CHAPTER XV
SENOR RAMIRO
If Foy van Goorl, by some magic, could have seen what was passing inthe mind of that fugitive in the boat as he sailed swiftly away from thescene of death and ruin, bitterly indeed would he have cursed his follyand inexperience which led him to disregard the advice of Red Martin.
Let us look at this man as he goes gnawing his hand in rage anddisappointment. There is something familiar about his face and bearing,still gallant enough in a fashion, yet the most observant would findit difficult to recognise in the Senor Ramiro the handsome and courtlyCount Juan de Montalvo of over twenty years before. A long spell of thegalleys changes the hardiest man, and by ill luck Montalvo, or Ramiro,to call him by his new name, had been forced to serve nearly his fulltime. He would have escaped earlier indeed, had he not been foolishenough to join in a mutiny, which was discovered and suppressed. It wasin the course of this savage struggle for freedom that he lost his eye,knocked out with a belaying pin by an officer whom he had just stabbed.The innocent officer died and the rascal Ramiro died, but without hisgood looks.
To a person of gentle birth, however great a scoundrel he might be, thegalleys, which represented penal servitude in the sixteenth century,were a very rough school. Indeed for the most part the man who went intothem blameless became bad, and the man who went into them bad becameworse, for, as the proverb says, those who have dwelt in hell alwayssmell of brimstone. Who can imagine the awfulness of it--the chains,the arduous and continual labour, the whip of the quarter-masters, thecompany of thieves and outcast ruffians, all dreadful in its squalidsameness?
Well, his strength and constitution, coupled with a sort of grimphilosophy, brought him through, and at length Ramiro found himselfa free man, middle-aged indeed, but intelligent and still strong, theworld once more before him. Yet what a world! His wife, believing himdead, or perhaps wishing to believe it, had remarried and gone with herhusband to New Spain, taking his children with her, and his friends,such of them as lived, turned their backs upon him. But although he hadbeen an unlucky man, for with him wickedness had not prospered, he stillhad resource and courage.
The Count Montalvo was a penniless outlaw, a byword and a scorn, and sothe Count Montalvo--died, and was buried publicly in the church of hisnative village. Strangely enough, however, about the same time theSenor Ramiro appeared in another part of Spain, where with success hepractised as a notary and man of affairs. Some years went by thus, tillat length, having realised a considerable sum of money by the help ofan ingenious fraud, of which the details are superfluous, an inspirationtook him and he sailed for the Netherlands.
In those dreadful days, in order to further the ends of religiouspersecution and of legalised theft, informers were rewarded with aportion of the goods of heretics. Ramiro's idea--a great one in itsway--was to organise this informing business, and, by interesting anumber of confederates who practically were shareholders in the venture,to sweep into his net more fortunes, or shares of fortunes, than asingle individual, however industrious, could hope to secure. As he hadexpected, soon he found plenty of worthy companions, and the company wasfloated. For a while, with the help of local agencies and spies, such asBlack Meg and the Butcher, with whom, forgetting past injuries, he hadsecretly renewed his acquaintance, it did very well, the dividends beinglarge and regular. In such times handsome sums were realised, withoutrisk, out of the properties of unfortunates who were brought to thestake, and still more was secured by a splendid system of blackmailextracted from those who wished to avoid execution, and who, when theyhad been sucked dry, could either be burnt or let go, as might provemost convenient.
Also there were other methods of making money--by an intelligent methodof robbery, by contracts to collect fines and taxes and so forth. Thusthings went well, and, at length, after many years of suffering andpoverty, the Senor Ramiro, that experienced man of affairs, beganto grow rich, until, indeed, driven forward by a natural but unwiseambition, a fault inherent to daring minds, he entered upon a dangerouspath.
The wealth of Hendrik Brant, the goldsmith, was a matter of commonreport, and glorious would be the fortune of him who could secure itsreversion. This Ramiro wished to win; indeed, there was no ostensiblereason why he should not do so, since Brant was undoubtedly a heretic,and, therefore, legitimate game for any honourable servant of the Churchand King. Yet there were lions in the path, two large and formidablelions, or rather a lion and the ghost of a lion, for one was materialand the other spiritual. The material lion was that the Government,or in other words, his august kingship Philip, desired the goldsmith'sthousands for himself, and was therefore likely to be irritated by aninterloper. The spiritual lion was that Brant was connected with Lysbethvan Goorl, once known as Lysbeth de Montalvo, a lady who had broughther reputed husband no luck. Often and often during dreary hours ofreflection beneath tropic suns, for which the profession of galley-slavegave great leisure, the Senor Ramiro remembered that very energeticcurse which his new affianced wife had bestowed upon him, a curse inwhich she prayed that through her he might live in heavy labour, thatthrough her and hers he might be haunted by fears and misfortunes, andat the last die in misery. Looking back upon the past it would certainlyseem that there had been virtue in this curse, for already throughLysbeth and his dealings with her, he had suffered the last degradationand the toil, which could not be called light, of nearly fourteen yearsof daily occupation in the galleys.
