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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Emma Orczy's 'The Laughing Cavalier' is a captivating historical novel set in the Dutch city of Haarlem during the 17th century. The story follows the adventures of a dashing cavalier, unraveling a tale of romance, intrigue, and daring escapades. With vivid descriptions and a fast-paced narrative, Orczy skillfully paints a vivid picture of the time period, immersing readers in a world filled with political upheaval and personal triumphs. The sequel, 'The First Sir Percy,' continues the tale of the enigmatic hero, delving deeper into his past and the challenges he faces. The books are rich in historical detail and evoke a sense of adventure that keeps readers engaged from beginning to end. Emma Orczy, a prolific writer known for her popular series featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, drew inspiration from her Hungarian heritage and love for historical fiction to create these compelling novels. Her background as a playwright and novelist shines through in her well-crafted characters and intricate plot twists. Fans of historical fiction and swashbuckling adventures will be drawn to Orczy's masterful storytelling and intricate character development in 'The Laughing Cavalier' and its sequel. These books are sure to delight readers looking for an escape to a bygone era filled with romance and bravery. 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 LAUGHING CAVALIER
(& Its Sequel The First Sir Percy)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection brings together two complete historical novels by Emma Orczy: The Laughing Cavalier and its direct sequel, The First Sir Percy. Presented as an integrated sequence, the pair charts a continuous arc of adventure while remaining readable on their own terms. Bringing them together clarifies their shared design, their echoes of character, tone, and incident, and their purposeful movement from first encounter to further exploit. Readers will find here the full text of each novel, assembled to foreground continuity of setting, hero, and idea, and to offer a compact portal into a distinct corner of Orczy’s larger imaginative world.
The volumes represented are novels—sustained works of narrative fiction blending historical adventure, romance, and intrigue. No plays, poems, essays, letters, or diaries are included; the scope is focused and complete within the genre of the historical novel. Orczy’s storytelling, with its emphasis on action, gallantry, and reversals of fortune, exemplifies the swashbuckling tradition while remaining grounded in character-driven motives. The pairing invites readers to experience the momentum of a two-part tale, in which plot, atmosphere, and recurring personae gather depth from one book to the next.
Within Orczy’s wider oeuvre, these novels occupy a distinctive position. She is best known for creating the Scarlet Pimpernel, the daring rescuer of the French Revolutionary era. The Laughing Cavalier explicitly reaches backward in time to explore an earlier generation connected to that legend, presenting the story of an ancestor and thereby expanding the mythology of resourceful heroism that animates the Pimpernel cycle. The sequel, The First Sir Percy: An Adventure of the Laughing Cavalier, continues this retrospective strand, affirming that the ideals associated with Orczy’s most famous creation—wit, courage, and chivalric resolve—could be dramatized in a different country, a different century, and yet with kindred spirit.
The Laughing Cavalier unfolds in the Dutch Republic during the early seventeenth century, a world of bustling trade, shifting alliances, and proud civic life. Its central figure, a blithe and audacious soldier of fortune, is distinguished as much by his laughter as by his sword-arm and ingenuity. Drawn into an intricate pattern of political and personal entanglements, he tests the boundary between merriment and responsibility. Without anticipating outcomes, it suffices to say that the opening premise sets a nimble mind and a daring temperament against circumstances that demand both finesse and fortitude—conditions in which Orczy’s talent for suspense and romantic tension thrives.
The First Sir Percy resumes the tale without delay, pursuing further hazards and stratagems that arise from the same milieu. Subtitled An Adventure of the Laughing Cavalier, it keeps the protagonist’s buoyant daring at the forefront while widening the scope of peril and the stakes of allegiance. Fresh intrigues emerge, and familiar relationships are tested in new ways. The narrative offers continuity of tone—spirited, bold, and quick with surprises—while exploring consequences that naturally follow from the earlier book’s opening situation. The result is a sequel that amplifies rather than repeats, refining the portrait of a cheerful tactician navigating risks with panache.
Read together, the two novels illuminate Orczy’s unifying themes. Identity is both a mask and a vocation; courage is as much a matter of wit as of force; and loyalty must negotiate the claims of love, honor, and survival. The hero’s laughter is emblematic rather than incidental, a signal of fearlessness and a refusal to surrender initiative. Disguise, misdirection, and carefully staged revelation structure the conflicts, offering a contest not only of blades but of minds. Throughout, Orczy treats gallantry as a lived ethic, measuring character by readiness to protect the vulnerable and to outthink the unscrupulous.
