The Cloister and the Hearth
by Charles Reade
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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AUTHOR'S PREFACE

A small portion of this tale appeared in Once a Week, July-
September, 1859, under the title of "A Good Fight."

After writing it, I took wider views of the subject, and also felt
uneasy at having deviated unnecessarily from the historical
outline of a true story. These two sentiments have cost me more
than a year's very hard labour, which I venture to think has not
been wasted. After this plain statement I trust all who comment on
this work will see that to describe it as a reprint would be
unfair to the public and to me. The English language is copious,
and, in any true man's hands, quite able to convey the truth-
namely, that one-fifth of the present work is a reprint, and four-
fifths of it a new composition.

CHARLES READE

CHAPTER I

Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do
great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. of these
obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, the greater part will
never be known till that hour, when many that are great shall be
small, and the small great; but of others the world's knowledge
may be said to sleep: their lives and characters lie hidden from
nations in the annals that record them. The general reader cannot
feel them, they are presented so curtly and coldly: they are not
like breathing stories appealing to his heart, but little historic
hail-stones striking him but to glance off his bosom: nor can he
understand them; for epitomes are not narratives, as skeletons are
not human figures.

Thus records of prime truths remain a dead letter to plain folk:
the writers have left so much to the imagination, and imagination
is so rare a gift. Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use
to the public - as an interpreter.

There is a musty chronicle, written in intolerable Latin, and in
it a chapter where every sentence holds a fact. Here is told, with
harsh brevity, the strange history of a pair, who lived
untrumpeted, and died unsung, four hundred years ago; and lie now,
as unpitied, in that stern page, as fossils in a rock. Thus,
living or dead, Fate is still unjust to them. For if I can but
show you what lies below that dry chronicler's words, methinks you
will correct the indifference of centuries, and give those two
sore-tried souls a place in your heart - for a day.

It was past the middle of the fifteenth century; Louis XI was
sovereign of France; Edward IV was wrongful king of England; and
Philip "the Good," having by force and cunning dispossessed his
cousin Jacqueline, and broken her heart, reigned undisturbed this
many years in Holland, where our tale begins.

Elias, and Catherine his wife, lived in the little town of Tergou.
He traded, wholesale and retail, in cloth, silk, brown holland,
and, above all, in curried leather, a material highly valued by
the middling people, because it would stand twenty years' wear,
and turn an ordinary knife, no small virtue in a jerkin of that
century, in which folk were so liberal of their steel; even at
dinner a man would leave his meat awhile, and carve you his
neighbour, on a very moderate difference of opinion.

The couple were well to do, and would have been free from all
earthly care, but for nine children. When these were coming into
the world, one per annum, each was hailed with rejoicings, and the
saints were thanked, not expostulated with; and when parents and
children were all young together, the latter were looked upon as
lovely little playthings invented by Heaven for the amusement,
joy, and evening solace of people in business.

But as the olive-branches shot up, and the parents grew older, and
saw with their own eyes the fate of large families, misgivings and
care mingled with their love. They belonged to a singularly wise
and provident people: in Holland reckless parents were as rare as
disobedient children. So now when the huge loaf came in on a
gigantic trencher, looking like a fortress in its moat, and, the
tour of the table once made, seemed to have melted away, Elias and
Catherine would look at one another and say, "Who is to find bread
for them all when we are gone?"

At this observation the younger ones needed all their filial
respect to keep their little Dutch countenances; for in their
opinion dinner and supper came by nature like sunrise and sunset,
and, so long as that luminary should travel round the earth, so
long as the brown loaf go round their family circle, and set in
their stomachs only to rise again in the family oven. But the
remark awakened the national thoughtfulness of the elder boys, and
being often repeated, set several of the family thinking, some of
them good thoughts, some ill thoughts, according to the nature of
the thinkers.

"Kate, the children grow so, this table will soon be too small."

"We cannot afford it, Eli," replied Catherine, answering not his
words, but his thought, after the manner of women.

Their anxiety for the future took at times a less dismal but more
mortifying turn. The free burghers had their pride as well as the
nobles; and these two could not bear that any of their blood
should go down in the burgh after their decease.

So by prudence and self-denial they managed to clothe all the
little bodies, and feed all the great mouths, and yet put by a
small hoard to meet the future; and, as it grew and grew, they
felt a pleasure the miser hoarding for himself knows not.

One day the eldest boy but one, aged nineteen, came to his mother,
and, with that outward composure which has so misled some persons
as to the real nature of this people, begged her to intercede with
his father to send him to Amsterdam, and place him with a
merchant. "It is the way of life that likes me: merchants are
wealthy; I am good at numbers; prithee, good mother, take my part
in this, and I shall ever be, as I am now, your debtor."

Catherine threw up her hands with dismay and incredulity.

"What! leave Tergou!"

"What is one street to me more than another? If I can leave the
folk of Tergou, I can surely leave the stones."

"What! quit your poor father now he is no longer young?"

"Mother, if I can leave you, I can leave"

"What! leave your poor brothers and sisters, that love you so
dear?"

"There are enough in the house without me."

"What mean you, Richart? Who is more thought of than you Stay,
have I spoken sharp to you? Have I been unkind to you?"

"Never that I know of; and if you had, you should never hear of it
from me. Mother," said Richart gravely, but the tear was in his
eye, "it all lies in a word, and nothing can change my mind. There
will be one mouth less for you to feed.'

"There now, see what my tongue has done," said Catherine, and the
next moment she began to cry. For she saw her first young bird on
the edge of the nest trying his wings to fly into the world.
Richart had a calm, strong will, and she knew he never wasted a
word.

It ended as nature has willed all such discourse shall end: young
Richart went to Amsterdam with a face so long and sad as it had
never been seen before, and a heart like granite.

That afternoon at supper there was one mouth less. Catherine
looked at Richart's chair and wept bitterly. On this Elias shouted
roughly and angrily to the children, "Sit wider, can't ye: sit
wider!" and turned his head away over the back of his seat awhile,
and was silent.

Richart was launched, and never cost them another penny; but to
fit him out and place him in the house of Vander Stegen, the
merchant, took all the little hoard but one gold crown. They began
again. Two years passed, Richart found a niche in commerce for his
brother Jacob, and Jacob left Tergou directly after dinner, which
was at eleven in the forenoon. At supper that day Elias remembered
what had happened the last time; so it was in a low whisper he
said, "Sit wider, dears!" Now until that moment, Catherine would
not see the gap at table, for her daughter Catherine had besought
her not to grieve to-night, and she had said, "No, sweetheart, I
promise I will not, since it vexes my children." But when Elias
whispered "Sit wider!" says she, "Ay! the table will soon be too
big for the children, and you thought it would be too small;" and
having delivered this with forced calmness. she put up her apron
the next moment, and wept sore.

"'Tis the best that leave us," sobbed she; "that is the cruel
part."

"Nay! nay!" said Elias, "our children are good children, and all
are dear to us alike. Heed her not! What God takes from us still
seems better that what He spares to us; that is to say, men are by
nature unthankful - and women silly."

"And I say Richart and Jacob were the flower of the flock," sobbed
Catherine.

The little coffer was empty again, and to fill it they gathered
like ants. In those days speculation was pretty much confined to
the card-and-dice business. Elias knew no way to wealth but the
slow and sure one. "A penny saved is a penny gained," was his
humble creed. All that was not required for the business and the
necessaries of life went into the little coffer with steel bands
and florid key. They denied themselves in turn the humblest
luxuries, and then, catching one another's looks, smiled; perhaps
with a greater joy than self-indulgence has to bestow. And so in
three years more they had gleaned enough to set up their fourth
son as a master-tailor, and their eldest daughter as a robemaker,
in Tergou. Here were two more provided for: their own trade would
enable them to throw work into the hands of this pair. But the
coffer was drained to the dregs, and this time the shop too bled a
little in goods if not in coin.

Alas! there remained on hand two that were unable to get their
bread, and two that were unwilling. The unable ones were, 1,
Giles, a dwarf, of the wrong sort, half stupidity, half malice,
all head and claws and voice, run from by dogs and unprejudiced
females, and sided with through thick and thin by his mother; 2,
Little Catherine, a poor little girl that could only move on
crutches. She lived in pain, but smiled through it, with her
marble face and violet eyes and long silky lashes; and fretful or
repining word never came from her lips. The unwilling ones were
Sybrandt, the youngest, a ne'er-do-weel, too much in love with
play to work; and Cornelis, the eldest, who had made calculations,
and stuck to the hearth, waiting for dead men's shoes. Almost worn
out by their repeated efforts, and above all dispirited by the
moral and physical infirmities of those that now remained on hand,
the anxious couple would often say, "What will become of all these
when we shall be no longer here to take care of them?" But when
they had said this a good many times, suddenly the domestic
horizon cleared, and then they used still to say it, because a
habit is a habit, but they uttered it half mechanically now, and
added brightly and cheerfully, "But thanks to St. Bavon and all
the saints, there's Gerard."

Young Gerard was for many years of his life a son apart and he was
going into the Church, and the Church could always maintain her
children by hook or by crook in those days: no great hopes,
because his family had no interest with the great to get him a
benefice, and the young man's own habits were frivolous, and,
indeed, such as our cloth merchant would not have put up with in
any one but a clerk that was to be. His trivialities were reading
and penmanship, and he was so wrapped up in them that often he
could hardly be got away to his meals. The day was never long
enough for him; and he carried ever a tinder-box and brimstone
matches, and begged ends of candles of the neighbours, which he
lighted at unreasonable hours - ay, even at eight of the clock at
night in winter, when the very burgomaster was abed. Endured at
home, his practices were encouraged by the monks of a neighbouring
convent. They had taught him penmanship, and continued to teach
him until one day they discovered, in the middle of a lesson, that
he was teaching them. They pointed this out to him in a merry way:
he hung his head and blushed: he had suspected as much himself,
but mistrusted his judgment in so delicate a matter. "But, my
son," said an elderly monk, "how is it that you, to whom God has
given an eye so true, a hand so subtle yet firm, and a heart to
love these beautiful crafts, how is it you do not colour as well
as write? A scroll looks but barren unless a border of fruit, and
leaves, and rich arabesques surround the good words, and charm the
sense as those do the soul and understanding; to say nothing of
the pictures of holy men and women departed, with which the
several chapters should be adorned, and not alone the eye soothed
with the brave and sweetly blended colours, but the heart lifted
by effigies of the saints in glory. Answer me, my son."

At this Gerard was confused, and muttered that he had made several
trials at illuminating, but had not succeeded well; and thus the
matter rested.

Soon after this a fellow-enthusiast came on the scene in the
unwonted form of an old lady. Margaret, sister and survivor of the
brothers Van Eyck, left Flanders, and came to end her days in her
native country. She bought a small house near Tergou. In course of
time she heard of Gerard, and saw some of his handiwork: it
pleased her so well that she sent her female servant, Reicht
Heynes, to ask him to come to her. This led to an acquaintance: it
could hardly be otherwise, for little Tergou had never held so
many as two zealots of this sort before. At first the old lady
damped Gerard's courage terribly. At each visit she fished out of
holes and corners drawings and paintings, some of them by her own
hand, that seemed to him unapproachable; but if the artist
overpowered him, the woman kept his heart up. She and Reicht soon
turned him inside out like a glove: among other things, they drew
from him what the good monks had failed to hit upon, the reason
why he did not illuminate, viz., that he could not afford the
gold, the blue, and the red, but only the cheap earths; and that
he was afraid to ask his mother to buy the choice colours, and was
sure he should ask her in vain. Then Margaret Van Eyck gave him a
little brush - gold, and some vermilion and ultramarine, and a
piece of good vellum to lay them on. He almost adored her. As he
left the house Reicht ran after him with a candle and two
quarters: he quite kissed her. But better even than the gold and
lapis-lazuli to the illuminator was the sympathy to the isolated
enthusiast. That sympathy was always ready, and, as he returned
it, an affection sprung up between the old painter and the young
caligrapher that was doubly characteristic of the time. For this
was a century in which the fine arts and the higher mechanical
arts were not separated by any distinct boundary, nor were those
who practised them; and it was an age in which artists sought out
and loved one another. Should this last statement stagger a
painter or writer of our day, let me remind him that even
Christians loved one another at first starting.

Backed by an acquaintance so venerable, and strengthened by female
sympathy, Gerard advanced in learning and skill. His spirits, too,
rose visibly: he still looked behind him when dragged to dinner in
the middle of an initial G; but once seated, showed great social
qualities; likewise a gay humour, that had hitherto but peeped in
him, shone out, and often he set the table in a roar, and kept it
there, sometimes with his own wit, sometimes with jests which were
glossy new to his family, being drawn from antiquity.

As a return for all he owed his friends the monks, he made them
exquisite copies from two of their choicest MSS., viz., the life
of their founder, and their Comedies of Terence, the monastery
finding the vellum.

The high and puissant Prince, Philip "the Good," Duke of Burgundy,
Luxemburg, and Brabant, Earl of Holland and Zealand, Lord of
Friesland, Count of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault, Lord of Salins
and Macklyn - was versatile.

He could fight as well as any king going; and lie could lie as
well as any, except the King of France. He was a mighty hunter,
and could read and write. His tastes were wide and ardent. He
loved jewels like a woman, and gorgeous apparel. He dearly loved
maids of honour, and indeed paintings generally; in proof of which
he ennobled Jan Van Eyck. He had also a rage for giants, dwarfs,
and Turks. These last stood ever planted about him, turbaned and
blazing with jewels. His agents inveigled them from Istamboul with
fair promises; but the moment he had got them, he baptized them by
brute force in a large tub; and this done, let them squat with
their faces towards Mecca, and invoke Mahound as much as they
pleased, laughing in his sleeve at their simplicity in fancying
they were still infidels. He had lions in cages, and fleet
leopards trained by Orientals to run down hares and deer. In
short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum virtues. For
anything singularly pretty or diabolically ugly, this was your
customer. The best of him was, he was openhanded to the poor; and
the next best was, he fostered the arts in earnest: whereof he now
gave a signal proof. He offered prizes for the best specimens of
orfevrerie in two kinds, religious and secular: item, for the best
paintings in white of egg, oils, and tempera; these to be on
panel, silk, or metal, as the artists chose: item, for the best
transparent painting on glass: item, for the best illuminating and
border-painting on vellum: item, for the fairest writing on
vellum. The burgomasters of the several towns were commanded to
aid all the poorer competitors by receiving their specimens and
sending them with due care to Rotterdam at the expense of their
several burghs. When this was cried by the bellman through the
streets of Tergou, a thousand mouths opened, and one heart beat -
Gerard's. He told his family timidly he should try for two of
those prizes. They stared in silence, for their breath was gone at
his audacity; but one horrid laugh exploded on the floor like a
petard. Gerard looked down, and there was the dwarf, slit and
fanged from ear to ear at his expense, and laughing like a lion.
Nature, relenting at having made Giles so small, had given him as
a set-off the biggest voice on record. His very whisper was a
bassoon. He was like those stunted wide-mouthed pieces of ordnance
we see on fortifications; more like a flower-pot than a cannon;
but ods tympana how they bellow!

Gerard turned red with anger, the more so as the others began to
titter. White Catherine saw, and a pink tinge came on her cheek.
She said softly, "Why do you laugh? Is it because he is our
brother you think he cannot be capable? Yes, Gerard, try with the
rest. Many say you are skilful; and mother and I will pray the
Virgin to guide your hand."

"Thank you, little Kate. You shall pray to our Lady, and our
mother shall buy me vellum and the colours to illuminate with."

"What will they cost, my lad?"

"Two gold crowns" (about three shillings and fourpence English
money).

"What!" screamed the housewife, "when the bushel of rye costs but
a groat! What! me spend a month's meal and meat and fire on such
vanity as that: the lightning from Heaven would fall on me, and my
children would all be beggars."

"Mother!" sighed little Catherine, imploringly.

"Oh! it is in vain, Kate," said Gerard, with a sigh. "I shall have
to give it up, or ask the dame Van Eyck. She would give it me, but
I think shame to be for ever taking from her."

"It is not her affair," said Catherine, very sharply; "what has
she to do coming between me and my sun?" and she left the room
with a red face. Little Catherine smiled. Presently the housewife
returned with a gracious, affectionate air, and two little gold
pieces in her hand.

"There, sweetheart," said she, "you won't have to trouble dame or
demoiselle for two paltry crowns."

But on this Gerard fell a thinking how he could spare her purse.

"One will do, mother. I will ask the good monks to let me send my
copy of their 'Terence:' it is on snowy vellum, and I can write no
better: so then I shall only need six sheets of vellum for my
borders and miniatures, and gold for my ground, and prime colours
- one crown will do.'

"Never tyne the ship for want of a bit of tar, Gerard," said his
changeable mother. But she added, "Well, there, I will put the
crown in my pocket. That won't be like putting it back in the box.
Going to the box to take out instead of putting in, it is like
going to my heart with a knife for so many drops of blood. You
will be sure to want it, Gerard. The house is never built for less
than the builder counted on."

Sure enough, when the time came, Gerard longed to go to Rotterdam
and see the Duke, and above all to see the work of his
competitors, and so get a lesson from defeat. And the crown came
out of the housewife's pocket with a very good grace. Gerard would
soon be a priest. It seemed hard if he might not enjoy the world a
little before separating himself from it for life.

The night before he went, Margaret Van Eyck asked him to take a
letter for her, and when he came to look at it, to his surprise he
found it was addressed to the Princess Marie, at the Stadthouse in
Rotterdam.

The day before the prizes were to be distributed, Gerard started
for Rotterdam in his holiday suit, to wit, a doublet of
silver-grey cloth, with sleeves, and a jerkin of the same over it,
but without sleeves. From his waist to his heels he was clad in a
pair of tight-fitting buckskin hose fastened by laces (called
points) to his doublet. His shoes were pointed, in moderation, and
secured by a strap that passed under the hollow of the foot. On
his head and the back of his neck he wore his flowing hair, and
pinned to his back between his shoulders was his hat: it was
further secured by a purple silk ribbon little Kate had passed
round him from the sides of the hat, and knotted neatly on his
breast; below his hat, attached to the upper rim of his broad
waist-belt, was his leathern wallet. When he got within a league
of Rotterdam he was pretty tired, but he soon fell in with a pair
that were more so. He found an old man sitting by the roadside
quite worn out, and a comely young woman holding his hand, with a
face brimful of concern. The country people trudged by, and
noticed nothing amiss; but Gerard, as he passed, drew conclusions.
Even dress tells a tale to those who study it so closely as he
did, being an illuminator. The old man wore a gown, and a fur
tippet, and a velvet cap, sure signs of dignity; but the
triangular purse at his girdle was lean, the gown rusty, the fur
worn, sure signs of poverty. The young woman was dressed in plain
russet cloth: yet snow-white lawn covered that part of her neck
the gown left visible, and ended half way up her white throat in a
little band of gold embroidery; and her head-dress was new to
Gerard: instead of hiding her hair in a pile of linen or lawn, she
wore an open network of silver cord with silver spangles at the
interstices: in this her glossy auburn hair was rolled in front
into two solid waves, and supported behind in a luxurious and
shapely mass. His quick eye took in all this, and the old man's
pallor, and the tears in the young woman's eyes. So when he had
passed them a few yards, he reflected, and turned back, and came
towards them bashfully.

"Father, I fear you are tired."

"Indeed, my son, I am," replied the old man, "and faint for lack
of food."

Gerard's address did not appear so agreeable to the girl as to the
old man. She seemed ashamed, and with much reserve in her manner,
said, that it was her fault - she had underrated the distance, and
imprudently allowed her father to start too late in the day.

"No, no "said the old man; "it is not the distance, it is the want
of nourishment."

The girl put her arms round his neck with tender concern, but took
that opportunity of whispering, "Father, a stranger- a young man!

But it was too late. Gerard, with simplicity, and quite as a
matter of course, fell to gathering sticks with great expedition.
This done, he took down his wallet, out with the manchet of bread
and the iron flask his careful mother had put up, and his
everlasting tinder-box; lighted a match, then a candle-end, then
the sticks; and put his iron flask on it. Then down he went on his
stomach, and took a good blow: then looking up, he saw the girl's
face had thawed, and she was looking down at him and his energy
with a demure smile. He laughed back to her. "Mind the pot," said
he, "and don't let it spill, for Heaven's sake: there's a cleft
stick to hold it safe with;" and with this he set off running
towards a corn-field at some distance.

Whilst he was gone, there came by, on a mule with rich purple
housings, an old man redolent of wealth. The purse at his girdle
was plethoric, the fur on his tippet was ermine, broad and new.

It was Ghysbrecht Van Swieten, the burgomaster of Tergou.

He was old, and his face furrowed. He was a notorious miser, and
looked one generally. But the idea of supping with the Duke raised
him just now into manifest complacency. Yet at the sight of the
faded old man and his bright daughter sitting by a fire of sticks,
the smile died out of his face, and he wore a strange look of pain
and uneasiness. He reined in his mule.

"Why, Peter,- Margaret," said he, almost fiercely, "what mummery
is this?" Peter was going to answer, but Margaret interposed
hastily, and said: "My father was exhausted, so I am warming
something to give him strength before we go on."

"What! reduced to feed by the roadside like the Bohemians," said
Ghysbrecht, and his hand went into his purse; but it did not seem
at home there; it fumbled uncertainly, afraid too large a coin
might stick to a finger and come out.

At this moment who should come bounding up but Gerard. He had two
straws in his hand, and he threw himself down by the fire and
relieved Margaret of the cooking part: then suddenly recognizing
the burgomaster, he coloured all over. Ghysbrecht Van Swieten
started and glared at him, and took his hand out of his purse.
"Oh!" said he bitterly, "I am not wanted," and went slowly on,
casting a long look of suspicion on Margaret, and hostility on
Gerard, that was not very intelligible. However, there was
something about it that Margaret could read enough to blush at,
and almost toss her head. Gerard only stared with surprise. "By
St. Bavon, I think the old miser grudges us three our quart of
soup," said he. When the young man put that interpretation on
Ghysbrecht's strange and meaning look, Margaret was greatly
relieved, and smiled gaily on the speaker.

Meanwhile Ghysbrecht plodded on, more wretched in his wealth than
these in their poverty. And the curious thing is, that the mule,
the purple housings, and one-half the coin in that plethoric
purse, belonged not to Ghysbrecht Van Swieten, but to that faded
old man and that comely girl, who sat by a roadside fire to he fed
by a stranger. They did not know this; but Ghysbrecht knew it, and
carried in his heart a scorpion of his own begetting; that
scorpion is remorse - the remorse that, not being penitence, is
incurable, and ready for fresh misdeeds upon a fresh temptation.

Twenty years ago, when Ghysbrecht Van Swieten was a hard and
honest man, the touchstone opportunity came to him, and he did an
act of heartless roguery. It seemed a safe one. It had hitherto
proved a safe one, though he had never felt safe. To-day he had
seen youth, enterprise, and, above all, knowledge, seated by fair
Margaret and her father on terms that look familiar and loving.

And the fiends are at big ear again.

CHAPTER II

"The soup is hot," said Gerard.

"But how are we to get it to our mouths?" inquired the senior,
despondingly.

"Father, the young man has brought us straws." And Margaret smiled
slily.

"Ay, ay!" said the old man; "but my poor bones are stiff, and
indeed the fire is too hot for a body to kneel over with these
short straws. St. John the Baptist, but the young man is adroit!"

For, while he stated his difficulty, Gerard removed it. He untied
in a moment the knot on his breast, took his hat off, put a stone
into each corner of it, then, wrapping his hand in the tail of his
jerkin, whipped the flask off the fire, wedged it in between the
stones, and put the hat under the old man's nose with a merry
smile. The other tremulously inserted the pipe of rye-straw and
sucked. Lo and behold, his wan, drawn face was seen to light up
more and more, till it quite glowed; and as soon as he had drawn a
long breath:

"Hippocrates and Galen!" he cried, "'tis a soupe au vin - the
restorative of restoratives. Blessed be the nation that invented
it, and the woman that made it, and the young man who brings it to
fainting folk. Have a suck, my girl, while I relate to our young
host the history and virtues of this his sovereign compound. This
corroborative, young sir, was unknown to the ancients: we find it
neither in their treatises of medicine, nor in those popular
narratives, which reveal many of their remedies, both in
chirurgery and medicine proper. Hector, in the Ilias, if my memory
does not play me false---

(Margaret. "Alas! he's off.")

----was invited by one of the ladies of the poem to drink a
draught of wine; but he declined, on the plea that he was just
going into battle, and must not take aught to weaken his powers.
Now, if the soupe au vin had been known in Troy, it is clear that
in declining vinum merum upon that score, he would have added in
the hexameter, 'But a soupe au vin, madam, I will degust, and
gratefully.' Not only would this have been but common civility - a
virtue no perfect commander is wanting in - but not to have done
it would have proved him a shallow and improvident person, unfit
to be trusted with the conduct of a war; for men going into a
battle need sustenance and all possible support, as is proved by
this, that foolish generals, bringing hungry soldiers to blows
with full ones, have been defeated, in all ages, by inferior
numbers. The Romans lost a great battle in the north of Italy to
Hannibal, the Carthaginian, by this neglect alone. Now, this
divine elixir gives in one moment force to the limbs and ardour to
the spirits; and taken into Hector's body at the nick of time,
would, by the aid of Phoebus, Venus, and the blessed saints, have
most likely procured the Greeks a defeat. For note how faint and
weary and heart-sick I was a minute ago; well, I suck this
celestial cordial, and now behold me brave as Achilles and strong
as an eagle."

"Oh, father, now? an eagle, alack!"

"Girl, I defy thee and all the world. Ready, I say, like a foaming
charger, to devour the space between this and Rotterdam, and
strong to combat the ills of life, even poverty and old age, which
last philosophers have called the summum malum. Negatur; unless
the man's life has been ill-spent - which, by the bye, it
generally has. Now for the moderns!"

"Father! dear father!"

"Fear me not, girl; I will be brief, unreasonably and unseasonably
brief. The soupe au vin occurs not in modern science; but this is
only one proof more, if proof were needed, that for the last few
hundred years physicians have been idiots, with their
chicken-broth and their decoction of gold, whereby they attribute
the highest qualities to that meat which has the least juice of
any meat, and to that metal which has less chemical qualities than
all the metals; mountebanks! dunces! homicides! Since, then, from
these no light is to be gathered, go we to the chroniclers; and
first we find that Duguesclin, a French knight, being about to
join battle with the English - masters, at that time, of half
France, and sturdy strikers by sea and land - drank, not one, but
three soupes au vin in honour of the Blessed Trinity. This done,
he charged the islanders; and, as might have been foretold, killed
a multitude, and drove the rest into the sea. But he was only the
first of a long list of holy and hard-hitting ones who have, by
this divine restorative, been sustentated, fortified,
corroborated, and consoled."

"Dear father, prithee add thyself to that venerable company ere
the soup cools." And Margaret held the hat imploringly in both
hands till he inserted the straw once more.

This spared them the "modern instances," and gave Gerard an
opportunity of telling Margaret how proud his mother would be her
soup had profited a man of learning.

"Ay! but," said Margaret, "it would like her ill to see her son
give all and take none himself. Why brought you but two straws?"

"Fair mistress, I hoped you would let me put my lips to your
straw, there being but two."

Margaret smiled and blushed. "Never beg that you may command,"
said she. "The straw is not mine, 'tis yours: you cut it in yonder
field."

"I cut it, and that made it mine; but after that, your lip touched
it, and that made it yours."

"Did it Then I will lend it you. There - now it is yours again;
your lip has touched it."

"No, it belongs to us both now. Let us divide it."

"By all means; you have a knife."

"No, I will not cut it - that would be unlucky. I'll bite it.
There I shall keep my half: you will burn yours, once you get
home, I doubt.'

"You know me not. I waste nothing. It is odds but I make a hairpin
of it, or something."

This answer dashed the novice Gerard, instead of provoking him, to
fresh efforts, and he was silent. And now, the bread and soup
being disposed of, the old scholar prepared to continue his
journey. Then came a little difficulty: Gerard the adroit could
not tie his ribbon again as Catherine had tied it. Margaret, after
slily eyeing his efforts for some time, offered to help him; for
at her age girls love to be coy and tender, saucy and gentle, by
turns, and she saw she had put him out of countenance but now.
Then a fair head, with its stately crown of auburn hair, glossy
and glowing through silver, bowed sweetly towards him; and, while
it ravished his eye, two white supple hands played delicately upon
the stubborn ribbon, and moulded it with soft and airy touches.
Then a heavenly thrill ran through the innocent young man, and
vague glimpses of a new world of feeling and sentiment opened on
him. And these new and exquisite sensations Margaret unwittingly
prolonged: it is not natural to her sex to hurry aught that
pertains to the sacred toilet. Nay, when the taper fingers had at
last subjugated the ends of the knot, her mind was not quite easy,
till, by a manoeuvre peculiar to the female hand, she had made her
palm convex, and so applied it with a gentle pressure to the
centre of the knot - a sweet little coaxing hand-kiss, as much as
to say, "Now be a good knot, and stay so." The palm-kiss was
bestowed on the ribbon, but the wearer's heart leaped to meet it.

"There, that is how it was," said Margaret, and drew back to take
one last keen survey of her work; then, looking up for simple
approval of her skill, received full in her eyes a longing gaze of
such ardent adoration, as made her lower them quickly and colour
all over. An indescribable tremor seized her, and she retreated
with downcast lashes and tell-tale cheeks, and took her father's
arm on the opposite side. Gerard, blushing at having scared her
away with his eyes, took the other arm; and so the two young
things went downcast and conscious, and propped the eagle along in
silence.

They entered Rotterdam by the Schiedamze Poort; and, as Gerard was
unacquainted with the town, Peter directed him the way to the
Hooch Straet, in which the Stadthouse was. He himself was going
with Margaret to his cousin, in the Ooster-Waagen Straet, so,
almost on entering the gate, their roads lay apart. They bade each
other a friendly adieu, and Gerard dived into the great town. A
profound sense of solitude fell upon him, yet the streets were
crowded. Then he lamented too late that, out of delicacy, he bad
not asked his late companions who they were and where they lived.

"Beshrew my shamefacedness!" said he. "But their words and their
breeding were above their means, and something did whisper me they
would not be known. I shall never see her more. Oh weary world, I
hate you and your ways. To think I must meet beauty and goodness
and learning - three pearls of price - and never see them more!"

Falling into this sad reverie, and letting his body go where it
would, he lost his way; but presently meeting a crowd of persons
all moving in one direction, he mingled with them, for he argued
they must be making for the Stadthouse. Soon the noisy troop that
contained the moody Gerard emerged, not upon the Stadthouse, but
upon a large meadow by the side of the Maas; and then the
attraction was revealed. Games of all sorts were going on:
wrestling, the game of palm, the quintain, legerdemain, archery,
tumbling, in which art, I blush to say, women as well as men
performed, to the great delectation of the company. There was also
a trained bear, who stood on his head, and marched upright, and
bowed with prodigious gravity to his master; and a hare that beat
a drum, and a cock that strutted on little stilts disdainfully.
These things made Gerard laugh now and then; but the gay scene
could not really enliven it, for his heart was not in tune with
it. So hearing a young man say to his fellow that the Duke had
been in the meadow, but was gone to the Stadthouse to entertain
the burgomasters and aldermen and the competitors for the prizes,
and their friends, he suddenly remembered he was hungry, and
should like to sup with a prince. He left the river-side, and this
time he found the Hooch Straet, and it speedily led him to the
Stadthouse. But when he got there he was refused, first at one
door, then at another, till he came to the great gate of the
courtyard. It was kept by soldiers, and superintended by a pompous
major-domo, glittering in an embroidered collar and a gold chain
of office, and holding a white staff with a gold knob. There was a
crowd of persons at the gate endeavouring to soften this official
rock. They came up in turn like ripples, and retired as such in
turn. It cost Gerard a struggle to get near him, and when he was
within four heads of the gate, he saw something that made his
heart beat; there was Peter, with Margaret on his arm, soliciting
humbly for entrance.