Well, he was clear of them, and thenceforward, the curse havingexhausted itself for the time being, he had prospered--at any rate to amoderate extent. But if once more he began to interfere with Lysbeth vanGoorl and her relatives, might it not re-assert its power? That was onequestion. Was it worth while to take his risk on the chance of securingBrant's fortune? That was another. Brant, it was true, was only a cousinof Lysbeth's husband, but when once you meddled with a member of thefamily, it was impossible to know how soon other members would becomemixed up in the affair.
The end may be guessed. The treasure was at hand and enormous, whereasthe wrath of a Heavenly or an earthly king was problematical and faraway. So greed, outstripping caution and superstitious fear, won therace, and Ramiro threw himself into the adventure with a resource andenergy which in their way were splendid.
Now, as always, he was a man who hated violence for its own sake. It wasno wish of his that the worthy Heer Brant should be unnecessarily burntor tortured. Therefore through his intermediaries, as Brant had narratedin his letter, he approached him with a proposal which, under thecircumstances, was liberal enough--that Brant should hand overtwo-thirds of his fortune to him and his confederates, on conditionthat he was assisted to escape with the remaining third. To his disgust,however, this obstinate Dutchman refused to buy his safety at the priceof a single stiver. Indeed, he answered with rude energy that now asalways he was in the hands of God, and if it pleased God that his lifeshould be sacrificed and his great wealth divided amongst thieves, well,it must be so, but he, at least, would be no party to the arrangement.
The details of the plots and counter-plots, the attack of the Ramirocompany, the defences of Brant, the internecine struggles between themembers of the company and the agents of the Government, if set outat length, would fill a considerable book. Of these we already knowsomething, and the rest may be divined.
In the course of the affair Ramiro had made but one mistake, and thatsprang from what he was wont to consider the weakness of his nature.Needless to say, it was that he had winked at the escape of Brant'sdaughter, Elsa. It may have been superstition that prompted him, or itmay have been pity, or perhaps it was a certain oath of mercy which hehad taken in an hour of need; at any rate, he was content that the girlshould not share the doom which overshadowed her father. He did notthink it at all likely that she would take with her any documents ofimportance, and the treasure, of course, she could not take; still, toprovide against accidents he arranged for her to be searched upon theroad.
As we know this search was a failure, and when
on the morrow Black Megarrived to make report and to warn him that Dirk van Goorl's son and hisgreat serving-man, whose strength was known throughout the Netherlands,were on their road to The Hague, he was sure that after all the girl hadcarried with her some paper or message.
By this time the whereabouts of Brant's treasure had been practicallysolved. It was believed to lie in the string of vessels, although it wasnot known that one of these was laden with powder as well as gold. Theplan of the Government agents was to search the vessels as they passedout to sea and seize the treasure as contraband, which would save muchlegal trouble, since under the law or the edicts wealth might not beshipped abroad by heretics. The plan of Ramiro and his friends wasto facilitate the escape of the treasure to the open sea, where theyproposed to swoop down upon it and convey it to more peaceful shores.
When Foy and his party started down the canal in the boat Ramiro knewthat his opportunity had come, and at once unmoored the big ship andfollowed. The attempted stabbing of Foy was not done by his orders, ashe wished the party to go unmolested and to be kept in sight. That was apiece of private malice on the part of Black Meg, for it was she who wasdressed as a man. On various occasions in Leyden Foy had made remarksupon Meg's character which she resented, and about her personalappearance, which she resented much more, and this was an attempt to payoff old scores that in the issue cost her a finger, a good knife, and agold ring which had associations connected with her youth.
At first everything had gone well. By one of the most daring andmasterly manoeuvres that Ramiro had ever seen in his long and variedexperience upon the seas, the little _Swallow_, with her crew of threemen, had run the gauntlet of the fort which was warned and waiting forher; had sunk and sailed through the big Government boat and her crew oflubberly soldiers, many of whom, he was glad to reflect, were drowned;had crushed the officer, against whom he had a personal grudge, like anegg-shell, and won through to the open sea. There he thought he was sureof her, for he took it for granted that she would run for the Norfolkcoast, and knew that in the gale of wind which was blowing his largerand well-manned vessel could pull her down. But then the ill-luck--thatancient ill-luck which always dogged him when he began to interfere withthe affairs of Lysbeth and her relatives--declared itself.
