DIRK’S desperate enterprise proved successful. No need to relate his adventures. Enough that next morning he was helped over the ramparts of Leyden by friendly ropes and yet more friendly hands, and stood sale and sound in the street now called the Kaiserstraat. He shouted to the crowd that gathered round him, ‘We have taken the Landscheiding—pierced it through. We are coming—coming!’ But his voice died away in a cry of anguish; and covering his face with both hands he moaned aloud, ‘O God! O God!—Am I in a city of the dead?’
For the crowd that thronged and pressed him looked like a host of dead men risen from their graves. Large wild eyes glared on him hungrily, bloodless faces, yellow with famine or gray with the shadow of death, gazed into his, gaunt figures stretched out bony hands to greet him. No mistaking their welcome; but it was the welcome of death in life.
‘Take me to the Burgomaster,’ he cried, as soon as he could speak again, ‘I have a letter!’ Almost borne off his feet by the throng, he was hurried to the Town Hall, where he delivered his precious scrap of paper and his verbal messages to the Burgomaster Adrian van der Werf—a name that will live in history as long as the story of the siege—and that is as long as men care to remember heroic deeds, and noble self-devotion to a holy cause.
When Dirk came out again the crowd received him with cheers—such cheers, alas! ‘sighs of extra strength, with the chill on.’ In response, he threw up his cap, the blue cap with the orange ribbon (which, imprudently enough, he had brought concealed about his person), and shouted ‘Vivât Oranje! Vivât Leyden!’ in a voice not yet thin and weak with hunger. Then he looked eagerly round for the face he longed to see. Yes, thank God! There stood the doctor in his fur cloak, looking taller, because more spare and gaunt, than ever. Dirk pushed towards him, and he towards Dirk, and, the crowd making way for them, they were soon locked in each other’s arms.
‘Well done, Dirk Willemszoon!’ cried Adrian. ‘A braver lad have I never seen.’
‘Is Mevrouw well, and the Juffrouw?’ gasped Dirk. ‘Well as may be in this stricken city, which God’s hand is heavy upon. Come and see.’
He led Dirk to his lodgings on the Apothecaries’ Dijk in the house of his friend Floriszoon, to whom he had been recommended by Kruytsoon of Rotterdam. The walk was short; but it seemed miles in length to the wondering, sorrow-stricken boy, such sad eyes peered at him from street and casement, such wasted forms glided by like ghosts. Once, a woman ran out of a house, and clasping the doctor’s cloak with a gesture of despair, implored him in heartrending tones to come and see her baby.
He said to Dirk, ‘Wait for me, I shall not be long,’ and went in.
As Dirk waited, he saw several women steal over to a heap of refuse which had been thrown upon the space between the street and the neighboring canal, and begin, with wasted, eager hands, to search the horrible, unsavory masa. Two or three had their faces carefully covered up, if to avoid recognition. He was still wondering what they were seeking, when Adrian came out.
‘The babe is dead,’ he said to Dirk. ‘Well for him! He is at rest.’ Then his eye fell upon the searchers of the refuse heap. ‘Good heavens!’ he cried, with a start of horror. ‘Rose—Rose! Has it come to this?’
One of the covered faces was lifted up, and Rose stood by his side, her left hand carefully clasping something—heaven knows what—which she thought it possible for human creatures to eat. ‘Be not angry, mon ami,’ she said in French, laying the other hand caressingly on his arm. ‘I only thought I might find somewhat there—as others do.’
‘Ma mie, here is Dirk, whom God has sent to comfort as, and to tell us our friends are coming.’
Thin and shadowy was the hand that took Dirk’s, but warm was the clasp it gave. ‘How did you come?’ was the first question, for his presence seemed little short of a miracle.
Dirk explained; and Rose added, ‘Roskĕ will be so glad to see you. It will be better than bread to her.’
They soon reached the house of Floriszoon. Adrian led them into a room of which the comfortable appearance mocked the misery of its occupants, everything being plentiful enough in Leyden except food. Presently a little child ran in, followed by a dark-eyed, dark-haired young girl, small in stature but very pretty, a stranger to Dirk. But no one else could turn his eyes for a moment from the tiny form whose little wasted arms were round his neck, clinging as if they could never let him go, while the pale lips, late so rosy, rained kisses on his cheek and brow—unconsciously paying back a hundredfold that one kiss he had given to his enemy, the dying Spaniard. Roskĕ’s eyes had the pathetic look one sees with children who have suffered what they cannot forget, even in play. Yet she had suffered less than others; since Adrian, Rose, and Adrian’s young sister Marie, had all denied themselves to spare the child.
