is a moral instrument; and courage is measured by a willingness to risk status, comfort, and reputation for a principled rescue. Her heroes and heroines engage in elaborate performances—disguises, misdirections, coded messages—that foreground the pleasures of narrative surprise. Yet this theatricality serves earnest ends: fidelity, mercy, and honor. The prose favors momentum and clarity, with frequent crescendos and chapter‑end provocations that keep the reader alert. Romantic feeling does not eclipse action; it sharpens the stakes, setting personal devotion against public danger without dismantling suspense.
Beyond the Pimpernel, the stand‑alone historical novels—among them The Emperor’s Candlesticks, The Tangled Skein (In Mary’s Reign), Beau Brocade, The Nest of the Sparrowhawk, Petticoat Rule (Petticoat Government), The Heart of a Woman (A True Woman), Unto Caesar, A Bride of the Plains, The Bronze Eagle, Leatherface, His Majesty’s Well‑Beloved, The Honourable Jim, The Celestial City, Marivosa, A Joyous Adventure, and The Uncrowned King—show Orczy’s versatility. These works share a fascination with risk, ruse, and reputation, often placing ordinary loyalty under extraordinary pressure. They favor dramatic confrontations, sudden reversals, and the steady tightening of moral choices, while maintaining Orczy’s characteristic balance of pace, clarity, and romantic intensity.
Orczy’s crime and detection collections form a second, equally influential pillar. The Old Man in the Corner and its continuation Unravelled Knots present an armchair analyst who untangles perplexing cases through sheer reasoning. Lady Molly of Scotland Yard offers one of fiction’s early female investigators at the center of her own cases. The Man in Grey brings a commanding figure to bear on crimes set against historical backdrops. Castles in the Air relishes the comic complications of schemes and counter‑schemes, while Skin o’ My Tooth pursues justice from the vantage of a shrewd legal mind. Together, they map key early contours of popular detective storytelling.
Across genres, certain stylistic hallmarks persist. Orczy delights in reversals—of fortune, allegiance, and perspective—often unveiled at precisely paced intervals. She relies on sharp scenic contrasts, from salons to alleyways, to stage moral and practical dilemmas. Dialogue carries wit and strategic ambiguity; descriptions keep the reader oriented without slowing the chase. Above all, her chapters tend to close on provocative turns, a serial energy that invites immediate continuation. This architecture, disciplined yet exuberant, explains the books’ lasting readability: once set in motion, they rarely relinquish momentum until the final page settles plot and feeling into satisfying alignment.
The historical settings are drawn with a storyteller’s selectivity: enough realism to anchor events, enough freedom to foreground character and design. Orczy intertwines recognized moments and milieus with invented figures whose choices dramatize the consequences of upheaval, authority, and dissent. Without pursuing exhaustive documentation, she evokes atmosphere through customs, dress, and protocol, then gives precedence to scenes of decision—ruses planned, doors opened, names answered or withheld. The result is accessible historical fiction that privileges moral clarity and narrative ingenuity, inviting readers to inhabit the crossroads where private resolve meets public turmoil.
The cultural legacy of Orczy’s work is substantial. The Scarlet Pimpernel in particular has been widely recognized as a prototype for later masked or double‑life heroes, its blend of aristocratic nonchalance, secret purpose, and emblematic identity proving especially durable. The stories have enjoyed repeated adaptations for stage and screen, testifying to their structural strength and popular appeal. Her detective cycles, meanwhile, contributed enduring figures and formats to crime fiction, from the armchair logician to the woman investigator. This volume situates those achievements side by side, allowing their reciprocal illumination to be felt across forms and decades.
As a curated gathering rather than an exhaustive oeuvre, this collection privileges completeness at the level of individual books—novels and entire story cycles—while offering a panoramic view of Emma Orczy’s craft. Arranged to honor both the coherence of the Scarlet Pimpernel corpus and the variety of the other historical and detective works, it invites readings that are chronological, thematic, or exploratory. Taken together, these texts reveal a writer devoted to courage in action, intelligence in design, and pleasure in narrative. Their lasting significance lies in that rare combination: stories at once shapely, spirited, and irresistibly re‑readable.
Author Biography
Emma (Baroness) Orczy (1865–1947) was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright whose blend of romantic adventure, historical color, and brisk plotting made her one of the most recognizable popular authors of the early twentieth century. Best known for creating the Scarlet Pimpernel, she helped define the modern masked avenger and the secret-identity hero. Writing across the late Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar periods, she produced stage hits, bestselling series fiction, and influential detective tales. Her work drew on a cosmopolitan upbringing and a deep fascination with European history, especially the upheavals of revolution and restoration, and it continues to be read for its nimble action, chivalric ideals, and theatrical flair.
Orczy’s formation was strongly artistic. After her family settled in London, she studied drawing and painting at the West London School of Art and at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art. The discipline of the studio and exposure to the London stage shaped her narrative style: visual, dramatic, and keenly paced. Early work as an illustrator preceded a decisive turn to writing and the theater. Collaboration with Montagu Barstow, her husband and creative partner, linked her to contemporary stagecraft and helped refine her instinct for scene, dialogue, and suspense. European history—absorbed in multiple languages and cultures—provided the grand backdrops on which her fiction would thrive.
Her breakthrough came with The Scarlet Pimpernel, introduced first as a West End play in the early twentieth century and soon afterward as a novel. The premise—a seemingly frivolous English aristocrat who, under a secret persona, rescues victims of the French Revolution—proved electrifying to audiences. The character’s mix of disguise, daring escapades, and moral purpose shaped a lasting archetype. The success of the play and book turned Orczy into a household name and launched a prolific franchise. She balanced brisk, episodic plotting with romantic tension and historical atmosphere, crafting stories that were both escapist and grounded in vividly rendered, turbulent times.