"My cousin the alderman is not at home; they say he is here."

"What is that to me, old man?"

"If you will not let us pass in to him, at least take this leaf
from my tablet to my cousin. See, I have written his name; he will
come out to us.

"For what do you take me? I carry no messages, I keep the gate."

He then bawled, in a stentorian voice, inexorably:

"No strangers enter here, but the competitors and their
companies."

"Come, old man," cried a voice in the crowd, "you have gotten your
answer; make way."

Margaret turned half round imploringly:

"Good people, we are come from far, and my father is old; and my
cousin has a new servant that knows us not, and would not let us
sit in our cousin's house."

At this the crowd laughed hoarsely. Margaret shrank as if they had
struck her. At that moment a hand grasped hers - a magic grasp; it
felt like heart meeting heart, or magnet steel. She turned quickly
round at it, and it was Gerard. Such a little cry of joy and
appeal came from her bosom, and she began to whimper prettily.

They had hustled her and frightened her, for one thing; and her
cousin's thoughtlessness, in not even telling his servant they
were coming, was cruel; and the servant's caution, however wise
and faithful to her master, was bitterly mortifying to her father
and her. And to her so mortified, and anxious and jostled, came
suddenly this kind hand and face. "Hinc illae lacrimae."

"All is well now," remarked a coarse humourist; "she hath gotten
her sweetheart."

"Haw! haw! haw!" went the crowd.

She dropped Gerard's hand directly, and turned round, with eyes
flashing through her tears:

"I have no sweetheart, you rude men. But I am friendless in your
boorish town, and this is a friend; and one who knows, what you
know not, how to treat the aged and the weak."

The crowd was dead silent. They had only been thoughtless, and now
felt the rebuke, though severe, was just. The silence enabled
Gerard to treat with the porter.

"I am a competitor, sir."

"What is your name?" and the man eyed him suspiciously.

"Gerard, the son of Elias."

The janitor inspected a slip of parchment he held in his hand:

"Gerard Eliassoen can enter."

"With my company, these two?"

"Nay; those are not your company they came before you."

"What matter? They are my friends, and without them I go not in."

"Stay without, then."

"That will I not."

"That we shall see."

"We will, and speedily." And with this, Gerard raised a voice of
astounding volume and power, and routed so that the whole street
rang:

"Ho! PHILIP, EARL OF HOLLAND!"

"Are you mad?" cried the porter.

"HERE IS ONE OF YOUR VARLETS DEFIES YOU."

"Hush, hush!"

"AND WILL NOT LET YOUR GUESTS PASS IN."

"Hush! murder! The Dukes there. I'm dead," cried the janitor,
quaking.

Then suddenly trying to overpower Gerard's thunder, he shouted,
with all his lungs:

"OPEN THE GATE, YE KNAVES! WAY THERE FOR GERARD ELIASSOEN AND HIS
COMPANY! (The fiends go with him!)"

The gate swung open as by magic. Eight soldiers lowered their
pikes halfway, and made an arch, under which the victorious three
marched in triumphant. The moment they had passed, the pikes
clashed together horizontally to bar the gateway, and all but
pinned an abdominal citizen that sought to wedge in along with
them.

Once past the guarded portal, a few steps brought the trio upon a
scene of Oriental luxury. The courtyard was laid out in tables
loaded with rich meats and piled with gorgeous plate. Guests in
rich and various costumes sat beneath a leafy canopy of fresh-cut
branches fastened tastefully to golden, silver, and blue silken
cords that traversed the area; and fruits of many hues, including
some artificial ones of gold, silver, and wax, hung pendant, or
peeped like fair eyes among the green leaves of plane-trees and
lime-trees. The Duke's minstrels swept their lutes at intervals,
and a fountain played red Burgundy in six jets that met and
battled in the air. The evening sun darted its fires through those
bright and purple wine spouts, making them jets and cascades of
molten rubies, then passing on, tinged with the blood of the
grape, shed crimson glories here and there on fair faces, snowy
beards, velvet, satin, jewelled hilts, glowing gold, gleaming
silver, and sparkling glass. Gerard and his friends stood dazzled,
spell-bound. Presently a whisper buzzed round them, "Salute the
Duke! Salute the Duke!" They looked up, and there on high, under
the dais, was their sovereign, bidding them welcome with a kindly
wave of the hand. The men bowed low, and Margaret curtsied with a
deep and graceful obeisance. The Duke's hand being up, he gave it
another turn, and pointed the new-comers out to a knot of valets.
Instantly seven of his people, with an obedient start, went
headlong at our friends, seated them at a table, and put fifteen
many-coloured soups before them, in little silver bowls, and as
many wines in crystal vases.

"Nay, father, let us not eat until we have thanked our good
friend," said Margaret, now first recovering from all this bustle.

"Girl, he is our guardian angel."

Gerard put his face into his hands.

"Tell me when you have done," said he, "and I will reappear and
have my supper, for I am hungry. I know which of us three is the
happiest at meeting again."

"Me?" inquired Margaret.

"No: guess again."

"Father?"

"No."

"Then I have no guess which it can be;" and she gave a little crow
of happiness and gaiety. The soup was tasted, and vanished in a
twirl of fourteen hands, and fish came on the table in a dozen
forms, with patties of lobster and almonds mixed, and of almonds
and cream, and an immense variety of brouets known to us as
rissoles. The next trifle was a wild boar, which smelt divine.
Why, then, did Margaret start away from it with two shrieks of
dismay, and pinch so good a friend as Gerard? Because the Duke's
cuisinier had been too clever; had made this excellent dish too
captivating to the sight as well as taste. He had restored to the
animal, by elaborate mimicry with burnt sugar and other edible
colours, the hair and bristles he had robbed him of by fire and
water. To make him still more enticing, the huge tusks were
carefully preserved in the brute's jaw, and gave his mouth the
winning smile that comes of tusk in man or beast; and two eyes of
coloured sugar glowed in his head. St. Argus! what eyes! so
bright, so bloodshot, so threatening - they followed a man and
every movement of his knife and spoon. But, indeed, I need the
pencil of Granville or Tenniel to make you see the two gilt valets
on the opposite side of the table putting the monster down before
our friends, with a smiling, self-satisfied, benevolent
obsequiousness for this ghastly monster was the flower of all
comestibles - old Peter clasping both hands in pious admiration of
it; Margaret wheeling round with horror-stricken eyes and her hand
on Gerard's shoulder, squeaking and pinching; his face of unwise
delight at being pinched, the grizzly brute glaring sulkily on
all, and the guests grinning from ear to ear.

"What's to do?" shouted the Duke, hearing the signals of female
distress. Seven of his people with a zealous start went headlong
and told him. He laughed and said, "Give her of the beef-stuffing,
then, and bring me Sir Boar." Benevolent monarch! The
beef-stuffing was his own private dish. On these grand occasions
an ox was roasted whole, and reserved for the poor. But this wise
as well as charitable prince had discovered, that whatever
venison, bares, lamb, poultry, etc., you skewered into that beef
cavern, got cooked to perfection, retaining their own juices and
receiving those of the reeking ox. These he called his
beef-stuffing, and took delight therein, as did now our trio; for,
at his word, seven of his people went headlong, and drove silver
tridents into the steaming cave at random, and speared a kid, a
cygnet, and a flock of wildfowl. These presently smoked before
Gerard and company; and Peter's face, sad and slightly morose at
the loss of the savage hog, expanded and shone. After this, twenty
different tarts of fruits and herbs, and last of all,
confectionery on a Titanic scale; cathedrals of sugar, all gilt
painted in the interstices of the bas-reliefs; castles with moats,
and ditches imitated to the life; elephants, camels, toads;
knights on horseback jousting; kings and princesses looking on
trumpeters blowing; and all these personages eating, and their
veins filled with sweet-scented juices: works of art made to be
destroyed. The guests breached a bastion, crunched a crusader and
his horse and lance, or cracked a bishop, cope, chasuble, crosier
and all, as remorselessly as we do a caraway comfit; sipping
meanwhile hippocras and other spiced drinks, and Greek and
Corsican wines, while every now and then little Turkish boys,
turbaned, spangled, jewelled, and gilt, came offering on bended
knee golden troughs of rose-water and orange-water to keep the
guests' hands cool and perfumed.

But long before our party arrived at this final stage appetite had
succumbed, and Gerard had suddenly remembered he was the bearer of
a letter to the Princess Marie, and, in an under-tone, had asked
one of the servants if he would undertake to deliver it. The man
took it with a deep obeisance: "He could not deliver it himself,
but would instantly give it one of the Princess's suite, several
of whom were about."

It may be remembered that Peter and Margaret came here not to
dine, but to find their cousin. Well, the old gentleman ate
heartily, and - being much fatigued, dropped asleep, and forgot
all about his cousin. Margaret did not remind him; we shall hear
why.

Meanwhile, that Cousin was seated within a few feet of them, at
their backs, and discovered them when Margaret turned round and
screamed at the boar. But he forbore to speak to them, for
municipal reasons. Margaret was very plainly dressed, and Peter
inclined to threadbare. So the alderman said to himself:

"'Twill be time to make up to them when the sun sets and the
company disperses then I will take my poor relations to my house,
and none will be the wiser."

Half the courses were lost on Gerard and Margaret. They were no
great eaters, and just now were feeding on sweet thoughts that
have ever been unfavourable to appetite. But there is a delicate
kind of sensuality, to whose influence these two were perhaps more
sensitive than any other pair in that assembly - the delights of
colour, music, and perfume, all of which blended so fascinatingly
here.

Margaret leaned back and half closed her eyes, and murmured to
Gerard: "What a lovely scene! the warm sun, the green shade, the
rich dresses, the bright music of the lutes and the cool music of
the fountain, and all faces so happy and gay! and then, it is to
you we owe it."

Gerard was silent all but his eyes; observing which -

"Now, speak not to me," said Margaret languidly; "let me listen to
the fountain: what are you a competitor for?"

He told her.

"Very well! You will gain one prize, at least."

"Which? which? have you seen any of my work?"

"I? no. But you will gain a prize.

"I hope so; but what makes you think so?"

"Because you were so good to my father."

Gerard smiled at the feminine logic, and hung his head at the
sweet praise, and was silent.

"Speak not," murmured Margaret. "They say this is a world of sin
and misery. Can that be? What is your opinion?"

"No! that is all a silly old song," explained Gerard. "'Tis a
byword our elders keep repeating, out of custom: it is not true."

"How can you know? You are but a child," said Margaret, with
pensive dignity.

"Why, only look round! And then thought I had lost you for ever;
and you are by my side; and now the minstrels are going to play
again. Sin and misery? Stuff and nonsense!"

The lutes burst out. The courtyard rang again with their delicate
harmony.

"What do you admire most of all these beautiful things, Gerard?"

"You know my name? How is that?"

"White magic. I am a - witch."

"Angels are never witches. But I can't think how you - "

"Foolish boy! was it not cried at the gate loud enough to deave
one?"

"So it was. Where is my head? What do I admire most? If you will
sit a little more that way, I'll tell you."

"This way?"

"Yes; so that the light may fall on you. There! I see many fair
things here, fairer than I could have conceived; but the fairest
of all, to my eye, is your lovely hair in its silver frame, and
the setting sun kissing it. It minds me of what the Vulgate
praises for beauty, 'an apple of gold in a network of silver,' and
oh, what a pity I did not know you before I sent in my poor
endeavours at illuminating! I could illuminate so much better now.
I could do everything better. There, now the sun is full on it, it
is like an aureole. So our Lady looked, and none since her until
to-day."

"Oh, fie! it is wicked to talk so. Compare a poor, coarse-favoured
girl like me with the Queen of Heaven? Oh, Gerard! I thought you
were a good young man." And Margaret was shocked apparently.

Gerard tried to explain. "I am no worse than the rest; but how can
I help having eyes, and a heart Margaret!"

"Gerard!"

"Be not angry now!"

"Now, is it likely?"

"I love you."

"Oh, for shame! you must not say that to me," and Margaret
coloured furiously at this sudden assault.

"I can't help it. I love you. I love you."

"Hush, hush! for pity's sake! I must not listen to such words from
a stranger. I am ungrateful to call you a stranger. Oh! how one
may be mistaken! If I had known you were so bold - And Margaret's
bosom began to heave, and her cheeks were covered with blushes,
and she looked towards her sleeping father, very much like a timid
thing that meditates actual flight.

Then Gerard was frightened at the alarm he caused. "Forgive me,"
said he imploringly. "How could any one help loving you?"

"Well, sir, I will try and forgive you - you are so good in other
respects; but then you must promise me never to say you - to say
that again."

"Give me your hand then, or you don't forgive me."

She hesitated; but eventually put out her hand a very little way,
very slowly, and with seeming reluctance. He took it, and held it
prisoner. When he thought it had been there long enough, she tried
gently to draw it away. He held it tight: it submitted quite
patiently to force. What is the use resisting force She turned her
head away, and her long eyelashes drooped sweetly. Gerard lost
nothing by his promise. Words were not needed here; and silence
was more eloquent. Nature was in that day what she is in ours; but
manners were somewhat freer. Then as now, virgins drew back
alarmed at the first words of love; but of prudery and artificial
coquetry there was little, and the young soon read one another's
hearts. Everything was on Gerard's side, his good looks, her
belief in his goodness, her gratitude; and opportunity for at the
Duke's banquet this mellow summer eve, all things disposed the
female nature to tenderness: the avenues to the heart lay open;
the senses were so soothed and subdued with lovely colours, gentle
sounds, and delicate odours; the sun gently sinking, the warm air,
the green canopy, the cool music of the now violet fountain.

Gerard and Margaret sat hand in hand in silence; and Gerard's eyes
sought hers lovingly; and hers now and then turned on him timidly
and imploringly and presently two sweet unreasonable tears rolled
down her cheeks, and she smiled

while they were drying: yet they did not take long.

And the sun declined; and the air cooled; and the fountain plashed
more gently; and the pair throbbed in unison and silence, and this
weary world looked heaven to them.

     Oh, the merry days, the merry days when we were young.
     Oh, the merry days, the merry days when we were young.

CHAPTER III

A grave white-haired seneschal came to their table, and inquired
courteously whether Gerard Eliassoen was of their company. Upon
Gerard's answer, he said:

"The Princess Marie would confer with you, young sir; I am to
conduct you to her presence."

Instantly all faces within hearing turned sharp round, and were
bent with curiosity and envy on the man that was to go to a
princess.

Gerard rose to obey.

"I wager we shall not see you again," said Margaret calmly, but
colouring a little.

"That you will," was the reply: then he whispered in her ear:
"This is my good princess; but you are my queen." He added aloud:
"Wait for me, I pray you, I will presently return."

"Ay, ay!" said Peter, awaking and speaking at one and the same
moment.

Gerard gone, the pair whose dress was so homely, yet they were
with the man whom the Princess sent for, became "the cynosure of
neighbouring eyes;" observing which, William Johnson came forward,
acted surprise, and claimed his relations.

"And to think that there was I at your backs, and you saw me not"

"Nay, cousin Johnson, I saw you long syne," said Margaret coldly.

"You saw me, and spoke not to me?"

"Cousin, it was for you to welcome us to Rotterdam, as it is for
us to welcome you at Sevenbergen. Your servant denied us a seat in
your house."

"The idiot!"

"And I had a mind to see whether it was 'like maid like master:'
for there is sooth in bywords."

William Johnson blushed purple. He saw Margaret was keen, and
suspected him. He did the wisest thing under the circumstances,
trusted to deeds not words. He insisted on their coming home with
him at once, and he would show them whether they were welcome to
Rotterdam or not.

"Who doubts it, cousin? Who doubts it?" said the scholar.

Margaret thanked him graciously, but demurred to go just now: said
she wanted to hear the minstrels again. In about a quarter of an
hour Johnson renewed his proposal, and bade her observe that many
of the guests had left. Then her real reason came out.

"It were ill manners to our friend; and he will lose us. He knows
not where we lodge in Rotterdam, and the city is large, and we
have parted company once already."

"Oh!" said Johnson, "we will provide for that. My young man, ahem!
I mean my secretary, shall sit here and wait, and bring him on to
my house: he shall lodge with me and with no other."

"Cousin, we shall be too burdensome."

"Nay, nay; you shall see whether you are welcome or not, you and
your friends, and your friends' friends, if need be; and I shall
hear what the Princess would with him."

Margaret felt a thrill of joy that Gerard should be lodged under
the same roof with her; then she had a slight misgiving.

"But if your young man should be thoughtless, and go play, and
Gerard miss him?"

"He go play? He leave that spot where I put him, and bid him stay?
Ho! stand forth, Hans Cloterman."

A figure clad in black serge and dark violet hose arose, and took
two steps and stood before them without moving a muscle: a solemn,
precise young man, the very statue of gravity and starched
propriety. At his aspect Margaret, being very happy, could hardly
keep her countenance. But she whispered Johnson, "I would put my
hand in the fire for him. We are at your command, cousin, as soon
as you have given him his orders."

Hans was then instructed to sit at the table and wait for Gerard,
and conduct him to Ooster-Waagen Straet. He replied, not in words,
but by calmly taking the seat indicated, and Margaret, Peter, and
William Johnson went away together.

"And, indeed, it is time you were abed, father, after all your
travel," said Margaret. This had been in her mind all along.

Hans Cloterman sat waiting for Gerard, solemn and businesslike.
The minutes flew by, but excited no impatience in that perfect
young man. Johnson did him no more than justice when he laughed to
scorn the idea of his secretary leaving his post or neglecting his
duty in pursuit of sport or out of youthful hilarity and
frivolity.

As Gerard was long in coming, the patient Hans - his employer's
eye being no longer on him improved the time by quaffing solemnly,
silently, and at short but accurately measured intervals, goblets
of Corsican wine. The wine was strong, so was Cloterman's head;
and Gerard had been gone a good hour ere the model secretary
imbibed the notion that Creation expected Cloterman to drink the
health of all good fellows, and nommement of the Duke of Burgundy
there present. With this view he filled bumper nine, and rose
gingerly but solemnly and slowly. Having reached his full height,
he instantly rolled upon the grass, goblet in hand, spilling the
cold liquor on more than one ankle - whose owners frisked - but
not disturbing a muscle in his own long face, which, in the total
eclipse of reason, retained its gravity, primness, and
infallibility.

The seneschal led Gerard through several passages to the door of
the pavilion, where some young noblemen, embroidered and
feathered, sat sentinel, guarding the heir-apparent, and playing
cards by the red light of torches their servants held. A whisper
from the seneschal, and one of them rose reluctantly, stared at
Gerard with haughty surprise, and entered the pavilion. He
presently returned, and, beckoning the pair, led then, through a
passage or two and landed them in an ante-chamber, where sat three
more young gentlemen, feathered, furred, and embroidered like
pieces of fancy work, and deep in that instructive and edifying
branch of learning, dice.

"You can't see the Princess - it is too late," said one.

Another followed suit:

"She passed this way but now with her nurse. She is gone to bed,
doll and all. Deuce - ace again!"

Gerard prepared to retire. The seneschal, with an incredulous
smile, replied:

"The young man is here by the Countess's orders; be so good as
conduct him to her ladies."

On this a superb Adonis rose, with an injured look, and led Gerard
into a room where sat or lolloped eleven ladies, chattering like
magpies. Two, more industrious than the rest, were playing
cat's-cradle with fingers as nimble as their tongues. At the sight
of a stranger all the tongues stopped like one piece of
complicated machinery, and all the eyes turned on Gerard, as if
the same string that checked the tongues had turned the eyes on.
Gerard was ill at ease before, but this battery of eyes
discountenanced him, and down went his eyes on the ground. Then
the cowards finding, like the hare who ran by the pond and the
frogs scuttled into the water, that there was a creature they
could frighten, giggled and enjoyed their prowess. Then a duenna
said severely, "Mesdames!" and they were all abashed at once as
though a modesty string had been pulled. This same duenna took
Gerard, and marched before him in solemn silence. The young man's
heart sank, and he had half a mind to turn and run out of the
place.

"What must princes be," he thought, "when their courtiers are so
freezing? Doubtless they take their breeding from him they serve."
These reflections were interrupted by the duenna suddenly
introducing him into a room where three ladies sat working, and a
pretty little girl tuning a lute. The ladies were richly but not
showily dressed, and the duenna went up to the one who was hemming
a kerchief, and said a few words in a low tone. This lady then
turned towards Gerard with a smile, and beckoned him to come near
her. She did not rise, but she laid aside her work, and her manner
of turning towards him, slight as the movement was, was full of
graCe and ease and courtesy. She began a conversation at once.

"Margaret Van Eyck is an old friend of mine, sir, and I am right
glad to have a letter from her hand, and thankful to you, sir, for
bringing it to me safely. Marie, my love, this is the gentleman
who brought you that pretty miniature."

"Sir, I thank you a thousand times," said the young lady.

"I am glad you feel her debtor, sweetheart, for our friend would
have us to do him a little service in return.

"I will do anything on earth for him," replied the young lady with
ardour.

"Anything on earth is nothing in the world," said the Countess of
Charolois quietly.

"Well, then, I will - What would you have me to do, sir?"

Gerard had just found out what high society he was in. "My
sovereign demoiselle," said he, gently and a little tremulously,
"where there have been no pains, there needs no reward."

But we must obey mamma. All the world must obey

"That is true. Then, our demoiselle, reward me, if you will. by
letting me hear the stave you were going to sing and I did
interrupt it."

"What! you love music, sir?"

"I adore it."

The little princess looked inquiringly at her mother, and received
a smile of assent. She then took her lute and sang a romaunt of
the day. Although but twelve years old, she was a well-taught and
painstaking musician. Her little claw swept the chords with
Courage and precision, and struck out the notes of the arpeggio
clear, and distinct, and bright, like twinkling stars; but the
main charm was her voice. It was not mighty, but it was round,
clear, full, and ringing like a bell. She sang with a certain
modest eloquence, though she knew none of the tricks of feeling.
She was too young to be theatrical, or even sentimental, so
nothing was forced - all gushed. Her little mouth seemed the mouth
of Nature. The ditty, too, was as pure as its utterance. As there
were none of those false divisions - those whining slurs, which
are now sold so dear by Italian songsters, though every jackal in
India delivers them gratis to his customers all night, and
sometimes gets shot for them, and always deserves it - so there
were no cadences and fiorituri, the trite, turgid, and feeble
expletives of song, the skim-milk with which mindless musicians
and mindless writers quench fire, wash out colour, and drown
melody and meaning dead.

While the pure and tender strain was flowing from the pure young
throat, Gerard's eyes filled. The Countess watched him with
interest, for it was usual to applaud the Princess loudly, but not
with cheek and eye. So when the voice ceased, and the glasses left
off ringing, she asked demurely, "Was he content?"

Gerard gave a little start; the spoken voice broke a charm and
brought him back to earth.

"Oh, madam!" he cried, "surely it is thus that cherubs and seraphs
sing, and charm the saints in heaven."

"I am somewhat of your opinion, my young friend," said the
Countess, with emotion; and she bent a look of love and gentle
pride upon her girl: a heavenly look, such as, they say, is given
to the eye of the short-lived resting on the short-lived.

The Countess resumed: "My old friend request me to be serviceable
to you. It is the first favour she has done us the honour of
asking us, and the request is sacred. You are in holy orders,
sir?"

Gerard bowed.

"I fear you are not a priest, you look too young."

"Oh no, madam; I am not even a sub-deacon. I am only a lector; but
next month I shall be an exorcist, and before long an acolyth."

"Well, Monsieur Gerard, with your accomplishments you can soon
pass through the inferior orders. And let me beg you to do so. For
the day after you have said your first mass I shall have the
pleasure of appointing you to a benefice."

"Oh, madam!"

"And, Marie, remember I make this promise in your name as well as
my own."

"Fear not, mamma: I will not forget. But if he will take my
advice, what he will be is Bishop of Liege. The Bishop of Liege is
a beautiful bishop. What! do you not remember him, mamma, that day
we were at Liege? he was braver than grandpapa himself. He had on
a crown, a high one, and it was cut in the middle, and it was full
of oh! such beautiful jewels; and his gown stiff with gold; and
his mantle, too; and it had a broad border, all pictures; but,
above all, his gloves; you have no such gloves, mamma. They were
embroidered and covered with jewels, and scented with such lovely
scent; I smelt them all the time he was giving me his blessing on
my head with them. Dear old man! I dare say he will die soon most
old people do and then, sir, you Can be bishop. you know, and wear
-

"Gently, Marie, gently: bishoprics are for old gentlemen; and this
is a young gentleman."

"Mamma! he is not so very young.

"Not compared with you, Marie, eh?"

"He is a good bigth. dear mamma; and I am sure he is good enough
for a bishop.

"Alas! mademoiselle, you are mistaken"

"I know not that, Monsieur Gerard; but I am a little puzzled to
know on what grounds mademoiselle there pronounces your character
so boldly."

"Alas! mamma, said the Princess, "you have not looked at his face,
then; "and she raised her eyebrows at her mother's simplicity.

"I beg your pardon," said the Countess, "I have. Well, sir, if I
cannot go quite so fast as my daughter, attribute it to my age,
not to a want of interest in your welfare. A benefice will do to
begin your Career with; and I must take care it is not too far
from - what call you the place?"

"Tergou, madam

"A priest gives up much," continued the Countess; "often, I fear,
he learns too late how much;" and her woman's eye rested a moment
on Gerard with mild pity and half surprise at his resigning her
sex and all the heaven they can bestow, and the great parental
joys: "at least you shall be near your friends. Have you a
mother?"

"Yes, madam, thanks be to God!"

"Good! You shall have a church near Tergou. She will thank me. And
now, sir, we must not detain you too long from those who have a
better claim on your society than we have. Duchess, oblige me by
bidding one of the pages conduct him to the hall of banquet; the
way is hard to find."

Gerard bowed low to the Countess and the Princess, and backed
towards the door.

"I hope it will be a nice benefice," said the Princess to him,
with a pretty smile, as he was going out; then, shaking her head
with an air of solemn misgiving, "but you had better have been
Bishop of Liege."

Gerard followed his new conductor, his heart warm with gratitude;
but ere he reached the banquet-hall a chill came over him. The
mind of one who has led a quiet, uneventful life is not apt to
take in contradictory feelings at the same moment and balance
them, but rather to be overpowered by each in turn. While Gerard
was with the Countess, the excitement of so new a situation, the
unlooked-for promise. the joy and pride it would cause at home,
possessed him wholly; but now it was passion's turn to be heard
again. What! give up Margaret, whose soft hand he still felt in
his, and her deep eyes in his heart? resign her and all the world
of love and joy she had opened on him to-day? The revulsion, when
it did come, was so strong that he hastily resolved to say nothing
at home about the offered benefice. "The Countess is so good,"
thought he, "she has a hundred ways of aiding a young man's
fortune: she will not compel me to be a priest when she shall
learn I love one of her sex: one would almost think she does know
it, for she cast a strange look on me, and said, 'A priest gives
up much, too much.' I dare say she will give me a place about the
palace." And with this hopeful reflection his mind was eased, and,
being now at the entrance of the banqueting hall, he thanked his
conductor, and ran hastily with joyful eyes to Margaret. He came
in sight of the table- she was gone. Peter was gone too. Nobody
was at the table at all; only a citizen in sober garments had just
tumbled under it dead drunk, and several persons were raising him
to carry him away. Gerard never guessed how important this solemn
drunkard was to him: he was looking for "Beauty," and let the
"Beast" lie. He ran wildly round the hall, which was now
comparatively empty. She was not there. He left the palace:
outside he found a crowd gaping at two great fan-lights just
lighted over the gate. He asked them earnestly if they had seen an
old man in a gown, and a lovely girl pass out. They laughed at the
question. "They were staring at these new lights that turn night
into day. They didn't trouble their heads about old men and young
wenches, every-day sights." From another group he learned there
was a Mystery being played under canvas hard by, and all the world
gone to see it. This revived his hopes, and he went and saw the
Mystery.

In this representation divine personages, too sacred for me to
name here, came clumsily down from heaven to talk sophistry with
the cardinal Virtues, the nine Muses, and the seven deadly sins,
all present in human shape, and not unlike one another. To enliven
which weary stuff in rattled the Prince of the power of the air,
and an imp that kept molesting him and buffeting him with a
bladder, at each thwack of which the crowd were in ecstasies. When
the Vices had uttered good store of obscenity and the Virtues
twaddle, the celestials, including the nine Muses went gingerly
back to heaven one by one; for there was but one cloud; and two
artisans worked it tip with its supernatural freight, and worked
it down with a winch, in full sight of the audience. These
disposed of, the bottomless pit opened and flamed in the centre of
the stage; the carpenters and Virtues shoved the Vices in, and the
Virtues and Beelzebub and his tormentor danced merrily round the
place of eternal torture to the fife and tabor.

This entertainment was writ by the Bishop of Ghent for the
diffusion of religious sentiment by the aid of the senses, and was
an average specimen of theatrical exhibitions so long as they were
in the hands of the clergy. But, in course of time, the laity
conducted plays, and so the theatre, I learn from the pulpit, has
become profane.

Margaret was nowhere in the crowd, and Gerard could not enjoy the
performance; he actually went away in Act 2, in the midst of a
much-admired piece of dialogue, in which Justice out-quibbled
Satan. He walked through many streets, but could not find her he
sought. At last, fairly worn out, he went to a hostelry and slept
till daybreak. All that day, heavy and heartsick, he sought her,
but could never fall in with her or her father, nor ever obtain
the slightest clue. Then he felt she was false or had changed her
mind. He was irritated now, as well as sad. More good fortune fell
on him; he almost hated it. At last, on the third day, after he
had once more been through every street, he said, "She is not in
the town, and I shall never see her again. I will go home." He
started for Tergou with royal favour promised, with fifteen golden
angels in his purse, a golden medal on his bosom, and a heart like
a lump of lead.

CHAPTER IV

It was near four o'clock in the afternoon. Eli was in the shop.
His eldest and youngest sons were abroad. Catherine and her little
crippled daughter had long been anxious about Gerard, and now they
were gone a little way down the road, to see if by good luck he
might be visible in the distance; and Giles was alone in the
sitting-room, which I will sketch, furniture and dwarf included.