When her captures had subsided, Dirk set her down upon a chair, ‘See, Juffrouw,’ he said, showing his cap, ‘I have got your gift quite safe—’
‘You were mad to bring it with you,’ Adrian interrupted. ‘No, Mynheer; it did me good service, when I showed it to the sentinels on the wall. And I had it well hidden.’
‘But if you had been caught and searched?’
‘Then—oh then, I should have taken my chance. They would have had more to find than that.’
As he spoke he drew out, from hiding-places beneath his clothes, cake after cake of the hard rye bread used on shipboard. Roskĕ welcomed each, as he laid it before her, with a cry of joy, and even the eyes of the elders glistened hungrily.
‘There, Juffrouw, that is my gift,’ he said at last. ‘Not at all so pretty as yours.’ Roskĕ, a few months before, would have turned from the coarse faro in disgust—now she hailed it with rapture. But ere her little white teeth closed upon the first morsel, father, mother, and Tant’ Marie must each have a cake too. There was one for Dirk himself, and three to keep for the morrow. ‘I think it is a whole year,’ said Roskĕ, with a child’s long sigh, ‘since we had any bread to eat.’
‘It is more than two months,’ Adrian explained. ‘For a month after the bread was gone we had malt cake. Now that is gone too, and we eat what God sends—or go without. All we get from the city is a morsel of flesh each day. They are killing now, for food, the few cows that were kept that the sick and the infants might have milk.’
‘What then do you find to eat?’ Dirk asked.
Adrian shrugged his shoulders. ‘Did you wonder what stripped the linden-trees of their leaves so early in the year? There are other things too. Best sometimes not to know too much.’
Yet the cross pressed less heavily on Adrian and his house than on others. His skill as a physician made him too useful a person to be willingly let die. He was constantly in attendance on the sick and wounded, and, that he might have strength for his arduous work, the town council cheerfully voted him special rations. He would willingly have shared them, and in a measure he did so, with the three dependent on him; but Rose and Marie were well-skilled in loving wiles and deceptions, which he was too unobservant to detect. So Dirk found Rose the most changed for the worse of the three he had known before; of the stranger he could not judge, though he thought that she too looked worn and ill.
Later in the day Adrian brought him into the room he called his study, though he seldom used it for that purpose now. ‘Dirk, my brave boy,’ he said to him, ‘thou hast come to a doomed city.’
‘I trust not, in God’s mercy. I come with a message of hope.’
‘How much hope.’ Adrian asked sorrowfully. ‘We know more in the city than you know outside. You have won the Landscheiding, but there remain the Greenway and the Kirkway, the inner circles of the mighty barrier raised by this strange, strong people to keep out the sea, when the sea was the worst foe they had to dread. The Spaniards, if they know their business—and they do, about as well as their father the devil knows his—will guard these with the flower of their host. And even suppose them won, there would not be water enough to float the ships.’
‘There is the fresh-water lake; the ships will get into that.’
‘Ay, but how? The only entrance is through a narrow canal, no doubt well-guarded by the Spaniards. Worst of all, the wind is dead against us; it is blowing from the east, carrying the waters away.’
‘God will not let us perish. And with our deliverers in sight! Five little miles away! No—no— impossible!’
‘Would it were! My poor child, God, or Natura, or Fate, whatsoever you will to call Him, goes His own way, unheeding our agonies and prayers. To Him time is nothing—to us time is life or death. You see how we are off for food?’
‘Yes.’
‘My wife and sister, with a courage wonderful to me—our women are often braver than our men— continue to spread the table somehow, morn and even, though it be with scraps which heretofore we would not have thrown to our dogs. They do well, for use and wont are the props of life—and reason. And already suffering has goaded some to frenzy, which is worse than death. There are so many things worse than death, that I marvel more are not tempted to take that swift, sure road out of all their miseries. Yet, Dirk, you must not dream that I want to surrender the town.’
‘Oh no, doctor—you, of all men, are no “Glipper,”’ Dirk interposed.
The very small number of Dutchmen who took part with the Spaniards were called Glippers. There were some of them in Leyden, continually preaching despair to their fellow citizens, and taunting them with their miseries. The wonder is that they were not massacred, or at least expelled the town, and turned over to the mercies of the enemy they professed to trust.