Orczy expanded the Scarlet Pimpernel universe over decades, exploring origins, companions, and adversaries across novels and story cycles. Prequels such as The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy trace ancestral bravado, while sequels and linked tales—including Sir Percy Leads the Band, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, Lord Tony’s Wife, The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Eldorado, Mam’zelle Guillotine, Sir Percy Hits Back, Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, A Child of the Revolution, In the Rue Monge, and Pimpernel and Rosemary—broaden the canvas. The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World offers reflective commentary using the hero’s persona. Throughout, themes of loyalty, courage, and resistance to tyranny recur.
Beyond her most famous hero, Orczy wrote a wide range of historical novels set in varied European locales and eras. The Emperor’s Candlesticks, The Tangled Skein (In Mary’s Reign), Beau Brocade, The Nest of the Sparrowhawk, Petticoat Rule (Petticoat Government), The Heart of a Woman (A True Woman), Unto Caesar, A Bride of the Plains, The Bronze Eagle, Leatherface, His Majesty’s Well-Beloved, The Honourable Jim, The Celestial City, Marivosa, A Joyous Adventure, and The Uncrowned King showcase her facility with intrigue, romance, and peril. These works emphasize decisive action, intricate plots, and a consistent admiration for steadfast honor under pressure, qualities that appealed to readers seeking vivid, morally charged storytelling.
She was also an inventive voice in early crime fiction. The Old Man in the Corner introduced an “armchair” problem-solver whose cool deductions prefigure later cerebral sleuths; Unravelled Knots continued the concept. Lady Molly of Scotland Yard presented a pioneering female investigator, while The Man in Grey and Castles in the Air blended mystery with historical or picaresque tones. Skin o’ My Tooth offered legal-and-detection tales centered on a shrewd advocate. Across these collections, Orczy experimented with narrative frames, unreliable raconteurs, and puzzle-driven plots, helping broaden the genre’s possibilities while maintaining the brisk readability that distinguished her popular historical romances.
Orczy continued to publish into the 1930s, often voicing a staunchly patriotic and anti-revolutionary outlook consistent with her favored themes of order, duty, and gallantry. Her later work—alongside ongoing editions of the Scarlet Pimpernel books—sustained a loyal readership. She died in 1947, by then firmly established as a cornerstone of popular historical adventure. The Pimpernel stories, repeatedly adapted for stage, screen, and radio, remain a touchstone for tales of masked courage and romantic heroism. Her legacy endures in the secret-identity tradition and in the enduring appeal of brisk, character-driven storytelling set against the sweep of European history.
Historical Context
Emma Orczy’s career unfolded from the late Victorian era into the interwar decades, a period when mass literacy, cheap editions, and the prestige of the West End stage converged to shape popular storytelling. Born in Hungary in 1865 and settled in Britain by the 1880s, she wrote romances, adventures, historical mysteries, and stage melodramas that often looked back to earlier centuries. Her work sits at the crossroads of the historical novel descended from Walter Scott, the Ruritanian romance popularized in the 1890s, and early twentieth‑century fascination with espionage and policing. The collection spans Tudor England to revolutionary France and Napoleonic Europe, reflecting shifting political and cultural currents across the continent.
The Scarlet Pimpernel cycle is rooted in the French Revolution’s most violent phase, the Reign of Terror (1793–1794). Revolutionary tribunals, the Committee of Public Safety, and the guillotine transformed Paris and provincial France, while émigrés fled to Britain and beyond. Against this background, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, Lord Tony’s Wife, Sir Percy Leads the Band, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and Eldorado dramatize clandestine rescues, surveillance, and the perils of denunciation. Orczy’s narrative world draws on documented features of the Terror—summary justice, networks of informers, militarization of daily life—while staging daring evasions across ports, roads, and frontier posts.
Her Revolution tales also echo nineteenth‑century British debates over Jacobinism and liberty. Since Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), British print culture had framed the Revolution as a warning about radical excess. Titles like Mam’zelle Guillotine, Sir Percy Hits Back, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, A Child of the Revolution, and In the Rue Monge revisit that cautionary narrative. Orczy emphasizes themes of chivalry, loyalty, and the protection of the vulnerable—values that resonated with generations taught to see the Terror’s tribunals and popular vengeance as the dark counterpart to constitutional government and ordered liberty.
The Pimpernel’s methods reflect contemporary fascination with secrecy and codework as modern states professionalized intelligence. Before 1914, British readers devoured spy fiction by authors such as Erskine Childers and William Le Queux; Orczy’s gentleman‑schemer with a concealed identity belongs to this milieu. The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel imagines disciplined cells, passwords, and misdirection that anticipate twentieth‑century spycraft tropes. Print culture’s expansion—newspapers, periodicals, and serialized fiction—helped normalize episodic adventures and recurring heroes. That cultural infrastructure made it possible for a once‑theatrical figure to become a durable literary presence whose operations echoed growing anxieties about surveillance, infiltration, and the ethics of clandestine action.
Beyond the Terror, Orczy’s settings track the Revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals that reshaped Europe from the 1790s to 1815. The Bronze Eagle and Castles in the Air engage the era’s bureaucracy, passports, and continental policing that proliferated under Napoleon and his opponents. Post‑Revolutionary France and its satellite states created novel conditions for mobility and deception: central registers, border checks, and new patterns of urban administration. These administrative transformations sharpened the stakes for smugglers, forgers, and undercover agents in fiction. The Napoleonic legacy—imperial ambitions, restoration politics, and the memory of mass conscription—lingers as a backdrop to aristocratic codes of honor and clandestine rescue.
Orczy also mined seventeenth‑century English turmoil, where political and religious conflict offered clear moral and institutional contrasts. The Nest of the Sparrowhawk, set during the Protectorate, reflects a world of Puritan governance, local surveillance, and contested authority in the 1650s. His Majesty’s Well‑Beloved turns to the Restoration, when 1660 brought back the monarchy and with it courtly display and a looser cultural climate. By toggling between Cromwellian rigor and Stuart pageantry, Orczy studies legitimacy, loyalty, and the consequences of civil strife—questions that Victorian and Edwardian readers revisited as constitutional monarchy defined Britain’s self‑image at home and abroad.