Stylistically, Orczy blends theatrical flourish with narrative economy. Scenes are arranged for maximum tension, with entrances, exits, and reversals timed to quicken the pulse. Dialogue sparkles with bravado and banter, yet it advances plot and clarifies motive. A melodramatic cadence—confidences overheard, peril at the threshold, rescues devised at the last possible moment—serves as a framework for ingenuity rather than mere ornament. The prose favors clarity and momentum, sustaining a tone that alternates between playful irony and earnest declaration. Cliff-edge chapters and deftly planted clues keep the reader in a state of pleasurable anticipation.
Characterization provides the ballast that steadies the thrill. The central adventurer is charismatic, tactically inventive, and instinctively protective, yet never humorless. Companions, foils, and adversaries are drawn to highlight shades of loyalty, ambition, and pride, while women in the narrative possess agency enough to challenge and inspire the hero’s resolve. Antagonists are more than obstacles; they embody competing codes—pragmatism against honor, calculation against conscience. By staging these collisions, Orczy crafts conflicts that feel personal even when they are entangled with public intrigue, ensuring that outcomes matter to hearts as well as to factions.
The historical setting contributes texture without overburdening the pace. Customs, civic rituals, and the visual character of towns and countryside supply a convincing backdrop for audacious action. Orczy’s approach to history is dramatic rather than documentary: the emphasis falls on atmosphere and plausibility, on how a marketplace might buzz, how a council chamber might echo, or how a winter night might sharpen danger. The novels use period detail to amplify mood and to anchor extravagant adventure in a recognizable world, allowing readers to trust the stage while they delight in the performance upon it.
The enduring significance of these works rests in how they extend Orczy’s central imaginative proposition. The Scarlet Pimpernel introduced a template for gallant cunning; The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy demonstrate that the same ethos can animate other eras and geographies. Together they show the durability of a narrative built on quick wits, moral purpose, and theatrical daring. Their legacy lies not in historical instruction but in the persuasive celebration of courage that outsmarts brute force. Readers return to them for the exhilaration of resourcefulness, the courtliness of sentiment, and the assurance that audacity can be humane.
As an editorial principle, this collection preserves the novels in their full integrity and arranges them in narrative order: first The Laughing Cavalier, then The First Sir Percy. The sequence is designed to be welcoming to newcomers while rewarding to readers familiar with Orczy’s broader cycle. No extraneous materials distract from the experience; the purpose is to present the story cleanly and completely. Those who prefer to savor character and atmosphere may linger; those who favor momentum may read swiftly. Either way, the architecture of the two-part design becomes clear when encountered in immediate succession.
Bringing these companion novels together acknowledges their pact: to entertain with speed and sparkle while honoring a code of generosity and nerve. This collection invites you to meet a cheerful strategist in his native element, to follow him through tangles of intrigue, and to witness how humor steadies the hand that must act decisively. If the titles hint at lineage and legacy, the pages reveal the substance of character through ordeal and choice. Here, in compact form, is a corner of Emma Orczy’s world where laughter is not levity but courage in its most disarming guise.
Author Biography
Emma Orczy (Baroness Orczy) was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright whose career flourished from the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth. She achieved international renown as the creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a figure who helped shape the modern ideal of the masked, resourceful hero. Writing across fiction and drama, she specialized in romantic, historical adventures that balanced brisk plotting with themes of honor and duty. The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy, included here, extend the world that made her famous by looking backward to earlier centuries, enriching her signature blend of intrigue, gallantry, and moral resolve.
Orczy’s early formation combined continental perspective with British cultural training. Born in Hungary and later settled in London, she initially trained as an artist before turning decisively to writing. The discipline of drawing and attention to visual detail carried into her prose, which often frames action like a series of vivid tableaux. Publicly documented influences include a lifelong fascination with European history and chivalric codes, which she adapted into popular entertainment rather than academic interpretation. She also worked collaboratively with her husband, the illustrator Montagu Barstow, an alliance that supported her ventures across magazines, the theatre, and the evolving market for historical romance.
Her career reached a decisive turning point in the early 1900s when a stage play about a daring English aristocrat rescuing victims of the French Revolution became a sensation, soon followed by a best-selling novelization. That character, the Scarlet Pimpernel, anchored a long-running cycle of books and stories that fixed Orczy’s reputation for brisk, suspenseful narratives and clear moral contrasts. Audiences admired the ingenuity of disguises, reversals, and codes of honor, while critics noted her flair for melodrama and momentum. The success of this franchise created a framework into which she later set prequels and related tales, including the two novels featured here.