‘I am no Glipper,’ Adrian answered sadly. ‘Not because hope from mercy from God, but because I despair of mercy from men—from Spaniards. I despair of truth from them. They may make what promises they will—and the one hopeful feature in our case is that they are raising their promises—but if you would know how they keep them—remember Haarlem! Two women and a child—a maiden child— depend on me, and I have sworn, if the town falls, to stab them all three to the heart, and myself afterward. You are a man in soul, though a boy in years, Dirk Willemszoon. I want your promise—your oath—that you will stand by me in this thing.’
Dirk shuddered. Plunge a knife into Roskĕ’s heart!
The thing was unimaginable. ‘Don’t ask me!’ he said hoarsely. ‘But, Mynheer, I will do all I can; all that is possible.’
‘My words are too hard for thee, poor boy. Keep them to thyself. Let not my wife and sister know that I have abandoned hope—or rather, that hope has abandoned me.’
No one spoke of Dirk’s return to the fleet. The attempt would have been almost certain death, and for no certain gain. His presence in the city was worth, many times over, the morsel of food upon which he contrived to exist. In the terrible enforced idleness caused by the stagnation of business in the town, one who had endless stories of what was doing in the fleet and in the country was an enormous acquisition. Many a weary hour did he beguile for the gaunt, hollow-eyed groups that used to gather round him in the squares, or at the corners of the streets. He would give a minute description of the ships, each and all, from the ponderous Ark of Delft, which was moved in the water, not by sails, but by paddles and a crank, down to his own little Scorpion, with her desperate crew and her brave one-eyed captain. On these occasions he would usually have Roskĕ in his arms, sometimes listening delighted to his stories, sometimes sleeping quietly, or playing with some toy he had made for her.
There was one subject, however, upon which he preserved a determined silence. ‘Why does not the Prince come himself to the fleet?’ was often asked of him. His presence would be worth a new army: ‘Would you wish him to come and be killed by the Spaniards?’ Dirk would ask.
No; they did not wish him to lose his life, though perhaps they wished him to risk it for their sakes. Perhaps it would have been some consolation to them in their misery if he had. But they thought him safe at Delft or Rotterdam, with plenty to eat and drink, while they were starving. There were some who even dared to hint that fighting was not his strong point, that he kept out of it whenever he could. Dirk’s loyal heart burned within him, but still he held his peace.
Such words as these were but chance ‘spray drops from the fount of misery:’ on the whole, and persistently, the agonized city looked to the Prince as mariners look to the pole-star. Next after the Name Divina, his name was ever on their lips; they could not pray for him, Dirk thought, more fervently, even if they knew how much he needed their prayers.
Dirk came to Leyden on the morning of September 12, and on the 18th, after sir slow days of suffering, there dawned a ray of hope. Going early out to visit some of the many sick, Adrian felt, to his joy, a strong north-west wind blowing in his face. He came back instantly. ‘Rose—Marie!’ he cried, as he entered the room where they were busy examining an armful of green things Dirk had brought in, to try if any were fit to eat. Rose—Marie—the wind has changed. And, thank God, it is blowing a gale! It will bring the water. The ships will float—at last Rose and Marie shed tears of joy, and even little Roskĕ, who had recovered some of her playfulness since the coming of Dirk, danced about the room, crying, ‘The ships will bring us bread—we shall have bread again.’
Rose reached down her hood.
‘Let us go to church,’ she said, ‘and thank God. Adrian, you will come too.’
During that sad time, all the churches in the town were opera continually, and preachers full of zeal exhorted the people, encouraged them to hope in God, and led their prayers for deliverance. Rose and Marie found much comfort in attending, but Adrian latterly had refused to accompany them. He said now, ‘Not to-day, ma mie; there are too many sick who need me. Pray thou for us both.’
For three days the gale lasted. Hope grew ever stronger in the hearts of the citizens. The tower of the church of St. Pancras commanded a wide view over the level plain that stretched around, intersected by canals and dotted with sheets of water. The men of Leyden, and Adrian amongst them, used often to ascend it, and watch the friendly fleet as it drew nearer and nearer, borne along upon the rapidly rising waters. And now, at last, the watery waste reflected something more than the shadow of the ships. There gleamed across it fires which were not baleful, but true beacons of hope. The Spanish fortifications, and the villages they had occupied, were falling one by one into the hands of the Sea Beggars, who set them on fire, to tell the citizens by their blaze that rescue was at hand. The excitement of the town rose to its utmost, when salvoes of artillery, plainly heard from the fleet, told that the strong position of the North As, which had been held in force by the Spaniards, was taken at last.