Earlier dynastic crises appear in The Tangled Skein (In Mary’s Reign), situated amid Tudor succession anxieties and volatile religious realignments in the 1550s. The oscillation between Catholic and Protestant regimes produced intense court intrigue, shifting alliances, and peril for dissenters—fertile ground for dramas of disguise, coded communication, and disputed loyalty. Such settings allowed Orczy to explore how political theology maps onto personal commitments. The material culture of the Tudor court—pageants, progresses, privy council politics—supplies recognizably historical textures that support her broader interest in the interplay of conscience, law, and sovereign power in periods of contested authority.
Eighteenth‑century Britain’s roads and turnpikes frame Beau Brocade, which draws on the folklore of highwaymen and the rise of professional policing. The mid‑1700s saw the Bow Street Runners (established 1749) and improved transport networks, making both crime and its pursuit more organized. Coaching inns, mail schedules, and toll gates become narrative instruments for chase and escape. Popular ballads and chapbooks had already romanticized the highwayman; Orczy adapts that tradition while acknowledging growing state capacity. Her evocations of uniforms, warrants, and watch‑houses reflect a society in which mobility expanded—and with it the mechanisms devised to control and record movement.
Diplomatic courts and the machinery of surveillance animate The Emperor’s Candlesticks, where nineteenth‑century Vienna and St. Petersburg register a Europe of envoys, secret compartments, and police scrutiny. The concert‑system politics that followed the Napoleonic Wars favored coordination among monarchies, while railways and telegraphy accelerated both diplomacy and counter‑espionage. Orczy’s other “continental” adventures, including The Honourable Jim, Marivosa, The Celestial City, A Joyous Adventure, and The Uncrowned King, tap the Ruritanian mode: small states, palace coups, and ceremonial politics. That vogue mirrored fin‑de‑siècle readers’ fascination with dynastic crises in the Balkans and elsewhere, where etiquette, uniforms, and border posts signaled real levers of power.
A Bride of the Plains reflects Orczy’s Hungarian connections, depicting rural life under the late Habsburg monarchy. Conscription, village custom, and ethnic complexity marked the empire’s peripheries in the nineteenth century. After 1918, Pimpernel and Rosemary turns to a Central Europe unsettled by the First World War and the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which redrew Hungary’s borders and displaced populations. In these works, military service, shifting frontiers, and political reprisals shape intimate destinies. The novels register how empire’s collapse disrupted familiar hierarchies and created zones of uncertainty—terrain well suited to Orczy’s longstanding interest in courage, allegiance, and the hazards of bureaucratic power.
Orczy’s Dutch settings—The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy—draw on the early seventeenth century, when the Dutch Republic navigated commercial expansion and confessional conflict. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the concluding phase of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) formed a broader context of diplomacy, mercenary service, and siege warfare. The title The Laughing Cavalier nods to the Dutch Golden Age of portraiture; Orczy imagines biography behind a famous genre of image to explore urban guilds, militias, and cross‑border intrigue. Leatherface, set amid the Low Countries’ resistance to Spanish hegemony, similarly leverages reprisals, fortified towns, and maritime raiding as engines of plot.
Unto Caesar reaches further back to antiquity, participating in an Edwardian fascination with Rome as a mirror for modern imperial concerns. Historical fiction set under the Roman Empire allowed writers to examine patronage, citizenship, and the duty owed to the state without direct polemic about contemporary politics. By portraying crowded forums, military discipline, and imperial bureaucracy, Orczy explores questions that recur across her oeuvre: who commands loyalty, how laws bind conscience, and where justice lies when institutions falter. The classical past, filtered through nineteenth‑century scholarship and school curricula, offered a shared vocabulary for readers trained to see civic virtue as timeless.
Questions of gendered authority surface regularly. Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910) introduced a woman investigator within an official policing context at a time when real police forces were only beginning to consider female officers in the 1910s. Petticoat Rule (also published as Petticoat Government) evokes the informal power of salons and courtiers in ancien‑régime France, where influence could flow through patronage and social performance. The Heart of a Woman (A True Woman) engages prevailing debates about domestic virtue and public action. These works intersect with the “New Woman” discourse, even as Orczy’s heroines often operate within, and sometimes subtly stretch, accepted norms.
Orczy’s detective fiction maps onto the professionalization of forensics and the commodification of crime in the press. The Old Man in the Corner popularized the armchair sleuth, solving cases from newspaper clippings in a tea‑room—a nod to modern information culture. British police adopted fingerprint classification in 1901, and growing interest in criminology lent plausibility to methodical deduction. Unravelled Knots continues that cerebral mode; Skin o’ My Tooth centers on a canny lawyer navigating courts and evidence. The Man in Grey and Castles in the Air turn historical confidence tricks and bureaucratic loopholes into puzzles, aligning Orczy with the puzzle‑plot tradition that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.
Theatrical culture shaped the cadence and reach of Orczy’s stories. The Scarlet Pimpernel began as a stage drama and became a London sensation in 1905, benefiting from the actor‑manager system, elaborate costume design, and touring circuits that carried West End successes to provincial and international audiences. The interplay of stagecraft—disguises, trapdoors, last‑minute reprieves—and prose narration helped fix the series’ tone. As cinema expanded in the 1910s and 1930s, screen adaptations further disseminated the mythos, reinforcing the iconic image of a masked aristocratic rescuer. The feedback loop between theater, print, and film exemplifies how popular genres consolidated during the early twentieth century.