The Laughing Cavalier transports readers to the seventeenth-century Netherlands, where political tensions and shifting loyalties provide a dramatic backcloth for adventure. Rather than revisiting the French Revolutionary period, Orczy imagines an earlier bearer of the same spirit of audacity and gallantry that would later characterize the Scarlet Pimpernel. The book establishes an ancestral strand for the saga, emphasizing wit, daring, and a personal code of chivalry amid urban intrigue and cross-border plotting. Its historical color—markets, guilds, and courtly maneuverings—reflects Orczy’s preference for atmosphere and pace over documentary detail, yielding a vigorous tale that broadens the lineage of her celebrated hero.
The First Sir Percy continues that seventeenth‑century thread, developing the prequel figure introduced in The Laughing Cavalier and placing him in perilous situations shaped by regional rivalries and questions of allegiance. Readers encounter a world of ambushes, political gambits, and romantic stakes, rendered with Orczy’s characteristic clarity and forward drive. Without relying on modern cynicism, she frames courage as a practical ethic—quick thinking under pressure, loyalty tested by deceit, and honor affirmed through action. This sequel strengthens the genealogical bridge to the later Pimpernel mythos, demonstrating how an inherited temperament—resourceful, principled, and daring—can be cast anew in different historical circumstances.
Across her output, Orczy expressed forthright patriotic and monarchist sympathies, and she publicly supported British national efforts during wartime. These convictions inform the architecture of her stories: aristocratic leadership, courageous service, and the defense of social order against violent upheaval. While not written as rigorous historiography, her novels assert that romance and idealism can coexist with tactical ingenuity. Contemporary reviewers sometimes faulted the works for improbabilities, yet many readers prized their momentum, moral clarity, and theatrical verve. In shaping heroes who win through intelligence, disguise, and nerve rather than brute force, she helped define a durable pattern for popular adventure fiction.
In later decades, Orczy continued to add to the corpus surrounding her most famous creation while producing related historical adventures. She remained a figure of popular fiction into the mid‑twentieth century. The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy, by projecting the saga backward, have proved particularly resilient: they offer fresh entry points for new readers and deepen the internal history that fans value. Her influence persists in narratives centered on hidden identities, clandestine rescues, and stylish audacity. As historical adventure continues to attract audiences, Orczy’s combination of pace, atmosphere, and a code of honor keeps her work in circulation.
Historical Context
Emma Orczy (1865–1947), a Hungarian-born British novelist, forged her reputation with The Scarlet Pimpernel and then expanded a cycle of swashbuckling prequels and sequels. The two novels in this collection, The Laughing Cavalier (1913) and The First Sir Percy (1921), move back to the early 1620s and relocate her drama to the Dutch Republic, at the cusp of the Dutch Golden Age and amid renewed war with Spain. They draw on courtly ideals, urban intrigue, and continental warfare. Understanding their historical scaffolding—politics in the United Provinces, religious contention, and the military revolution—clarifies how Orczy adapts earlier European crises to her characteristic adventure form.
Orczy wrote for a mass Anglophone audience shaped by late Victorian and Edwardian print culture. Cheap reprints, serial magazines, and theatre tie-ins created demand for brisk, romantic historical fiction. Her success in 1905 with the Pimpernel play and novel encouraged cycles featuring charismatic aristocrats defending order against upheaval. Pre–First World War nationalism and, later, wartime anxieties favored tales of loyalty, espionage, and daring rescues. The Dutch setting of these two books offered a Protestant, commercial, and martial society legible to British readers, while the seventeenth century provided safely distant yet recognizable conflicts about sovereignty, faith, and civic authority.
The Dutch Republic, or United Provinces, emerged from rebellion against Habsburg Spain in the late sixteenth century. By the 1620s it was a confederation of seven provinces governed through provincial estates and the States General, with a stadtholder—then Maurice of Nassau—exercising military leadership and patronage. Power rested with urban regents, merchant oligarchs who governed cities such as Amsterdam, Leiden, and Haarlem. Political life alternated between Orangist support for the House of Orange and regent desires for provincial autonomy. Orczy’s plots, moving among patrician houses, civic offices, and military encampments, mirror this layered constitution and its opportunities for intrigue and faction.