The Hollanders were always an original and leading people. They
claim to have invented printing (wooden type), oil-painting,
liberty, banking, gardening, etc. Above all, years before my tale,
they invented cleanliness. So, while the English gentry, in velvet
jerkins and chicken-toed shoes, trode floors of stale rushes, foul
receptacle of bones, decomposing morsels, spittle, dogs, eggs, and
all abominations, this hosier's sitting-room at Tergou was floored
with Dutch tiles, so highly glazed and constantly washed, that you
could eat off them. There was one large window; the cross
stone-work in the centre of it was very massive, and stood in
relief, looking like an actual cross to the inmates, and was eyed
as such in their devotions. The panes were very small and
lozenge-shaped, and soldered to one another with strips of lead:
the like you may see to this day in our rural cottages. The chairs
were rude and primitive, all but the arm-chair, whose back, at
right angles with its seat, was so high that the sitter's head
stopped two feet short of the top. This chair was of oak, and
carved at the summit. There was a copper pail, that went in at the
waist, holding holy water, and a little hand-besom to sprinkle it
far and wide; and a long, narrow, but massive oak table, and a
dwarf sticking to its rim by his teeth, his eyes glaring, and his
claws in the air like a pouncing vampire. nature, it would seem,
did not make Giles a dwarf out of malice prepense; she constructed
a head and torso with her usual care; but just then her attention
was distracted, and she left the rest to chance; the result was a
human wedge, an inverted cone. He might justly have taken her to
task in the terms of Horace
     "Amphora coepit
     Institui; currente rota cur urceus exit?"

His centre was anything but his centre of gravity. Bisected, upper
Giles would have outweighed three lower Giles. But this very
disproportion enabled him to do feats that would have baffled
Milo. His brawny arms had no weight to draw after them; so he
could go up a vertical pole like a squirrel, and hang for hours
from a bough by one hand like a cherry by its stalk. If he could
have made a vacuum with his hands, as the lizard is said to do
with its feet, he would have gone along a ceiling. Now, this
pocket-athlete was insanely fond of gripping the dinner-table with
both hands, and so swinging; and then - climax of delight! he
would seize it with his teeth, and, taking off his hands, hold on
like grim death by his huge ivories.

But all our joys, however elevating, suffer interruption. Little
Kate caught Sampsonet in this posture, and stood aghast. She was
her mother's daughter, and her heart was with the furniture, not
with the 12mo gymnast.

"Oh, Giles! how can you? Mother is at hand. It dents the table."

"Go and tell her, little tale-bearer," snarled Giles. "You are the
one for making mischief."

"Am I?" inquired Kate calmly; "that is news to me."

"The biggest in Tergou," growled Giles, fastening on again.

"Oh, indeed!" said Kate drily.

This piece of unwonted satire launched, and Giles not visibly
blasted, she sat down quietly and cried.

Her mother came in almost at that moment, and Giles hurled himself
under the table, and there glared.

"What is to do now?" said the dame sharply. Then turning her
experienced eyes from Kate to Giles, and observing the position he
had taken up, and a sheepish expression, she hinted at cuffing of
ears.

"Nay, mother," said the girl; "it was but a foolish word Giles
spoke. I had not noticed it at another time; but I was tired and
in care for Gerard, you know."

"Let no one be in care for me," said a faint voice at the door,
and in tottered Gerard, pale, dusty, and worn out; and amidst
uplifted hands and cries of delight, curiosity, and anxiety
mingled, dropped exhausted into the nearest chair.

Beating Rotterdam, like a covert, for Margaret, and the long
journey afterwards, had fairly knocked Gerard up. But elastic
youth soon revived, and behold him the centre of an eager circle.
First of all they must hear about the prizes. Then Gerard told
them he had been admitted to see the competitors' works, all laid
out in an enormous hall before the judges pronounced.

"Oh, mother! oh, Kate! when I saw the goldsmiths' work, I had
liked to have fallen on the floor. I thought not all the
goldsmiths on earth had so much gold, silver, jewels, and craft of
design and facture. But, in sooth, all the arts are divine."

Then, to please the females, he described to them the reliquaries,
feretories, calices, crosiers, crosses, pyxes, monstrances, and
other wonders ecclesiastical, and the goblets, hanaps, watches,
Clocks, chains, brooches, &c., so that their mouths watered.

"But, Kate, when I came to the illuminated work from Ghent and
Bruges, my heart sank. Mine was dirt by the side of it. For the
first minute I could almost have cried; but I prayed for a better
spirit, and presently I was able to enjoy them, and thank God for
those lovely works, and for those skilful, patient craftsmen, whom
I own my masters. Well, the coloured work was so beautiful I
forgot all about the black and white. But next day, when all the
other prizes had been given, they came to the writing, and whose
name think you was called first?"

"Yours," said Kate.

The others laugher her to scorn.

"You may well laugh," said Gerard, "but for all that, Gerard
Eliassoen of Tergou was the name the herald shouted. I stood
stupid; they thrust me forward. Everything swam before my eyes. I
found myself kneeling on a cushion at the feet of the Duke. He
said something to me, but I was so fluttered I could not answer
him. So then he put his hand to his side, and did not draw a
glaive and cut off my dull head, but gave me a gold medal, and
there it is." There was a yell and almost a scramble. "And then he
gave me fifteen great bright golden angels. I had seen one before,
but I never handled one. Here they are."

"Oh, Gerard! oh, Gerard!"

"There is one for you, our eldest; and one for you, Sybrandt, and
for you, Little Mischief; and two for thee, Little Lily, because
God hath afflicted thee; and one for myself, to buy colours and
vellum; and nine for her that nursed us all, and risked the two
crowns upon poor Gerard's hand."

The gold drew out their characters. Cornelis and Sybrandt clutched
each his coin with one glare of greediness and another glare of
envy at Kate, who had got two pieces. Giles seized his and rolled
it along the floor and gambolled after it. Kate put down her
crutches and sat down, and held out her little arms to Gerard with
a heavenly gesture of love and tenderness; and the mother, fairly
benumbed at first by the shower of gold that fell on her apron,
now cried out, "Leave kissing him, Kate; he is my son, not yours.
Ah. Gerard! my boy! I have not loved you as you deserved."

Then Gerard threw himself on his knees beside her, and she flung
her arms round him and wept for joy and pride upon his neck.

"Good lad! good lad!" cried the hosier, with some emotion. "I must
go and tell the neighbours. Lend me the medal, Gerard; I'll show
it my good friend Peter Buyskens; he is ever regaling me with how
his son Jorian won the tin mug a shooting at the butts."

"Ay, do, my man; and show Peter Buyskens one of the angels. Tell
him there are fourteen more where that came from. Mind you bring
it me back!"

"Stay a minute, father; there is better news behind," said Gerard,
flushing with joy at the joy he caused.

"Better! better than this?"

Then Gerard told his interview with the Countess, and the house
rang with joy.

"Now, God bless the good lady, and bless the dame Van Eyck! A
benefice? our son! My cares are at an end. Eli, my good friend and
master, now we two can die happy whenever our time comes. This
dear boy will take our place, and none of these loved ones will
want a home or a friend."

From that hour Gerard was looked upon as the stay of the family.
He was a son apart, but in another sense. He was always in the
right, and nothing too good for him. Cornelis and Sybrandt became
more and more jealous of him, and longed for the day he should go
to his benefice; they would get rid of the favourite, and his
reverence's purse would be open to them. With these views he
co-operated. The wound love had given him throbbed duller and
duller. His success and the affection and admiration of his
parents made him think more highly of himself, and resent with
more spirit Margaret's ingratitude and discourtesy. For all that,
she had power to cool him towards the rest of her sex, and now for
every reason he wished to be ordained priest as soon as he could
pass the intermediate orders. He knew the Vulgate already better
than most of the clergy, and studied the rubric and the dogmas of
the Church with his friends the monks; and, the first time the
bishop came that way, he applied to be admitted "exorcist," the
third step in holy orders. The bishop questioned him, and ordained
him at once. He had to kneel, and, after a short prayer, the
bishop delivered to him a little MS. full of exorcisms, and said:
"Take this, Gerard, and have power to lay hands on the possessed,
whether baptized or catechumens!" and he took it reverently, and
went home invested by the Church with power to cast out demons.

Returning home from the church, he was met by little Kate on her
crutches.

"Oh, Gerard! who, think you, hath sent to our house seeking you? -
the burgomaster himself."

"Ghysbrecht Van Swieten! What would he with me?"

"Nay, Gerard, I know not. But he seems urgent to see you. You are
to go to his house on the instant."

"Well, he is the burgomaster: I will go; but it likes me not.
Kate, I have seen him cast such a look on me as no friend casts.
No matter; such looks forewarn the wise. To be sure, he knows

"Knows what, Gerard?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Kate, I'll go."

CHAPTER V

Ghysbrecht Van Swieten was an artful man. He opened on the novice
with something quite wide of the mark he was really aiming at.
"The town records," said he, "are crabbedly written, and the ink
rusty with age." He offered Gerard the honour of transcribing them
fair.

Gerard inquired what he was to be paid.

Ghysbrecht offered a sum that would have just purchased the pens,
ink, and parchment.

"But, burgomaster, my labour? Here is a year's work."

"Your labour? Call you marking parchment labour? Little sweat goes
to that, I trow."

"'Tis labour, and skilled labour to boot; and that is better paid
in all crafts than rude labour, sweat or no sweat. Besides,
there's my time."

"Your time? Why, what is time to you, at two-and-twenty?" Then
fixing his eyes keenly on Gerard, to mark the effect of his words,
he said: "Say, rather, you are idle grown. You are in love. Your
body is with these chanting monks, but your heart is with Peter
Brandt and his red-haired girl."

"I know no Peter Brandt."

This denial confirmed Ghysbrecht's suspicion that the caster-out
of demons was playing a deep game.

"Ye lie!" he shouted. "Did I not find you at her elbow on the road
to Rotterdam?"

"Ah!"

"Ah! And you were seen at Sevenbergen but t'other day."

"Was I?'

"Ah and at Peter's house."

"At Sevenbergen?"

"Ay, at Sevenbergen."

Now, this was what in modern days is called a draw. It was a
guess, put boldly forth as fact, to elicit by the young man's
answer whether he had been there lately or not.

The result of the artifice surprised the crafty one. Gerard
started up in a strange state of nervous excitement.

"Burgomaster," said he, with trembling voice, "I have not been at
Sevenbergen these three years, and I know not the name of those
you saw me with, nor where they dwelt; but, as my time is
precious, though you value it not, give you good day." And he
darted out, with his eyes sparkling.

Ghysbrecht started up in huge ire; but he sank into his chair
again.

"He fears me not. He knows something, if not all."

Then he called hastily to his trusty servant, and almost dragged
him to a window.

"See you yon man?" he cried. "Haste! follow him! But let him not
see you. He is young, but old in craft. Keep him in sight all day.
Let me know whither he goes, and what he does."

It was night when the servant returned.

"Well? well?" cried Van Swieten eagerly.

"Master, the young man went from you to Sevenbergen."

Ghysbrecht groaned.

"To the house of Peter the Magician."

CHAPTER VI

"Look into your own heart and write!" said Herr Cant; and earth's
cuckoos echoed the cry. Look into the Rhine where it is deepest,
and the Thames where it is thickest, and paint the bottom. Lower a
bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be
immortal truth, mustn't it? Now, in the first place, no son of
Adam ever reads his own heart at all, except,by the habit
acquired, and the light gained, from some years perusal of other
hearts; and even then, with his acquired sagacity and reflected
light, he can but spell and decipher his own heart, not read it
fluently. Half way to Sevenbergen Gerard looked into his own
heart, and asked it why he was going to Sevenbergen. His heart
replied without a moment's hesitation, "We are going out of
curiosity to know why she jilted us, and to show her it has not
broken our hearts, and that we are quite content with our honours
and our benefice in prospectu, and don't want her nor ally of her
fickle sex."

He soon found out Peter Brandt's cottage; and there sat a girl in
the doorway, plying her needle, and a stalwart figure leaned on a
long bow and talked to her. Gerard felt an unaccountable pang at
the sight of him. However, the man turned out to be past fifty
years of age, an old soldier, whom Gerard remembered to have seen
shoot at the butts with admirable force and skill. Another minute
and the youth stood before them. Margaret looked up and dropped
her work, and uttered a faint cry, and was white and red by turns.
But these signs of emotion were swiftly dismissed, and she turned
far more chill and indifferent than she would if she had not
betrayed this agitation.

"What! is it you, Master Gerard? What on earth brings you here, I
wonder?"

"I was passing by and saw you; so I thought I would give you good
day, and ask after your father."

"My father is well. He will be here anon."

"Then I may as well stay till he comes."

"As you will. Good Martin, step into the village and tell my
father here is a friend of his."

"And not of yours?"

"My father's friends are mine."

"That is doubtful. It was not like a friend to promise to wait for
me, and then make off the moment my back was turned. Cruel
Margaret you little know how I searched the town for you; how for
want of you nothing was pleasant to me."

"These are idle words; if you had desired my father's company, or
mine, you would have come back. There I had a bed laid for you,
sir, at my cousin's, and he would have made much of you, and, who
knows, I might have made much of you too. I was in the humour that
day. You will not catch me in the same mind again, neither you nor
any young man, I warrant me."

"Margaret, I came back the moment the Countess let me go; but you
were not there."

"Nay, you did not, or you had seen Hans Cloterman at our table; we
left him to bring you on."

"I saw no one there, but only a drunken man, that had just tumbled
down."

"At our table? How was he clad?"

"Nay, I took little heed: in sad-coloured garb."

At this Margaret's face gradually warmed; but presently, assuming
incredulity and severity, she put many shrewd questions, all of
which Gerard answered most loyally. Finally, the clouds cleared,
and they guessed how the misunderstanding had come about. Then
came a revulsion of tenderness, all the more powerful that they
had done each other wrong; and then, more dangerous still, came
mutual confessions. Neither had been happy since; neither ever
would have been happy but for this fortunate meeting.

And Gerard found a MS. Vulgate lying open on the table, and
pounced upon it like a hawk. MSS. were his delight; but before he
could get to it two white hands quickly came flat upon the page,
and a red face over them.

"Nay, take away your hands, Margaret, that I may see where you are
reading, and I will read there too at home; so shall my soul meet
yours in the sacred page. You will not? Nay, then I must kiss them
away." And he kissed them so often, that for very shame they were
fain to withdraw, and, lo! the sacred book lay open at

"An apple of gold in a network of silver."

"There, now," said she, "I had been hunting for it ever so long,
and found it but even now - and to be caught!" and with a touch of
inconsistency she pointed it out to Gerard with her white finger.

"Ay," said he, "but to-day it is all hidden in that great cap."

"It is a comely cap, I'm told by some."

"Maybe; but what it hides is beautiful."

"It is not: it is hideous."

"Well, it was beautiful at Rotterdam."

"Ay, everything was beautiful that day" (with a little sigh).

And now Peter came in, and welcomed Gerard cordially, and would
have him to stay supper. And Margaret disappeared; and Gerard had
a nice learned chat with Peter; and Margaret reappeared with her
hair in her silver net, and shot a glance half arch, half coy, and
glided about them, and spread supper, and beamed bright with
gaiety and happiness. And in the cool evening Gerard coaxed her
out, and she objected and came; and coaxed her on to the road to
Tergou, and she declined, and came; and there they strolled up and
down, hand in hand; and when he must go, they pledged each other
never to quarrel or misunderstand one another again; and they
sealed the promise with a long loving kiss, and Gerard went home
on wings.

From that day Gerard spent most of his evenings with Margaret, and
the attachment deepened and deepened on both sides, till the hours
they spent together were the hours they lived; the rest they
counted and underwent. And at the outset of this deep attachment
all went smoothly. Obstacles there were, but they seemed distant
and small to the eyes of hope, youth, and love. The feelings and
passions of so many persons, that this attachment would thwart,
gave no warning smoke to show their volcanic nature and power. The
course of true love ran smoothly, placidly. until it had drawn
these two young hearts into its current for ever.

And then -

CHAPTER VII

One bright morning unwonted velvet shone, unwonted feathers waved,
and horses' hoofs glinted and ran through the streets of Tergou,
and the windows and balconies were studded with wondering faces.
The French ambassador was riding through to sport in the
neighbouring forest.

Besides his own suite, he was attended by several servants of the
Duke of Burgundy, lent to do him honour and minister to his
pleasure. The Duke's tumbler rode before him with a grave, sedate
majesty, that made his more noble companions seem light, frivolous
persons. But ever and anon, when respect and awe neared the
oppressive, he rolled off his horse so ignobly and funnily, that
even the ambassador was fain' to burst out laughing. He also
climbed up again by the tail in a way provocative of mirth, and so
he played his part. Towards the rear of the pageant rode one that
excited more attention still - the Duke's leopard. A huntsman,
mounted on a Flemish horse of giant prodigious size and power,
carried a long box fastened to the rider's loins by straps
curiously contrived, and on this box sat a bright leopard
crouching. She was chained to the huntsman. The people admired her
glossy hide and spots, and pressed near, and one or two were for
feeling her, and pulling her tail; then the huntsman shouted in a
terrible voice, "Beware! At Antwerp one did but throw a handful of
dust at her, and the Duke made dust of him."

"Gramercy!"

"I speak sooth. The good Duke shut him up in prison, in a cell
under ground, and the rats cleaned the flesh off his bones in a
night. Served him right for molesting the poor thing."

There was a murmur of fear, and the Tergovians shrank from
tickling the leopard of their sovereign.

But an incident followed that raised their spirits again. The
Duke's giant, a Hungarian seven feet four inches high, brought up
the rear. This enormous creature had, like some other giants, a
treble, fluty voice of little power. He was a vain fellow, and not
conscious of this nor any defect. Now it happened he caught sight
of Giles sitting on the top of the balcony; so he stopped and
began to make fun of him.

"Hallo! brother!" squeaked he, "I had nearly passed without seeing
thee."

"You are plain enough to see," bellowed Giles in his bass tones.

"Come on my shoulder, brother," squeaked Titan, and held out a
shoulder of mutton fist to help him down.

"If I do I'll cuff your ears," roared the dwarf.

The giant saw the homuncule was irascible, and played upon him,
being encouraged thereto by the shouts of laughter. For he did not
see that the people were laughing not at his wit, but at the
ridiculous incongruity of the two voices - the gigantic feeble
fife, and the petty deep, loud drum, the mountain delivered of a
squeak, and the mole-hill belching thunder.

The singular duet came to as singular an end. Giles lost all
patience and self-command, and being a creature devoid of fear,
and in a rage to boot, he actually dropped upon the giant's neck,
seized his hair with one hand, and punched his head with the
other. The giant's first impulse was to laugh, but the weight and
rapidity of the blows soon corrected that inclination.

"He! he! Ah! ha! hallo! oh! oh! Holy saints! here! help! or I must
throttle the imp. I can't! I'll split your skull against the - "
and he made a wild run backwards at the balcony. Giles saw his
danger, seized the balcony in time with both hands, and whipped
over it just as the giant's head came against it with a stunning
crack. The people roared with laughter and exultation at the
address of their little champion. The indignant giant seized two
of the laughers, knocked them together like dumb-bells, shook them
and strewed them flat - (Catherine shrieked and threw her apron
over Giles - then strode wrathfully away after the party. This
incident had consequences no one then present foresaw. Its
immediate results were agreeable. The Tergovians turned proud of
Giles, and listened with more affability to his prayers for
parchment. For he drove a regular trade with his brother Gerard in
this article. Went about and begged it gratis, and Gerard gave him
coppers for it.

On the afternoon of the same day, Catherine and her daughter were
chatting together about their favourite theme, Gerard, his
goodness, his benefice, and the brightened prospects of the whole
family.

Their good luck had come to them in the very shape they would have
chosen; besides the advantages of a benefice such as the Countess
Charolois would not disdain to give, there was the feminine
delight at having a priest, a holy man, in their own family. "He
will marry Cornelis and Sybrandt: for they can wed (good
housewives), now, if they will. Gerard will take care of you and
Giles, when we are gone."

"Yes, mother, and we can confess to him instead of to a stranger,"
said Kate.

"Ay, girl! and he can give the sacred oil to your father and me,
and close our eyes when our time comes."

"Oh, mother! not for many, many years, I do pray Heaven. Pray
speak not of that, it always makes me sad. I hope to go before
you, mother dear. No; let us be gay to-day. I am out of pain,
mother, quite out of all pain; it does seem so strange; and I feel
so bright and happy, that - mother, Can you keep a secret?"

"Nobody better, child. Why, you know I can."

"Then I will show you something so beautiful. You never saw the
like, I trow. Only Gerard must never know; for sure he means to
surprise us with it; he covers it up so, and sometimes he carries
it away altogether."

Kate took her crutches, and moved slowly away, leaving her mother
in an exalted state of curiosity. She soon returned with something
in a cloth, uncovered it, and there was a lovely picture of the
Virgin, with all her insignia, and wearing her tiara over a wealth
of beautiful hair, which flowed loose over her shoulders.
Catherine, at first, was struck with awe.

"It is herself," she cried; "it is the Queen of Heaven. I never
saw one like her to my mind before."

"And her eyes, mother: lifted to the sky, as if they belonged
there, and not to a mortal creature. And her beautiful hair of
burning gold."

"And to think I have a son that can make the saints live again
upon a piece of wood!"

"The reason is, he is a young saint himself, mother. He is too
good for this world; he is here to portray the blessed, and then
to go away and be with them for ever."

Ere they had half done admiring it, a strange voice was heard at
the door. By one of the furtive instincts of their sex they
hastily hid the picture in the cloth, though there was no need,
And the next moment in came, casting his eyes furtively around, a
man that had not entered the house this ten years Ghysbrecht Van
Swieten.

The two women were so taken by surprise, that they merely stared
at him and at one another, and said, "The burgomaster!" in a tone
so expressive, that Ghysbrecht felt compelled to answer it.

"Yes! I own the last time I came here was not on a friendly
errand. Men love their own interest - Eli's and mine were
contrary. Well, let this visit atone the last. To-day I come on
your business and none of mine." Catherine and her daughter
exchanged a swift glance of contemptuous incredulity. They knew
the man better than he thought.

"It is about your son Gerard."

"Ay! ay! you want him to work for the town all for nothing. He
told us."

"I come on no such errand. It is to let you know he has fallen
into bad hands."

"Now Heaven and the saints forbid! Man,torture not a mother! Speak
out, and quickly: speak ere you have time to coin falsehood: we
know thee."

Ghysbrecht turned pale at this affront, and spite mingled with the
other motives that brought him here. "Thus it is, then," said he,
grinding his teeth and speaking very fast. "Your son Gerard is
more like to be father of a family than a priest: he is for ever
with Margaret, Peter Brandt's red-haired girl, and loves her like
a cow her calf."

Mother and daughter both burst out laughing. Ghysbrecht stared at
them.

"What! you knew it?"

"Carry this tale to those who know not my son, Gerard. Women are
nought to him."

"Other women, mayhap. But this one is the apple of his eye to him,
or will be, if you part them not, and soon. Come, dame, make me
not waste time and friendly counsel: my servant has seen them
together a score times, handed, and reading babies in one
another's eyes like - you know, dame - you have been young, too."

"Girl, I am ill at ease. Yea, I have been young, and know how
blind and foolish the young are. My heart! he has turned me sick
in a moment. Kate, if it should be true?"

"Nay, nay!" cried Kate eagerly. "Gerard might love a young woman:
all young men do: I can't find what they see in them to love so;
but if he did, he would let us know; he would not deceive us. You
wicked man! No, dear mother, look not so! Gerard is too good to
love a creature of earth. His love is for our Lady and the saints.
Ah! I will show you the picture there: if his heart was earthly,
could he paint the Queen of Heaven like that - look! look!" and
she held the picture out triumphantly, and, more radiant and
beautiful in this moment of enthusiasm than ever dead picture was
or will be, over-powered the burgomaster with her eloquence and
her feminine proof of Gerard's purity. His eyes and mouth opened,
and remained open: in which state they kept turning, face and all
as if on a pivot, from the picture to the women, and from the
women to the picture.

"Why, it is herself," he gasped.

"Isn't it!" cried Kate, and her hostility was softened. "You
admire it? I forgive you for frightening us."

"Am I in a mad-house?" said Ghysbrecht Van Swieten thoroughly
puzzled. "You show me a picture of the girl; and you say he
painted it; and that is a proof he cannot love her. Why, they all
paint their sweethearts, painters do."

"A picture of the girl?" exclaimed Kate, shocked. "Fie! this is no
girl; this is our blessed Lady."

"No, no; it is Margaret Brandt."

"Oh blind! It is the Queen of Heaven."

"No; only of Sevenbergen village."

"Profane man! behold her crown!"

"Silly child! look at her red hair! Would the Virgin be seen in
red hair? She who had the pick of all the colours ten thousand
years before the world began."

At this moment an anxious face was insinuated round the edge of
the open door: it was their neighbour Peter Buyskens.

"What is to do?" said he in a cautious whisper. "We can hear you
all across the street. What on earth is to do?"

"Oh, neighbour! What is to do? Why, here is the burgomaster
blackening our Gerard."

"Stop!" cried Van Swieten. "Peter Buyskens is come in the nick of
time. He knows father and daughter both. They cast their glamour
on him."

"What! is she a witch too?"

"Else the egg takes not after the bird. Why is her father called
the magician? I tell you they bewitched this very Peter here; they
cast unholy spells on him, and cured him of the colic: now, Peter,
look and tell me who is that? and you be silent, women, for a
moment, if you can; who is it, Peter?"

"Well, to be sure!" said Peter, in reply; and his eye seemed
fascinated by the picture.

"Who is it?" repeated Ghysbrecht impetuously.

Peter Buyskens smiled. "Why, you know as well as I do; but what
have they put a crown on her for? I never saw her in a crown, for
my part."

"Man alive! Can't you open your great jaws, and just speak a
wench's name plain out to oblige three people?"

"I'd do a great deal more to oblige one of you than that,
burgomaster. If it isn't as natural as life!"

"Curse the man! he won't, he won't - curse him!"

"Why, what have I done now?"

"Oh, sir!" said little Kate, "for pity's sake tell us; are these
the features of a living woman, of - of - Margaret Brandt?"

"A mirror is not truer, my little maid."

"But is it she, sir, for very certain?"

"Why, who else should it be?"

"Now, why couldn't you say so at once?" snarled Ghysbrecht.

"I did say so, as plain as I could speak," snapped Peter; and they
growled over this small bone of contention so zealously, that they
did not see Catherine and her daughter had thrown their aprons
over their heads, and were rocking to and fro in deep distress.
The next moment Elias came in from the shop, and stood aghast.
Catherine, though her face was covered, knew his footstep.

"That is my poor man," she sobbed. "Tell him, good Peter Buyskens,
for I have not the courage."

Elias turned pale. The presence of the burgomaster in his house,
after so many years of coolness, coupled with his wife's and
daughter's distress, made him fear some heavy misfortune.

"Richart! Jacob!" he gasped.

"No, no!" said the burgomaster; "it is nearer home, and nobody is
dead or dying, old friend."

"God bless you, burgomaster! Ah! something has gone off my breast
that was like to choke me. Now, what is the matter?"

Ghysbrecht then told him all that he told the women, and showed
the picture in evidence.

"Is that all?" said Eli, profoundly relieved. "What are ye roaring
and bellowing for? It is vexing - it is angering, but it is not
like death, not even sickness. Boys will be boys. He will outgrow
that disease: 'tis but skin-deep."

But when Ghysbrecht told him that Margaret was a girl of good
character; that it was not to be supposed she would be so intimate
if marriage had not been spoken of between them, his brow
darkened.

"Marriage! that shall never be," said he sternly. "I'll stay that;
ay, by force, if need be - as I would his hand lifted to cut his
throat. I'd do what old John Koestein did t'other day."

"And what is that, in Heaven's name?" asked the mother, suddenly
removing her apron.

It was the burgomaster who replied:

"He made me shut young Albert Koestein up in the prison of the
Stadthouse till he knocked under. It was not long: forty-eight
hours, all alone, on bread and water, cooled his hot stomach.
'Tell my father I am his humble servant,' says he, 'and let me
into the sun once more - the sun is worth all the wenches in the
world.'"

"Oh, the cruelty of men!" sighed Catherine.

"As to that, the burgomaster has no choice: it is the law. And if
a father says, 'Burgomaster, lock up my son,' he must do it. A
fine thing it would be if a father might not lock up his own son."

"Well, well! it won't come to that with me and my son. He never
disobeyed me in his life: he never shall, Where is he? It is past
supper-time. Where is he, Kate?"

"Alas! I know not, father."

"I know," said Ghysbrecht; "he is at Sevenbergen. My servant met
him on the road."

Supper passed in gloomy silence. Evening descended - no Gerard!
Eight o'clock came - no Gerard! Then the father sent all to bed,
except Catherine.

"You and I will walk abroad, wife, and talk over this new care."

"Abroad, my man, at this time? Whither?"

"Why, on the road to Sevenbergen."

"Oh no; no hasty words, father. Poor Gerard! he never vexed you
before."

"Fear me not. But it must end; and I am not one that trusts
to-morrow with to-day's work."

The old pair walked hand in hand; for, strange is it may appear to
some of my readers, the use of the elbow to couples walking was
not discovered in Europe till centuries after this. They sauntered
on a long time in silence. The night was clear and balmy. Such
nights, calm and silent, recall the past from the dead.

"It is a many years since we walked so late, my man," said
Catherine softly.

"Ay, sweetheart, more than we shall see again (is he never coming,
I wonder?)"

"Not since our courting days, Eli."

"No. Ay, you were a buxom lass then."

"And you were a comely lad, as ever a girl's eye stole a look at.
I do suppose Gerard is with her now, as you used to be with me.
Nature is strong, and the same in all our generations."

"Nay, I hope he has left her by now, confound her, or we shall be
here all night."

"Eli!"

"Well, Kate?"

"I have been happy with you, sweetheart, for all our rubs - much
happier, I trow, than if I had - been - a - a - nun. You won't
speak harshly to the poor child? One can be firm without being
harsh."

"Surely."

"Have you been happy with me, my poor Eli?"

"Why, you know I have. Friends I have known, but none like thee.
Buss me, wife!"

"A heart to share joy and grief with is a great comfort to man or
woman. Isn't it, Eli?"

"It is so, my lass.
     'It doth joy double,
     And halveth trouble,'
runs the byword. And so I have found it, sweetheart. Ah! here
comes the young fool."

Catherine trembled, and held her husband's hand tight.

The moon was bright, but they were in the shadow of some trees,
and their son did not see them. He came singing in the moonlight,
and his face shining.

CHAPTER VIII

While the burgomaster was exposing Gerard at Tergou, Margaret had
a trouble of her own at Sevenbergen. It was a housewife's
distress, but deeper than we can well conceive. She came to Martin
Wittenhaagen, the old soldier, with tears in her eyes.

"Martin, there's nothing in the house, and Gerard is coming, and
he is so thoughtless. He forgets to sup at home. When he gives
over work, then he runs to me straight, poor soul; and often he
comes quite faint. And to think I have nothing to set before my
servant that loves me so dear."

Martin scratched his head. "What can I do?"

"It is Thursday; it is your day to shoot; sooth to Say, I counted
on you to-day."