The Pimpernel myth aligns with early modern and modern anxieties about surveillance, law, and conscience. Britain’s Aliens legislation in the 1790s, émigré communities in London, and wartime mobilizations fostered debates about hospitality and security that echoed into later eras. Across Orczy’s corpus, passports, safe‑conducts, and uniforms become tokens of identity in systems where paperwork increasingly governs movement. Moments of martial law, emergency tribunals, and secret policing—whether during the Terror, the Napoleonic wars, or interwar upheavals—furnish plots with both danger and critique, asking how far a state may go to defend itself and what space remains for mercy or principled dissent.
Interwar politics sharpened the stakes for Orczy’s historical conservatism. The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World (early 1930s) is a non‑fictional commentary that reads contemporary international affairs through a lens formed by earlier revolutionary crises. Across Europe, the 1920s and 1930s saw economic dislocation, new authoritarian regimes, and fear of renewed revolution. Orczy’s continuing returns to the French Revolution and to small‑state diplomacy offered implicit comparisons for readers watching borders shift and ideologies harden. Emphasis on personal honor, rescue, and fidelity to tradition provided a counter‑narrative to mass politics, without requiring direct depiction of contemporary leaders or events in her fiction. The collection’s historical canvases collectively stage a recurring argument: that character, not program, safeguards civilization. Their appeal has endured because successive audiences read them through the crises of their own time—whether world wars, Cold War tensions, or modern debates about terrorism and refugees. Modern readers also revisit the works to discuss gendered agency in early detective fiction, the roots of superhero archetypes in the Pimpernel, and the politics of nostalgia that frame Orczy’s vision of Europe. Though written as entertainment, the books double as a commentary on state power, violence, and the fragile infrastructures of liberty.
Synopsis (Selection)
Scarlet Pimpernel: Founding Adventures
The Scarlet Pimpernel, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Leads the Band, and The Elusive Pimpernel establish the masked English aristocrat who outwits revolutionary agents to spirit the endangered to safety. These tales balance ballroom wit with cloak‑and‑dagger ruses, sharpening a duel of minds that turns on disguises, coded plans, and social comedy. The tone is brisk and gallant, with episodic capers that expand a loyal circle of allies and formidable foes.
Scarlet Pimpernel: High Stakes and Wider Circle
In I Will Repay, Lord Tony’s Wife, Eldorado, and The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, private vendettas and political vendettas collide, drawing friends and strangers into peril. The rescues grow more daring and emotionally costly, testing vows of loyalty, love, and honor against the machinery of terror. Orczy deepens her chivalric ideal with darker turns and hard‑won reversals while keeping the romance of high adventure intact.
Scarlet Pimpernel: Late and Peripheral Cases
The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Mam’zelle Guillotine, Sir Percy Hits Back, A Child of the Revolution, In the Rue Monge, and Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel pivot to tighter puzzles and localized dramas that spotlight ordinary people caught in extraordinary danger. Plots hinge on quick stratagems, misdirection, and moral choices made under pressure, often in humbler settings. The mood can be leaner and more somber, yet the series’ characteristic compassion and audacity still carry the day.
Scarlet Pimpernel: Lineage, Legacy, and Reflections
The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy look backward to a swashbuckling forebear whose panache and nerve prefigure the later hero’s code, while Pimpernel and Rosemary projects the legend forward into a new generation. The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World playfully refracts the series’ outlook into wry, observational commentary. Together they frame the myth of gallantry as a living tradition—adaptable, witty, and self‑aware.
Other Novels: Court and Crown Romances
The Tangled Skein (In Mary’s Reign), Petticoat Rule (Petticoat Government), His Majesty’s Well‑Beloved, Unto Caesar, and The Bronze Eagle orbit thrones and antechambers where affection, ambition, and allegiance continually collide. Intrigue moves from salons to council rooms as heroines and heroes navigate rules of etiquette that conceal sharp stakes. Orczy’s signatures—bold gestures, reversals of fortune, and women’s strategic agency—animate these high‑society dramas.
Other Novels: Outlaws and Disguises
Beau Brocade, The Nest of the Sparrowhawk, and Leatherface follow masked or marginal figures whose identities are weapons in contests against rigid authority. Pursuits, ambushes, and sudden reveals turn on honor as much as cunning, with countryside or provincial backdrops sharpening the suspense. The tone is swift, romantic, and morally pointed, favoring audacity and last‑minute redress.
Other Novels: Continental Intrigue and Statecraft
The Emperor’s Candlesticks, Marivosa, and The Uncrowned King trace plots where diplomatic tokens, contested borders, and symbolic titles become catalysts for pursuit and negotiation. Characters cross salons, embassies, and outposts, playing games of leverage that entangle hearts and nations alike. The atmosphere is cosmopolitan and suspenseful, marrying espionage rhythms to melodramatic stakes.
Other Novels: Passions and Homeward Trials
The Heart of a Woman (A True Woman), A Bride of the Plains, The Honourable Jim, The Celestial City, and A Joyous Adventure foreground private loyalties and everyday courage when social expectation and personal feeling come to blows. Journeys—literal or emotional—test promises, reshape identities, and reward perseverance. These stories favor earnest sentiment, flashes of humor, and the steady dignity of choice.
Detective Story Cycles: Armchair Ratiocination
The Old Man in the Corner and Unravelled Knots present an enigmatic commentator who solves crimes through talk and logic rather than pursuit, turning café conversations into forensic arenas. The puzzles emphasize motive and misdirection, often leaving a cool aftertaste of ambiguity. Tone and structure showcase Orczy’s knack for neat construction and quiet, unsettling twists.
Detective Story Cycles: Women and Other Unconventional Sleuths
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard and Skin o’ My Tooth feature investigators who exploit social insight and legal cunning as much as evidence. Cases hinge on reading character, navigating decorum, and outthinking procedure, with solutions that feel deft rather than forceful. The result is lively, character‑driven detection that broadens who gets to be brilliant and brave.
