and ten o'clock, indeed, when Dirk had been already two
hours at his factory and Lysbeth was buying provisions in the market
place, was that accomplished and excellent officer, Captain the Count
Juan de Montalvo. For a few seconds after his dark eyes opened he stared
at the ceiling collecting his thoughts. Then, sitting up in bed, he
burst into a prolonged roar of laughter. Really the whole thing was
too funny for any man of humour to contemplate without being moved
to merriment. That gaby, Dirk van Goorl; the furiously indignant but
helpless Lysbeth; the solemn, fat-headed fools of Netherlanders at the
supper, and the fashion in which he had played his own tune on the whole
pack of them as though they were the strings of a fiddle--oh! it was
delicious.

As the reader by this time may have guessed, Montalvo was not the
typical Spaniard of romance, and, indeed, of history. He was not gloomy
and stern; he was not even particularly vengeful or bloodthirsty. On the
contrary, he was a clever and utterly unprincipled man with a sense of
humour and a gift of _bonhomie_ which made him popular in all places.
Moreover, he was brave, a good soldier; in a certain sense sympathetic,
and, strange to say, no bigot. Indeed, which seems to have been a rare
thing in those days, his religious views were so enlarged that he
had none at all. His conduct, therefore, if from time to time it
was affected by passing spasms of acute superstition, was totally
uninfluenced by any settled spiritual hopes or fears, a condition which,
he found, gave him great advantages in life. In fact, had it suited his
purpose, Montalvo was prepared, at a moment's notice, to become Lutheran
or Calvinist, or Mahomedan, or Mystic, or even Anabaptist; on the
principle, he would explain, that it is easy for the artist to paint any
picture he likes upon a blank canvas.

And yet this curious pliancy of mind, this lack of conviction, this
absolute want of moral sense, which ought to have given the Count such
great advantages in his conflict with the world, were, in reality, the
main source of his weakness. Fortune had made a soldier of the man, and
he filled the part as he would have filled any part. But nature intended
him for a play-actor, and from day to day he posed and mimed and mouthed
through life in this character or in that, though never in his
own character, principally because he had none. Still, far down in
Montalvo's being there was something solid and genu