After the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–1621), hostilities in the Eighty Years’ War restarted. In the early 1620s, Spanish forces under commanders such as Ambrogio Spinola pressed sieges along the frontier while Dutch armies and allies maneuvered to protect river corridors and trade. Warfare centered on fortified towns and strategic waterways rather than open battle. The Laughing Cavalier situates its chases and conspiracies against this pressured borderland, where loyalties could be bought, passports scrutinized, and supplies diverted. The resumption of war explains the prominence of soldiers of fortune, intelligence-gatherers, and city militias who pass through Orczy’s pages as patrons, foils, or threats.
Religious conflict shaped civic politics. The Synod of Dort (1618–1619) condemned Arminian or Remonstrant doctrines and affirmed strict Calvinist teaching, after which Remonstrant leaders were exiled or silenced. The political stakes were high: Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, advocate of Holland and a leading statesman, was executed in 1619 for treason after aligning with the Remonstrant cause. Cities saw pulpits, guilds, and magistracies divided along confessional lines. In such a climate, public festivals and private devotions could carry partisan meanings, and accusations of sedition could mask commercial or familial rivalries. Orczy’s conspiratorial atmospheres gain plausibility from this blend of creed and power.
Contemporaries associated the Dutch army with innovation. Under Maurice of Nassau and his engineers, drill was systematized, volley fire coordinated, and the art of fortification elevated. The tactics of countermarch and the science of tracing bastions defined campaigns in the Low Countries. Siege logistics—pontoons, gabions, saps, and mines—mattered more than cavalry charges. The First Sir Percy leans on this milieu: the hazards of winter marches, river crossings, and night alarms, familiar to seventeenth-century soldiers, become stagecraft for ambush and escape. The novels’ emphasis on watches, passwords, and guarded gates reflects the professionalized vigilance of garrisoned towns along contested frontiers.
The early Dutch Golden Age brought extraordinary commercial expansion. The Dutch East India Company (VOC, founded 1602) and, after the truce, the Dutch West India Company (WIC, chartered 1621) made the Republic a hub of global trade and privateering. Amsterdam’s Exchange and warehouses handled Baltic grain, Asian spices, and colonial goods, while inland cities prospered through textiles, brewing, and shipbuilding. Such wealth financed painting, printing, and science but also made merchants targets for extortion and political leverage. Orczy’s plots exploit this nexus of money and risk: letters of credit, jewels, and cargoes become instruments of pressure, bargaining chips in perilous negotiations.
Seventeenth-century Dutch urban life was dense, regulated, and proud of civic institutions. Guilds supervised trades; orphanages and almshouses demonstrated communal charity; civic militias—the schutterij—paraded in finery yet mustered for defense. Canal belts, drawbridges, and city gates structured movement and surveillance. Inns and taverns served as nodes where foreign languages, ship’s news, and rumors mingled. For storytellers, such cities offered a mosaic of lodging houses, counting rooms, and back alleys conducive to disguises and sudden recognitions. The Laughing Cavalier uses this setting’s social permeability—between noble salons and shop floors—to move characters across class lines while remaining faithful to a recognizably Dutch urban texture.
Art shaped modern perceptions of this era. Frans Hals, active in Haarlem, painted lively portraits of militia officers and burghers. His 1624 portrait popularly called The Laughing Cavalier—its sitter remains unidentified and does not literally laugh—became famous in nineteenth-century Britain after acquisition by the Hertford-Wallace collection. The nickname, not contemporary to Hals, suggested jaunty bravado to Victorian eyes. Orczy’s The Laughing Cavalier borrows this title and persona, inviting readers to map a gallant, smiling swordsman onto the Dutch Golden Age. The appropriation shows how art-historical reception can frame historical fiction, supplying an emblem around which narrative character coalesces.
The Low Countries were entwined with Stuart England. James VI and I pursued peace with Spain yet maintained Protestant ties with the Dutch. English diplomats such as Sir Dudley Carleton represented the Crown at The Hague, and English, Scottish, and Irish soldiers served in Dutch regiments throughout the long war. Trade and migration brought weavers, printers, and refugees back and forth across the North Sea. Orczy’s anglicized hero-types, names, and idioms align with this knit of alliances and mercenary service, making it plausible that an adventurer could move between English and Dutch milieus, shifting allegiance among patrons while professing personal honor.
Travel in the early seventeenth century relied on riverboats, sea coasters, and post roads. Toll stations, ferries, and city gates controlled movement, but porous borders fostered smuggling and espionage, especially along the line separating the United Provinces from the Spanish Netherlands. While the Dutch heartland enjoyed comparatively effective urban policing, marshes, dunes, and frontier woods could harbor robbers or deserters, and war itself created predatory opportunities. Such conditions underpin the novels’ reliance on coded passes, false identities, and hurried flights by water or sled. The geography of dikes and winter ice supplies plausible hazards and rescues without departing from documented landscape constraints.