Detective Story Cycles: Gothic and Picaresque Turns
The Man in Grey and Castles in the Air stretch the mystery form from brooding romantic suspense to capers of imposture and tall‑tale bravado. One sequence leans on atmospheric menace and stern justice, the other on charm, audacity, and unreliable narration. Together they reveal Orczy’s range—sleek setups, theatrical reveals, and a relish for performance in crime and its unmasking.
The Greatest Works of Emma Orczy
The Scarlet Pimpernel Series
The Laughing Cavalier
AN APOLOGY
Does it need one?
If so it must also come from those members of the Blakeney family in whose veins runs the blood of that Sir Percy Blakeney who is known to history as the Scarlet Pimpernel — for they in a manner are responsible for the telling of this veracious chronicle.
For the past eight years now — ever since the true story of The Scarlet Pimpernel was put on record by the present author — these gentle, kind, inquisitive friends have asked me to trace their descent back to an ancestor more remote than was Sir Percy, to one in fact who by his life and by his deeds stands forth from out the distant past as a conclusive proof that the laws which govern the principles of heredity are as unalterable as those that rule the destinies of the universe. They have pointed out to me that since Sir Percy Blakeney's was an exceptional personality, possessing exceptional characteristics which his friends pronounced sublime and his detractors arrogant — he must have had an ancestor in the dim long ago who was, like him, exceptional, like him possessed of qualities which call forth the devotion of friends and the rancour of enemies. Nay, more! there must have existed at one time or another a man who possessed that same sunny disposition, that same irresistible laughter, that same careless insouciance and adventurous spirit which were subsequently transmitted to his descendants, of whom the Scarlet Pimpernel himself was the most distinguished individual.
All these were unanswerable arguments, and with the request that accompanied them I had long intended to comply. Time has been my only enemy in thwarting my intentions until now — time and the multiplicity of material and documents to be gone through ere vague knowledge could be turned into certitude.
Now at last I am in a position to present not only to the Blakeneys themselves, but to all those who look on the Scarlet Pimpernel as their hero and their friend — the true history of one of his most noted forebears.
Strangely enough his history has never been written before. And yet countless millions must during the past three centuries have stood before his picture; we of the present generation, who are the proud possessors of that picture now, have looked on him many a time, always with sheer, pure joy in our hearts, our lips smiling, our eyes sparkling in response to his; almost forgetting the genius of the artist who portrayed him in the very realism of the personality which literally seems to breathe and palpitate and certainly to laugh to us out of the canvas.
Those twinkling eyes! how well we know them! that laugh! we can almost hear it; as for the swagger, the devil-may-care arrogance, do we not condone it, seeing that it has its mainspring behind a fine straight brow whose noble, sweeping lines betray an undercurrent of dignity and of thought.
And yet no biographer has — so far as is known to the author of this veracious chronicle — ever attempted to tell us anything of this man's life, no one has attempted hitherto to lift the veil of anonymity which only thinly hides the identity of the Laughing Cavalier.
But here in Haarlem — in the sleepy, yet thriving little town where he lived, the hard-frozen ground in winter seems at times to send forth a memory-echo of his firm footstep, of the jingling of his spurs, and the clang of his sword, and the old gate of the Spaarne through which he passed so often is still haunted with the sound of his merry laughter, and his pleasant voice seems still to rouse the ancient walls from their sleep.
Here too — hearing these memory-echoes whenever the shadows of evening draw in on the quaint old city — I had a dream. I saw him just as he lived, three hundred years ago. He had stepped out of the canvas in London, had crossed the sea and was walking the streets of Haarlem just as he had done then, filling them with his swagger, with his engaging personality, above all with his laughter. And sitting beside me in the old tavern of the "Lame Cow," in that self-same tap-room where he was wont to make merry, he told me the history of his life.
Since then kind friends at Haarlem have placed documents in my hands which confirmed the story told me by the Laughing Cavalier. To them do I tender my heartfelt and grateful thanks. But it is to the man himself — to the memory of him which is so alive here in Haarlem — that I am indebted for the true history of his life, and therefore I feel that but little apology is needed for placing the true facts before all those who have known him hitherto only by his picture, who have loved him only for what they guessed.
The monograph which I now present with but few additions of minor details, goes to prove what I myself had known long ago, namely, that the Laughing Cavalier who sat to Frans Hals for his portrait in 1624 was the direct ancestor of Sir Percy Blakeney, known to history as the Scarlet Pimpernel.
EMMUSKA ORCZY. Haarlem, 1913.
THE PROLOGUE
HAARLEM — MARCH 29TH, 1623
The day had been spring-like — even hot; a very unusual occurrence in Holland at this time of year.
Gilda Beresteyn had retired early to her room. She had dismissed Maria, whose chatterings grated upon her nerves, with the promise that she would call her later. Maria had arranged a tray of dainties on the table, a jug of milk, some fresh white bread and a little roast meat on a plate, for Gilda had eaten very little supper and it might happen that she would feel hungry later on.
It would have been useless to argue with the old woman about this matter. She considered Gilda's health to be under her own special charge, ever since good Mevrouw Beresteyn had placed her baby girl in Maria's strong, devoted arms ere she closed her eyes in the last long sleep.
Gilda Beresteyn, glad to be alone, threw open the casement of the window and peered out into the night.
The shadow of the terrible tragedy — the concluding acts of which were being enacted day by day in the Gevangen Poort of 'S Graven Hage — had even touched the distant city of Haarlem with its gloom. The eldest son of John of Barneveld was awaiting final trial and inevitable condemnation, his brother Stoutenburg was a fugitive, and their accomplices Korenwinder, van Dyk, the redoubtable Slatius and others, were giving away under torture the details of the aborted conspiracy against the life of Maurice of Nassau, Stadtholder of Holland, Gelderland, Utrecht and Overyssel, Captain and Admiral-General of the State, Prince of Orange, and virtual ruler of Protestant and republican Netherlands.