"Nay," said the soldier, "I may not shoot when the Duke or his
friends are at the chase; read else. I am no scholar." And he took
out of his pouch a parchment with a grand seal. It purported to be
a stipend and a licence given by Philip, Duke of Burgundy, to
Martin Wittenhaagen, one of his archers, in return for services in
the wars, and for a wound received at the Dukes side. The stipend
was four merks yearly, to be paid by the Duke's almoner, and the
licence was to shoot three arrows once a week, viz., on Thursday,
and no other day, in any of the Duke's forests in Holland, at any
game but a seven-year-old buck or a doe carrying fawn; proviso,
that the Duke should not be hunting on that day, or any of his
friends. In this case Martin was not to go and disturb the woods
on peril of his salary and his head, and a fine of a penny.

Margaret sighed and was silent.

"Come, cheer up, mistress," said he; "for your sake I'll peril my
carcass; I have done that for many a one that was not worth your
forefinger. It is no such mighty risk either. I'll but step into
the skirts of the forest here. It is odds but they drive a hare or
a fawn within reach of my arrow."

"Well, if I let you go, you must promise me not to go far, and not
to be seen; far better Gerard went supperless than ill should come
to you, faithful Martin."

The required promise given, Martin took his bow and three arrows,
and stole cautiously into the wood: it was scarce a furlong
distant. The horns were heard faintly in the distance, and all the
game was afoot. "Come," thought Martin, "I shall soon fill the
pot, and no one be the wiser." He took his stand behind a thick
oak that commanded a view of an open glade, and strung his bow, a
truly formidable weapon. It was of English yew, six feet two
inches high, and thick in proportion; and Martin, broad-chested,
with arms all iron and cord, and used to the bow from infancy,
could draw a three-foot arrow to the head, and, when it flew, the
eye could scarce follow it, and the bowstring twanged as musical
as a harp. This bow had laid many a stout soldier low in the wars
of the Hoecks and Cabbel-jaws. In those days a battlefield was not
a cloud of smoke; the combatants were few, but the deaths many -
for they saw what they were about; and fewer bloodless arrows flew
than bloodless bullets now. A hare came cantering, then sat
sprightly, and her ears made a capital V. Martin levelled his
tremendous weapon at her. The arrow flew, the string twanged; but
Martin had been in a hurry to pot her, and lost her by an inch:
the arrow seemed to hit her, but it struck the ground close to
her, and passed under her belly like a flash, and hissed along the
short grass and disappeared. She jumped three feet perpendicular
and away at the top of her speed. "Bungler!" said Martin. A sure
proof he was not an habitual bungler, or he would have blamed the
hare. He had scarcely fitted another arrow to his string when a
wood-pigeon settled on the very tree he stood under. "Aha!"
thought he, you are small, but dainty." This time he took more
pains; drew his arrow carefully, loosed it smoothly, and saw it,
to all appearance, go clean through the bird, carrying feathers
skyward like dust. Instead of falling at his feet, the bird, whose
breast was torn, not fairly pierced, fluttered feebly away, and,
by a great effort, rose above the trees, flew some fifty yards and
dead at last; but where, he could not see for the thick foliage.

"Luck is against me," said he despondingly. But he fitted another
arrow, and eyed the glade keenly. Presently he heard a bustle
behind him, and turned round just in time to see a noble buck
cross the open, but too late to shoot at him. He dashed his bow
down with an imprecation. At that moment a long spotted animal
glided swiftly across after the deer; its belly seemed to touch
the ground as it went. Martin took up his bow hastily: he
recognized the Duke's leopard. "The hunters will not be far from
her," said he, "and I must not be seen. Gerard must go supperless
this night."

He plunged into the wood, following the buck and leopard. for that
was his way home. He had not gone far when he heard an unusual
sound ahead of him - leaves rustling violently and the ground
trampled. He hurried in the direction. He found the leopard on the
buck's back, tearing him with teeth and claw, and the buck running
in a circle and bounding convulsively, with the blood pouring down
his hide. Then Martin formed a desperate resolution to have the
venison for Margaret. He drew his arrow to the head, and buried it
in the deer, who, spite of the creature on his back, bounded high
into the air, and fell dead. The leopard went on tearing him as if
nothing had happened.

Martin hoped that the creature would gorge itself with blood, and
then let him take the meat. He waited some minutes, then walked
resolutely up, and laid his hand on the buck's leg. The leopard
gave a frightful growl. and left off sucking blood. She saw
Martin's game, and was sulky and on her guard. What was to be
done? Martin had heard that wild creatures cannot stand the human
eye. Accordingly, he stood erect, and fixed his on the leopard:
the leopard returned a savage glance, and never took her eye off
Martin. Then Martin continuing to look the beast down, the
leopard, brutally ignorant of natural history, flew at his head
with a frightful yell, flaming eyes, and jaws and distended. He
had but just time to catch her by the throat, before her teeth
could crush his face; one of her claws seized his shoulder and
rent it, the other, aimed at his cheek, would have been more
deadly still, but Martin was old-fashioned, and wore no hat, but a
scapulary of the same stuff as his jerkin, and this scapulary he
had brought over his head like a hood; the brute's claw caught in
the loose leather. Martin kept her teeth off his face with great
difficulty, and griped her throat fiercely, and she kept rending
his shoulder. It was like blunt reaping-hooks grinding and
tearing. The pain was fearful; but, instead of cowing the old
soldier, it put his blood up, and he gnashed his teeth with rage
almost as fierce as hers, and squeezed her neck with iron force.
The two pair of eyes flared at one another - and now the man's
were almost as furious as the brute's. She found he was throttling
her, and made a wild attempt to free herself, in which she dragged
his cowl all over his face and blinded him, and tore her claw out
of his shoulder, flesh and all; but still he throttled her with
hand and arm of iron. Presently her long tail, that was high in
the air, went down. "Aha!" cried Martin, joyfully, and gripped her
like death; next, her body lost its elasticity, and he held a
choked and powerless thing: he gripped it still, till all motion
ceased, then dashed it to the earth; then, panting, removed his
cowl: the leopard lay mute at his feet with tongue protruding and
bloody paw; and for the first time terror fell on Martin. "I am a
dead man: I have slain the Duke's leopard." He hastily seized a
few handfuls of leaves and threw them over her; then shouldered
the buck, and staggered away, leaving a trail of blood all the way
his own and the buck's. He burst into Peter's house a horrible
figure, bleeding and bloodstained, and flung the deer's carcass
down.

"There - no questions," said he, "but broil me a steak on't, for I
am faint."

Margaret did not see he was wounded; she thought the blood was all
from the deer.

She busied herself at the fire, and the stout soldier stanched and
bound his own wound apart; and soon he and Gerard and Margaret
were supping royally on broiled venison.

They were very merry; and Gerard, with wonderful thoughtfulness,
had brought a flask of Schiedam, and under its influence Martin
revived, and told them how the venison was got; and they all made
merry over the exploit.

Their mirth was strangely interrupted. Margaret's eye became fixed
and fascinated, and her cheek pale with fear. She gasped, and
could not speak, but pointed to the window with trembling finger.
Their eyes followed hers, and there in the twilight crouched a
dark form with eyes like glowworms.

It was the leopard.

While they stood petrified, fascinated by the eyes of green fire,
there sounded in the wood a single deep bay. Martin trembled at
it.

"They have lost her, and laid muzzled bloodhounds on her scent;
they will find her here, and the venison. Good-bye, friends,
Martin Wittenhaagen ends here."

Gerard seized his bow, and put it into the soldier's hands.

"Be a man," he cried; "shoot her, and fling her into the wood ere
they come up. Who will know?"

More voices of hounds broke out, and nearer.

"Curse her!" cried Martin; "I spared her once; now she must die,
or I, or both more likely;" and he reared his bow, and drew his
arrow to the head.

"Nay! nay!" cried Margaret, and seized the arrow. It broke in
half: the pieces fell on each side the bow. The air at the same
time filled with the tongues of the hounds: they were hot upon the
scent.

"What have you done, wench? You have put the halter round my
throat."

"No!" cried Margaret. "I have saved you: stand back from the
window, both! Your knife, quick!"

She seized his long-pointed knife, almost tore it out of his
girdle, and darted from the room. The house was now surrounded
with baying dogs and shouting men.

The glowworm eyes moved not.

CHAPTER IX

Margaret cut off a huge piece of venison, and ran to the window
and threw it out to the green eyes of fire. They darted on to it
with a savage snarl; and there was a sound of rending and
crunching: at this moment, a hound uttered a bay so near and loud
it rang through the house; and the three at the window shrank
together. Then the leopard feared for her supper, and glided
swiftly and stealthily away with it towards the woods, and the
very next moment horses and men and dogs came helter-skelter past
the window, and followed her full cry. Martin and his companions
breathed again: the leopard was swift, and would not be caught
within a league of their house. They grasped hands. Margaret
seized this opportunity, and cried a little; Gerard kissed the
tears away.

To table once more, and Gerard drank to woman's wit: "'Tis
stronger than man's force," said he.

"Ay," said Margaret, "when those she loves are in danger; not
else."

To-night Gerard stayed with her longer than usual, and went home
prouder than ever of her, and happy as a prince. Some little
distance from home, under the shadow of some trees, he encountered
two figures: they almost barred his way.

It was his father and mother.

Out so late! what could be the cause?

A chill fell on him.

He stopped and looked at them: they stood grim and silent. He
stammered out some words of inquiry.

"Why ask?" said the father; "you know why we are here."

"Oh, Gerard!" said his mother, with a voice full of reproach yet
of affection.

Gerard's heart quaked: he was silent.

Then his father pitied his confusion, and said to him:

"Nay, you need not to hang your head. You are not the first young
fool that has been caught by a red cheek and a pair of blue eyes."

"Nay, nay!" put in Catherine, "it was witchcraft; Peter the
Magician is well known for that."

"Come, Sir Priest," resumed his father, "you know you must not
meddle with women folk. But give us your promise to go no more to
Sevenbergen, and here all ends: we won't be hard on you for one
fault."

"I cannot promise that, father."

"Not promise it, you young hypocrite!"

"Nay, father, miscall me not: I lacked courage to tell you what I
knew would vex you; and right grateful am I to that good friend,
whoever he be, that has let you wot. 'Tis a load off my mind. Yes,
father, I love Margaret; and call me not a priest, for a priest I
will never be. I will die sooner."

"That we shall see, young man. Come, gainsay me no more; you will
learn what 'tis to disrespect a father."

Gerard held his peace, and the three walked home in gloomy
silence, broken only by a deep sigh or two from Catherine.

From that hour the little house at Tergou was no longer the abode
of peace. Gerard was taken to task next day before the whole
family; and every voice was loud against him, except little Kate's
and the dwarf's, who was apt to take his cue from her without
knowing why. As for Cornelis and Sybrandt, they were bitterer than
their father. Gerard was dismayed at finding so many enemies, and
looked wistfully into his little sister's face: her eyes were
brimming at the harsh words showered on one who but yesterday was
the universal pet. But she gave him no encouragement: she turned
her head away from him and said:

"Dear, dear Gerard, pray to Heaven to cure you of this folly!"

"What, are you against me too?" said Gerard, sadly; and he rose
with a deep sigh, and left the house and went to Sevenbergen.

The beginning of a quarrel, where the parties are bound by
affection though opposed in interest and sentiment, is
comparatively innocent: both are perhaps in the right at first
starting, and then it is that a calm, judicious friend, capable of
seeing both sides, is a gift from Heaven. For the longer the
dissension endures, the wider and deeper it grows by the
fallibility and irascibility of human nature: these are not
confined to either side, and finally the invariable end is reached
- both in the wrong.

The combatants were unequally matched: Elias was angry, Cornelis
and Sybrandt spiteful; but Gerard, having a larger and more
cultivated mind, saw both sides where they saw but one, and had
fits of irresolution, and was not wroth, but unhappy. He was
lonely, too, in this struggle. He could open his heart to no one.
Margaret was a high-spirited girl: he dared not tell her what he
had to endure at home; she was capable of siding with his
relations by resigning him, though at the cost of her own
happiness. Margaret Van Eyck had been a great comfort to him on
another occasion; but now he dared not make her his confidant. Her
own history was well known. In early life she had many offers of
marriage; but refused them all for the sake of that art, to which
a wife's and mother's duties are so fatal: thus she remained
single and painted with her brothers. How could he tell her that
he declined the benefice she had got him, and declined it for the
sake of that which at his age she had despised and sacrificed so
lightly?

Gerard at this period bade fair to succumb. But the other side had
a horrible ally in Catherine, senior. This good-hearted but
uneducated woman could not, like her daughter, act quietly and
firmly: still less could she act upon a plan. She irritated Gerard
at times, and so helped him; for anger is a great sustainer of the
courage: at others she turned round in a moment and made
onslaughts on her own forces. To take a single instance out of
many: one day that they were all at home, Catherine and all,
Cornelis said: "Our Gerard wed Margaret Brandt? Why, it is hunger
marrying thirst."

"And what will it be when you marry?" cried Catherine. "Gerard can
paint, Gerard can write, but what can you do to keep a woman, ye
lazy loon? Nought but wait for your father's shoon. Oh we can see
why you and Sybrandt would not have the poor boy to marry. You are
afraid he will come to us for a share of our substance. And say
that he does, and say that we give it him, it isn't yourn we part
from, and mayhap never will be."

On these occasions Gerard smiled slily, and picked up heart, and
temporary confusion fell on Catherine's unfortunate allies. But at
last, after more than six months of irritation, came the climax.
The father told the son before the whole family he had ordered the
burgomaster to imprison him in the Stadthouse rather than let him
marry Margaret. Gerard turned pale with anger at this, but by a
great effort held his peace. His father went on to say, "And a
priest you shall be before the year is out, nilly-willy."

"Is it so?" cried Gerard. "Then, hear me, all. By God and St.
Bavon I swear I will never be a priest while Margaret lives. Since
force is to decide it, and not love and duty, try force, father;
but force shall not serve you, for the day I see the burgomaster
come for me, I leave Tergou for ever, and Holland too, and my
father's house, where it seems I have been valued all these years,
not for myself, but for what is to be got out of me."

And he flung out of the room white with anger and desperation.

"There!" cried Catherine, "that comes of driving young folks too
hard. But men are crueller than tigers, even to their own flesh
and blood. Now, Heaven forbid he should ever leave us, married or
single."

As Gerard came out of the house, his cheeks pale and his heart
panting, he met Reicht Heynes: she had a message for him: Margaret
Van Eyck desired to see him. He found the old lady seated grim as
a judge. She wasted no time in preliminaries, but inquired coldly
why he had not visited her of late: before he could answer, she
said in a sarcastic tone, "I thought we had been friends, young
sir."

At this Gerard looked the picture of doubt and consternation.

"It is because you never told her you were in love," said Reicht
Heynes, pitying his confusion.

"Silence, wench! Why should he tell us his affairs? We are not his
friends: we have not deserved his confidence."

"Alas! my second mother," said Gerard, "I did not dare to tell you
my folly."

"What folly? Is it folly to love?"

"I am told so every day of my life."

"You need not have been afraid to tell my mistress; she is always
kind to true lovers."

"Madam - Reicht I was afraid because I was told..."

"Well, you were told -?"

"That in your youth you scorned love, preferring art."

"I did, boy; and what is the end of it? Behold me here a barren
stock, while the women of my youth have a troop of children at
their side, and grandchildren at their knee I gave up the sweet
joys of wifehood and motherhood for what? For my dear brothers.
They have gone and left me long ago. For my art. It has all but
left me too. I have the knowledge still, but what avails that when
the hand trembles. No, Gerard; I look on you as my son. You are
good, you are handsome, you are a painter, though not like some I
have known. I will not let you throw your youth away as I did
mine: you shall marry this Margaret. I have inquired, and she is a
good daughter. Reicht here is a gossip. She has told me all about
it. But that need not hinder you to tell me."

Poor Gerard was overjoyed to be permitted to praise Margaret
aloud, and to one who could understand what he loved in her.

Soon there were two pair of wet eyes over his story; and when the
poor boy saw that, there ware three.

Women are creatures brimful of courage. Theirs is not exactly the
same quality as manly courage; that would never do, hang it all;
we should have to give up trampling on them. No; it is a vicarious
courage. They never take part in a bull-fight by any chance; but
it is remarked that they sit at one unshaken by those tremors and
apprehensions for the combatants to which the male
spectator-feebla-minded wretch! -is subject. Nothing can exceed
the resolution with which they have been known to send forth men
to battle: as some witty dog says,
     "Les femmes sont tres braves avec le peur d'autrui."

By this trait Gerard now profited. Margaret and Reicht were agreed
that a man should always take the bull by the horns. Gerard's only
course was to marry Margaret Brandt off-hand; the old people would
come to after a while, the deed once done. Whereas, the longer
this misunderstanding continued on its present footing, the worse
for all parties, especially for Gerard.

"See how pale and thin they have made him amongst them."

"Indeed you are, Master Gerard," said Reicht. "It makes a body sad
to see a young man so wasted and worn. Mistress, when I met him in
the street to-day, I had liked to have burst out crying: he was so
changed.

"And I'll be bound the others keep their colour; ah, Reicht? such
as it is."

"Oh, I see no odds in them."

"Of course not. We painters are no match for boors. We are glass,
they are stone. We can't stand the worry, worry, worry of little
minds; and it is not for the good of mankind we should be exposed
to it. It is hard enough, Heaven knows, to design and paint a
masterpiece, without having gnats and flies stinging us to death
into the bargain."

Exasperated as Gerard was by his father's threat of violence, he
listened to these friendly voices telling him the prudent course
was rebellion. But though he listened, he was not convinced.

"I do not fear my father's violence," he said, "but I do fear his
anger. When it came to the point he would not imprison me. I would
marry Margaret to-morrow if that was my only fear. No; he would
disown me. I should take Margaret from her father, and give her a
poor husband, who would never thrive, weighed down by his parent's
curse. Madam! I sometimes think if I could marry her secretly, and
then take her away to some country where my craft is better paid
than in this; and after a year or two, when the storm had blown
over, you know, could come back with money in my purse, and say,
'My dear parents, we do not seek your substance, we but ask you to
love us once more as you used, and as we have never ceased to love
you' - but, alas! I shall be told these are the dreams of an
inexperienced young man."

The old lady's eyes sparkled.

"It is no dream, but a piece of wonderful common-sense in a boy;
it remains to be seen whether you have spirit to carry out your
own thought. There is a country, Gerard, where certain fortune
awaits you at this moment. Here the arts freeze, but there they
flourish, as they never yet flourished in any age or land."

"It is Italy!" cried Gerard. "It is Italy!"

"Ay, Italy! where painters are honoured like princes, and scribes
are paid three hundred crowns for copying a single manuscript.
Know you not that his Holiness the Pope has written to every land
for skilful scribes to copy the hundreds of precious manuscripts
that are pouring into that favoured land from Constantinople,
whence learning and learned men are driven by the barbarian
Turks?"

"Nay, I know not that; but it has been the dream and hope of my
life to visit Italy, the queen of all the arts; oh, madam! But the
journey, and we are all so poor."

"Find you the heart to go, I'll find the means. I know where to
lay my hand on ten golden angels: they will take you to Rome: and
the girl with you, if she loves you as she ought."

They sat till midnight over this theme. And, after that day,
Gerard recovered his spirits, and seemed to carry a secret
talisman against all the gibes and the harsh words that flew about
his ears at home.

Besides the money she procured him for the journey, Margaret Van
Eyck gave him money's worth. Said she, "I will tell you secrets
that I learned from masters that are gone from me, and have left
no fellow behind. Even the Italians know them not; and what I tell
you now in Tergou you shall sell hear in Florence. Note my brother
Jan's pictures: time, which fades all other paintings, leaves his
colours bright as the day they left the easel. The reason is, he
did nothing blindly, in a hurry. He trusted to no hireling to
grind his colours; he did0it himself, or saw it done. His panel
was prepared. and prepared again - I will show you how - a year
before he laid his colour on. Most of them are quite content to
have their work sucked up and lost, sooner than not be in a hurry.
Bad painters are always in a hurry. Above all, Gerard, I warn you
use but little oil, and never boil it: boiling it melts that
vegetable dross into its heart which it is our business to clear
away; for impure oil is death to colour. No; take your oil and
pour it into a bottle with water. In a day or two the water will
turn muddy: that is muck from the oil. Pour the dirty water
carefully away. and add fresh. When that is poured away, you will
fancy the oil is clear. You mistaken. Reicht, fetch me that!"
Reicht brought a glass trough with a glass lid fitting tight.
"When your oil has been washed in bottle, put it into this trough
with water, and put the trough in the sun all day. You will soon
see the water turbid again. But mark, you must not carry this game
too far, or the sun will turn your oil to varnish. When it is as
clear as crystal, not too luscious, drain carefully, and cork it
up tight. Grind your own prime colours, and lay them on with this
oil, and they shall live. Hubert would put sand or salt in the
water to clear the oil quicker. But Jan used to say, 'Water will
do it best; give water time.' Jan Van Eyck was never in a hurry,
and that is why the world will not forget him in a hurry."

This and several other receipts, quae nunc perscribere longum est,
Margaret gave him with sparkling eyes, and Gerard received them
like' a legacy from Heaven, so interesting are some things that
read uninteresting. Thus provided with money and knowledge, Gerard
decided to marry and fly with his wife to Italy. Nothing remained
now but to inform Margaret Brandt of his resolution, and to
publish the banns as quietly as possible. He went to Sevenbergen
earlier than usual on both these errands. He began with Margaret;
told her of the Dame Van Eyck's goodness, and the resolution he
had come to at last, and invited her co-operation.

She refused it plump.

"No, Gerard; you and I have never spoken of your family, but when
you come to marriage - " She stopped, then began again. "I do
think your father has no ill-will to me more than to another. He
told Peter Buyskens as much, and Peter told me. But so long as he
is bent on your being a priest (you ought have told me this
instead of I you), I could not marry you, Gerard, dearly as I love
you."

Gerard strove in vain to shake this resolution. He found it very
easy to make her cry, but impossible to make her yield. Then
Gerard was impatient and unjust.

"Very well!" he cried; "then you are on their side, and you will
drive me to be a priest, for this must end one way or another. My
parents hate me in earnest, but my lover only loves me in jest."

And with this wild, bitter speech, he flung away home again, and
left Margaret weeping.

When a man misbehaves, the effect is curious on a girl who loves
him sincerely. It makes her pity him. This, to some of us males,
seems anything but logical. The fault is in our own eye; the logic
is too swift for us. The girl argues thus:- "How unhappy, how
vexed, poor *** must be; him to misbehave! Poor thing!"

Margaret was full of this sweet womanly pity, when, to her great
surprise, scarce an hour and a half after he left her, Gerard came
running back to her with the fragments of a picture in his hand,
and panting with anger and grief.

"There, Margaret! see! see! the wretches! Look at their spite!
They have cut your portrait to pieces."

Margaret looked, and, sure enough, some malicious hand had cut her
portrait into five pieces. She was a good girl, but she was not
ice; she turned red to her very forehead.

"Who did it?"

"Nay, I know not. I dared not ask; for I should hate the hand that
did it, ay, till my dying day. My poor Margaret! The butchers, the
ruffians! Six months' work cut out of my life, and nothing to show
for it now. See, they have hacked through your very face; the
sweet face that every one loves who knows it. oh. heartless,
merciless vipers!"

"Never mind, Gerard," said Margaret, panting. "Since this is how
they treat you for my sake - Ye rob him of my portrait, do ye?
Well, then, he shall have the face itself, such as it is."

"Oh, Margaret!"

"Yes, Gerard; since they are so cruel, I will be the kinder:
forgive me for refusing you. I will be your wife: to-morrow, if it
is your pleasure."

Gerard kissed her hands with rapture, and then her lips; and in a
tumult of joy ran for Peter and Martin. They came and witnessed
the betrothal; a solemn ceremony in those days, and indeed for
more than a century later, though now abolished.

CHAPTER X

The banns of marriage had to be read three times, as in our days;
with this difference, that they were commonly read on week-days,
and the young couple easily persuaded the cure to do the three
readings in twenty-four hours: he was new to the place, and their
looks spoke volumes in their favour. They were cried on Monday at
matins and at vespers; and, to their great delight. nobody from
Tergou was in the church. The next morning they were both there,
palpitating with anxiety, when, to their horror, a stranger stood
up and forbade the banns, On the score that the parties were not
of age, and their parents not consenting.

Outside the church door Margaret and Gerard held a trembling, and
almost despairing consultation; but, before they could settle
anything, the man who had done them so ill a turn approached, and
gave them to understand that he was very sorry to interfere: that
his inclination was to further the happiness of the young; but
that in point of fact his only means of getting a living was by
forbidding banns: what then? "The young people give me a crown.
and I undo my work handsomely; tell the cure I was misinformed,
and all goes smoothly."

"A crown! I will give you a golden angel to do this," said Gerard
eagerly; the man consented as eagerly, and went with Gerard to the
cure, and told him he had made a ridiculous mistake, which a sight
of the parties had rectified. On this the cure agreed to marry the
young couple next day at ten: and the professional obstructor of
bliss went home with Gerard's angel. Like most of these very
clever knaves, he was a fool, and proceeded to drink his angel at
a certain hostelry in Tergou where was a green devoted to archery
and the common sports of the day. There, being drunk, he bragged
of his day's exploit; and who should be there, imbibing every
word, but a great frequenter of the spot, the ne'er-do-weel
Sybrandt. Sybrandt ran home to tell his father; his father was not
at home; he was gone to Rotterdam to buy cloth of the merchants.
Catching his elder brother's eye, he made him a signal to come
out, and told him what he had heard.

There are black sheep in nearly every large family; and these two
were Gerard's black brothers. Idleness is vitiating: waiting for
the death of those we ought to love is vitiating; and these two
one-idea'd curs were ready to tear any one to death that should
interfere with that miserable inheritance which was their thought
by day and their dream by night. Their parents' parsimony was a
virtue; it was accompanied by industry, and its motive was love of
their offspring; but in these perverse and selfish hearts that
homely virtue was perverted into avarice, than which no more
fruitful source of crimes is to be found in nature.

They put their heads together, and agreed not to tell their
mother, whose sentiments were so uncertain, but to go first to the
burgomaster. They were cunning enough to see that he was averse to
the match, though they could not divine why.

Ghysbrecht Van Swieten saw through them at once; but he took care
not to let them see through him. He heard their story, and putting
on magisterial dignity and coldness, he said;

"Since the father of the family is not here, his duty falleth on
me, who am the father of the town. I know your father's mind;
leave all to me; and, above all, tell not a woman a word of this,
least of all the women that are in your own house: for chattering
tongues mar wisest counsels."

So he dismissed them, a little superciliously: he was ashamed of
his confederates.

On their return home they found their brother Gerard seated on a
low stool at their mother's knee: she was caressing his hair with
her hand, speaking very kindly to him, and promising to take his
part with his father and thwart his love no more. The main cause
of this change of mind was characteristic of the woman. She it was
who in a moment of female irritation had cut Margaret's picture to
pieces. She had watched the effect with some misgivings, and had
seen Gerard turn pale as death, and sit motionless like a bereaved
creature, with the pieces in his hands, and his eyes fixed on them
till tears came and blinded them. Then she was terrified at what
she had done; and next her heart smote her bitterly; and she wept
sore apart; but, being what she was, dared not own it, but said to
herself, "I'll not say a word, but I'll make it up to him." And
her bowels yearned over her son, and her feeble violence died a
natural death, and she was transferring her fatal alliance to
Gerard when the two black sheep came in. Gerard knew nothing of
the immediate cause; on the contrary, inexperienced as he was in
the ins and outs of females, her kindness made him ashamed of a
suspicion he had entertained that she was the depredator, and he
kissed her again and again, and went to bed happy as a prince to
think his mother was his mother once more at the very crisis of
his fate.

The next morning, at ten o'clock, Gerard and Margaret were in the
church at Sevenbergen, he radiant with joy, she with blushes.
Peter was also there, and Martin Wittenhaagen, but no other
friend. Secrecy was everything. Margaret had declined Italy. She
could not leave her father; he was too learned and too helpless.
But it was settled they should retire into Flanders for a few
weeks until the storm should be blown over at Tergou. The cure did
not keep them waiting long, though it seemed an age. Presently he
stood at the altar, and called them to him. They went hand in
hand, the happiest in Holland. The cure opened his book.

But ere he uttered a single word of the sacred rite, a harsh voice
cried "Forbear!" And the constables of Tergou came up the aisle
and seized Gerard in the name of the law. Martin's long knife
flashed out directly.

"Forbear, man!" cried the priest. "What! draw your weapon in a
church, and ye who interrupt this holy sacrament, what means this
impiety?"

"There is no impiety, father," said the burgomaster's servant
respectfully. "This young man would marry against his father's
will, and his father has prayed our burgomaster to deal with him
according to the law. Let him deny it if he can."

"Is this so, young man?"

Gerard hung his head.

"We take him to Rotterdam to abide the sentence of the Duke."

At this Margaret uttered a cry of despair, and the young
creatures, who were so happy a moment ago, fell to sobbing in one
another's arms so piteously, that the instruments of oppression
drew back a step and were ashamed; but one of them that was
good-natured stepped up under pretence of separating them, and
whispered to Margaret:

"Rotterdam? it is a lie. We but take him to our Stadthouse."

They took him away on horseback, on the road to Rotterdam; and,
after a dozen halts, and by sly detours, to Tergou. Just outside
the town they were met by a rude vehicle covered with canvas.
Gerard was put into this, and about five in the evening was
secretly conveyed into the prison of the Stadthouse. He was taken
up several flights of stairs and thrust into a small room lighted
only by a narrow window, with a vertical iron bar. The whole
furniture was a huge oak chest.

Imprisonment in that age was one of the highroads to death. It is
horrible in its mildest form; but in those days it implied cold,
unbroken solitude, torture, starvation, and often poison. Gerard
felt he was in the hands of an enemy.

"Oh, the look that man gave me on the road to Rotterdam. There is
more here than my father's wrath. I doubt I shall see no more the
light of day." And he kneeled down and commended his soul to God.

Presently he rose and sprang at the iron bar of the window, and
clutched it. This enabled him to look out by pressing his knees
against the wall. It was but for a minute; but in that minute he
saw a sight such as none but a captive can appreciate.

Martin Wittenhaagen's back.

Martin was sitting, quietly fishing in the brook near the
Stadthouse.

Gerard sprang again at the window, and whistled. Martin instantly
showed that he was watching much harder than fishing. He turned
hastily round and saw Gerard - made him a signal, and taking up
his line and bow, went quickly off.

Gerard saw by this that his friends were not idle: yet had rather
Martin had stayed. The very sight of him was a comfort. He held
on, looking at the soldier's retiring form as long as he could,
then falling back somewhat heavily. wrenched the rusty iron bar,
held only by rusty nails, away from the stone-work just as
Ghysbrecht Van Swieten opened the door stealthily behind him. The
burgomaster's eye fell instantly on the iron, and then glanced at
the window; but he said nothing. The window was a hundred feet
from the ground; and if Gerard had a fancy for jumping out, why
should he balk it? He brought a brown loaf and a pitcher of water,
and set them on the chest in solemn silence. Gerard's first
impulse was to brain him with the iron bar and fly down the
stairs; but the burgomaster seeing something wicked in his eye.
gave a little cough, and three stout fellows, armed, showed
themselves directly at the door.

"My orders are to keep you thus until you shall bind yourself by
an oath to leave Margaret Brandt, and return to the Church, to
which you have belonged from your cradle."

"Death sooner."

"With all my heart." And the burgomaster retired.