Orczy’s swashbuckling ethos rests on seventeenth-century codes of rank and reputation. Dutch society was broadly patriarchal, yet urban women could manage property and businesses within legal frameworks that recognized marital partnerships and widowhood. Courtship, guardianship, and contract law were matters for notaries and magistrates, not merely romantic impulse. Dueling existed but was restricted; insults and slander carried legal remedies. The novels exploit these norms: oaths, betrothals, and challenges have civic consequences, while chivalric postures derive credibility from the era’s concern with honor. Scenes at balls, civic banquets, or guild halls resonate with documented rituals that governed status and obligation.
The Dutch Republic was a European center of printing and news. Amsterdam and Leiden presses published Bibles, polemics, maps, and scientific works for an international market. Early corantos—serial news pamphlets—circulated by the 1610s; a Dutch newspaper appeared in 1618. Pamphleteering during the Remonstrant controversy had already shown how print could mobilize opinion. Intelligence moved with merchants, sailors, and exiles, and ciphers or aliases were common in diplomatic correspondence. The novels’ frequent reliance on letters intercepted, proclamations posted, or rumors spread through taverns echoes this information-rich environment, where news could travel quickly yet remain contested and manipulable.
The First Sir Percy, written after the First World War but set in the same Dutch milieu of the early 1620s, accents the tightening military pressure that preceded the celebrated 1625 capture of Breda by Spinola and the succession of Frederick Henry as stadtholder after Maurice’s death. Even without naming specific sieges, the novel’s reliance on entrenched camps, contested bridges, and winter maneuver reflects a theater where Spain sought to cut Dutch communications along the Maas and IJssel. The book’s strategic anxieties—supply, morale, and divided councils—mirror records from these years, when stalemate could tip suddenly toward catastrophe.
Orczy’s Edwardian and wartime British milieu shaped her historical gaze. She favored hierarchical duty, individual gallantry, and suspicion of revolutionary crowds—stances visible in The Scarlet Pimpernel and reframed here within Dutch-Protestant civic order. During the First World War she founded the Women of England’s Active Service League, advocating enlistment, a public act consistent with her valorization of service. Reading the Dutch novels against that background highlights how commercial republics and princely leadership are harmonized in her fiction: merchants deserve protection, magistrates must decide firmly, and a charismatic gentleman-adventurer restores balance when institutions falter under internal dissension or foreign threat.
Modern scholarship emphasizes the Dutch Republic’s negotiated power-sharing, religious pluralities, and economic pragmatism. Orczy’s narratives condense this complexity into sharply drawn virtues and vices, a typical move in historical romance. Even the label cavalier, borrowed from a nineteenth-century title for a Hals portrait, can mislead, since the term evokes the later English Civil War rather than Dutch civic soldiery. Yet the novels accurately register features of their setting: militia pomp, fortress warfare, Calvinist mores, and the entanglement of wealth and politics. Later readers can thus use them both as energetic adventure tales and as artifacts of early twentieth-century historical imagination.
Taken together, The Laughing Cavalier and The First Sir Percy transform the early 1620s Netherlands into a testing ground for questions that preoccupied Orczy’s era: how honor operates within a commercial society, how loyalty survives faction, and how individuals counteract state weakness or overreach. Their selective fidelity to events and institutions, their reliance on an iconic painting, and their cross-Channel sensibility make the collection a commentary on both the Dutch Golden Age and British romantic conservatism. Subsequent readers often read them intertextually with the Pimpernel cycle, reassessing themes of lineage and national character and debating their mixture of color, license, and fact.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Laughing Cavalier
Amid seventeenth-century upheaval, a flamboyant adventurer known as the Laughing Cavalier accepts a dangerous commission that entangles him in political intrigue and a wary alliance with a strong-willed young woman. Through disguises, reversals, and narrow escapes, he maneuvers among rival factions while testing the line between self-interest and honor. The tone blends swashbuckling bravado with romantic wit, introducing recurring concerns with masked identities, chivalry, and triumph by finesse rather than force.
The First Sir Percy
This sequel follows the Laughing Cavalier—now Sir Percy—as a new conspiracy threatens both public order and his most valued loyalties. Pressed into leadership, he turns apparent vulnerabilities into stratagems, orchestrating ruses and perilous rides that demand steadier resolve than roguish charm alone. The mood shifts from playful caper to resolute heroism, emphasizing responsibility, fidelity, and the sustaining power of wit while amplifying the author’s flair for theatrical set pieces.
