{ Warning! Kind of spoilers ahead. }
"Death in itself matters but little," mused the philosopher with his gently ironical smile. "I would have chosen another mode than hanging . . . but after all 'tis swift and sure; and of course now she will never know."
Know what, O philosopher? What is it
that she -- Gilda -- with the fair curls and the blue eyes, the
proud firm mouth and round chin -- what is it that she will never
know?
She will never know that a nameless, penniless
soldier of fortune has loved her with every beat of his heart,
every thought of his brain, with every sinew and every aspiration.
She will never know that just in order to remain near her, when
she was dragged away out of Rotterdam he affronted deliberately
the trap into which he fell. She will never know that for
her dear sake, he has borne humiliation against which every nerve
of his splendid nature did inwardly rebel, owning to guilt and
shame lest her blue eyes shed tears from a brother's sin.
She will never know that the warning to the Stadtholder came from
him, and that he was neither a forger nor a thief, only just a
soldier of fortune with a contempt for death, and an unspoken
adoration for the one woman who seemed to him as distant from
him as the stars.
But there were no vain regrets in him now;
no regret of life, for this he always held in his own hand ready
to toss it away for a fancy of an ideal -- no regret of the might-have-been
because he was a philosopher, and the very moment that love for
the unattainable was born in his heart he had already realized
that love to him could only mean a memory.
Therefore when he watched the preparations
out there in the mist, and heard the heavy blows upon the wooden
planks and the murmurs of his sympathizers at their work, he only
smiled gently, self-deprecatingly, but always good-humouredly.
If the Lord of Stoutenburg only knew how little
he really cared.
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"The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it." ~ Alain Robbe-Grillet