Martin went with all speed to Sevenbergen; there he found Margaret
pale and agitated, but full of resolution and energy. She was just
finishing a letter to the Countess Charolois, appealing to her
against the violence and treachery of Ghysbrecht.

"Courage!" cried Martin on entering. "I have found him. He is in
the haunted tower, right at the top of it. Ay, I know the place:
many a poor fellow has gone up there straight, and come down feet
foremost."

He then told them how he had looked up and seen Gerard's face at a
window that was like a slit in the wall.

"Oh, Martin! how did he look?"

"What mean you? He looked like Gerard Eliassoen."

"But was he pale?"

"A little."

"Looked he anxious? Looked he like one doomed?"

"Nay, nay; as bright as a pewter pot."

"You mock me. Stay! then that must have been at sight of you. He
counts on us. Oh, what shall we do? Martin, good friend, take this
at once to Rotterdam."

Martin held out his hand for the letter.

Peter had sat silent all this time, but pondering, and yet,
contrary to custom, keenly attentive to what was going on around
him.

"Put not your trust in princes," said he.

"Alas! what else have we to trust in?"

"Knowledge."

"Well-a-day,father! your learning will not serve us here."

"How know you that? Wit has been too strong for iron bars ere
to-day.

"Ay, father; but nature is stronger than wit, and she is against
us. Think of the height! No ladder in Holland might reach him."

"I need no ladder; what I need is a gold crown."

"Nay, I have money, for that matter. I have nine angels. Gerard
gave them me to keep; but what do they avail? The burgomaster will
not be bribed to let Gerard free."

"What do they avail? Give me but one crown, and the young man
shall sup with us this night."

Peter spoke so eagerly and confidently, that for a moment Margaret
felt hopeful; but she caught Martin's eye dwelling upon him with
an expression of benevolent contempt.

"It passes the powers of man's invention," said she, with a deep
sigh.

"Invention!" cried the old man. "A fig for invention. What need we
invention at this time of day? Everything has been said that is to
be said, and done that ever will be done. I shall tell you how a
Florentine knight was shut up in a tower higher than Gerard's; yet
did his faithful squire stand at the tower foot and get him out,
with no other engine than that in your hand, Martin, and certain
kickshaws I shall buy for a crown."

Martin looked at his bow, and turned it round in his hand, and
seemed to interrogate it. But the examination left him as
incredulous as before.

Then Peter told them his story, how the faithful squire got the
knight out of a high tower at Brescia. The manoeuvre, like most
things that are really scientific, was so simple. that now their
wonder was they had taken for impossible what was not even
difficult.

The letter never went to Rotterdam. They trusted to Peter's
learning and their own dexterity.

It was nine o'clock on a clear moonlight night; Gerard, senior,
was still away; the rest of his little family had been some time
abed.

A figure stood by the dwarf's bed. It was white, and the moonlight
shone on it.

With an unearthly noise, between a yell and a snarl, the gymnast
rolled off his bed and under it by a single unbroken movement. A
soft voice followed him in his retreat.

"Why, Giles, are you afeard of me?"

At this, Giles's head peeped cautiously up, and he saw it was only
his sister Kate.

She put her finger to her lips. "Hush! lest the wicked Cornelis or
the wicked Sybrandt hear us." Giles's claws seized the side of the
bed, and he returned to his place by one undivided gymnastic.

Kate then revealed to Giles that she had heard Cornelis and
Sybrandt mention Gerard's name; and being herself in great anxiety
at his not coming home all day, had listened at their door, and
had made a fearful discovery. Gerard was in prison, in the haunted
tower of the Stadthouse. He was there, it seemed, by their
father's authority. But here must be some treachery; for how could
their father have ordered this cruel act? He was at Rotterdam. She
ended by entreating Giles to bear her company to the foot of the
haunted tower, to say a word of comfort to poor Gerard, and let
him know their father was absent, and would be sure to release him
on his return.

"Dear Giles, I would go alone, but I am afeard of the spirits that
men say do haunt the tower; but with you I shall not be afeard."

"Nor I with you," said Giles. "I don't believe there are any
spirits in Tergou. I never saw one. This last was the likest one
ever I saw; and it was but you, Kate, after all."

In less than half an hour Giles and Kate opened the housedoor
cautiously and issued forth. She made him carry a lantern, though
the night was bright. "The lantern gives me more courage against
the evil spirits," said she.

The first day of imprisonment is very trying, especially if to the
horror of captivity is added the horror of utter solitude. I
observe that in our own day a great many persons commit suicide
during the first twenty-four hours of the solitary cell. This is
doubtless why our Jairi abstain so carefully from the impertinence
of watching their little experiment upon the human soul at that
particular stage of it.

As the sun declined, Gerard's heart too sank and sank; with the
waning light even the embers of hope went out. He was faint, too,
with hunger; for he was afraid to eat the food Ghysbrecht had
brought him; and hunger alone cows men. He sat upon the chest, his
arms and his head drooping before him, a picture of despondency.
Suddenly something struck the wall beyond him very sharply, and
then rattled on the floor at his feet. It was an arrow; he saw the
white feather. A chill ran through him - they meant then to
assassinate him from the outside. He crouched. No more missiles
came. He crawled on all fours, and took up the arrow; there was no
head to it. He uttered a cry of hope: had a friendly hand shot it?
He took it up, and felt it all over: he found a soft substance
attached to it. Then one of his eccentricities was of grand use to
him. His tinder-box enabled him to strike a light: it showed him
two things that made his heart bound with delight, none the less
thrilling for being somewhat vague. Attached to the arrow was a
skein of silk, and on the arrow itself were words written.

How his eyes devoured them, his heart panting the while!

Well beloved, make fast the silk to thy knife and lower to us: but
hold thine end fast: then count an hundred and draw up.

Gerard seized the oak chest, and with almost superhuman energy
dragged it to the window: a moment ago he could not have moved it.
Standing on the chest and looking down, he saw figures at the
tower foot. They were so indistinct, they looked like one huge
form. He waved his bonnet to them with trembling hand: then he
undid the silk rapidly but carefully, and made one end fast to his
knife and lowered it till it ceased to draw. Then he counted a
hundred. Then pulled the silk carefully up: it came up a little
heavier. At last he came to a large knot, and by that knot a stout
whipcord was attached to the silk. What could this mean? While he
was puzzling himself Margaret's voice came up to him, low but
clear. "Draw up, Gerard, till you see liberty." At the word Gerard
drew the whipcord line up, and drew and drew till he came to
another knot, and found a cord of some thickness take the place of
the whipcord. He had no sooner begun to draw this up, than he
found that he had now a heavy weight to deal with. Then the truth
suddenly flashed on him, and he went to work and pulled and pulled
till the perspiration rolled down him: the weight got heavier and
heavier, and at last he was well-nigh exhausted: looking down, he
saw in the moonlight a sight that revived him: it was as it were a
great snake coming up to him out of the deep shadow cast by the
tower. He gave a shout of joy, and a score more wild pulls, and
lo! a stout new rope touched his hand: he hauled and hauled, and
dragged the end into his prison, and instantly passed it through
both handles of the chest in succession, and knotted it firmly;
then sat for a moment to recover his breath and collect his
courage. The first thing was to make sure that the chest was
sound, and capable of resisting his weight poised in mid-air. He
jumped with all his force upon it. At the third jump the whole
side burst open, and out scuttled the contents, a host of
parchments.

After the first start and misgiving this gave him, Gerard
comprehended that the chest had not burst, but opened: he had
doubtless jumped upon some secret spring. Still it shook in some
degree his confidence in the chest's powers of resistance; so he
gave it an ally: he took the iron bar and fastened it with the
small rope across the large rope, and across the window. He now
mounted the chest, and from the chest put his foot through the
window, and sat half in and half out, with one hand on that part
of the rope which was inside. In the silent night he heard his own
heart beat.

The free air breathed on his face, and gave him the courage to
risk what we must all lose one day - for liberty. Many dangers
awaited him, but the greatest was the first getting on to the rope
outside. Gerard reflected. Finally, he put himself in the attitude
of a swimmer, his body to the waist being in the prison, his legs
outside. Then holding the inside rope with both hands, he felt
anxiously with his feet for the outside rope, and when he had got
it, he worked it in between the palms of his feet, and kept it
there tight: then he uttered a short prayer, and, all the calmer
for it, put his left hand on the sill and gradually wriggled out.
Then he seized the iron bar, and for one fearful moment hung
outside from it by his right hand, while his left hand felt for
the rope down at his knees; it was too tight against the wall for
his fingers to get round it higher up. The moment he had fairly
grasped it, he left the bar, and swiftly seized the rope with the
right hand too; but in this manoeuvre his body necessarily fell
about a yard. A stifled cry came up from below. Gerard hung in
mid-air. He clenched his teeth, and nipped the rope tight with his
feet and gripped it with his hands, and went down slowly hand
below hand. He passed by one huge rough stone after another. He
saw there was green moss on one. He looked up and he looked down.
The moon shone into his prison window: it seemed very near. The
fluttering figures below seemed an awful distance. It made him
dizzy to look down: so he fixed his eyes steadily on the wall
close to him, and went slowly down, down, down.

He passed a rusty, slimy streak on the wall: it was some ten feet
long. The rope made his hands very hot. He stole another look up.

The prison window was a good way off now.

Down - down - down - down.

The rope made his hands sore.

He looked up. The window was so distant, he ventured now to turn
his eyes downward again; and there, not more than thirty feet
below him, were Margaret and Martin, their faithful hands
upstretched to catch him should he fall. He could see their eyes
and their teeth shine in the moonlight. For their mouths were
open, and they were breathing hard.

"Take care, Gerard oh, take care! Look not down."

"Fear me not," cried Gerard joyfully, and eyed the wall, but came
down faster.

In another minute his feet were at their hands. They seized him
ere he touched the ground, and all three clung together in one
embrace.

"Hush! away in silence, dear one."

They stole along the shadow of the wall.

Now, ere they had gone many yards, suddenly a stream of light shot
from an angle of the building, and lay across their path like a
barrier of fire, and they heard whispers and footsteps close at
hand.

"Back!" hissed Martin. "Keep in the shade."

They hurried back, passed the dangling rope, and made for a little
square projecting tower. They had barely rounded it when the light
shot trembling past them, and flickered uncertainly into the
distance.

"A lantern!" groaned Martin in a whisper. "They are after us."

"Give me my knife," whispered Gerard. "I'll never be taken alive."

"No, no!" murmured Margaret; "is there no way out where we are?"

"None! none! But I carry six lives at my shoulder;" and with the
word, Martin strung his bow, and fitted an arrow to the string:
"in war never wait to be struck: I will kill one or two ere they
shall know where their death comes from:" then, motioning his
companions to be quiet he began to draw his bow, and, ere the
arrow was quite drawn to the head, he glided round the corner
ready to loose the string the moment the enemy should offer a
mark.

Gerard and Margaret held their breath in horrible expectation:
they had never seen a human being killed.

And now a wild hope, but half repressed, thrilled through Gerard,
that this watchful enemy might be the burgomaster in person. The
soldier, he knew, would send an arrow through a burgher or
burgomaster, as he would through a boar in a wood.

But who may foretell the future, however near? The bow, instead of
remaining firm, and loosing the deadly shaft, was seen to waver
first, then shake violently, and the stout soldier staggered back
to them, his knees knocking and his cheeks blanched with fear. He
let his arrow fall, and clutched Gerard's shoulder.

"Let me feel flesh and blood," he gasped. "The haunted tower! the
haunted tower!"

His terror communicated itself to Margaret and Gerard. They gasped
rather than uttered an inquiry.

"Hush!" he cried, "it will hear you. up the wall! it is going up
the wall! Its head is on fire. Up the wall, as mortal creatures
walk upon green sward. If you know a prayer, say it, for hell is
loose to-night."

"I have power to exorcise spirits," said Gerard, trembling. "I
will venture forth."

"Go alone then," said Martin; "I have looked on't once, and live.

CHAPTER XI

The strange glance of hatred the burgomaster had cast on Gerard,
coupled with his imprisonment, had filled the young man with a
persuasion that Ghysbrecht was his enemy to the death, and he
glided round the angle of the tower, fully expecting to see no
supernatural appearance, but some cruel and treacherous
contrivance of a bad man to do him a mischief in that prison, his
escape from which could hardly be known.

As he stole forth, a soft but brave hand crept into his; and
Margaret was by his side, to share this new peril.

No sooner was the haunted tower visible, than a sight struck their
eyes that benumbed them as they stood. More than halfway up the
tower, a creature with a fiery head, like an enormous glowworm,
was steadily mounting the wall: the body was dark, but its outline
visible through the glare from the head, and the whole creature
not much less than four feet long.

At the foot of the tower stood a thing in white, that looked
exactly like the figure of a female. Gerard and Margaret
palpitated with awe.

"The rope! the rope! It is going up the rope," gasped Gerard.

As they gazed, the glowworm disappeared in Gerard's late prison,
but its light illuminated the cell inside and reddened the window.
The white figure stood motionless below.

Such as can retain their senses after the first prostrating effect
of the supernatural are apt to experience terror in one of its
strangest forms, a wild desire to fling themselves upon the
terrible object. It fascinates them as the snake the bird. The
great tragedian Macready used to render this finely in Macbeth, at
Banquo's second appearance. He flung himself with averted head at
the horrible shadow. This strange impulse now seized Margaret. She
put down Gerard's hand quietly, and stood bewildered; then, all in
a moment, with a wild cry, darted towards the spectre. Gerard, not
aware of the natural impulse I have spoken of, never doubted the
evil one was drawing her to her perdition. He fell on his knees.

"Exorcizo vos. In nomine beatae Mariae, exorcizo vos."

While the exorcist was shrieking his incantations in extremity of
terror, to his infinite relief he heard the spectre utter a feeble
cry of fear. To find that hell had also its little weaknesses was
encouraging. He redoubled his exorcisms, and presently he saw the
ghastly shape kneeling at Margaret's knees, and heard it praying
piteously for mercy.

Kate and Giles soon reached the haunted tower. Judge their
surprise when they found a new rope dangling from the prisoner's
window to the ground.

"I see how it is," said the inferior intelligence, taking facts as
they came. "Our Gerard has come down this rope. He has got clear.
Up I go, and see."

"No, Giles, no!" said the superior intelligence, blinded by
prejudice. "See you not this is glamour? This rope is a line the
evil one casts out to wile thee to destruction. He knows the
weaknesses of all our hearts; he has seen how fond you are of
going up things. Where should our Gerard procure a rope? how
fasten it in the sky like this? It is not in nature. Holy saints
protect us this night, for hell is abroad."

"Stuff!" said the dwarf; "the way to hell is down, and this rope
leads up. I never had the luck to go up such a long rope. It may
be years ere I fall in with such a long rope all ready for me. As
well be knocked on the head at once as never know happiness."

And he sprung on to the rope with a cry of delight. as a cat jumps
with a mew on to a table where fish is. All the gymnast was on
fire; and the only concession Kate could gain from him was
permission to fasten the lantern on his neck first.

"A light scares the ill spirits," said she.

And so, with his huge arms, and his legs like feathers, Giles went
up the rope faster than his brother came down it. The light at the
nape of his neck made a glowworm of him. His sister watched his
progress, with trembling anxiety. Suddenly a female figure started
out of the solid masonry. and came flying at her with more than
mortal velocity.

Kate uttered a feeble cry. It was all she could, for her tongue
clove to her palate with terror. Then she dropped her crutches,
and sank upon her knees, hiding her face and moaning:

"Take my body, but spare my soul!"

Margaret (panting). "Why, it is a woman!"

Kate (quivering). "Why, it is a woman!"

Margaret. "How you scared me!"

Kate. "I am scared enough myself. Oh! oh! oh!"

"This is strange! But the fiery-headed thing? Yet it was with you.
and you are harmless! But why are you here at this time of night?"

"Nay. why are YOU?"

"Perhaps we are on the same errand? Ah! you are his good sister,
Kate!"

"And you are Margaret Brandt."

"Yes.

"All the better. You love him; you are here. Then Giles was right.
He has won free."

Gerard came forward, and put the question at rest. But all further
explanation was cut short by a horrible unearthly noise, like a
sepulchre ventriloquizing:

"PARCHMENT! - PARCHMENT! - PARCHMENT!"

At each repetition, it rose in intensity. They looked up. and
there was the dwarf, with his hands full of parchments, and his
face lighted with fiendish joy and lurid with diabolical fire. The
light being at his neck, a more infernal "transparency" never
startled mortal eye. With the word, the awful imp hurled parchment
at the astonished heads below. Down came records, like wounded
wild-ducks; some collapsed, others fluttering, and others spread
out and wheeling slowly down in airy circles. They had hardly
settled, when again the sepulchral roar was heard - "Parchment
-parchment!" and down pattered and sailed another flock of
documents: another followed: they whitened the grass. Finally, the
fire-headed imp, with his light body and horny hands, slid down
the rope like a falling star, and (business before sentiment)
proposed to his rescued brother an immediate settlement for the
merchandise he had just delivered.

"Hush!" said Gerard; "you speak too loud. Gather them up. and
follow us to a safer place than this."

"Will you come home with me, Gerard?" said little Kate.

"I have no home."

"You shall not say so. Who is more welcome than you will be, after
this cruel wrong, to your father's house?

"Father! I have no father," said Gerard sternly. "He that was my
father is turned my gaoler. I have escaped from his hands; I will
never come within their reach again."

"An enemy did this, and not our father."

And she told him what she had overheard Cornelis and Sybrandt say.
But the injury was too recent to be soothed. Gerard showed a
bitterness of indignation he had hitherto seemed incapable of.

"Cornelis and Sybrandt are two ill curs that have shown me their
teeth and their heart a long while; but they could do no more. My
father it is that gave the burgomaster authority. or he durst not
have laid a finger on me, that am a free burgher of this town. So
be it, then. I was his son. I am his prisoner. He has played his
part. I shall play mine. Farewell the burgh where I was born, and
lived honestly and was put in prison. While there is another town
left in creation, I'll never trouble you again, Tergou."

"Oh! Gerard! Gerard!"

Margaret whispered her: "Do not gainsay him now. Give his choler
time to cool!"

Kate turned quickly towards her. "Let me look at your face?" The
inspection was favourable, it seemed, for she whispered: "It is a
comely face, and no mischief-maker's."

"Fear me not," said Margaret, in the same tone. "I could not be
happy without your love, as well as Gerard's."

"These are comfortable words," sobbed Kate. Then, looking up, she
said, "I little thought to like you so well. My heart is willing,
but my infirmity will not let me embrace you."

At this hint, Margaret wound gently round Gerard's sister, and
kissed her lovingly.

"Often he has spoken of you to me, Kate; and often I longed for
this."

"You, too, Gerard," said Kate; "kiss me ere you go; for my heart
lies heavy at parting with you this night."

Gerard kissed her, and she went on her crutches home. The last
thing they heard of her was a little patient sigh. Then the tears
came and stood thick in Margaret's eyes. But Gerard was a man, and
noticed not his sister's sigh.

As they turned to go to Sevenbergen, the dwarf nudged Gerard with
his bundle of parchments and held out a concave claw.

Margaret dissuaded Gerard. "Why take what is not ours?"

"Oh, spoil an enemy how you can."

"But may they not make this a handle for fresh violence?"

"How can they? Think you I shall stay in Tergou after this? The
burgomaster robbed me of my liberty; I doubt I should take his
life for it, if I could."

"Oh, fie! Gerard."

"What! Is life worth more than liberty? Well, I can't take his
life, so I take the first thing that comes to hand."

He gave Giles a few small coins, with which the urchin was
gladdened, and shuffled after his sister. Margaret and Gerard were
speedily joined by Martin, and away to Sevenbergen.

CHAPTER XII

Ghysbrecht Van Swieten kept the key of Gerard's prison in his
pouch. He waited till ten of the clock ere he visited for he said
to himself, "A little hunger sometimes does well it breaks 'em."
At ten he crept up the stairs with a loaf and pitcher, followed by
his trusty servant well armed. Ghysbrecht listened at the door.
There was no sound inside. A grim smile stole over his features.
"By this time he will be as down-hearted as Albert Koestein was,"
thought he. He opened the door.

No Gerard.

Ghysbrecht stood stupefied.

Although his face was not visible, his body seemed to lose all
motion in so peculiar a way, and then after a little he fell
trembling so, that the servant behind him saw there was something
amiss, and crept close to him and peeped over his shoulder. At
sight of the empty cell, and the rope, and iron bar, he uttered a
loud exclamation of wonder; but his surprise doubled when his
master, disregarding all else, suddenly flung himself on his knees
before the empty chest, and felt wildly all over it with quivering
hands, as if unwilling to trust his eyes in a matter so important.

The servant gazed at him in utter bewilderment.

"Why, master, what is the matter?"

Ghysbrecht's pale lips worked as if he was going to answer; but
they uttered no sound: his hands fell by his side, and he stared
into the chest.

"Why, master, what avails glaring into that empty box? The lad is
not there. See here! note the cunning of the young rogue; he hath
taken out the bar, and - "

"GONE! GONE! GONE!"

"Gone! What is gone, Holy saints! he is planet-struck!"

"STOP THIEF!" shrieked Ghysbrecht, and suddenly turned, on his
servant and collared him, and shook him with rage. "D'ye stand
there, knave, and see your master robbed? Run! fly! A hundred
crowns to him that finds it me again. No, no! 'tis in vain. Oh,
fool! fool! to leave that in the same room with him. But none ever
found the secret spring before. None ever would but he. It was to
be. It is to be. Lost! lost!" and his years and infirmity now
gained the better of his short-lived frenzy, and he sank on the
chest muttering "Lost! lost!"

"What is lost, master?" asked the servant kindly.

"House and lands and good name," groaned Ghysbrecht, and wrung his
hands feebly.

"WHAT?" cried the servant.

This emphatic word, and the tone of eager curiosity, struck on
Ghysbrecht's ear and revived his natural cunning.

"I have lost the town records," stammered he, and he looked askant
at the man like a fox caught near a hen-roost.

"Oh, is that all?"

"Is't not enough? What will the burghers say to me? What will the
burghs do?" Then he suddenly burst out again, "A hundred crowns to
him who shall recover them; all, mind, all that were in this box.
If one be missing, I give nothing."

"'Tis a bargain, master: the hundred crowns are in my pouch. See
you not that where Gerard Eliassoen is, there are the pieces of
sheepskin you rate so high?"

"That is true; that is true, good Dierich: good faithful Dierich.
All, mind, all that were in the chest."

"Master, I will take the constables to Gerard's house, and seize
him for the theft."

"The theft? ay! good; very good. It is theft. I forgot that. So,
as he is a thief now, we will put him in the dungeons below, where
the toads are and the rats. Dierich, that man must never see
daylight again. 'Tis his own fault; he must be prying. Quick,
quick! ere he has time to talk, you know, time to talk."

In less than half an hour Dierich Brower and four constables
entered the hosier's house, and demanded young Gerard of the
panic-stricken Catherine.

"Alas! what has he done now?" cried she; "that boy will break my
heart."

"Nay, dame, but a trick of youth," said Dierich. "He hath but made
off with certain skins of parchment, in a frolic doubtless but the
burgomaster is answerable to the burgh for their safe keeping, so
he is in care about them; as for the youth, he will doubtless be
quit for a reprimand."

This smooth speech completely imposed on Catherine; but her
daughter was more suspicious, and that suspicion was strengthened
by the disproportionate anger and disappointment Dierich showed
the moment he learned Gerard was not at home, had not been at home
that night.

"Come away then," said he roughly. "We are wasting time." He added
vehemently, "I'll find him if he is above ground."

Affection sharpens the wits, and often it has made an innocent
person more than a match for the wily. As Dierich was going out,
Kate made him a signal she would speak with him privately. He bade
his men go on, and waited outside the door. She joined him.

"Hush!" said she; "my mother knows not. Gerard has left Tergou."

"How?"

"I saw him last night."

"Ay! Where?" cried Dierich eagerly.

"At the foot of the haunted tower."

"How did he get the rope?"

"I know not; but this I know; my brother Gerard bade me there
farewell, and he is many leagues from Tergou ere this. The town,
you know, was always unworthy of him, and when it imprisoned him,
he vowed never to set foot in it again. Let the burgomaster be
content, then. He has imprisoned him, and he has driven him from
his birthplace and from his native land. What need now to rob him
and us of our good name?"

This might at another moment have struck Dierich as good sense;
but he was too mortified at this escape of Gerard and the loss of
a hundred crowns.

"What need had he to steal?" retorted he bitterly.

"Gerard stole not the trash; he but took it to spite the
burgomaster, who stole his liberty; but he shall answer to the
Duke for it, he shall. As for these skins of parchment you keep
such a coil about, look in the nearest brook or stye, and 'tis
odds but you find them."

"Think ye so, mistress? - think ye so?" And Dierich's eyes
flashed. "Mayhap you know 'tis so."

"This I know, that Gerard is too good to steal, and too wise to
load himself with rubbish, going a journey."

"Give you good day, then," said Dierich sharply. "The sheepskin
you scorn, I value it more than the skin of any in Tergou."

And he went off hastily on a false scent.

Kate returned into the house and drew Giles aside.

"Giles, my heart misgives me; breathe not to a soul what I say to
you. I have told Dirk Brower that Gerard is out of Holland, but
much I doubt he is not a league from Tergou."

"Why, where is he, then?"

"Where should he be, but with her he loves? But if so, he must not
loiter. These be deep and dark and wicked men that seek him.
Giles, I see that in Dirk Brower's eye makes me tremble. Oh, why
cannot I fly to Sevenbergen and bid him away? Why am I not lusty
and active like other girls? God forgive me for fretting at His
will; but I never felt till now what it is to be lame and weak and
useless. But you are strong, dear Giles," added she coaxingly;
"you are very strong."

"Yes, I am strong," thundered Perpusillus; then, catching sight of
her meaning, "but I hate to go on foot," he added sulkily.

"Alas! alas! who will help me if you will not? Dear Giles, do you
not love Gerard?"

"Yes, I like him best of the lot. I'll go to Sevenbergen on Peter
Buyskens his mule. Ask you him, for he won't lend her me."

Kate remonstrated. The whole town would follow him. It would be
known whither he was gone, and Gerard be in worse danger than
before.

Giles parried this by promising to ride out of the town the
opposite way, and not turn the mule's head towards Sevenbergen
till he had got rid of the curious.

Kate then assented and borrowed the mule. She charged Giles with a
short but meaning message, and made him repeat it after her over
and over, till he could say it word for word.

Giles started on the mule, and little Kate retired, and did
the last thing now in her power for her beloved brother - prayed
on her knees long and earnestly for his safety.

CHAPTER XIII

Gerard and Margaret went gaily to Sevenbergen in the first flush
of recovered liberty and successful adventure. But these soon
yielded to sadder thoughts. Gerard was an escaped prisoner, and
liable to be retaken and perhaps punished; and therefore he and
Margaret would have to part for a time. Moreover, he had conceived
a hatred to his native place. Margaret wished him to leave the
country for a while, but at the thought of his going to Italy her
heart fainted. Gerard, on the contrary. was reconciled to leaving
Margaret only by his desire to visit Italy, and his strong
conviction that there he should earn money and reputation, and
remove every obstacle to their marriage. He had already told her
all that the demoiselle Van Eyck had said to him. He repeated it,
and reminded Margaret that the gold pieces were only given him to
go to Italy with. The journey was clearly for Gerard's interest.
He was a craftsman and an artist, lost in this boorish place. In
Italy they would know how to value him. On this ground above all
the unselfish girl gave her consent; but many tender tears came
with it, and at that Gerard, young and loving as herself, cried
bitterly with her, and often they asked one another what they had
done, that so many different persons should be their enemies, and
combine, as it seemed, to part them.

They sat hand in hand till midnight, now deploring their hard
fate, now drawing bright and hopeful pictures of the future, in
the midst of which Margaret's tears would suddenly flow, and then
poor Gerard's eloquence would die away in a sigh.

The morning found them resigned to part, but neither had the
courage to say when; and much I doubt whether the hour of parting
ever would have struck.

But about three in the afternoon, Giles, who had made a circuit of
many miles to avoid suspicion, rode up to the door. They both ran
out to him, eager with curiosity.

"Brother Gerard," cried he, in his tremendous tones, "Kate bids
you run for your life. They charge you with theft; you have given
them a handle. Think not to explain. Hope not for justice in
Tergou. The parchments you took, they are but a blind. She hath
seen your death in the men's eyes; a price is on your head. Fly!
For Margaret's sake and all who love you, loiter not life away,
but fly!"

It was a thunder-clap, and left two white faces looking at one
another, and at the terrible messenger.

Then Giles, who had hitherto but uttered by rote what Catherine
bade him, put in a word of his own.

"All the constables were at our house after you, and so was Dirk
Brower. Kate is wise, Gerard. Best give ear to her rede, and fly!"

"Oh, yes, Gerard," cried Margaret wildly. "Fly on the instant. Ah!
those parchments; my mind misgave me: why did I let you take
them?"

"Margaret, they are but a blind: Giles says so. No matter: the old
caitiff shall never see them again; I will not go till I have
hidden his treasure where he shall never find it." Gerard then,
after thanking Giles warmly, bade him farewell, and told him to go
back and tell Kate he was gone. "For I shall be gone ere you reach
home," said he. He then shouted for Martin; and told him what had
happened. and begged him to go a little way towards Tergou, and
watch the road.

"Ay!" said Martin, "and if I see Dirk Brower or any of his men, I
will shoot an arrow into the oak-tree that is in our garden; and
on that you must run into the forest hard by, and meet me at the
weird hunter's spring. Then I will guide you through the wood."

Surprise thus provided against, Gerard breathed again. He went
with Margaret, and while she watched the oak-tree tremblingly,
fearing every moment to see an arrow strike among the branches,
Gerard dug a deep hole to bury the parchments in.

He threw them in, one by one. They were nearly all charters and
records of the burgh; but one appeared to be a private deed
between Floris Brandt, father of Peter, and Ghysbrecht.

"Why, this is as much yours as his," said Gerard. "I will read
this."

"Oh, not now, Gerard, not now," cried Margaret. "Every moment you
lose fills me with fear; and see, large drops of rain are
beginning to fall, and the clouds lower."

Gerard yielded to this remonstrance; but he put the deed into his
bosom, and threw the earth in over the others, and stamped it
down. While thus employed there came a flash of lightning followed
by a peal of distant thunder, and the rain came down heavily.
Margaret and Gerard ran into the house, whither they were speedily
followed by Martin.

"The road is clear," said he, "and a heavy storm coming on."

His words proved true. The thunder came nearer and nearer till it
crashed overhead: the flashes followed one another close, like the
strokes of a whip, and the rain fell in torrents. Margaret hid her
face not to see the lightning. On this, Gerard put up the rough
shutter and lighted a candle. The lovers consulted together, and
Gerard blessed the storm that gave him a few hours more with
Margaret. The sun set unperceived, and still the thunder pealed,
and the lightning flashed, and the rain poured. Supper was set;
but Gerard and Margaret could not eat: the thought that this was
the last time they should sup together choked them. The storm
lulled a little. Peter retired to rest. But Gerard was to go at
peep of day, and neither he nor Margaret could afford to lose an
hour in sleep. Martin sat a while, too; for he was fitting a new
string to his bow, a matter in which he was very nice.

