A NIGHT OF STORM
I will now tell the thing which happened to Kate in the house in
Zaandpoort Street that stormy night when for an hour she was left alone.
When Maisie went out, Kate heard the outer door shut with a crash as
the wind rushed in. The flames swirled up the wide chimney in the
sitting-room, whereupon she rose and drew the curtain across the inner
door. Then she went to the wood-box and piled fresh fagots about the
great back-log, which had grown red and smouldering. For a long time
after she had finished she knelt looking at the cheerful blaze. She
sighed deeply, as if her thoughts had not been of the same complexion.
Then she rose and went to the window which looked out upon the canal.
It was her favorite musing-place. She leaned her brow against the
half-drawn dimity curtain, and watched the rain thresh the waters till
they gleamed gray-white in the sparkle of the lights along the canal
bank. A vague unrest and uncertainty filled her soul.
"Wat, Wat!" she whispered, half to herself. "What would I not give if I
might speak to you to-night--only tell you that I would never be hasty
or angry with you again!"
And she set her hand upon her side as though she had been suddenly
stricken by a pain of some grievous sort. Yet not a pang of sharp
agony, but only a dull, empty ache, lonely and hungry, was abiding
there.
"How he must hate me!" she said. "It was my fault that he went away
in anger. He would never have gone to that place had we not first been
cruel to him here."
And in his cell, listening dully, to the tramp of the sparse passers-by
coming up to his window through the tumultuous blowing of all the horns
of the tempest, Wat was saying to himself the same thing: "How she must
hate me--thus to walk with him and let him point a scornful hand at my
prison window."
But in the street of Zaandpoort, the lonely girl's uneasiness was fast
deepening into terror.
Suddenly Kate lifted her head. There was surely a slight noise at the
outer door. She had a vague feeling that a foot was coming up the
stair. She listened intently, but heard nothing save the creaking
of doors within and the hurl of the tempest without. A thought came
sharply to her, and her heart leaped palpably in her breast. Could it
possibly be that Wat, released from prison, had come directly back to
her? Her lips parted, and a very lovely light came into her eyes, as of
late was used to do when one spoke well of Wat Gordon.
She stood gazing fixedly at the door, but the sound was not repeated.
Then she looked at the place where he had stood on the threshold that
first night when he came bursting in upon them--the time when he saw
her lie with her head low in Maisie's lap.
"Dear Wat!" she said softly, over and over to herself--"dear, dear Wat!"
But alas! Wat Gordon was lying stretched on his pallet in the round
tower of the prison of Amersfort; while without another maid called to
him in the drenching rain, which love did not permit her to feel. He
could neither hear the tender thrill in his true love's voice, nor yet
respond to the pleading of her once proud heart, which love had now
made gentle. He heard nothing but the roar of the wind which whirled
away towards the North Sea, yelling with demon laughter as it shook
his window bar, and shouted mocking words over the sill.
But all suddenly, as Kate looked again through the window, she became
aware that certain of the lights on the canal edge were being blotted
out. Something black seemed to rise up suddenly before the window.
The girl started back, and even as she stood motionless, stricken
with sudden fear, the window was forcibly opened, and a man in a long
cloak, and wearing a black mask, stepped into the room. Kate was too
much astonished to cry out. She turned quickly towards the door with
intent to flee. But before she could reach it two men entered by it,
masked and equipped like the first. None of the three uttered a word of
threatening or explanation; they only advanced and seized her arms. In
a moment they had wrapped Kate in a great cloak, slipped a soft elastic
gag into her mouth, and carried her towards the window. The single
wild cry which she had time to utter before her mouth was stopped was
whirled away by a gust yet fiercer than any of those which all night
had ramped and torn their way to the sea betwixt the irregular gables
and twisted chimney-stalks of the ancient street of Zaandpoort.
The man who had entered first through the window now received her in
his arms. He clambered down by a ladder which was set on the canal
bank, and held in its position by two men. Yet another man stood ready
to assist, and so in a few moments Kate found herself upon a horse,
while the man who had come first through the window mounted behind her
and kept about her waist an arm of iron strength. By this time Kate was
half unconscious with the terror of her position. She knew not whither
she was being taken, and could make no guess at the identity of her
captors.
She could, indeed, hear them talking together, but in a language which
she could not understand and which she had never before heard. The
gag in her mouth did not greatly hurt her, but her arms were tightly
fastened to her sides, and her cramped position on the saddle in front
of her captor became, as the miles stretched themselves out behind
them, an exquisitely painful one.