During those days of strained expectation, the citizens lived on hope, and they had little else left them to live upon. But, to the thunder of that cannon from the North As, there succeeded an ominous silence. Again the wind changed; now, as before, it blew persistently from the east. From the summit of the tower of St. Pancras, to which day by day with weary feet and throbbing hearts the citizens climbed, they could plainly see the fleet lying stranded in the shallow water. Between them and it they saw the host of their enemies—driven into an ever-narrowing, yet all the more impenetrable circle—bristling with cannon, and glistening with steel around the doomed city—doomed, it would seem, to perish in a lingering agony with rescue full in view.
On one of these awful days, Adrian came into the house with a frown on his brow, holding Roskĕ by the hand. That frown was often seen now upon the broad forehead of the poor perplexed man of science, forced, in spite of himself, to take part in the turmoil of the distracting world around him. ‘For Heaven’s sake, Rose, keep the child indoors!’ he said, almost angrily. ‘I found her down by the canal playing with the children of Arendtz the glover. And—he has got the plague.’
Rose’s pale cheek took an added shade of paleness. ‘The plague! Oh, Adrian, has God sent that too?’
‘God, or the devil. God, perhaps, to shorten our misery, since He does not mean to save us. Whoever sent it, it is here. The watchmen report several found dead of it this morning. I myself saw a woman with a baby at her breast—both dead. But I own that, upon examination, I found no trace of the plague. It was only starvation. Still, if you think it worth while keeping Roskĕ, or any of us, alive a little longer, ‘twere well to take more care of her. Where is Dirk?’
‘Gone to fetch our daily morsel of flesh from the shambles. He says the crowds there are fearful. Scraps of hide, blood, offal—everything is desperately fought for.’
‘That will be over soon—when the cattle are all gone. And there is Valdez outside bidding high for a surrender.’
‘Which the city fathers will not hear of,’ said Rose’s steadfast, sorrowful voice.
‘Nor any man—nor woman—nor child even. We have often said we would die first. And now, it means that. But I must go. If I can do no more, I can at least show myself no whit afraid of this thing they call the plague. Why should we fear it? It is a quicker and easier death than starvation.’ (Still, he had been tremblingly anxious to preserve Roskĕ from contagion. Hope is hard to kill, when it draws its life from love.)
‘Adrian,’ Rose said with hesitation, ‘these are perilous days. Wilt kiss me ere thou goest forth, my husband?’
‘Surely, my beloved.’
Long and tender was the kiss he pressed upon the white and trembling lips.
She held his hand fast in hers, looked into his face, and smiled.
‘Thou canst smile—now?’ he said, surprised.
‘Why not?’ she answered, smiling still. ‘Adrian, I am not unhappy. For in these dark days I have come back to my father’s God, or rather, my father’s God has come back to me. It is better with me now (were it not for you and Roskĕ and the others) than it was in Antwerp or Rotterdam, where we had bread enough and to spare. Do you remember that day, in the Venetian house in Antwerp, after Alva came, when we stood and watched the martyrs, with our Betteken among them, go singing to their death? I knew why they sang, and I envied them in my heart. God was with them. But He is so good that sometimes He forgives and blesses—not steadfast martyrs only—but those who have been weak and faithless—like me.’
‘It is well for thee,’ said Adrian gently, though sadly. ‘But—weak and faithless! ‘Tis thou that hast the strong faith, to stand all these trials.’
‘Through the trials God brought me the faith,’ said Rose. ‘As the waters are bringing the ships of our deliverance. It was when everything, even daily bread, was gone, that I first knew He was there—my father’s God, and my God. But go now, beloved, I must not keep thee from the sick, who need thee so. Only remember, whatever comes, that thy poor weak Rose is strong now, for His strength is made perfect in weakness.’
Adrian went forth to his work with a softened, but foreboding heart. He speedily found his boast that no one in the city would hear of a surrender falsified by facts. It was impossible that the miscellaneous population of a great city should all, without exception, behave like heroes and martyrs. There were the Glippers, whose Cassandra like prophecies were forever sounding in the ears of their fellow-citizens; but these were few compared with the great crowd, who were neither Glippers nor traitors, only men and women dying slowly of hunger, and seeing their loved ones die before their eyes. Was it any wonder if the wish, which is father to the thought, inclined them to place faith in the promises of mercy and forgiveness the Spaniards were now daily proffering, and urging?
At first Adrian did not notice anything unusual, so full were his thoughts of Rose, and Rose’s words of peace and resignation. Far from bringing him any comfort, these filled his heart with a great fear. Could it be that God, or whatever dread Power ruled their destinies, was going to take from him the desire of his eyes? ‘For,’ thought he, ‘it is ever so. At the end comes peace. The ship settles ere it sinks, the thunder burst is heralded by a calm. Well, and what matter, after all? Are we not dying, all of us?’ Here he came suddenly out of his reverie to find himself entangled in a crowd; a thing which often happened to him, not because he liked crowds, for he hated them, but because he was apt to lose himself in his own thoughts, and take no heed whither was going.