The lovers murmured their sorrows and their love beside him.

Suddenly the old man held up his hand to them to be silent.

They were quiet and listened, and heard nothing. But the next
moment a footstep crackled faintly upon the autumn leaves that lay
strewn in the garden at the back door of the house. To those who
had nothing to fear such a step would have said nothing; but to
those who had enemies it was terrible. For it was a foot trying to
be noiseless.

Martin fitted an arrow to his string and hastily blew out the
candle. At this moment, to their horror, they heard more than one
footstep approach the other door of the cottage, not quite so
noiselessly as the other, but very stealthily - and then a dead
pause.

Their blood froze in their veins.

Oh, Kate, oh, Kate! You said fly on the instant." And Margaret
moaned and wrung her hands in anguish and terror and wild remorse
for having kept Gerard.

"Hush, girl!" said Martin, in a stern whisper.

A heavy knock fell on the door.

And on the hearts within.

CHAPTER XIV

As if this had been a concerted signal, the back door was struck
as rudely the next instant. They were hemmed in. But at these
alarming sounds Margaret seemed to recover some share of
self-possession. She whispered, "Say he was here, but is gone."
And with this she seized Gerard and almost dragged him up the rude
steps that led to her father's sleeping-room. Her own lay next
beyond it.

The blows on the door were repeated.

"Who knocks at this hour?"

"Open, and you will see!"

"I open not to thieves - honest men are all abed now."

"Open to the law, Martin Wittenhaagen, or you shall rue it."

"Why, that is Dirk Brower's voice, I trow. What make you so far
from Tergou?"

"Open, and you will know."

Martin drew the bolt very slowly, and in rushed Dierich and four
more. They let in their companion who was at the back door.

"Now, Martin, where is Gerard Eliassoen?"

"Gerard Eliassoen? Why, he was here but now!"

"Was here?" Dierich's countenance fell. "And where is he now?"

"They say he has gone to Italy. Why, what is to do?"

"No matter. When did he go? Tell me not that he went in such a
storm as this!"

"Here is a coil about Gerard Eliassoen," said Martin
contemptuously. Then he lighted the candle, and seating himself
coolly by the fire, proceeded to whip some fine silk round his
bow-string at the place where the nick of the arrow frets it.

"I'll tell you," said he carelessly. "Know you his brother Giles?
- a little misbegotten imp, all head and arms? Well, he came
tearing over here on a mule, and bawled out something, I was too
far off to hear the creature's words, but only its noise. Any way,
he started Gerard. For as soon as he was gone, there was such
crying and kissing, and then Gerard went away. They do tell me he
has gone to Italy - mayhap you know where that is, for I don't."

Dierich's countenance fell lower and lower at this account. There
was no flaw in it, A cunninger man than Martin would perhaps have
told a lie too many and raised suspicion. But Martin did his task
well. He only told the one falsehood he was bade to tell, and of
his own head invented nothing.

"Mates," said Dierich, "I doubt he speaks sooth. I told the
burgomaster how 'twould be. He met the dwarf galloping Peter
Buyskens's mule from Sevenbergen. 'They have sent that imp to
Gerard,' says he, "'so, then, Gerard is at Sevenbergen.' 'Ah,
master!' says I, ''tis too late now. We should have thought of
Sevenbergen before, instead of wasting our time hunting all the
odd corners of Tergou for those cursed parchments that we shall
never find till we find the man that took 'em. If he was at
Sevenbergen,' quoth I, 'and they sent the dwarf to him, it must
have been to warn him we are after him. He is leagues away by
now,' quoth I. Confound that chalk-faced girl! she has outwitted
us bearded men; and so I told the burgomaster, but he would not
hear reason. A wet jerkin apiece, that is all we shall get, mates,
by this job."

Martin grinned coolly in Dierich's face.

"However," added the latter, "to content the burgomaster, we will
search the house."

Martin turned grave directly.

This change of countenance did not escape Dierich. He reflected a
moment.

"Watch outside two of you, one on each side of the house, that no
one jump from the upper windows. The rest come with me."

And he took the candle and mounted the stairs, followed by three
of his comrades.

Martin was left alone.

The stout soldier hung his head. All had gone so well at first;
and now this fatal turn! Suddenly it occurred to him that all was
not yet lost. Gerard must be either in Peter's room or Margaret's;
they were not so very high from the ground. Gerard would leap out.
Dierich had left a man below; but what then? For half a minute
Gerard and he would be two to one, and in that brief space, what
might not be done?

Martin then held the back door ajar and watched. The light shone
in Peter's room. "Curse the fool!" said he, "is he going to let
them take him like a girl?"

The light now passed into Margaret's bedroom. Still no window was
opened. Had Gerard intended to escape that way, he would not have
waited till the men were in the room. Martin saw that at once, and
left the door, and came to the foot-stair and listened.

He began to think Gerard must have escaped by the window while all
the men were in the house. The longer the silence continued, the
stronger grew this conviction. But it was suddenly and rudely
dissipated.

Faint cries issued from the inner bedroom - Margaret's.

"They have taken him," groaned Martin; "they have got him."

It now flashed across Martin's mind that if they took Gerard away,
his life was not worth a button; and that, if evil befell him,
Margaret's heart would break. He cast his eyes wildly round like
some savage beast seeking an escape, and in a twinkling formed a
resolution terribly characteristic of those iron times and of a
soldier driven to bay. He stepped to each door in turn, and
imitating Dierich Brower's voice, said sharply, "Watch the
window!" He then quietly closed and bolted both doors. He then
took up his bow and six arrows; one he fitted to his string, the
others he put into his quiver. His knife he placed upon a chair
behind him, the hilt towards him; and there he waited at the foot
of the stair with the calm determination to slay those four men,
or be slain by them. Two, he knew, he could dispose of by his
arrows, ere they could get near him, and Gerard and he must take
their chance hand-to-hand with the remaining pair. Besides, he had
seen men panic-stricken by a sudden attack of this sort. Should
Brower and his men hesitate but an instant before closing with
him, he should shoot three instead of two, and then the odds would
be on the right side.

He had not long to wait. The heavy steps sounded in Margaret's
room, and came nearer and nearer.

The light also approached, and voices.

Martin's heart, stout as it was, beat hard, to hear men coming
thus to their death, and perhaps to his; more likely so than not:
for four is long odds in a battlefield of ten feet square. and
Gerard might be bound perhaps, and powerless to help. But this
man, whom we have seen shake in his shoes at a Giles-o'-lanthorn,
never wavered in this awful moment of real danger, but stood
there, his body all braced for combat, and his eye glowing,
equally ready to take life and lose it. Desperate game! to win
which was exile instant and for life, and to lose it was to die
that moment upon that floor he stood on.

Dierich Brower and his men found Peter in his first sleep. They
opened his cupboards, they ran their knives into an alligator he
had nailed to his wall; they looked under his bed: it was a large
room, and apparently full of hiding-places, but they found no
Gerard.

Then they went on to Margaret's room, and the very sight of it was
discouraging - it was small and bare, and not a cupboard in it;
there was, however, a large fireplace and chimney. Dierich's eye
fell on these directly. Here they found the beauty of Sevenbergen
sleeping on an old chest not a foot high, and no attempt made to
cover it; but the sheets were snowy white, and so was Margaret's
own linen. And there she lay, looking like a lily fallen into a
rut.

Presently she awoke, and sat up in the bed, like one amazed; then,
seeing the men, began to scream faintly, and pray for mercy.

She made Dierich Brower ashamed of his errand.

"Here is a to-do," said he, a little confused. "We are not going
to hurt you, my pretty maid. Lie you still, and shut your eyes,
and think of your wedding-night, while I look up this chimney to
see if Master Gerard is there."

"Gerard! in my room?"

"Why not? They say that you and he - "

"Cruel! you know they have driven him away from me - driven him
from his native place. This is a blind. You are thieves; you are
wicked men; you are not men of Sevenbergen, or you would know
Margaret Brandt better than to look for her lover in this room of
all others in the world. Oh, brave! Four great hulking men to
come, armed to the teeth, to insult one poor honest girl! The
women that live in your own houses must be naught, or you would
respect them too much to insult a girl of good character."

"There! come away, before we hear worse," said Dierich hastily.
"He is not in the chimney. Plaster will mend what a cudgel breaks;
but a woman's tongue is a double-edged dagger, and a girl is a
woman with her mother's milk still in her." And he beat a hasty
retreat. "I told the burgomaster how 'twould be."

CHAPTER XV

Where is the woman that cannot act a part? Where is she who will
not do it, and do it well, to save the man she loves? Nature on
these great occasions comes to the aid of the simplest of the sex,
and teaches her to throw dust in Solomon's eyes. The men had no
sooner retired than Margaret stepped out of bed, and opened the
long chest on which she had been lying down in her skirt and
petticoat and stockings, and nightdress over all; and put the lid,
bed-clothes and all, against the wall: then glided to the door and
listened. The footsteps died away through her father's room and
down the stairs.

Now in that chest there was a peculiarity that it was almost
impossible for a stranger to detect. A part of the boarding of the
room had been broken, and Gerard being applied to to make it look
neater, and being short of materials, had ingeniously sawed away a
space sufficient just to admit Margaret's soi-disant bed, and with
the materials thus acquired he had repaired the whole room. As for
the bed or chest, it really rested on the rafters a foot below the
boards. Consequently it was full two feet deep, though it looked
scarce one.

All was quiet. Margaret kneeled and gave thanks to Heaven. Then
she glided from the door and leaned over the chest, and whispered
tenderly, "Gerard!'

Gerard did not reply.

She then whispered a little louder, "Gerard, all is safe, thank
Heaven! You may rise; but oh! be cautious!"

Gerard made no reply.

She laid her hand upon his shoulder - "Gerard!"

No reply.

"Oh, what is this?" she cried, and her hands ran wildly over his
face and his bosom. She took him by the shoulders; she shook him;
she lifted him; but he escaped from her trembling hands, and fell
back, not like a man, but like a body. A great dread fell on her.
The lid had been down. She had lain upon it. The men had been some
time in the room. With all the strength of frenzy she tore him out
of the chest. She bore him in her arms to the window. She dashed
the window open. The sweet air came in. She laid him in it and in
the moonlight. His face was the colour of ashes; his body was all
limp and motionless. She felt his heart. Horror! it was as still
as the rest! Horror of horrors! she had stifled him with her own
body.

The mind cannot all at once believe so great and sudden and
strange a calamity. Gerard, who had got alive into that chest
scarce five minutes ago, how could he be dead?

She called him by all the endearing names that heart could think
or tongue could frame. She kissed him and fondled him and coaxed
him and implored him to speak to her.

No answer to words of love, such as she had never uttered to him
before, nor thought she could utter. Then the poor creature,
trembling all over, began to say over that ashy face little
foolish things that were at once terrible and pitiable.

"Oh, Gerard! I am very sorry you are dead. I am very sorry I have
killed you. Forgive me for not letting the men take you; it would
have been better than this. Oh, Gerard! I am very, very sorry for
what I have done." Then she began suddenly to rave.

"No! no! such things can't be, or there is no God. It is
monstrous. How can my Gerard be dead? How can I have killed my
Gerard? I love him. Oh, God! you know how I love him. He does not.
I never told him. If he knew my heart, he would speak to me, he
would not be so deaf to his poor Margaret. It is all a trick to
make me cry out and betray him; but no! I love him too well for
that. I'll choke first." And she seized her own throat, to check
her wild desire to scream in her terror and anguish.

"If he would but say one word. Oh, Gerard! don't die without a
word. Have mercy on me and scold me, but speak to me: if you are
angry with me, scold me! curse me! I deserve it: the idiot that
killed the man she loved better than herself. Ah I am a murderess.
The worst in all the world. Help! help! I have murdered him. Ah!
ah! ah! ah! ah!"

She tore her hair, and uttered shriek after shriek, so wild, so
piercing, they fell like a knell upon the ears of Dierich Brower
and his men. All started to their feet and looked at one another.

CHAPTER XVI

Martin Wittenhaagen, standing at the foot of the stairs with his
arrow drawn nearly to the head and his knife behind him, was
struck with amazement to see the men come back without Gerard: he
lowered his bow and looked open-mouthed at them. They, for their
part, were equally puzzled at the attitude they had caught him in.

"Why, mates, was the old fellow making ready to shoot at us?"

"Stuff!" said Martin, recovering his stolid composure; "I was but
trying my new string. There! I'll unstring my bow, if you think
that."

"Humph!" said Dierich suspiciously, "there is something more in
you than I understand: put a log on, and let us dry our hides a
bit ere we go."

A blazing fire was soon made, and the men gathered round it, and
their clothes and long hair were soon smoking from the cheerful
blaze. Then it was that the shrieks were heard in Margaret's room.
They all started up, and one of them seized the candle and ran up
the steps that led to the bedrooms.

Martin rose hastily too, and being confused by these sudden
screams, and apprehending danger from the man's curiosity, tried
to prevent him from going there.

At this Dierich threw his arms round him from behind, and called
on the others to keep him. The man that had the candle got clear
away, and all the rest fell upon Martin, and after a long and
fierce struggle, in the course of which they were more than once
all rolling on the floor, with Martin in the middle, they
succeeded in mastering the old Samson, and binding him hand and
foot with a rope they had brought for Gerard.

Martin groaned aloud. He saw the man had made his way to
Margaret's room during the struggle, and here was he powerless.

"Ay, grind your teeth, you old rogue," said Dierich, panting with
the struggle. "You shan't use them."

"It is my belief, mates, that our lives were scarce safe while
this old fellow's bones were free."

"He makes me think this Gerard is not far off," put in another.

"No such luck," replied Dierich. "Hallo, mates. Jorian Ketel is a
long time in that girl's bedroom. Best go and see after him, some
of us."

The rude laugh caused by this remark had hardly subsided, when
hasty footsteps were heard running along over head.

"Oh, here he comes, at last. Well, Jorian, what is to do now up
there

CHAPTER XVII

Jorian Ketel went straight to Margaret's room, and there, to his
infinite surprise, he found the man he had been in search of, pale
and motionless, his head in Margaret's lap, and she kneeling over
him, mute now, and stricken to stone. Her eyes were dilated yet
glazed, and she neither saw the light nor heard the man, nor cared
for anything on earth, but the white face in her lap.

Jorian stood awe-struck, the candle shaking in his hand.

"Why, where was he, then, all the time?"

Margaret heeded him not. Jorian went to the empty chest and
inspected it. He began to comprehend. The girl's dumb and frozen
despair moved him.

"This is a sorry sight," said he; "it is a black night's work: all
for a few skins! Better have gone with us than so. She is past
answering me, poor wench. Stop! let us try whether - "

He took down a little round mirror, no bigger than his hand, and
put it to Gerard's mouth and nostrils, and held it there. When he
withdrew it, it was dull.

"THERE IS LIFE IN HIM!" said Jorian Ketel to himself.

Margaret caught the words instantly, though only muttered, and it
was if a statue should start into life and passion. She rose and
flung her arms round Jorian's neck.

"Oh, bless the tongue that tells me so!" and she clasped the great
rough fellow again and again, eagerly, almost fiercely.

"There, there! let us lay him warm, said Jorian; and in a moment
he raised Gerard and laid him on the bed-clothes. Then he took out
a flask he carried, and filled his hand twice with Schiedamze, and
flung it sharply each time in Gerard's face. The pungent liquor
co-operated with his recovery - he gave a faint sigh. Oh, never
was sound so joyful to human ear! She flew towards him, but then
stopped, quivering for fear she should hurt him. She had lost all
confidence in herself.

"That is right - let him alone," said Jorian; "don't go cuddling
him as you did me, or you'll drive his breath back again. Let him
alone: he is sure to come to. 'Tisn't like as if he was an old
man."

Gerard sighed deeply, and a faint streak of colour stole to his
lips. Jorian made for the door. He had hardly reached it, when he
found his legs seized from behind.

It was Margaret! She curled round his knees like a serpent, and
kissed his hand, and fawned on him. "You won't tell? You have
saved his life; you have not the heart to thrust him back into his
grave, to undo your own good work?"

"No, no! It is not the first time I have done you two a good turn;
'twas I told you in the church whither we had to take him.
Besides, what is Dierich Brower to me? I'll see him hanged ere
I'll tell him. But I wish you'd tell me where the parchments are!
There are a hundred crowns offered for them. That would be a good
windfall for my Joan and the children, you know."

"Ah! they shall have those hundred crowns.

"What! are the things in the house?" asked Jorian eagerly.

"No; but I know where they are; and by God and St. Bavon I swear
you shall have them to-morrow. Come to me for them when you will,
but come alone."

"I were made else. What! share the hundred crowns with Dirk
Brower? And now may my bones rot in my skin if I let a soul know
the poor boy is here."

He then ran off, lest by staying longer he should excite
suspicion, and have them all after him. And Margaret knelt,
quivering from head to foot, and prayed beside Gerard and for
Gerard.

"What is to do?" replied Jorian to Dierich Brower's query; "why,
we have scared the girl out of her wits. She was in a kind of
fit."

"We had better all go and doctor her, then."

"Oh, yes! and frighten her into the churchyard. Her father is a
doctor, and I have roused him, and set him to bring her round. Let
us see the fire, will ye?"

His off-hand way disarmed all suspicion. And soon after the party
agreed that the kitchen of the "Three Kings" was much warmer than
Peter's house, and they departed, having first untied Martin.

"Take note, mate, that I was right, and the burgomaster wrong,"
said Dierich Brower at the door; "I said we should be too late to
catch him, and we were too late."

Thus Gerard, in one terrible night, grazed the prison and the
grave.

And how did he get clear at last? Not by his cunningly contrived
hiding-place, nor by Margaret's ready wit; but by a good impulse
in one of his captors, by the bit of humanity left in a somewhat
reckless fellow's heart, aided by his desire of gain. So mixed and
seemingly incongruous are human motives, so shortsighted our
shrewdest counsels.

They whose moderate natures or gentle fates keep them, in life's
passage, from the fierce extremes of joy and anguish our nature is
capable of, are perhaps the best, and certainly the happiest of
mankind. But to such readers I should try in vain to convey what
bliss unspeakable settled now upon these persecuted lovers, Even
to those who have joyed greatly and greatly suffered, my feeble
art can present but a pale reflection of Margaret's and Gerard's
ecstasy.

To sit and see a beloved face come back from the grave to the
world, to health and beauty, by swift gradations; to see the roses
return to the loved cheek, love's glance to the loved eye, and his
words to the loved mouth - this was Margaret's - a joy to balance
years of sorrow. It was Gerard's to awake from a trance, and find
his head pillowed on Margaret's arm; to hear the woman he adored
murmur new words of eloquent love, and shower tears and tender
kisses and caresses on him. He never knew, till this sweet moment,
how ardently, how tenderly, she loved him. He thanked his enemies.
They wreathed their arms sweetly round each other, and trouble and
danger seemed a world, an age behind them. They called each other
husband and wife. Were they not solemnly betrothed? And had they
not stood before the altar together? Was not the blessing of Holy
Church upon their union? - her curse on all who would part them?

But as no woman's nerves can bear with impunity so terrible a
strain. presently Margaret turned faint, and sank on Gerard's
shoulder, smiling feebly, but quite, quite unstrung. Then Gerard
was anxious, and would seek assistance. But she held him with a
gentle grasp, and implored him not to leave her for a moment.

"While I can lay my hand on you, I feel you are safe, not else.
Foolish Gerard! nothing ails me. I am weak, dearest, but happy,
oh! so happy!"

Then it was Gerard's turn to support that dear head, with its
great waves of hair flowing loose over him, and nurse her, and
soothe her, quivering on his bosom, with soft encouraging words
and murmurs of love, and gentle caresses. Sweetest of all her
charms is a woman's weakness to a manly heart.

Poor things! they were happy. To-morrow they must part. But that
was nothing to them now. They had seen Death, and all other
troubles seemed light as air. While there is life there is hope;
while there is hope there is joy. Separation for a year or two,
what was it to them, who were so young, and had caught a glimpse
of the grave? The future was bright, the present was Heaven: so
passed the blissful hours.

Alas! their innocence ran other risks besides the prison and the
grave. They were in most danger from their own hearts and their
inexperience, now that visible danger there was none.

CHAPTER XVIII

Ghysbrecht Van Swieten could not sleep all night for anxiety. He
was afraid of thunder and lightning, or he would have made one of
the party that searched Peter's house. As soon as the storm ceased
altogether, he crept downstairs, saddled his mule, and rode to the
"Three Kings" at Sevenbergen. There he found his men sleeping,
some on the chairs, some on the tables, some on the floor. He
roused them furiously, and heard the story of their unsuccessful
search, interlarded with praises of their zeal.

"Fool! to let you go without me," cried the burgomaster. "My life
on't he was there all the time. Looked ye under the girl's bed?"

"No; there was no room for a man there."

"How know ye that, if ye looked not?" snarled Ghysbrecht. "Ye
should have looked under her bed, and in it too, and sounded all
the panels with your knives. Come, now, get up, and I shall show
ye how to search."

Dierich Brower got up and shook himself. "If you find him, call me
a horse and no man.

In a few minutes Peter's house was again surrounded.

The fiery old man left his mule in the hands of Jorian Ketel, and,
with Dierich Brower and the others, entered the house.

The house was empty.

Not a creature to be seen, not even Peter. They went upstairs, and
then suddenly one of the men gave a shout, and pointed through
Peter's window, which was open. The others looked, and there, at
some little distance, walking quietly across the fields with
Margaret and Martin, was the man they sought. Ghysbrecht, with an
exulting yell, descended the stairs and flung himself on his mule;
and he and his men set off in hot pursuit.

CHAPTER XIX

Gerard warned by recent peril, rose before daybreak and waked
Martin. The old soldier was astonished. He thought Gerard had
escaped by the window last night. Being consulted as to the best
way for him to leave the country and elude pursuit, he said there
was but one road safe. "I must guide you through the great forest
to a bridle-road I know of. This will take you speedily to a
hostelry, where they will lend you a swift horse; and then a day's
gallop will take you out of Holland. But let us start ere the folk
here quit their beds."

Peter's house was but a furlong and a half from the forest. They
started, Martin with his bow and three arrows, for it was
Thursday; Gerard with nothing but a stout oak staff Peter gave him
for the journey.

Margaret pinned up her kirtle and farthingale, for the road was
wet. Peter went as far as his garden hedge with them, and then
with more emotion than he often bestowed on passing events, gave
the young man his blessing.

The sun was peeping above the horizon as they crossed the stony
field and made for the wood. They had crossed about half, when
Margaret, who kept nervously looking back every now and then,
uttered a cry, and, following her instinct, began to run towards
the wood, screaming with terror all the way.

Ghysbrecht and his men were in hot pursuit.

Resistance would have been madness. Martin and Gerard followed
Margaret's example. The pursuers gained slightly on them; but
Martin kept shouting, "Only win the wood! only win the wood!"

They had too good a start for the men on foot, and their hearts
bounded with hope at Martin's words, for the great trees seemed
now to stretch their branches like friendly arms towards them, and
their leaves like a screen.

But an unforeseen danger attacked them. The fiery old burgomaster
flung himself on his mule, and, spurring him to a gallop, he
headed not his own men only, but the fugitives. His object was to
cut them off. The old man came galloping in a semicircle, and got
on the edge of the wood, right in front of Gerard; the others
might escape for aught he cared.

Margaret shrieked, and tried to protect Gerard by clasping him;
but he shook her off without ceremony.

Ghysbrecht in his ardour forgot that hunted animals turn on the
hunter; and that two men can hate, and two can long to kill the
thing they hate.

Instead of attempting to dodge him, as the burgomaster made sure
he would, Gerard flew right at him, with a savage, exulting cry,
and struck at him with all his heart, and soul and strength. The
oak staff came down on Ghysbrecht's face with a frightful crash,
and laid him under his mule's tail beating the devil's tattoo with
his heels, his face streaming, and his collar spattered with
blood.

The next moment the three were in the wood. The yell of dismay and
vengeance that burst from Ghysbrecht's men at that terrible blow
which felled their leader, told the fugitives that it was now a
race for life or death.

"Why run?" cried Gerard, panting. "You have your bow, and I have
this," and he shook his bloody staff.

"Boy!" roared Martin; "the GALLOWS! Follow me," and he fled into
the wood. Soon they heard a cry like a pack of hounds opening on
sight of the game. The men were in the wood, and saw them flitting
amongst the trees. Margaret moaned and panted as she ran; and
Gerard clenched his teeth and grasped his staff. The next minute
they came to a stiff hazel coppice. Martin dashed into it, and
shouldered the young wood aside as if it were standing corn.

Ere they had gone fifty yards in it they came to four blind paths.

Martin took one. "Bend low," said he. And, half creeping, they
glided along. Presently their path was again intersected with
other little tortuous paths. They took one of them. It seemed to
lead back; but it soon took a turn, and, after a while, brought
them to a thick pine grove, where the walking was good and hard.
There were no paths here; and the young fir-trees were so thick,
you could not see three yards before your nose.

When they had gone some way in this, Martin sat down; and, having
learned in war to lose all impression of danger with the danger
itself, took a piece of bread and a slice of ham out of his
wallet, and began quietly to eat his breakfast.

The young ones looked at him with dismay. He replied to their
looks.

"All Sevenbergen could not find you now; you will lose your purse,
Gerard, long before you get to Italy; is that the way to carry a
purse?"

Gerard looked, and there was a large triangular purse, entangled
by its chains to the buckle and strap of his wallet.

"This is none of mine," said he. "What is in it, I wonder?" and he
tried to detach it; but in passing through the coppice it had
become inextricably entangled in his strap and buckle. "It seems
loath to leave me," said Gerard, and he had to cut it loose with
his knife. The purse, on examination, proved to be well provided
with silver coins of all sizes, but its bloated appearance was
greatly owing to a number of pieces of brown paper folded and
doubled. A light burst on Gerard. "Why, it must be that old
thief's; and see! stuffed with paper to deceive the world!"

The wonder was how the burgomaster's purse came on Gerard.

They hit at last upon the right solution. The purse must have been
at Ghysbrecht's saddle-bow, and Gerard rushing at his enemy, had
unconsciously torn it away, thus felling his enemy and robbing
him, with a single gesture.

Gerard was delighted at this feat, but Margaret was uneasy.

"Throw it away, Gerard, or let Martin take it back. Already they
call you a thief. I cannot bear it."

"Throw it away! give it him back? not a stiver! This is spoil
lawfully won in battle from an enemy. Is it not, Martin?"

"Why, of course. Send him back the brown paper, and you will; but
the purse or the coin - that were a sin."

"Oh, Gerard!" said Margaret, "you are going to a distant land. We
need the goodwill of Heaven. How can we hope for that if we take
what is not ours?"

But Gerard saw it in a different light.

"It is Heaven that gives it me by a miracle, and I shall cherish
it accordingly," said this pious youth. "Thus the favoured people
spoiled the Egyptians, and were blessed."

"Take your own way," said Margaret humbly; "you are wiser than I
am. You are my husband," added she, in a low murmuring voice; is
it for me to gainsay you?"

These humble words from Margaret, who, till that day, had held the
whip-hand, rather surprised Martin for the moment. They recurred
to him some time afterwards, and then they surprised him less.

Gerard kissed her tenderly in return for her wife-like docility.
and they pursued their journey hand in hand, Martin leading the
way, into the depths of the huge forest. The farther they went,
the more absolutely secure from pursuit they felt. Indeed, the
townspeople never ventured so far as this into the trackless part
of the forest.

Impetuous natures repent quickly. Gerard was no sooner out of all
danger than his conscience began to prick him.

"Martin, would I had not struck quite so hard."

"Whom? Oh! let that pass, he is cheap served."

"Martin, I saw his grey hairs as my stick fell on him. I doubt
they will not from my sight this while."

Martin grunted with contempt. "Who spares a badger for his grey
hairs? The greyer your enemy is, the older; and the older the
craftier and the craftier the better for a little killing."

"Killing? killing, Martin? Speak not of killing!" and Gerard shook
all over.

"I am much mistook if you have not," said Martin cheerfully.

"Now Heaven forbid!"

"The old vagabond's skull cracked like a walnut. Aha!"

"Heaven and the saints forbid it!"

"He rolled off his mule like a stone shot out of a cart. Said I to
myself, 'There is one wiped out,'" and the iron old soldier
grinned ruthlessly.

Gerard fell on his knees and began to pray for his enemy's life.

At this Martin lost his patience. "Here's mummery. What! you that
set up for learning, know you not that a wise man never strikes
his enemy but to kill him? And what is all this coil about killing
of old men? If it had been a young one, now. with the joys of life
waiting for him, wine, women, and pillage! But an old fellow at
the edge of the grave, why not shove him in? Go he must, to-day or
to-morrow; and what better place for greybeards? Now, if ever I
should be so mischancy as to last so long as Ghysbrecht did, and
have to go on a mule's legs instead of Martin Wittenhaagen's, and
a back like this (striking the wood of his bow), instead of this
(striking the string), I'll thank and bless any young fellow who
will knock me on the head, as you have done that old shopkeeper;
malison on his memory.

"Oh, culpa mea! culpa mea!" cried Gerard, and smote upon his
breast.

"Look there!" cried Martin to Margaret scornfully, "he is a priest
at heart still - and when he is not in ire, St. Paul, what a
milksop!"

"Tush, Martin!" cried Margaret reproachfully: then she wreathed
her arms round Gerard, and comforted him with the double magic of
a woman's sense and a woman's voice.

"Sweetheart!" murmured she, "you forget: you went not a step out
of the way to harm him, who hunted you to your death. You fled
from him. He it was who spurred on you. Then did you strike; but
in self-defence and a single blow, and with that which was in your
hand. Malice had drawn knife, or struck again and again. How often
have men been smitten with staves not one but many blows, yet no
lives lost! If then your enemy has fallen, it is through his own
malice, not yours, and by the will of God."

"Bless you, Margaret; bless you for thinking so!"

"Yes; but, beloved one, if you have had the misfortune to kill
that wicked man, the more need is there that you fly with haste
from Holland. Oh, let us on."

"Nay, Margaret," said Gerard. "I fear not man's vengeance, thanks
to Martin here and this thick wood: only Him I fear whose eye
pierces the forest and reads the heart of man. If I but struck in
self-defence, 'tis well; but if in hate, He may bid the avenger of
blood follow me to Italy - to Italy? ay, to earth's remotest
bounds."

"Hush!" said Martin peevishly. "I can't hear for your chat."

"What is it?"

"Do you hear nothing, Margaret; my ears are getting old."

Margaret listened, and presently she heard a tuneful sound, like a
single stroke upon a deep ringing bell. She described it so to
Martin.

"Nay, I heard it," said he.

"And so did I," said Gerard; "it was beautiful. Ah! there it is
again. How sweetly it blends with the air. It is a long way off.
It is before us, is it not?"

"No, no! the echoes of this wood confound the ear of a stranger.
It comes from the pine grove."

"What! the one we passed?"

"Why, Martin, is this anything? You look pale."

"Wonderful!" said Martin, with a sickly sneer. "He asks me is it
anything? Come, on, on! at any rate, let us reach a better place
than this."

"A better place - for what?"

"To stand at bay, Gerard," said Martin gravely; "and die like
soldiers, killing three for one."

"What's that sound?"