Traitors all of them — would-be assassins — the Stadtholder whom they had planned to murder was showing them no mercy. As he had sent John of Barneveld to the scaffold to assuage his own thirst for supreme power and satisfy his own ambitions, so he was ready to send John of Barneveld's sons to death and John of Barneveld's widow to sorrow and loneliness.
The sons of John of Barneveld had planned to avenge their father's death by the committal of a cruel and dastardly murder: fate and the treachery of mercenary accomplices had intervened, and now Grœneveld was on the eve of condemnation, and Stoutenburg was a wanderer on the face of the earth with a price put upon his head.
Gilda Beresteyn could not endure the thought of it all. All the memories of her childhood were linked with the Barnevelds. Stoutenburg had been her brother Nicolaes' most intimate friend, and had been the first man to whisper words of love in her ears, ere his boundless ambition and his unscrupulous egoism drove him into another more profitable marriage.
Gilda's face flamed up with shame even now at recollection of his treachery, and the deep humiliation which she had felt when she saw the first budding blossom of her girlish love so carelessly tossed aside by the man whom she had trusted.
A sense of oppression weighed her spirits down to-night. It almost seemed as if the tragedy which had encompassed the entire Barneveld family was even now hovering over the peaceful house of Mynheer Beresteyn, deputy burgomaster and chief civic magistrate of the town of Haarlem. The air itself felt heavy as if with the weight of impending doom.
The little city lay quiet and at peace; a soft breeze from the south lightly fanned the girl's cheeks. She leaned her elbows on the window-sill and rested her chin in her hands. The moon was not up and yet it was not dark; a mysterious light still lingered on the horizon far away where earth and sea met in a haze of purple and indigo.
From the little garden down below there rose the subtle fragrance of early spring — of wet earth and budding trees, and the dim veiled distance was full of strange sweet sounds, the call of night-birds, the shriek of sea-gulls astray from their usual haunts.
Gilda looked out and listened — unable to understand this vague sense of oppression and of foreboding: when she put her finger up to her eyes, she found them wet with tears.
Memories rose from out the past, sad phantoms that hovered in the scent of the spring. Gilda had never wholly forgotten the man who had once filled her heart with his personality, much less could she chase away his image from her mind now that a future of misery and disgrace was all that was left to him.
She did not know what had become of him, and dared not ask for news. Mynheer Beresteyn, loyal to the House of Nassau and to its prince, had cast out of his heart the sons of John of Barneveld whom he had once loved. Assassins and traitors, he would with his own lips have condemned them to the block, or denounced them to the vengeance of the Stadtholder for their treachery against him.
The feeling of uncertainty as to Stoutenburg's fate softened Gilda's heart toward him. She knew that he had become a wanderer on the face of the earth, Cain-like, homeless, friendless, practically kinless; she pitied him far more than she did Grœneveld or the others who were looking death quite closely in the face.
She was infinitely sorry for him, for him and for his wife, for whose sake he had been false to his first love. The gentle murmur of the breeze, the distant call of the water-fowl, seemed to bring back to Gilda's ears those whisperings of ardent passion which had come from Stoutenburg's lips years ago. She had listened to them with joy then, with glowing eyes cast down and cheeks that flamed up at his words.
And as she listened to these dream-sounds others more concrete mingled with the mystic ones far away: the sound of stealthy footsteps upon the flagged path of the garden, and of a human being breathing and panting somewhere close by, still hidden by the gathering shadows of the night.
She held her breath to listen — not at all frightened, for the sound of those footsteps, the presence of that human creature close by, were in tune with her mood of expectancy of something that was foredoomed to come.
Suddenly the breeze brought to her ear the murmur of her name, whispered as if in an agony of pleading:
"Gilda!"
She leaned right out of the window. Her eyes, better accustomed to the dim evening light, perceived a human figure that crouched against the yew hedge, in the fantastic shadow cast by the quaintly shaped peacock at the corner close to the house.
"Gilda!" came the murmur again, more insistent this time.
"Who goes there?" she called in response: and it was an undefinable instinct stronger than her will that caused her to drop her own voice also to a whisper.
"A fugitive hunted to his death," came the response scarce louder than the breeze. "Give me shelter, Gilda — human bloodhounds are on my track."
Gilda's heart seemed to stop its beating; the human figure out there in the shadows had crept stealthily nearer. The window out of which she leaned was only a few feet from the ground; she stretched out her hand into the night.
"There is a projection in the wall just there," she whispered hurriedly, "and the ivy stems will help you.... Come!"
The fugitive grasped the hand that was stretched out to him in pitying helpfulness. With the aid of the projection in the wall and of the stems of the century-old ivy, he soon cleared the distance which separated him from the window-sill. The next moment he had jumped into the room.
Gilda in this impulsive act of mercy had not paused to consider either the risks or the cost. She had recognised the voice of the man whom she had once loved, that voice called to her out of the depths of boundless misery; it was the call of a man at bay, a human quarry hunted and exhausted, with the hunters close upon his heels. She could not have resisted that call even if she had allowed her reason to fight her instinct then.
But now that he stood before her in rough fisherman's clothes, stained and torn, his face covered with blood and grime, his eyes red and swollen, the breath coming in quick, short gasps through his blue, cracked lips, the first sense of fear at what she had done seized hold of her heart.
At first he took no notice of her, but threw himself into the nearest chair and passed his hands across his face and brow.
"My God," he murmured, "I thought they would have me to-night."
She stood in the middle of the room, feeling helpless and bewildered; she was full of pity for the man, for there is nothing more unutterably pathetic than the hunted human creature in its final stage of apathetic exhaustion, but she was just beginning to co-ordinate her thoughts and they for the moment were being invaded by fear.
She felt more than she saw, that presently he turned his hollow, purple-rimmed eyes upon her, and that in them there was a glow half of passionate will-power and half of anxious, agonizing doubt.
"Of what are you afraid, Gilda?" he asked suddenly, "surely not of me?"
