was ready to be led
away. "Is there aught your greatness would still desire to say to him?"

"Only this," said Beresteyn firmly, "that were his hands free I would
ask leave to grasp them."

A look of kindly amusement fell from the prisoner's eyes upon the pale
face of the young man.

"I have never known you, sir, save by a quaint nick-name," continued
Beresteyn earnestly, "but surely you have kith and kin somewhere. Have
you no father or mother living whom you will leave to mourn?"

The prisoner made no immediate reply, the smile of kindly amusement
still lingered round his lips, but presently with an instinctive gesture
of pride, he threw back his head and looked around him, as one who has
nothing to fear and but little to regret. He met the sympathetic glance
cast on him by the man who had done him--was still doing him--an
infinite wrong, and all round those of his mute and humble friends who
seemed to be listening eagerly now for the answer which he would give to
Mynheer. Then with a quick sweep his eyes suddenly rested on the wooden
erection beyond the molens that loomed out so tragically through the
mist, pointing with its one weird arm to some infinite distance far
away.

Something in the gentle pathos of this humble deference that encompassed
him, something mayhap in the solemnity of that ghostly arm suddenly
seemed to melt the thin crust of his habitual flippancy. He looked back
on Beresteyn and said softly:

"I have a friend, Frans Hals--the painter of pictures--tell him when
next you see him that I am glad his portrait of me is finished, and that
I asked God to bless him for all his goodness has meant to me in the
past."

"But your father, sir," urged Beresteyn, "your kindred...."

"My father, sir," replied Diogenes curtly, "would not care to hear that
his son had died upon the gallows."

Beresteyn would have spoken again but Jan interposes once more, humbly
but firmly.

"My lord's orders," he now says briefly, "and time presses, mynheer."

Beresteyn stands back, smothering a sigh. Jan on ahead, then Piet the
Red and the six soldiers with the prisoner between them. A few steps
only divide them from the gruesome erection that looms more solidly now
out of the mist. Beresteyn, wrapping his head up in his cloak to shut
out sound and sight, walks rapidly away in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER XXXIX

"SAUVE QUI PEUT"

Then it is that, out of the thickness of the fog a figure suddenly
em