"IT IS THE AVENGER OF BLOOD."

"Oh, Martin, save him! Oh, Heaven be merciful What new mysterious
peril is this?"

"GIRL, IT'S A BLOODHOUND."

CHAPTER XX

The courage, like the talent, of common men, runs in a narrow
groove. Take them but an inch out of that, and they are done.
Martin's courage was perfect as far as it went. He had met and
baffled many dangers in the course of his rude life, and these
familiar dangers he could face with Spartan fortitude, almost with
indifference; but he had never been hunted by a bloodhound, nor
had he ever seen that brute's unerring instinct baffled by human
cunning. Here then a sense of the supernatural combined with
novelty to ungenteel his heart. After going a few steps, he leaned
on his bow, and energy and hope oozed out of him. Gerard, to whom
the danger appeared slight in proportion as it was distant, urged
him to flight.

"What avails it?" said Martin sadly; "if we get clear of the wood
we shall die cheap; here, hard by, I know a place where we may die
dear."

"Alas! good Martin," cried Gerard, "despair not so quickly; there
must be some way to escape."

"Oh, Martin!" cried Margaret, "what if we were to part company?
Gerard's life alone is forfeit. Is there no way to draw the
pursuit on us twain and let him go safe?"

"Girl, you know not the bloodhound's nature. He is not on this
man's track or that; he is on the track of blood. My life on't
they have taken him to where Ghysbrecht fell, and from the dead
man's blood to the man that shed it that cursed hound will lead
them, though Gerard should run through an army or swim the Meuse."
And again he leaned upon his bow, and his head sank.

The hound's mellow voice rang through the wood.

     A cry more tunable
     Was never halloed to, nor cheered with horn,
     In Crete, in Sparta, or in Thessaly.

Strange that things beautiful should be terrible and deadly' The
eye of the boa-constrictor, while fascinating its prey, is lovely.
No royal crown holds such a jewel; it is a ruby with the emerald's
green light playing ever upon it. Yet the deer that sees it loses
all power of motion, and trembles, and awaits his death and even
so, to compare hearing with sight, this sweet and mellow sound
seemed to fascinate Martin Wittenhaagen. He stood uncertain,
bewildered, and unnerved. Gerard was little better now. Martin's
last words had daunted him, He had struck an old man and shed his
blood, and, by means of that very blood, blood's four-footed
avenger was on his track. Was not the finger of Heaven in this?

Whilst the men were thus benumbed, the woman's brain was all
activity. The man she loved was in danger.

"Lend me your knife," said she to Martin. He gave it her.

"But 'twill be little use in your hands," said he.

Then Margaret did a sly thing. She stepped behind Gerard, and
furtively drew the knife across her arm, and made it bleed freely;
then stooping, smeared her hose and shoes; and still as the blood
trickled she smeared them; but so adroitly that neither Gerard nor
Martin saw. Then she seized the soldier's arm.

"Come, be a man!" she said, "and let this end. Take us to some
thick place, where numbers will not avail our foes."

"I am going," said Martin sulkily. "Hurry avails not; we cannot
shun the hound, and the place is hard by;" then turning to the
left, he led the way, as men go to execution.

He soon brought them to a thick hazel coppice, like the one that
had favoured their escape in the morning.

"There," said he, "this is but a furlong broad, but it will serve
our turn."

"What are we to do?"

"Get through this, and wait on the other side; then as they come
straggling through, shoot three, knock two on the head, and the
rest will kill us."

"Is that all you can think of?" said Gerard.

"That is all."

"Then, Martin Wittenhaagen, I take the lead, for you have lost
your head. Come, can you obey so young a man as I am?"

"Oh, yes, Martin," cried Margaret, "do not gainsay Gerard! He is
wiser than his years."

Martin yielded a sullen assent.

"Do then as you see me do," said Gerard; and drawing his huge
knife, he cut at every step a hazel shoot or two close by the
ground, and turning round twisted them breast-high behind him
among the standing shoots. Martin did the same, but with a dogged
hopeless air. When they had thus painfully travelled through the
greater part of the coppice, the bloodhound's deep bay came nearer
and nearer, less and less musical, louder and sterner.

Margaret trembled.

Martin went down on his stomach and listened.

"I hear a horse's feet."

"No," said Gerard; "I doubt it is a mule's. That cursed Ghysbrecht
is still alive: none other would follow me up so bitterly."

"Never strike your enemy but to slay him," said Martin gloomily.

"I'll hit harder this time, if Heaven gives me the chance," said
Gerard.

At last they worked through the coppice, and there was an open
wood. The trees were large, but far apart, and no escape possible
that way.

And now with the hound's bay mingled a score of voices hooping and
hallooing.

"The whole village is out after us," said Martin.

"I care not," said Gerard. "Listen, Martin. I have made the track
smooth to the dog, but rough to the men, that we may deal with
them apart. Thus the hound will gain on the men, and as soon as he
comes out of the coppice we must kill him,"

"The hound? There are more than one."

"I hear but one."

"Ay! but one speaks, the others run mute; but let the leading
hound lose the scent, then another shall give tongue. There will
be two dogs, at least, or devils in dog's hides."

"Then we must kill two instead of one. The moment they are dead,
into the coppice again, and go right back."

"That is a good thought, Gerard," said Martin, plucking up heart.

"Hush! the men are in the wood."

Gerard now gave his orders in a whisper.

"Stand you with your bow by the side of the coppice - there, in
the ditch. I will go but a few yards to yon oak-tree, and hide
behind it; the dogs will follow me, and, as they come out, shoot
as many as you can, the rest will I brain as they come round the
tree."

Martin's eye flashed. They took up their places.

The hooping and hallooing came closer and closer, and soon even
the rustling of the young wood was heard, and every now and then
the unerring bloodhound gave a single bay.

It was terrible! the branches rustling nearer and nearer, and the
inevitable struggle for life and death coming on minute by minute,
and that death-knell leading it. A trembling hand was laid on
Gerard's shoulder. It made him start violently, strung up as he
was.

"Martin says if we are forced to part company, make for that high
ash-tree we came in by."

"Yes! yes! yes! but go back for Heaven's sake! don't come here,
all out in the open!"

She ran back towards Martin; but, ere she could get to him,
suddenly a huge dog burst out of the coppice, and stood erect a
moment. Margaret cowered with fear, but he never noticed her.
Scent was to him what sight is to us. He lowered his nose an
instant, and the next moment, with an awful yell, sprang straight
at Gerard's tree and rolled head-over-heels dead as a stone,
literally spitted with an arrow from the bow that twanged beside
the coppice in Martin's hand. That same moment out came another
hound and smelt his dead comrade. Gerald rushed out at him; but
ere he could use his cudgel, a streak of white lightning seemed to
strike the hound, and he grovelled in the dust, wounded
desperately, but not killed, and howling piteously.

Gerard had not time to despatch him: the coppice rustled too near:
it seemed alive. Pointing wildly to Martin to go back, Gerard ran
a few yards to the right, then crept cautiously into the thick
coppice just as three men burst out. These had headed their
comrades considerably: the rest were following at various
distances. Gerard crawled back almost on all-fours. Instinct
taught Martin and Margaret to do the same upon their line of
retreat. Thus, within the distance of a few yards, the pursuers
and pursued were passing one another upon opposite tracks.

A loud cry announced the discovery of the dead and the wounded
hound. Then followed a babble of voices, still swelling as fresh
pursuers reached the spot. The hunters, as usual on a surprise,
were wasting time, and the hunted ones were making the most of it.

"I hear no more hounds," whispered Martin to Margaret, and he was
himself again.

It was Margaret's turn to tremble and despair.

"Oh, why did we part with Gerard? They will kill my Gerard, and I
not near him."

"Nay, nay! the head to catch him is not on their shoulders. You
bade him meet us at the ash-tree?"

"And so I did. Bless you, Martin, for thinking of that. To the
ash-tree!"

"Ay! but with less noise."

They were now nearly at the edge of the coppice, when suddenly
they heard hooping and hallooing behind them. The men had
satisfied themselves the fugitives were in the coppice, and were
beating back.

"No matter," whispered Martin to his trembling companion. "We
shall have time to win clear and slip back out of sight by hard
running. Ah!"

He stooped suddenly; for just as he was going to burst out of the
brushwood, his eye caught a figure keeping sentinel. It was
Ghysbrecht Van Swieten seated on his mule; a bloody bandage was
across his nose, the bridge of which was broken; but over this his
eyes peered keenly, and it was plain by their expression he had
heard the fugitives rustle, and was looking out for them. Martin
muttered a terrible oath, and cautiously strung his bow, then with
equal caution fitted his last arrow to the string. Margaret put
her hands to her face, but said nothing. She saw this man must die
or Gerard. After the first impulse she peered through her fingers,
her heart panting to her throat.

The bow was raised, and the deadly arrow steadily drawn to its
head, when at that moment an active figure leaped on Ghysbrecht
from behind so swiftly, it was like a hawk swooping on a pigeon. A
kerchief went over the burgomaster, in a turn of the hand his head
was muffled in it, and he was whirled from his seat and fell
heavily upon the ground, where he lay groaning with terror; and
Gerard jumped down after him.

"Hist, Martin! Martin!"

Martin and Margaret came out, the former openmouthed crying, "Now
fly! fly! while they are all in the thicket; we are saved."

At this crisis, when safety seemed at hand, as fate would have it,
Margaret, who had borne up so bravely till now, began to succumb,
partly from loss of blood.

"Oh, my beloved, fly!" she gasped. "Leave me, for I am faint."

"No! no!" cried Gerard. "Death together, or safety. Ah! the mule!
mount her, you, and I'll run by your side."

In a moment Martin was on Ghysbrecht's mule, and Gerard raised the
fainting girl in his arms and placed her on the saddle, and
relieved Martin of his bow.

"Help! treason! murder! murder!" shrieked Ghysbrecht, suddenly
rising on his hams.

"Silence, cur," roared Gerard, and trode him down again by the
throat as men crush an adder.

"Now, have you got her firm? Then fly! for our lives! for our
lives!"

But even as the mule, urged suddenly by Martin's heel, scattered
the flints with his hind hoofs ere he got into a canter, and even
as Gerard withdrew his foot from Ghysbrecht's throat to run,
Dierich Brower and his five men, who had come back for orders, and
heard the burgomaster's cries, burst roaring out of the coppice on
them.

CHAPTER XXI

Speech is the familiar vent of human thoughts; but there are
emotions so simple and overpowering, that they rush out not in
words, but eloquent sounds. At such moments man seems to lose his
characteristics, and to be merely one of the higher animals; for
these, when greatly agitated, ejaculate, though they cannot speak.

There was something terrible and truly animal, both in the roar of
triumph with which the pursuers burst out of the thicket on our
fugitives, and the sharp cry of terror with which these latter
darted away. The pursuers hands clutched the empty air, scarce two
feet behind them, as they fled for life. Confused for a moment,
like lions that miss their spring, Dierich and his men let Gerard
and the mule put ten yards between them. Then they flew after with
uplifted weapons. They were sure of catching them; for this was
not the first time the parties had measured speed. In the open
ground they had gained visibly on the three this morning, and now,
at last, it was a fair race again, to be settled by speed alone. A
hundred yards were covered in no time. Yet still there remained
these ten yards between the pursuers and the pursued.

This increase of speed since the morning puzzled Dierich Brower.
The reason was this. When three run in company. the pace is that
of the slowest of the three. From Peter's house to the edge of the
forest Gerard ran Margaret's pace; but now he ran his own; for the
mule was fleet, and could have left them all far behind. Moreover,
youth and chaste living began to tell. Daylight grew imperceptibly
between the hunted ones and the hunters. Then Dierich made a
desperate effort, and gained two yards; but in a few seconds
Gerard had stolen them quietly back. The pursuers began to curse.

Martin heard, and his face lighted up. "Courage, Gerard! courage,
brave lad! they are straggling."

It was so. Dierich was now headed by one of his men, and another
dropped into the rear altogether.

They came to a rising ground, not sharp, but long; and here youth,
and grit, and sober living told more than ever.

Ere he reached the top, Dierich's forty years weighed him down
like forty bullets. "Our cake is dough," he gasped. "Take him
dead, if you can't alive;" and he left running, and followed at a
foot's pace. Jorian Ketel tailed off next; and then another, and
so, one by one, Gerard ran them all to a standstill, except one
who kept on stanch as a bloodhound, though losing ground every
minute. His name, if I am not mistaken, was Eric Wouverman.
Followed by him, they came to a rise in the wood, shorter, but
much steeper than the last.

"Hand on mane!" cried Martin.

Gerard obeyed, and the mule helped him up the hill faster even
than he was running before.

At the sight of this manoeuvre, Dierich's man lost heart, and,
being now full eighty yards behind Gerard, and rather more than
that in advance of his nearest comrade, he pulled up short, and,
in obedience to Dierich's order, took down his crossbow, levelled
it deliberately, and just as the trio were sinking out of sight
over the crest of the hill, sent the bolt whizzing among them.

There was a cry of dismay; and, next moment, as if a thunder-bolt
had fallen on them, they were all lying on the ground, mule and
all.

CHAPTER XXII

The effect was so sudden and magical, that the shooter himself was
stupefied for an instant. Then he hailed his companions to join
him in effecting the capture, and himself set off up the hill;
but, ere he had got half way, up rose the figure of Martin
Wittenhaagen with a bent bow in his hand. Eric Wouverman no sooner
saw him in this attitude, than he darted behind a tree, and made
himself as small as possible. Martin's skill with that weapon was
well known, and the slain dog was a keen reminder of it.

Wouverman peered round the bark cautiously: there was the arrow's
point still aimed at him. He saw it shine. He dared not move from
his shelter.

When he had been at peep-ho some minutes, his companions came up
in great force.

Then, with a scornful laugh, Martin vanished, and presently was
heard to ride off on the mule.

All the men ran up together. The high ground commanded a view of a
narrow but almost interminable glade.

They saw Gerard and Margaret running along at a prodigious
distance; they looked like gnats; and Martin galloping after them
ventre a terre.

The hunters were outwitted as well as outrun. A few words will
explain Martin's conduct. We arrive at causes by noting
coincidences; yet, now and then, coincidences are deceitful. As we
have all seen a hare tumble over a briar just as the gun went off,
and so raise expectations, then dash them to earth by scudding
away untouched, so the burgomaster's mule put her foot in a
rabbit-hole at or about the time the crossbow bolt whizzed
innocuous over her head: she fell and threw both her riders.
Gerard caught Margaret, but was carried down by her weight and
impetus; and, behold, the soil was strewed with dramatis personae.

The docile mule was up again directly, and stood trembling. Martin
was next, and looking round saw there was but one in pursuit; on
this he made the young lovers fly on foot, while he checked the
enemy as I have recorded.

He now galloped after his companions, and when after a long race
he caught them, he instantly put Gerard and Margaret on the mule,
and ran by their side till his breath failed, then took his turn
to ride, and so in rotation. Thus the runner was always fresh, and
long ere they relaxed their speed all sound and trace of them was
hopelessly lost to Dierich and his men. These latter went
crestfallen back to look after their chief and their winged
bloodhound.

CHAPTER XXIII

Life and liberty, while safe, are little thought of: for why? they
are matters of course. Endangered, they are rated at their real
value. In this, too, they are like sunshine, whose beauty men
notice not at noon when it is greatest, but towards evening, when
it lies in flakes of topaz under shady elms. Yet it is feebler
then; but gloom lies beside it, and contrast reveals its fire.
Thus Gerard and Margaret, though they started at every leaf that
rustled louder than its fellows, glowed all over with joy and
thankfulness as they glided among the friendly trees in safety and
deep tranquil silence, baying dogs and brutal voices yet ringing
in their mind's ears.

But presently Gerard found stains of blood on Margaret's ankles.

"Martin! Martin! help! they have wounded her: the crossbow!"

"No, no!" said Margaret, smiling to reassure him; "I am not
wounded, nor hurt at all."

"But what is it, then, in Heaven's name?" cried Gerard, in great
agitation.

"Scold me not, then!" and Margaret blushed.

"Did I ever scold you?"

"No, dear Gerard. Well, then, Martin said it was blood those cruel
dogs followed; so I thought if I could but have a little blood on
my shoon, the dogs would follow me instead, and let my Gerard wend
free. So I scratched my arm with Martin's knife - forgive me!
Whose else could I take? Yours, Gerard? Ah, no. You forgive me?"
said she beseechingly, and lovingly and fawningly, all in one.

"Let me see this scratch first," said Gerard, choking with
emotion. "There, I thought so. A scratch? I call it a cut - a
deep, terrible, cruel cut.'

Gerard shuddered at sight of it.

"She might have done it with her bodkin," said the soldier.
"Milksop! that sickens at sight of a scratch and a little blood."

"No, no. I could look on a sea of blood, but not on hers. Oh,
Margaret! how could you be so cruel?"

Margaret smiled with love ineffable. "Foolish Gerard," murmured
she, "to make so much of nothing." And she flung the guilty arm
round his neck. "As if I would not give all the blood in my heart
for you, let alone a few drops from my arm." And with this, under
the sense of his recent danger, she wept on his neck for pity and
love; and he wept with her.

"And I must part from her," he sobbed; "we two that love so dear
-one must be in Holland, one in Italy. Ah me! ah me! ah me!"

At this Margaret wept afresh, but patiently and silently. Instinct
is never off its guard, and with her unselfishness was an
instinct. To utter her present thoughts would be to add to
Gerard's misery at parting, so she wept in silence.

Suddenly they emerged upon a beaten path, and Martin stopped.

"This is the bridle-road I spoke of," said he hanging his head;
"and there away lies the hostelry."

Margaret and Gerard cast a scared look at one another.

"Come a step with me, Martin," whispered Gerard. When he had drawn
him aside, he said to him in a broken voice, "Good Martin, watch
over her for me! She is my wife; yet I leave her. See Martin! here
is gold - it was for my journey; it is no use my asking her to
take it - she would not; but you will for her, will you not? Oh,
Heaven! and is this all I can do for her? Money? But poverty is a
curse. You will not let her want for anything, dear Martin? The
burgomaster's silver is enough for me."

"Thou art a good lad, Gerard. Neither want nor harm shall come to
her. I care more for her little finger than for all the world; and
were she nought to me, even for thy sake would I be a father to
her. Go with a stout heart, and God be with thee going and
coming." And the rough soldier wrung Gerard's hand, and turned his
head away, with unwonted feeling.

After a moment's silence he was for going back to Margaret, but
Gerard stopped him. "No, good Martin; prithee, stay here behind
this thicket, and turn your head away from us, while I-oh, Martin!
Martin!"

By this means Gerard escaped a witness of his anguish at leaving
her he loved, and Martin escaped a piteous sight. He did not see
the poor young things kneel and renew before Heaven those holy
vows cruel men had interrupted. He did not see them cling together
like one, and then try to part, and fail, and return to one
another, and cling again, like drowning, despairing creatures. But
he heard Gerard sob, and sob, and Margaret moan.

At last there was a hoarse cry, and feet pattered on the hard
road.

He started up, and there was Gerard running wildly, with both
hands clasped above his head, in prayer, and Margaret tottering
back towards him with palms extended piteously, as if for help,
and ashy cheek and eyes fixed on vacancy.

He caught her in his arms, and spoke words of comfort to her; but
her mind could not take them in; only at the sound of his voice
she moaned and held him tight, and trembled violently.

He got her on the mule, and put his arm around her, and so,
supporting her frame, which, from being strong like a boy, had now
turned all relaxed and powerless, he took her slowly and sadly
home.

She did not shed one tear, nor speak one word.

At the edge of the wood he took her off the mule, and bade her go
across to her father's house. She did as she was bid.

Martin to Rotterdam. Sevenbergen was too hot for him.

Gerard, severed from her he loved, went like one in a dream. He
hired a horse and a guide at the little hostelry, and rode swiftly
towards the German frontier. But all was mechanical; his senses
felt blunted; trees and houses and men moved by him like objects
seen through a veil. His companions spoke to him twice, but he did
not answer. Only once he cried out savagely, "Shall we never be
out of this hateful country?"

After many hours' riding they came to the brow of a steep hill; a
small brook ran at the bottom.

"Halt!" cried the guide, and pointed across the valley. "Here is
Germany."

"Where?"

"On t'other side of the bourn. No need to ride down the hill, I
trow."

Gerard dismounted without a word, and took the burgomaster's purse
from his girdle: while he opened it, "You will soon be out of this
hateful country," said his guide, half sulkily; "mayhap the one
you are going to will like you no better; any way, though it be a
church you have robbed, they cannot take you, once across that
bourn."

These words at another time would have earned the speaker an
admonition or a cuff. They fell on Gerard now like idle air. He
paid the lad in silence, and descended the hill alone. The brook
was silvery; it ran murmuring over little pebbles, that glittered,
varnished by the clear water; he sat down and looked stupidly at
them. Then he drank of the brook; then he laved his hot feet and
hands in it; it was very cold: it waked him. He rose, and taking a
run, leaped across it into Germany. Even as he touched the strange
land he turned suddenly and looked back. "Farewell, ungrateful
country!" he cried. "But for her it would cost me nought to leave
you for ever, and all my kith and kin, and - the mother that bore
me, and - my playmates, and my little native town. Farewell,
fatherland - welcome the wide world! omne so-lum for-ti p
p-at-r-a." And with these brave words in his mouth he drooped
suddenly with arms and legs all weak, and sat down and sobbed
bitterly upon the foreign soil.

When the young exile had sat a while bowed down, he rose and
dashed the tears from his eyes like a man; and not casting a
single glance more behind him, to weaken his heart, stepped out
into the wide world.

His love and heavy sorrow left no room in him for vulgar
misgivings. Compared with rending himself from Margaret, it seemed
a small thing to go on foot to Italy in that rude age.

All nations meet in a convent. So, thanks to his good friends the
monks, and his own thirst of knowledge, he could speak most of the
languages needed on that long road. He said to himself, "I will
soon be at Rome; the sooner the better now."

After walking a good league, he came to a place where four
ways met. Being country roads, and serpentine, they had puzzled
many an inexperienced neighbour passing from village to village.
Gerard took out a little dial Peter had given him, and set it in
the autumn sun, and by this compass steered unhesitatingly
for Rome inexperienced as a young swallow flying south; but
unlike the swallow, wandering south alone.

CHAPTER XXIV

Not far on this road he came upon a little group. Two men in sober
suits stood leaning lazily on each side of a horse, talking to one
another. The rider, in a silk doublet and bright green jerkin and
hose, both of English cloth, glossy as a mole, lay flat on his
stomach in the afternoon sun, and looked an enormous lizard. His
velvet cloak (flaming yellow) was carefully spread over the
horse's loins.

"Is aught amiss?" inquired Gerard.

"Not that I wot of," replied one of the servants.

"But your master, he lies like a corpse. Are ye not ashamed to let
him grovel on the ground?"

"Go to; the bare ground is the best cure for his disorder. If you
get sober in bed, it gives you a headache; but you leap up from
the hard ground like a lark in spring. Eh, Ulric?"

"He speaks sooth, young man," said Ulric warmly.

"What, is the gentleman drunk?"

The servants burst into a hoarse laugh at the simplicity of
Gerard's question. But suddenly Ulric stopped, and eyeing him all
over, said very gravely, "Who are you, and where born, that know
not the Count is ever drunk at this hour?" And Gerard found
himself a suspected character.

"I am a stranger," said he, "but a true man, and one that loves
knowledge; therefore ask I questions, and not for love of prying."

"If you be a true man," said Ulric shrewdly, "then give us
trinkgeld for the knowledge we have given you."

Gerard looked blank, but putting a good face on it, said,
"Trinkgeld you shall have, such as my lean purse can spare, an if
you will tell me why ye have ta'en his cloak from the man and laid
it on the beast."

Under the inspiring influence of coming trinkgeld, two solutions
were instantly offered Gerard at once: the one was, that should
the Count come to himself (which, being a seasoned toper, he was
apt to do all in a minute), and find his horse standing sweating
in the cold, while a cloak lay idle at hand, he would fall to
cursing, and peradventure to laying on; the other, more
pretentious, was, that a horse is a poor milksop, which, drinking
nothing but water, has to be cockered up and warmed outside; but a
master, being a creature ever filled with good beer, has a store
of inward heat that warms him to the skin, and renders a cloak a
mere shred of idle vanity.

Each of the speakers fell in love with his theory, and, to tell
the truth, both had taken a hair or two of the dog that had bitten
their master to the brain; so their voices presently rose so high,
that the green sot began to growl instead of snoring. In their
heat they did not notice this.

Ere long the argument took a turn that sooner or later was pretty
sure to enliven a discussion in that age. Hans, holding the bridle
with his right hand, gave Ulric a sound cuff with his left; Ulric
returned it with interest, his right hand being free; and at it
they went, ding dong, over the horse's mane, pommelling one
another, and jagging the poor beast, till he ran backward, and
trode with iron heel upon a promontory of the green lord; he, like
the toad stung by Ithuriel's spear, started up howling, with one
hand clapped to the smart and the other tugging at his hilt. The
servants, amazed with terror, let the horse go; he galloped off
whinnying, the men in pursuit of him crying out with fear, and the
green noble after them, volleying curses, his naked sword in his
hand, and his body rebounding from hedge to hedge in his headlong
but zigzag career down the narrow lane.

"In which hurtling" Gerard turned his back on them all, and went
calmly south, glad to have saved the four tin farthings he had got
ready for trinkgeld, but far too heavy hearted even to smile at
their drunken extravagance.

The sun was nearly setting, and Gerard, who had now for some time
been hoping in vain to find an inn by the way, was very ill at
ease. To make matters worse, black clouds gathered over the sky.

Gerard quickened his pace almost to a run.

It was in vain; down came the rain in torrents, drenched the
bewildered traveller, and seemed to extinguish the very sun-for
his rays, already fading, could not cope with this new assailant.

Gerard trudged on, dark, and wet, and in an unknown region. "Fool!
to leave Margaret," said he.

Presently the darkness thickened.

He was entering a great wood. Huge branches shot across the narrow
road, and the benighted stranger groped his way in what seemed an
interminable and inky cave with a rugged floor, on which he
stumbled and stumbled as he went.

On, and on, and on, with shivering limbs and empty stomach, and
fainting heart, till the wolves rose from their lairs and bayed
all round the wood.

His hair bristled; but he grasped his cudgel, and prepared to sell
his life dear.

There was no wind; and his excited ear heard light feet patter at
times over the newly fallen leaves, and low branches rustle with
creatures gliding swiftly past them.

Presently in the sea of ink there was a great fiery star close to
the ground. He hailed it as he would his patron saint. "CANDLE! a
CANDLE!" he shouted, and tried to run. But the dark and rugged way
soon stopped that. The light was more distant than he had thought.
But at last, in the very heart of the forest, he found a house,
with lighted candles and loud voices inside it. He looked up to
see if there was a signboard. There was none. "Not an inn after
all!" said he sadly. "No matter; what Christian would turn a dog
out into this wood to-night?" and with this he made for the door
that led to the voices. He opened it slowly, and put his head in
timidly. He drew it out abruptly, as if slapped in the face, and
recoiled into the rain and darkness.

He had peeped into a large but low room, the middle of which was
filled by a huge round stove, or clay oven, that reached to the
ceiling; round this, wet clothes were drying-some on lines, and
some more compendiously, on rustics. These latter habiliments,
impregnated with the wet of the day, but the dirt of a life, and
lined with what another foot traveller in these parts call
"rammish clowns," evolved rank vapours and compound odours
inexpressible, in steaming clouds.

In one corner was a travelling family, a large one: thence flowed
into the common stock the peculiar sickly smell of neglected
brats. Garlic filled up the interstices of the air. And all this
with closed window, and intense heat of the central furnace, and
the breath of at least forty persons.

They had just supped.

Now Gerard, like most artists, had sensitive organs, and the
potent effluvia struck dismay into him. But the rain lashed him
outside, and the light and the fire tempted him in.

He could not force his way all at once through the palpable
perfumes, but he returned to the light again and again, like the
singed moth. At last he discovered that the various smells did not
entirely mix, no fiend being there to stir them round. Odour of
family predominated in two corners; stewed rustic reigned supreme
in the centre; and garlic in the noisy group by the window. He
found, too, by hasty analysis, that of these the garlic described
the smallest aerial orbit, and the scent of reeking rustic darted
farthest - a flavour as if ancient goats, or the fathers of all
foxes, had been drawn through a river, and were here dried by
Nebuchadnezzar.

So Gerard crept into a corner close to the door. But though the
solidity of the main fetors isolated them somewhat, the heat and
reeking vapours circulated, and made the walls drip; and the
home-nurtured novice found something like a cold snake wind about
his legs, and his head turn to a great lump of lead; and next, he
felt like choking, sweetly slumbering, and dying, all in one.

He was within an ace of swooning, but recovered to a deep sense of
disgust and discouragement; and settled to go back to Holland at
peep of day. This resolution formed, he plucked up a little heart;
and being faint with hunger, asked one of the men of garlic
whether this was not an inn after all?

"Whence come you, who know not 'The Star of the Forest'?" was the
reply.

"I am a stranger; and in my country inns have aye a sign."

"Droll country yours! What need of a sign to a public-house -a
place that every soul knows?"

Gerard was too tired and faint for the labour of argument, so he
turned the conversation, and asked where he could find the
landlord?

At this fresh display of ignorance, the native's contempt rose too
high for words. He pointed to a middle-aged woman seated on the
other side of the oven; and turning to his mates, let them know
what an outlandish animal was in the room. Thereat the loud voices
stopped, one by one, as the information penetrated the mass; and
each eye turned, as on a pivot, following Gerard, and his every
movement, silently and zoologically.

The landlady sat on a chair an inch or two higher than the rest,
between two bundles. From the first, a huge heap of feathers and
wings, she was taking the downy plumes, and pulling the others
from the quills, and so filling bundle two littering the floor
ankle-deep, and contributing to the general stock a stuffy little
malaria, which might have played a distinguished part in a sweet
room, but went for nothing here. Gerard asked her if he could have
something to eat.

She opened her eyes with astonishment. "Supper is over this hour
and more.

"But I had none of it, good dame."

"Is that my fault? You were welcome to your share for me."

"But I was benighted, and a stranger; and belated sore against my
will."

"What have I to do with that? All the world knows 'The Star of the
Forest' sups from six till eight. Come before six, ye sup well;
come before eight, ye sup as pleases Heaven; come after eight, ye
get a clean bed, and a stirrup cup, or a horn of kine's milk, at
the dawning."

Gerard looked blank. "May I go to bed, then, dame?" said he
sulkily "for it is ill sitting up wet and fasting, and the byword
saith, 'He sups who sleeps.'"

"The beds are not come yet," replied the landlady. "You will sleep
when the rest do. Inns are not built for one.

It was Gerard's turn to be astonished. "The beds were not come!
what, in Heaven's name, did she mean?" But he was afraid to ask
for every word he had spoken hitherto had amazed the assembly, and
zoological eyes were upon him-he felt them. He leaned against the
wall, and sighed audibly.

At this fresh zoological trait, a titter went round the watchful
company.

"So this is Germany," thought Gerard; "and Germany is a great
country by Holland. Small nations for me."