"Not of you, my lord," she replied quietly, "only for you."
"I am a miserable outlaw now, Gilda," he rejoined bitterly, "four thousand golden guilders await any lout who chooses to sell me for a competence."
"I know that, my lord ... and marvel why you are here? I heard that you were safe — in Belgium."
He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
"I was safe there," he said, "but I could not rest. I came back a few days ago, thinking I could help my brother to escape. Bah!" he added roughly, "he is a snivelling coward...."
"Hush! for pity's sake," she exclaimed, "some one will hear you."
"Close that window and lock the door," he murmured hoarsely. "I am spent — and could not resist a child if it chose to drag me at this moment to the Stadtholder's spies."
Gilda obeyed him mechanically. First she closed the window; then she went to the door listening against the panel with all her senses on the alert. At the further end of the passage was the living-room where her father must still be sitting after his supper, poring over a book on horticulture, or mayhap attending to his tulip bulbs. If he knew that the would-be murderer of the Stadtholder, the prime mover and instigator of the dastardly plot was here in his house, in his daughter's chamber ... Gilda shuddered, half-fainting with terror, and her trembling fingers fumbled with the lock.
"Is Nicolaes home?" asked Stoutenburg, suddenly.
"Not just now," she replied, "but he, too, will be home anon.... My father is at home...."
"Ah!... Nicolaes is my friend ... I counted on seeing him here ... he would help me I know ... but your father, Gilda, would drag me to the gallows with his own hand if he knew that I am here."
"You must not count on Nicolaes either, my lord," she pleaded, "nor must you stay here a moment longer ... I heard my father's step in the passage already. He is sure to come and bid me good-night before he goes to bed...."
"I am spent, Gilda," he murmured, and indeed his breath came in such feeble gasps that he could scarce speak. "I have not touched food for two days. I landed at Scheveningen a week ago, and for five days have hung about the Gevangen Poort of 'S Graven Hage trying to get speech with my brother. I had gained the good will of an important official in the prison, but Grœneveld is too much of a coward to make a fight for freedom. Then I was recognized by a group of workmen outside my dead father's house. I read recognition in their eyes — knowledge of me and knowledge of the money which that recognition might mean to them. They feigned indifference at first, but I had read their thoughts. They drew together to concert over their future actions and I took to my heels. It was yesterday at noon, and I have been running ever since, running, running, with but brief intervals to regain my breath and beg for a drink of water — when thirst became more unendurable than the thought of capture. I did not even know which way I was running till I saw the spires of Haarlem rising from out the evening haze; then I thought of you, Gilda, and of this house. You would not sell me, Gilda, for you are rich, and you loved me once," he added hoarsely, while his thin, grimy hands clutched the arms of the chair and he half-raised himself from his seat, as if ready to spring up and to start running again; running, running until he dropped.
But obviously his strength was exhausted, for the next moment he fell back against the cushions, the swollen lids fell upon the hollow eyes, the sunken cheeks and parched lips became ashen white.
"Water!" he murmured.
She ministered to him kindly and gently, first holding the water to his lips, then when he had quenched that raging thirst, she pulled the table up close to his chair, and gave him milk to drink and bread and meat to eat.
He seemed quite dazed, conscious only of bodily needs, for he ate and drank ravenously without thought at first of thanking her. Only when he had finished did he lean back once again against the cushions which her kindly hand had placed behind him, and he murmured feebly like a tired but satisfied child:
"You are an angel of goodness, Gilda. Had you not helped me to-night, I should either have perished in a ditch, or fallen in the hands of the Stadholder's minions."
Quickly she put a restraining hand on his shoulder. A firm step had echoed in the flagged corridor beyond the oaken door.
"My father!" she whispered.
In a moment the instinct for life and liberty was fully aroused in the fugitive; his apathy and exhaustion were forgotten; terror, mad, unreasoning terror, had once more taken possession of his mind.
"Hide me, Gilda," he entreated hoarsely, and his hands clutched wildly at her gown, "don't let him see me ... he would give me up ... he would give me up...."
"Hush, in the name of God," she commanded, "he will hear you if you speak."
Swiftly she blew out the candles, then with dilated anxious eyes searched the recesses of the room for a hiding-place — the cupboard which was too small — the wide hearth which was too exposed — the bed in the wall....
His knees had given way under him, and, as he clutched at her gown, he fell forward at her feet, and remained there crouching, trembling, his circled eyes trying to pierce the surrounding gloom, to locate the position of the door behind which lurked the most immediate danger.
"Hide me, Gilda," he murmured almost audibly under his breath, "for the love you bore me once."
"Gilda!" came in a loud, kindly voice from the other side of the door.
"Yes, father!"
"You are not yet abed, are you, my girl?"
"I have just blown out the candles, dear," she contrived to reply with a fairly steady voice.
"Why is your door locked?"
"I was a little nervous to-night, father dear. I don't know why."
"Well! open then! and say good-night."
"One moment, dear."
She was white to the lips, white as the gown which fell in straight heavy folds from her hips, and which Stoutenburg was still clutching with convulsive fingers. Alone her white figure detached itself from the darkness around. The wretched man as he looked up could see her small pale head, the stiff collar that rose above her shoulders, her embroidered corslet, and the row of pearls round her neck.
"Save me, Gilda," he repeated with the agony of despair, "do not let your father hand me over to the Stadtholder ... there will be no mercy for me, Gilda ... hide me ... for the love of God."
Noiselessly she glided across the room, dragging him after her by the hand. She pulled aside the bed-curtains, without a word pointed to the recess. The bed, built into the wall, was narrow but sure; it smelt sweetly of lavender; the hunted man, his very senses blurred by that overwhelming desire to save his life at any cost, accepted the shelter so innocently offered him. Gathering his long limbs together, he was soon hidden underneath the coverlet.
"Gilda!" came more insistently from behind the heavy door.
"One moment, father. I was fastening my gown."