THE LAUGHING CAVALIER (& Its Sequel The First Sir Percy)
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[1q]. 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."
"Then you know that I am a free man again?"
"The law no doubt will soon make you so."
"The law has already freed me through Walburg's own act of desertion. You know our laws as well as I do, Gilda. If you have any doubt ask your own father whose business it is to administer them. Walburg de Marnix has set me free, free to begin a new life, free to follow at last the dictates of my heart."
"For the moment, my lord," she retorted coldly, "you are not free even to live your old life."
"I would not live it again, Gilda, now that I have seen you again. The past seems even now to be falling away from me. Dreams and memories are stronger than reality. And you, Gilda ... have you forgotten?"
"I have forgotten nothing, my lord."
"Our love — your vows — that day in June when you yielded your lips to my kiss?"
"Nor that dull autumnal day, my lord, when I heard from the lips of strangers that in order to further your own ambitious schemes you had cast me aside like a useless shoe, and had married another woman who was richer and of nobler birth than I."
She had at last succeeded in freeing herself from his grasp, and had risen to her feet, and retreated further and further away from him until she stood up now against the opposite wall, her slender, white form lost in the darkness, her whispered words only striking clearly on his ear.
He too rose from the bed and drew up his tall lean figure with a gesture still expressive of that ruthless ambition with which Gilda had taunted him.
"My marriage then was pure expediency, Gilda," he said with a shrug of the shoulders. "My father, whose differences with the Stadtholder were reaching their acutest stage, had need of the influence of Marnix de St. Aldegonde; my marriage with Walburg de Marnix was done in my father's interests and went sorely against my heart ... it is meet and natural that she herself should have severed a tie which was one only in name. A year hence from now, the law grants me freedom to contract a new marriage tie; my love for you, Gilda, is unchanged."
"And mine for you, my lord, is dead."
He gave a short, low laugh in which there rang a strange note of triumph.
"Dormant mayhap, Gilda," he said as he groped his way across the darkened room and tried to approach her. "Your ears have been poisoned by your father's hatred of me. Let me but hold you once more in my arms, let me but speak to you once again of the past, and you will forget all save your real love for me."
"All this is senseless talk, my lord," she said coldly, "your life at this moment hangs upon the finest thread that destiny can weave. Human bloodhounds you said were upon your track; they have not wholly lost the scent, remember."
Her self-possession acted like a fall of icy-cold water upon the ardour of his temper. Once more that hunted look came into his face; he cast furtive, frightened glances around him, peering into the gloom, as if enemies might be lurking in every dark recess.
"They shall not have me," he muttered through set teeth, "not to-night ... not now that life again holds out to me a cup brimful of happiness. I will go, Gilda, just as you command ... they shall not find me ... I have something to live for now ... you and revenge.... My father, my brother, my friends, I shall avenge them all — that treacherous Stadtholder shall not escape from my hatred the second time. Then will I have power, wealth, a great name to offer you. Gilda, you will remember me?"
"I will remember you, my lord, as one who has passed out of my life. My playmate of long ago, the man whom I once loved is dead to me. He who would stain his hands with blood is hateful in my sight. Go, go, my lord, I entreat you, ere you make my task of helping you to life and safety harder than I can bear."
She ran to the window and threw it open, then pointed out into the night.
"There lies your way, my lord. God only knows if I do right in not denouncing you even now to my father."
"You will not denounce me, Gilda," he said, drawing quite near to her, now that he could see her graceful figure silhouetted against the starlit sky, "you will not denounce me for unknown mayhap even to yourself, your love for me is far from dead. As for me I feel that I have never loved as I love you now. Your presence has intoxicated me, your nearness fills my brain as with a subtle, aromatic wine. All thought of my own danger fades before my longing to hold you just for one instant close to my heart, to press for one brief yet eternal second my lips against yours. Gilda, I love you!"
His arms quickly closed round her, she felt his hot breath against her cheek. For one moment did she close her eyes, for she felt sick and faint, but the staunch valour of that same Dutch blood which had striven and fought and endured and conquered throughout the ages past gave her just that courage, just that presence of mind which she needed.
"An you do not release me instantly," she said firmly, "I will rouse the house with one call."
Then, as his arms instinctively dropped away from her and he drew back with a muttered curse:
"Go!" she said, once more pointing toward the peaceful and distant horizon now wrapped in the veil of night. "Go! while I still have the strength to keep silent, save for a prayer for your safety."