Instead of attempting to cross the North Sea the little _Swallow_ huggedthe coast, where, for various nautical reasons connected with the wind,the water, and the build of their respective ships, she had the legs ofhim. Next he lost her in the gut, and after that we know what happened.There was no disguising it; it was a most dreadful fiasco. To have one'svessel boarded, the expensive vessel in which so large a proportion ofthe gains of his honourable company had been invested, not only boarded,but fired, and the watchman stabbed by a single naked devil of unknownsex or character was bad enough. And then the end of it!
To have found the gold-laden ship, to have been gulled into attackingher, and--and--oh! he could scarcely bear to think of it! There was butone consolation. Although too late to save the others, even through themist he had seen that wisp of smoke rising from the hold; yes, he, theexperienced, had smelt a rat, and, warned by some half-divine intuition,had kept his distance with the result that he was still alive.
But the others! Those gallant comrades in adventure, where were they?Well, to be frank, he did not greatly care. There was another questionof more moment. Where was the treasure? Now that his brain had clearedafter the shock and turmoil it was evident to him that Foy van Goorl,Red Martin, and the white devil who had boarded his ship, would not havedestroyed so much wealth if they could help it, and still less wouldthey have destroyed themselves. Therefore, to pursue the matter to alogical conclusion, it seemed probable that they had spent the night insinking or burying the money, and preparing the pretty trap into whichhe had walked. So the secret was in their hands, and as they were stillalive very possibly means could be found to induce them to reveal itshiding-place. There was still hope; indeed, now that he came to weighthings, they were not so bad.
To begin with, almost all the shareholders in the affair had perishedby the stern decree of Providence, and he was the natural heir oftheir interests. In other words, the treasure, if it was recovered, washenceforth his property. Further, when they came to hear the story, theGovernment would set down Brant's fortune as hopelessly lost, so thatthe galling competition from which he had suffered so much was at anend.
Under these circumstances what was to be done? Very soon, as he sailedaway over the lake in the sweet air of the morning, the Senor Ramirofound an answer to the question.
The treasure had left The Hague, he must leave The Hague. The secret ofits disposal was at Leyden, henceforth he must live at Leyden. Why not?He knew Leyden well. It was a pleasant place, but, of course, he mightbe recognised there; though, after so long, this was scarcely probable,for was not the Count de Montalvo notoriously dead and buried? Time andaccident had changed him; moreover, he could bring art to the assistanceof nature. In Leyden, too, he had confederates--Black Meg to wit, forone; also he had funds, for was he not the treasurer of the companythat this very morning had achieved so remarkable and unsought-for anascension?
There was only one thing against the scheme. In Leyden lived Lysbeth vanGoorl and her husband, and with them a certain young man whose parentagehe could guess. More, her son Foy knew the hiding-place of Brant'shoard, and from him or his servant Martin that secret must be won.So once again he was destined to match himself against Lysbeth--thewronged, the dreaded, the victorious Lysbeth, whose voice ofdenunciation still rang in his ear, whose eyes of fire still scorchedhis soul, the woman whom he feared above everything on earth. He foughther once for money, and, although he won the money, it had done himlittle good, for in the end she worsted him. Now, if he went to Leyden,he must fight her again for money, and what would be the issue of thatwar? Was it worth while to take the risk? Would not history repeatitself? If he hurt her, would she not crush him? But the treasure, thatmighty treasure, which could give him so much, and, above all, couldrestore to him the rank and station he had forfeited, and which hecoveted more than anything in life. For, low as he had fallen, Montalvocould not forget that he had been born a gentleman.
He would take his chance; he would go to Leyden. Had he weighed thematter in the gloom of night, or even in a dull and stormy hour,perhaps--nay probably--he would have decided otherwise. But this morningthe sun shone brightly, the wind made a merry music in the reeds; on therippling surface of the lake the marsh-birds sang, and from the shorecame a cheerful lowing of kine. In such surroundings his fears andsuperstitions vanished. He was master of himself, and he knew that alldepended upon himself, the rest was dream and nonsense. Behind him laythe buried gold; before him rose the towers of Leyden, where he couldfind its key. A God! that haunting legend of a God of vengeance, inwhich priests and others affected to believe? Now that he came to thinkof it, what rubbish was here, for as any agent of the Inquisition knewwell, the vengeance always fell upon those who trusted in this same God;a hundred torture dens, a thousand smoking fires bore witness to thefact. And if there was a God, why, recognising his personal merits,only this morning He had selected him out of many to live on and be theinheritor of the wealth of Hendrik Brant. Yes, he would go to Leyden andfight the battle out.
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