With the beating of the horses' hoofs the cloak gradually dropped from
her eyes, so that Kate could discern dark hedge-rows and occasional
trees drifting like smoke behind them as they rode. The lightning
played about in front, dividing land and sky with its vivid pale-blue
line. Then the thunder went roaring and galloping athwart the universe,
and lo! on the back of that, the black and starless canopy shut down
blacker than ever. Once through the folds of the cloak Kate saw a field
of flowers, all growing neatly together in squares, lit up by the
lightning. Every parallelogram stood clear as on a chess-board. But
the color was wholly gone out of them, all being subdued to a ghastly
pallor by the fierce brilliance of the zigzag flame.
To the dazed and terrified girl hours seemed to pass, and still the
horses did not stop. At last Kate could feel, by the uneven falling of
the hoofs and by the slower pace of the beasts, that they had reached
rougher country, where the roads were less densely compacted than in
the neighborhood of the traffic of a city.
Then, after a little, the iron of the horseshoes grated sharply on the
pebbles of the sea-shore. Men's voices cried harshly back and forth,
lanterns flashed, snorting horses checked themselves, spraying the
pebbles every way from their forefeet--and presently Kate felt herself
being lifted down from the saddle. So stiff was she with the constraint
of her position that, but for the support of the man who helped her
down, she would have fallen among the stones.
The lightning still gleamed fitfully along the horizon. The wind was
blowing off shore, but steadily and with a level persistence which one
might lean against. The wild gustiness of the first burst of the storm
had passed away, and as the pale lightning flared up along the rough
edges of the sea, which appeared to rise above her like a wall, Kate
could momentarily see the slanting masts of a small vessel lying-to
just outside the bar, her bowsprit pointing this way and that, as she
heaved and labored in the swell.
"You are monstrously late!" a voice exclaimed, in English, and a dark
figure stood between them and the white tops of the nearer waves.
Kate's conductor grunted surlily, but made no audible reply. The man
in whose arms she had travelled, as in bands of iron, now dismounted
and began to swear at the speaker in strange, guttural, unintelligible
oaths.
"We are here to wait for my lord!" cried the man who had lifted Kate
from the saddle. He stood by her, still holding her arm securely.
His voice had a curious metallic ring in it, and an odd upward
intonation at the close of a sentence which remained in the memory.
"Indeed!" replied the voice which had first spoken; "then we, for our
part, can stop neither for my lord nor any other lord in heaven or on
earth. For Captain Smith of Poole has weighed his anchor, and waits
now only the boat's return to run for Branksea, with the wind and the
white horses at his tail. Nor is he the man to play pitch-and-toss out
there very long, even for his own long-boat and shipmates, with such a
spanking blow astern of the _Sea Unicorn_."
"My lord will doubtless be here directly. His horse was at the door ere
we left," again answered the metallic voice with the quirk in the tail
of it.
"We will e'en give him other ten minutes," quoth the sailor,
imperturbably.
[Illustration: "THE MAN CARRIED HER EASILY THROUGH THE SURF"]
And he stood with his ship's watch in his hand, swinging his lantern
up and down in answer to some signal from the ship, too faint for
ordinary eyes to catch across the whip and swirl of the uneasy waves.
But he was spared any long time of waiting; for a man in uniform rode
up, whose horse, even in the faint light, showed evident signs of
fatigue.
"You are to proceed on board at once with your charge. My lord has
been stricken down by an assassin. He lies in the palace of Amersfort,
dangerously but not fatally hurt. Nevertheless, you are to carry out
his directions to the letter, and at the end of your journeying he or
his steward will meet you, and you shall receive the reward."
"That will not do for Captain Smith," cried the sailor, emphatically.
"He must have the doubloons in hand ere a soul of you quit the coast."
The man who had held Kate in his arms during her night-ride turned
sharply about.
"Quit your huxtering! I have it here!" cried he, indignantly, slapping
his pocket as he spoke.
"Run out the boat!" shouted the man, promptly, and half a dozen sailors
squattered mid-thigh in the foam and swelter of the sea.
"Now, on board with you this instant!" he cried, as one accustomed to
command where boats and water were in question.
Then the man with the money took Kate again in his arms and carried her
easily through the surf to where the men held the leaping craft. One
by one the dripping crew and passengers scrambled in, and presently,
with four stout fellows bending at the long oars, the boat gathered way
through the cold gray waves of the bar towards the masts of the ship
which tossed and heaved in the offing.