He prayed her to rise.  “I want to save your husband’s life,” he said.  “I give you my word that if only he will tell me what I desire to know, I will save it; yes, although the risk is great, I will even manage his escape, and I shall ask you to go upstairs presently and explain my amiable intentions to him.”  Then he thought a moment and added, “But you mentioned one Adrian.  Pray do you mean the gentleman whose signature appears here?” and he handed her another document, saying, “Read it quietly, there is no hurry.  The good Dirk is not starving yet; I am informed, indeed, that he has just made an excellent breakfast—­not his last by many thousands, let us hope.”

Lysbeth took the sheets and glanced at them.  Then her intelligence awoke, and she read on fiercely until her eye came to the well-known signature at the foot of the last page.  She cast the roll down with a cry as though a serpent had sprung from its pages and bitten her.

“I fear that you are pained,” said Montalvo sympathetically, “and no wonder, for myself I have gone through such disillusionments, and know how they wound a generous nature.  That’s why I showed you this document, because I also am generous and wish to warn you against this young gentleman, who, I understand, you allege is my son.  You see the person who would betray his brother might even go a step further and betray his mother, so, if you take my advice, you will keep an eye upon the young man.  Also I am bound to remind you that it is more or less your own fault.  It is a most unlucky thing to curse a child before it is born—­you remember the incident?  That curse has come home to roost with a vengeance.  What a warning against giving way to the passion of the moment!”

Lysbeth heeded him no longer; she was thinking as she had never thought before.  At that moment, as though by an inspiration, there floated into her mind the words of the dead Vrouw Jansen:  “The plague, I wish that I had caught it before, for then I would have taken it to him in prison, and they couldn’t have treated him as they did.”  Dirk was in prison, and Dirk was to be starved to death, for, whatever Montalvo might think, he did not know the secret, and, therefore, could not tell it.  And she—­she had the plague on her; she knew its symptoms well, and its poison was burning in her every vein, although she still could think and speak and walk.

Well, why not?  It would be no crime.  Indeed, if it was a crime, she cared little; it would be better that he should die of the plague in five days, or perhaps in two, if it worked quickly, as it often did with the full-blooded, than that he should linger on starving for twelve or more, and perhaps be tormented besides.

Swiftly, very swiftly, Lysbeth came to her dreadful decision.  Then she spoke in a hoarse voice.

“What do you wish me to do?”

“I wish you to reason with your husband, and to persuade him to cease from his obstinacy, and to surrender to me the secret of the hiding-place of Brant’s hoard.  In that event, so soon as I have proved the truth of what he tells me, I undertake that he shall be set at liberty unharmed, and that, meanwhile, he shall be well treated.”