"Don't trouble to do that. I only wished to say good-night."
She pulled the curtains together very carefully in front of the bed: she even took the precaution of taking off her stiff collar and embroidered corslet. Then she lighted one of the candles, and with it in her hand she went to the door.
Then she drew back the bolt.
"May I not come in?" said Mynheer Beresteyn gaily, for she remained standing on the threshold.
"Well no, father!" she replied, "my room is very untidy ... I was just getting into bed...."
"Just getting into bed," he retorted with a laugh, "why, child, you have not begun to undress."
"I wished to undress in the dark. My head aches terribly ... it must be the spring air ... Good-night, dear."
"Good-night, little one!" said Beresteyn, as he kissed his daughter tenderly. "Nicolaes has just come home," he added, "he wanted to see you too."
"Ask him to wait till to-morrow then. My head feels heavy. I can scarcely hold it up."
"You are not ill, little one?" asked the father anxiously.
"No, no ... only oppressed with this first hot breath of spring."
"Why is not Maria here to undress you? I'll send her."
"Not just now, father. She will come presently. Her chattering wearied me and I sent her away."
"Well! good-night again, my girl. God bless you. You will not see Nicolaes?"
"Not to-night, father. Tell him I am not well. Good-night."
Mynheer Beresteyn went away at last, not before Gilda feared that she must drop or faint under the stress of this nerve-racking situation.
Even now when at last she was alone, when once again she was able to close and bolt the door, she could scarcely stand. She leaned against the wall with eyes closed, and heart that beat so furiously and so fast that she thought she must choke.
The sound of her father's footsteps died away along the corridor. She heard him opening and shutting a door at the further end of the passage, where there were two or three living rooms and his own sleeping chamber. For awhile now the house was still, so still that she could almost hear those furious heart-beats beneath her gown. Then only did she dare to move. With noiseless steps she crossed the room to that recess in the wall hidden by the gay-flowered cotton curtains.
She paused close beside these.
"My lord!" she called softly.
No answer.
"My lord! my father has gone! you are in no danger for the moment!"
Still no answer, and as she paused, straining her ears to listen, she caught the sound of slow and regular breathing. Going back to the table she took up the candle, then with it in her hand she returned to the recess and gently drew aside the curtain. The light from the candle fell full upon Stoutenburg's face. Inexpressibly weary, exhausted both bodily and mentally, not even the imminence of present danger had succeeded in keeping him awake. The moment that he felt the downy pillow under his head, he had dropped off to sleep as peacefully as he used to do years ago before the shadow of premeditated crime had left its impress on his wan face.
Gilda looking down on him sought in vain in the harsh and haggard features, the traces of those boyish good looks which had fascinated her years ago; she tried in vain to read on those thin, set lips those words of passionate affection which had so readily flown from them then.
She put down the candle again and drew a chair close to the bed, then she sat down and waited.
And he slept on calmly, watched over by the woman whom he had so heartlessly betrayed. All love for him had died out in her heart ere this, but pity was there now, and she was thankful that it had been in her power to aid him at the moment of his most dire peril.
But that danger still existed of course. The household was still astir and the servants not yet all abed. Gilda could hear Jakob, the old henchman, making his rounds, seeing that all the lights were safely out, the bolts pushed home and chains securely fastened, and Maria might come back at any moment, wondering why her mistress had not yet sent for her. Nicolaes too was at home, and had already said that he wished to see his sister.
She tried to rouse the sleeping man, but he lay there like a log. She dared not speak loudly to him or to call his name, and all her efforts at shaking him by the shoulder failed to waken him.
Lonely and seriously frightened now Gilda fell on her knees beside the bed. Clasping her hands she tried to pray. Surely God could not leave a young girl in such terrible perplexity, when her only sin had been an act of mercy. The candle on the bureau close by burnt low in its socket and its flickering light outlined her delicate profile and the soft tendrils of hair that escaped from beneath her coif. Her eyes were closed in the endeavour to concentrate her thoughts, and time flew by swiftly while she tried to pray. She did not perceive that after awhile the Lord of Stoutenburg woke and that he remained for a long time in mute contemplation of the exquisite picture which she presented, clad all in white, with the string of pearls still round her throat, her hands clasped, her lips parted breathing a silent prayer.
"How beautiful you are, Gilda!" he murmured quite involuntarily at last.
Then — as suddenly startled and terrified — she tried to jump up quickly, away from him, he put out his hand and succeeded in capturing her wrists and thus holding her pinioned and still kneeling close beside him.
"An angel of goodness," he said, "and exquisitely beautiful."
At his words, at the renewed pressure of his hand upon her wrists she made a violent effort to recover her composure.
"I pray you, my lord, let go my hands. They were clasped in prayer for your safety. You slept so soundly that I feared I could not wake you in order to tell you that you must leave this house instantly."
"I will go, Gilda," he said quietly, making no attempt to move or to relax his hold on her, "for this brief interval of sleep, your kind ministrations and the food you gave me have already put new strength into me. And the sight of you kneeling and praying near me has put life into me again."
"Then, since you are better," she rejoined coldly, "I pray you rise, my lord, and make ready to go. The garden is quite lonely, the Oude Gracht at its furthest boundary is more lonely still. The hour is late and the city is asleep ... you would be quite safe now."
"Do not send me away yet, Gilda, just when a breath of happiness — the first I have tasted for four years — has been wafted from heaven upon me. May I not stay here awhile and live for a brief moment in a dream which is born of unforgettable memories?"
"It is not safe for you to stay here, my lord," she said coldly.
"My lord? You used to call me Willem once."
"That was long ago, my lord, ere you gave Walburg de Marnix the sole right to call you by tender names."
"She has deserted me, Gilda. Fled from me like a coward, leaving me to bear my misery alone."
"She shared your misery for four years, my lord; it was your disgrace that she could not endure."
"You knew then that she had left me?"
"My father had heard of it."
