The last of our three friends to awake on this particular morning, between nine 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 genuine, and that something not good but bad.  It was very rarely on view; the hand of circumstance must plunge deep to find it, but it dwelt there; the strong, cruel Spanish spirit which would sacrifice anything to save, or even to advance, itself.  It was this spirit that Lysbeth had seen looking out of his eyes on the yesterday, which, when he knew that the race was lost, had prompted him to try to kill his adversary, although he killed himself and her in the attempt.  Nor did she see it then for the last time, for twice more at least in her life she was destined to meet and tremble at its power.