This was no common crowd. Fierce, wild-eyed men and fiercer women yelled, screamed, shouted, tossing their thin arms in passionate supplication, or clenching their hands, as if for some dread revenge.
‘What is the matter?’ he asked of some one near, as soon as he could make his voice heard above the tumult. ‘Have the Spaniards forced the gate?’
‘Would they had!’ said the man addressed.
‘Better the Spaniards than the hunger fiend!’ cried another.
‘My wife died of hunger last night,’ a third added; and Adrian’s heart sank within him at the word.
‘We are all dying—dying!’ wailed a woman’s voice.
‘But what do all these people want?’ asked Adrian of the first speaker.
They want the Burgomaster to surrender the town. All this misery is his doing. And that of Colonel Van der Does, the Commandant.
‘Is the Burgomaster here?’ asked Adrian. He could not see for the throng around him.
‘Look! that’s his hat yonder with the Beggar’s medal in it! There, in the very midst! Well if he escape with life.’
‘God help him!’ said another. ‘They are like to tear him limb from limb.’
Adrian did not try now to get out of the crowd. Exerting all his remaining strength, he pushed his way into the very center of it, and as the units that composed it were ab least as weak as himself, it was no difficult task. To stand beside the breve Burgomaster, and help him to keep off his cowardly assailants, was his one thought and aim. With all his heart Adrian Perrenot reverenced Adrian Van dar Werf, the soul of adamant nothing could more, the strong rock upon which ah men rested, the man who was, for the town of Leyden, what William of Nassau was for the whole land. Pressing to his side, he saw at a glance that in the midst of that furious mob he was cool and dauntless, as in his seat in the Council Hall. To the threats, the curses, the prayers that rang in his ears he made no reply, but walked on steadily, drawing the crowd after him. Down they passed through narrow streets, on by the Tower of Hengist, on—on still— until they all poured together into the Place where stood the church of St. Pancras. There, at the door, between two ancient lime-trees, the Burgomaster took his stand, a tall, gaunt figure, worn and haggard as the poorest who cried to him for bread, but full of the majesty of high resolve and unflinching courage. He took off his broad-leaved felt hat and waved it over the crowd, imploring, or rather commanding silence. The crowd knew its master, and obeyed.
Then he spoke those heroic words which still echo down the centuries: ‘What would ye, my friends? That we should break our vows, and surrender to the Spaniards, a fate more horrible than the agony we are enduring now? I tell you, I have sworn to hold the city, and may God give me strength to keep my oath! I can die but once, whether by your hands, or the enemy’s, or the hand of God. For my own fate I care not, but I care for the city entrusted to me. I know we shall starve if not soon relieved, but better starvation than dishonored death. Your threats move me not,—my life is in your hands, here is my sword, plunge it into my heart, divide my flesh among you. Take my body to appease your hunger, but expect no surrender as long as I live.’
There was a moment’s silence. Then Adrian’s voice raised a shout of applause. It was caught up instantly by the crowd:—famished and desperate though they were, they were not false-hearted. Long and loud it sounded, making the walls of the old church, and the houses clustering round it, ring again and yet again with its echoes. Yet it had an undertone of deep pathos, showing that the hearts it came from, though resolved, were well-nigh breaking. But the Burgomaster knew now that the men of Leyden would be true to him, and to each other, ‘to the bitter end.’
Thus was quelled the solitary outbreak by which a few—and only a few—of the agonized citizens of Leyden dimmed the glory of their long martyrdom. All this time the Spaniards were tempting them to surrender with promises of mercy and pardon, which grew every day more liberal and more alluring. They mocked with bitter scorn their hopes of rescue. ‘As well,’ cried they to the starving sentinels on the walls, ‘as well could the Prince of Orange pluck the stars from the sky, as bring the bread to the walls of Leyden.’ But this was the final answer to threat and taunt and promise— ‘Ye call us rat-eaters and dog-eaters, and it is true. So long then as ye hear dog bark or cat mew within the walls, so long ye may know that the city holds out. And when all have perished, we will devour our left arms, keeping our right to defend our women, our freedom, and our faith. When the last hour has come, with our own hands we will set fire to the city, and die together, men, women, and children in the flames, rather than Buffer our homes to be polluted and our liberties to be crushed!’