He consoled himself by reflecting it was to be his last, as well
as his first, night in the land. His reverie was interrupted by an
elbow driven into his ribs. He turned sharp on his assailant, who
pointed across the room. Gerard looked, and a woman in the corner
was beckoning him. He went towards her gingerly, being surprised
and irresolute, so that to a spectator her beckoning finger seemed
to be pulling him across the floor with a gut-line. When he had
got up to her, "Hold the child," said she, in a fine hearty voice;
and in a moment she plumped the bairn into Gerard's arms.

He stood transfixed, jelly of lead in his hands, and sudden horror
in his elongated countenance.

At this ruefully expressive face, the lynx-eyed conclave laughed
loud and long.

"Never heed them," said the woman cheerfully; "they know no
better; how should they, bred an' born in a wood?" She was
rummaging among her clothes with the two penetrating hands, one of
which Gerard had set free. Presently she fished out a small tin
plate and a dried pudding; and resuming her child with one arm,
held them forth to Gerard with the other, keeping a thumb on the
pudding to prevent it from slipping off.

"Put it in the stove," said she; "you are too young to lie down
fasting."

Gerard thanked her warmly. But on his way to the stove, his eye
fell on the landlady. "May I, dame?" said he beseechingly.

"Why not?" said she.

The question was evidently another surprise, though less startling
than its predecessors.

Coming to the stove, Gerard found the oven door obstructed by "the
rammish clowns." They did not budge. He hesitated a moment. The
landlady saw, calmly put down her work, and coming up, pulled a
hircine man or two hither, and pushed a hircine man or two
thither, with the impassive countenance of a housewife moving her
furniture. "Turn about is fair play," she said; "ye have been dry
this ten minutes and better."

Her experienced eye was not deceived; Gorgonii had done stewing,
and begun baking. Debarred the stove, they trundled home, all but
one, who stood like a table, where the landlady had moved him to,
like a table. And Gerard baked his pudding; and getting to the
stove, burst into steam.

The door opened, and in flew a bundle of straw.

It was hurled by a hind with a pitchfork. Another and another came
flying after it, till the room was like a clean farm- yard. These
were then dispersed round the stove in layers, like the seats in
an arena, and in a moment the company was all on its back.

The beds had come.

Gerard took out his pudding, and found it delicious. While he was
relishing it, the woman who had given it him, and who was now
abed, beckoned him again. He went to her bundle side. "She is
waiting for you," whispered the woman. Gerard returned to the
stove, and gobbled. the rest of his sausage, casting uneasy
glances at the landlady, seated silent as fate amid the prostrate
multitude. The food bolted, he went to her, and said, "Thank you
kindly, dame, for waiting for me."

"You are welcome," said she calmly, making neither much nor little
of the favour; and with that began to gather up the feathers. But
Gerard stopped her. "Nay, that is my task;" and he went down on
his knees, and collected them with ardour. She watched him
demurely.

"I wot not whence ye come,"said she, with a relic of distrust;
adding, more cordially, "but ye have been well brought up; -y'
have had a good mother, I'll go bail."

At the door she committed the whole company to Heaven, in a
formula, and disappeared. Gerard to his straw in the very
corner-for the guests lay round the sacred stove by seniority,
i.e. priority of arrival.

This punishment was a boon to Gerard, for thus he lay on the shore
of odour and stifling heat, instead of in mid-ocean.

He was just dropping off, when he was awaked by a noise; and lo
there was the hind remorselessly shaking and waking guest after
guest, to ask him whether it was he who had picked up the
mistress's feathers.

"It was I," cried Gerard.

"Oh, it was you, was it?" said the other, and came striding
rapidly over the intermediate sleepers. "She bade me say, 'One
good turn deserves another,' and so here's your nightcap," and he
thrust a great oaken mug under Gerard's nose.

"I thank her, and bless her; here goes - ugh!" and his gratitude
ended in a wry face; for the beer was muddy, and had a strange,
medicinal twang new to the Hollander.

"Trinke aus!" shouted the hind reproachfully.

"Enow is as good as a feast," said the youth Jesuitically.

The hind cast a look of pity on this stranger who left liquor in
his mug. "Ich brings euch," said he, and drained it to the bottom.

And now Gerard turned his face to the wall and pulled up two
handfuls of the nice clean straw, and bored in them with his
finger, and so made a scabbard, and sheathed his nose in it. And
soon they were all asleep; men, maids, wives, and children all
lying higgledy-piggledy, and snoring in a dozen keys like an
orchestra slowly tuning; and Gerard's body lay on straw in
Germany, and his spirit was away to Sevenbergen.

When he woke in the morning he found nearly all his fellow-
passengers gone. One or two were waiting for dinner, nine o'clock;
it was now six. He paid the landlady her demand, two pfenning, or
about an English halfpenny, and he of the pitchfork demanded
trinkgeld, and getting a trifle more than usual, and seeing Gerard
eye a foaming milk-pail he had just brought from the cow, hoisted
it up bodily to his lips. "Drink your fill, man," said he, and on
Gerard offering to pay for the delicious draught, told him in
broad patois that a man might swallow a skinful of milk, or a
breakfast of air, without putting hand to pouch. At the door
Gerard found his benefactress of last night, and a huge-chested
artisan, her husband.

Gerard thanked her, and in the spirit of the age offered her a
creutzer for her pudding.

But she repulsed his hand quietly. "For what do you take me?" said
she, colouring faintly; "we are travellers and strangers the same
as you, and bound to feel for those in like plight."

Then Gerard blushed in his turn and stammered excuses.

The hulking husband grinned superior to them both.

"Give the vixen a kiss for her pudding, and cry quits," said he,
with an air impartial, judge-like and Jove-like.

Gerard obeyed the lofty behest, and kissed the wife's cheek. "A
blessing go with you both, good people," said he.

"And God speed you, young man!" replied the honest couple; and
with that they parted, and never met again in this world.

The sun had just risen: the rain-drops on the leaves glittered
like diamonds. The air was fresh and bracing, and Gerard steered
south, and did not even remember his resolve of overnight.

Eight leagues he walked that day, and in the afternoon came upon a
huge building with an enormous arched gateway and a postern by its
side.

A monastery!" cried he joyfully; "I go no further lest I fare
worse." He applied at the postern, and on stating whence he came
and whither bound, was instantly admitted and directed to the
guestchamber, a large and lofty room, where travellers were fed
and lodged gratis by the charity of the monastic orders. Soon the
bell tinkled for vespers, and Gerard entered the church of the
convent, and from his place heard a service sung so exquisitely,
it seemed the choir of heaven. But one thing was wanting, Margaret
was not there to hear it with him, and this made him sigh bitterly
in mid rapture. At supper, plain but wholesome and abundant food,
and good beer, brewed in the convent, were set before him and his
fellows, and at an early hour they were ushered into a large
dormitory, and the number being moderate, had each a truckle bed,
and for covering, sheepskins dressed with the fleece on; but
previously to this a monk, struck by his youth and beauty,
questioned him, and soon drew out his projects and his heart. When
he was found to be convent bred, and going alone to Rome, he
became a personage, and in the morning they showed him over the
convent and made him stay and dine in the refectory. They also
pricked him a route on a slip of parchment, and the prior gave him
a silver guilden to help him on the road, and advised him to join
the first honest company he should fall in with, "and not face
alone the manifold perils of the way."

"Perils?" said Gerard to himself.

That evening he came to a small straggling town where was one inn;
it had no sign; but being now better versed in the customs of the
country, he detected it at once by the coats of arms on its walls.
These belonged to the distinguished visitors who had slept in it
at different epochs since its foundation, and left these customary
tokens of their patronage. At present it looked more like a
mausoleum than a hotel. Nothing moved nor sounded either in it or
about it. Gerard hammered on the great oak door: no answer. He
hallooed: no reply. After a while he hallooed louder, and at last
a little round window, or rather hole in the wall, opened, a man's
head protruded cautiously, like a tortoise's from its shell, and
eyed Gerard stolidly, but never uttered a syllable.

"Is this an inn?" asked Gerard, with a covert sneer.

The head seemed to fall into a brown study; eventually it nodded,
but lazily.

"Can I have entertainment here?"

Again the head pondered and ended by nodding, but sullenly, and
seemed a skull overburdened with catch-penny interrogatories.

"How am I to get within, an't please you?"

At this the head popped in, as if the last question had shot it;
and a hand popped out, pointed round the corner of the building,
and slammed the window.

Gerard followed the indication, and after some research discovered
that the fortification had one vulnerable part, a small low door
on its flank. As for the main entrance, that was used to keep out
thieves and customers, except once or twice in a year, when they
entered together, i.e., when some duke or count arrived in pomp
with his train of gaudy ruffians.

Gerard, having penetrated the outer fort, soon found his way to
the stove (as the public room was called from the principal
article in it), and sat down near the oven, in which were only a
few live embers that diffused a mild and grateful heat.

After waiting patiently a long time, he asked a grim old fellow
with a long white beard, who stalked solemnly in, and turned the
hour-glass, and then was stalking out, when supper would be. The
grisly Ganymede counted the guests on his fingers- "When I see
thrice as many here as now." Gerard groaned.

The grisly tyrant resented the rebellious sound. "Inns are not
built for one," said he; "if you can't wait for the rest, look out
for another lodging."

Gerard sighed.

At this the greybeard frowned.

After a while company trickled steadily in, till full eighty
persons of various conditions were congregated, and to our novice
the place became a chamber of horrors; for here the mothers got
together and compared ringworms, and the men scraped the mud off
their shoes with their knives, and left it on the floor, and
combed their long hair out, inmates included, and made their
toilet, consisting generally of a dry rub. Water, however, was
brought in ewers. Gerard pounced on one of these, but at sight of
the liquid contents lost his temper and said to the waiter, "Wash
you first your water, and then a man may wash his hands withal."

"An' it likes you not, seek another inn!"

Gerard said nothing, but went quietly and courteously besought an
old traveller to tell him how far it was to the next inn.

"About four leagues."

Then Gerard appreciated the grim pleasantry of the unbending sire.

That worthy now returned with an armful of wood, and counting the
travellers, put on a log for every six, by which act of raw
justice the hotter the room the more heat he added. Poor Gerard
noticed this little flaw in the ancient man's logic, but carefully
suppressed every symptom of intelligence, lest his feet should
have to carry his brains four leagues farther that night.

When perspiration and suffocation were far advanced, they brought
in the table-cloths; but oh, so brown, so dirty, and so coarse;
they seemed like sacks that had been worn out in agriculture and
come down to this, or like shreads from the mainsail of some
worn-out ship. The Hollander, who had never seen such linen even
in nightmare, uttered a faint cry.

"what is to do?" inquired a traveller. Gerard pointed ruefully to
the dirty sackcloth. The other looked at it with lack lustre eye,
and comprehended nought.

A Burgundian soldier with his arbalest at his back came peeping
over Gerard's shoulder, and seeing what was amiss, laughed so loud
that the room rang again, then slapped him on the back and cried,
"Courage! le diable est mort."

Gerard stared: he doubted alike the good tidings and their
relevancy; but the tones were so hearty and the arbalestrier's
face, notwithstanding a formidable beard, was so gay and genial,
that he smiled, and after a pause said drily, "Il a bien faite
avec l'eau et linge du pays on allait le noircir a ne se
reconnaitre plus."

"Tiens, tiens!" cried the soldier, "v'la qui parle le Francais peu
s'en faut," and he seated himself by Gerard, and in a moment was
talking volubly of war, women, and pillage, interlarding his
discourse with curious oaths, at which Gerard drew away from him
more or less.

Presently in came the grisly servant, and counted them all on his
fingers superciliously, like Abraham telling sheep; then went out
again, and returned with a deal trencher and deal spoon to each.

Then there was an interval. Then he brought them a long mug apiece
made of glass, and frowned. By-and-by he stalked gloomily in with
a hunch of bread apiece, and exit with an injured air. Expectation
thus raised, the guests sat for nearly an hour balancing the
wooden spoons, and with their own knives whittling the bread.
Eventually, when hope was extinct, patience worn out, and hunger
exhausted, a huge vessel was brought in with pomp, the lid was
removed, a cloud of steam rolled forth, and behold some thin broth
with square pieces of bread floating. This, though not agreeable
to the mind, served to distend the body. Slices of Strasbourg ham
followed, and pieces of salt fish, both so highly salted that
Gerard could hardly swallow a mouthful. Then came a kind of gruel,
and when the repast had lasted an hour and more, some hashed meat
highly peppered and the French and Dutch being now full to the
brim with the above dainties, and the draughts of beer the salt
and spiced meats had provoked, in came roasted kids, most
excellent, and carp and trout fresh from the stream. Gerard made
an effort and looked angrily at them, but "could no more," as the
poets say. The Burgundian swore by the liver and pike-staff of the
good centurion, the natives had outwitted him. Then turning to
Gerard, he said, "Courage, l'ami, le diable est mort," as loudly
as before, but not with the same tone of conviction. The canny
natives had kept an internal corner for contingencies, and
polished the kid's very bones.

The feast ended with a dish of raw animalcula in a wicker cage. A
cheese had been surrounded with little twigs and strings; then a
hole made in it and a little sour wine poured in. This speedily
bred a small but numerous vermin. When the cheese was so rotten
with them that only the twigs and string kept it from tumbling to
pieces and walking off quadrivious, it came to table. By a
malicious caprice of fate, cage and menagerie were put down right
under the Dutchman's organ of self-torture. He recoiled with a
loud ejaculation, and hung to the bench by the calves of his legs.

"What is the matter?" said a traveller disdainfully. "Does the
good cheese scare ye? Then put it hither, in the name of all the
saints!"

"Cheese!" cried Gerard, "I see none. These nauseous reptiles have
made away with every bit of it."

"Well," replied another, "it is not gone far. By eating of the
mites we eat the cheese to boot."

"Nay, not so," said Gerard. "These reptiles are made like us, and
digest their food and turn it to foul flesh even as we do ours to
sweet; as well might you think to chew grass by eating of
grass-fed beeves, as to eat cheese by swallowing these uncleanly
insects."

Gerard raised his voice in uttering this, and the company received
the paradox in dead silence, and with a distrustful air, like any
other stranger, during which the Burgundian, who understood German
but imperfectly, made Gerard Gallicize the discussion. He patted
his interpreter on the back. "C'est bien, mon gars; plus fin que
toi n'est pas bete," and administered his formula of
encouragement; and Gerard edged away from him; for next to ugly
sights and ill odours, the poor wretch disliked profaneness.

Meantime, though shaken in argument, the raw reptiles were duly
eaten and relished by the company, and served to provoke thirst, a
principal aim of all the solids in that part of Germany. So now
the company drank garausses all round, and their tongues were
unloosed, and oh, the Babel! But above the fierce clamour rose at
intervals, like some hero's war-cry in battle, the trumpet- like
voice of the Burgundian soldier shouting lustily, "Courage,
camarades, le diable est mort!"

Entered grisly Ganymede holding in his hand a wooden dish with
circles and semicircles marked on it in chalk. He put it down on
the table and stood silent, sad, and sombre, as Charon by Styx
waiting for his boat-load of souls. Then pouches and purses were
rummaged, and each threw a coin into the dish. Gerard timidly
observed that he had drunk next to no beer, and inquired how much
less he was to pay than the others.

"What mean you?" said Ganymede roughly. "Whose fault is it you
have not drunken? Are all to suffer because one chooses to be a
milksop? You will pay no more than the rest, and no less."

Gerard was abashed.

"Courage, petit, le diable est mort," hiccoughed the soldier and
flung Ganymede a coin.

"You are bad as he is," said the old man peevishly; "you are
paying too much;" and the tyrannical old Aristides returned him
some coin out of the trencher with a most reproachful countenance.
And now the man whom Gerard had confuted an hour and a half ago
awoke from a brown study, in which he had been ever since, and
came to him and said, "Yes, but the honey is none the worse for
passing through the bees' bellies."

Gerard stared. The answer had been so long on the road he hadn't
an idea what it was an answer to. Seeing him dumfounded, the other
concluded him confuted, and withdrew calmed.

The bedrooms were upstairs, dungeons with not a scrap of furniture
except the bed, and a male servant settled inexorably who should
sleep with whom. Neither money nor prayers would get a man a bed
to himself here; custom forbade it sternly. You might as well have
asked to monopolize a see-saw. They assigned to Gerard a man with
a great black beard. He was an honest fellow enough, but not
perfect; he would not go to bed, and would sit on the edge of it
telling the wretched Gerard by force, and at length, the events of
the day, and alternately laughing and crying at the same
circumstances, which were not in the smallest degree pathetic or
humorous, but only dead trivial. At last Gerard put his fingers in
his ears, and lying down in his clothes, for the sheets were too
dirty for him to undress, contrived to sleep. But in an hour or
two he awoke cold, and found that his drunken companion had got
all the feather bed; so mighty is instinct. They lay between two
beds; the lower one hard and made of straw, the upper soft and
filled with feathers light as down. Gerard pulled at it, but the
experienced drunkard held it fast mechanically. Gerard tried to
twitch it away by surprise, but instinct was too many for him. On
this he got out of bed, and kneeling down on his bedfellow's
unguarded side, easily whipped the prize away and rolled with it
under the bed, and there lay on one edge of it, and curled the
rest round his shoulders. Before he slept he often heard something
grumbling and growling above him, which was some little
satisfaction. Thus instinct was outwitted, and victorious Reason
lay chuckling on feathers, and not quite choked with dust.

At peep of day Gerard rose, flung the feather bed upon his snoring
companion, and went in search of milk and air.

A cheerful voice hailed him in French: "What ho! you are up with
the sun, comrade."

"He rises betimes that lies in a dog's lair," answered Gerard
crossly.

"Courage, l'ami! le diable est mort," was the instant reply. The
soldier then told him his name was Denys, and he was passing from
Flushing in Zealand to the Duke's French dominions; a change the
more agreeable to him, as he should revisit his native place, and
a host of pretty girls who had wept at his departure, and should
hear French spoken again. "And who are you, and whither bound?"

"My name is Gerard, and I am going to Rome," said the more
reserved Hollander, and in a way that invited no further
confidences.

"All the better; we will go together as far as Burgundy."

"That is not my road."

"All roads take to Rome."

"Ay, but the shortest road thither is my way."

"Well, then, it is I who must go out of my way a step for the sake
of good company, for thy face likes me, and thou speakest French,
or nearly."

"There go two words to that bargain," said Gerard coldly. "I steer
by proverbs, too. They do put old heads on young men's shoulders.
'Bon loup mauvais compagnon, dit le brebis;' and a soldier, they
say, is near akin to a wolf."

"They lie," said Denys; "besides, if he is, 'les loups ne se
mangent pas entre eux.'"

"Aye but, sir soldier, I am not a wolf; and thou knowest, a bien
petite occasion se saisit le loup du mouton.'"

"Let us drop wolves and sheep, being men; my meaning is, that a
good soldier never pillages-a comrade. Come, young man, too much
suspicion becomes not your years. They who travel should learn to
read faces; methinks you might see lealty in mine sith I have seen
it in yourn. Is it yon fat purse at your girdle you fear for?"
(Gerard turned pale.) "Look hither!" and he undid his belt, and
poured out of it a double handful of gold pieces, then returned
them to their hiding-place. "There is a hostage for you," said he;
"carry you that, and let us be comrades," and handed him his belt,
gold and all.

Gerard stared. "If I am over prudent, you have not enow." But he
flushed and looked pleased at the other's trust in him.

"Bah! I can read faces; and so must you, or you'll never take your
four bones safe to Rome."

"Soldier, you would find me a dull companion, for my heart is very
heavy," said Gerard, yielding.

"I'll cheer you, mon gars."

"I think you would," said Gerard sweetly; "and sore need have I of
a kindly voice in mine ear this day."

"Oh! no soul is sad alongside me. I lift up their poor little
hearts with my consigne: 'Courage, tout le monde, le diable est
mort.' Ha! ha!"

"So be it, then," said Gerard. "But take back your belt, for I
could never trust by halves. We will go together as far as Rhine,
and God go with us both!"

"Amen!" said Denys. and lifted his cap. "En avant!"

The pair trudged manfully on, and Denys enlivened the weary way.
He chattered about battles and sieges, and things which were new
to Gerard; and he was one of those who make little incidents
wherever they go. He passed nobody without addressing them. "They
don't understand it, but it wakes them up," said he. But whenever
they fell in with a monk or priest. he pulled a long face, and
sought the reverend father's blessing, and fearlessly poured out
on him floods of German words in such order as not to produce a
single German sentence - He doffed his cap to every woman, high or
low, he caught sight of, and with eagle eye discerned her best
feature, and complimented her on it in his native tongue, well
adapted to such matters; and at each carrion crow or magpie, down
came his crossbow, and he would go a furlong off the road to
circumvent it; and indeed he did shoot one old crow with laudable
neatness and despatch, and carried it to the nearest hen-roost,
and there slipped in and set it upon a nest. "The good-wife will
say, 'Alack, here is Beelzebub ahatching of my eggs.'"

"No, you forget he is dead," objected Gerard.

"So he is, so he is. But she doesn't know that, not having the
luck to be acquainted with me, who carry the good news from city
to city, uplifting men's hearts."

Such was Denys in time of peace.

Our travellers towards nightfall reached a village; it was a very
small one, but contained a place of entertainment. They searched
for it, and found a small house with barn and stables. In the
former was the everlasting stove, and the clothes drying round it
on lines, and a traveller or two sitting morose. Gerard asked for
supper.

"Supper? We have no time to cook for travellers; we only provide
lodging, good lodging for man and beast. You can have some beer."

"Madman, who, born in Holland, sought other lands!" snorted Gerard
in Dutch. The landlady started.

"What gibberish is that?" asked she, and crossed herself with
looks of superstitious alarm. "You can buy what you like in the
village, and cook it in our oven; but, prithee, mutter no charms
nor sorceries here, good man; don't ye now, it do make my flesh
creep so."

They scoured the village for food, and ended by supping on roasted
eggs and brown bread.

At a very early hour their chambermaid came for them. It was a
rosy-cheeked old fellow with a lanthorn.

They followed him. He led them across a dirty farmyard, where they
had much ado to pick their steps. and brought them into a
cow-house. There, on each side of every cow, was laid a little
clean straw, and a tied bundle of ditto for a pillow. The old man
looked down on this his work with paternal pride. Not so Gerard.
"What, do you set Christian men to lie among cattle?"

"Well, it is hard upon the poor beasts. They have scarce room to
turn."

"Oh! what, it is not hard on us, then?"

"Where is the hardship? I have lain among them all my life. Look
at me! I am fourscore, and never had a headache in all my born
days - all along of lying among the kye. Bless your silly head,
kine's breath is ten times sweeter to drink nor Christians'. You
try it!" and he slammed the bedroom door.

"Denys, where are you?" whined Gerard.

"Here, on her other side."

"What are you doing?"

"I know not; but as near as I can guess, I think I must be going
to sleep. What are you at?

"I am saying my prayers."

"Forget me not in them!"

"Is it likely? Denys, I shall soon have done: do not go to sleep,
I want to talk.

"Despatch then! for I feel - augh like floating-in the sky on a
warm cloud."

"Denys!"

"Augh! eh! hallo! is it time to get up?"

"Alack, no. There, I hurried my orisons to talk; and look at you,
going to sleep! We shall be starved before morning, having no
coverlets."

"Well, you know what to do."

"Not I, in sooth."

"Cuddle the cow."

"Thank you."

"Burrow in the straw, then. You must be very new to the world, to
grumble at this. How would you bear to lie on the field of battle
on a frosty night, as I did t'other day, stark naked, with nothing
to keep me warm but the carcass of a fellow I had been and helped
kill?"

"Horrible! horrible! Tell me all about it! Oh, but this is sweet."

"Well, we had a little battle in Brabant, and won a little
victory, but it cost us dear; several arbalestriers turned their
toes up. and I among them."

"Killed, Denys? come now!"

"Dead as mutton. Stuck full of pike-holes till the blood ran out
of me, like the good wine of Macon from the trodden grapes. It is
right bounteous in me to pour the tale in minstrel phrase, for -
augh - I am sleepy. Augh - now where was I?"

"Left dead on the field of battle, bleeding like a pig; that is to
say, like grapes. or something; go on, prithee go on, 'tis a sin
to sleep in the midst of a good story."

"Granted. Well, some of those vagabonds, that strip the dead
soldier on the field of glory, came and took every rag off me;
they wrought me no further ill, because there was no need."

"No; you were dead."

"C'est convenu. This must have been at sundown; and with the night
came a shrewd frost that barkened the blood on my wounds, and
stopped all the rivulets that were running from my heart, and
about midnight I awoke as from a trance.'

"And thought you were in heaven?" asked Gerard eagerly, being a
youth inoculated with monkish tales.

"Too frost-bitten for that, mon gars; besides, I heard the wounded
groaning on all sides, so I knew I was in the old place. I saw I
could not live the night through without cover. I groped about
shivering and shivering; at last one did suddenly leave groaning.
'You are sped,' said I, so made up to him, and true enough he was
dead, but warm, you know. I took my lord in my arms, but was too
weak to carry him, so rolled with him into a ditch hard by; and
there my comrades found me in the morning properly stung with
nettles, and hugging a dead Fleming for the bare life."

Gerard shuddered. "And this is war; this is the chosen theme of
poets and troubadours, and Reden Ryckers. Truly was it said by the
men of old, dulce bellum inexpertis."

"Tu dis?"

"I say-oh, what stout hearts some men have!"

"N'est-ce pas, p'tit? So after that sort - thing - this sort thing
is heaven. Soft - warm - good company, comradancow - cou'age
-diable - m-ornk!"

And the glib tongue was still for some hours.

In the morning Gerard was wakened by a liquid hitting his eye, and
it was Denys employing the cow's udder as a squirt.

"Oh, fie!" cried Gerard, "to waste the good milk;" and he took a
horn out of his wallet. "Fill this! but indeed I see not what
right we have to meddle with her milk at all."

"Make your mind easy! Last night la camarade was not nice; but
what then, true friendship dispenses with ceremony. To-day we make
as free with her."

"Why, what did she do, poor thing?"

"Ate my pillow."

"Ha! ha!"

"On waking I had to hunt for my head, and found it down in the
stable gutter. She ate our pillow from us, we drink our pillow
from her. A votre sante, madame; et sans rancune;" and the dog
drank her milk to her own health.

"The ancient was right though," said Gerard. "Never have I risen
so refreshed since I left my native land. Henceforth let us shun
great towns, and still lie in a convent or a cow-house; for I'd
liever sleep on fresh straw, than on linen well washed six months
agone; and the breath of kine it is sweeter than that of
Christians, let alone the garlic, which men and women folk affect,
but cowen abhor from, and so do I, St. Bavon be my witness!"

The soldier eyed him from head to foot: "Now but for that little
tuft on your chin I should take you for a girl; and by the
finger-nails of St. Luke, no ill-favoured one neither."

These three towns proved types and repeated themselves with slight
variations for many a weary league; but even when he could get
neither a convent nor a cow-house, Gerard learned in time to steel
himself to the inevitable. and to emulate his comrade, whom he
looked on as almost superhuman for hardihood of body and spirit.

There was, however, a balance to all this veneration.

Denys, like his predecessor Achilles, had his weak part, his very
weak part, thought Gerard.

His foible was "woman."

Whatever he was saying or doing, he stopped short at sight of a
farthingale, and his whole soul became occupied with that garment
and its inmate till they had disappeared; and some- times for a
good while after.

He often put Gerard to the blush by talking his amazing German to
such females as he caught standing or sitting indoors or out, at
which they stared; and when he met a peasant girl on the road, he
took off his cap to her and saluted her as if she was a queen; the
invariable effect of which was, that she suddenly drew herself up
quite stiff like a soldier on parade, and wore a forbidding
countenance.

"They drive me to despair," said Denys. "Is that a just return to
a civil bonnetade? They are large, they are fair, but stupid as
swans."

"What breeding can you expect from women that wear no hose?"
inquired Gerard; "and some of them no shoon? They seem to me
reserved and modest, as becomes their sex, and sober, whereas the
men are little better than beer-barrels. Would you have them
brazen as well as hoseless?"

"A little affability adorns even beauty," sighed Denys.

"Then let these alone, sith they are not to your taste," retorted
Gerard. "What, is there no sweet face in Burgundy that would pale
to see you so wrapped up in strange women?"

"Half-a-dozen that would cry their eyes out."

"Well then!"

"But it is a long way to Burgundy."

"Ay, to the foot, but not to the heart. I am there, sleeping and
waking, and almost every minute of the day."

"In Burgundy? Why, I thought you had never - "

"In Burgundy?" cried Gerard contemptuously. "No, in sweet
Sevenbergen. Ah! well-a-day! well-a-day!"

Many such dialogues as this passed between the pair on the long
and weary road, and neither could change the other.

One day about noon they reached a town of some pretensions, and
Gerard was glad, for he wanted to buy a pair of shoes; his own
were quite worn out. They soon found a shop that displayed a
goodly array, and made up to it, and would have entered it, but
the shopkeeper sat on the doorstep taking a nap, and was so fat as
to block up the narrow doorway; the very light could hardly
struggle past his "too, too solid flesh," much less a carnal
customer.

My fair readers, accustomed, when they go shopping, to be met half
way with nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles, and waved into a
seat, while almost at the same instant an eager shopman flings
himself half across the counter in a semi-circle to learn their
commands, can best appreciate this mediaeval Teuton, who kept a
shop as a dog keeps a kennel, and sat at the exclusion of custom
snoring like a pig.

Denys and Gerard stood and contemplated this curiosity; emblem,
permit me to remark, of the lets and hindrances to commerce that
characterized his epoch.

"Jump over him!"

"The door is too low."

"March through him!"

"The man is too thick."

"What is the coil?" inquired a mumbling voice from the interior;
apprentice with his mouth full.

"We want to get into your shop?"

"What for, in Heaven's name??!!!"

"Shoon, lazy bones!"

The ire of the apprentice began to rise at such an explanation.
"And could ye find no hour out of all the twelve to come pestering
us for shoon, but the one little, little hour my master takes his
nap, and I sit down to my dinner, when all the rest of the world
is full long ago?"

Denys heard, but could not follow the sense. "Waste no more time
talking their German gibberish," said he; "take out thy knife and
tickle his fat ribs."

"That I will not," said Gerard.

"Then here goes; I'll prong him with this."

Gerard seized the mad fellow's arm in dismay, for he had been long
enough in the country to guess that the whole town would take part
in any brawl with the native against a stranger. But Denys twisted
away from him, and the cross-bow bolt in his hand was actually on
the road to the sleeper's ribs; but at that very moment two
females crossed the road towards him; he saw the blissful vision,
and instantly forgot what he was about, and awaited their approach
with unreasonable joy.

Though companions, they were not equals, except in attractiveness
to a Burgundian crossbow man; for one was very tall, the other
short, and by one of those anomalies which society, however
primitive, speedily establishes, the long one held up the little
one's tail. The tall one wore a plain linen coif on her head, a
little grogram cloak over her shoulders, a grey kirtle, and a
short farthingale or petticoat of bright red cloth, and feet and
legs quite bare, though her arms were veiled in tight linen
sleeves.

The other a kirtle broadly trimmed with fur, her arms in double
sleeves, whereof the inner of yellow satin clung to the skin; the
outer, all befurred, were open at the inside of the elbow, and so
the arm passed through and left them dangling. Velvet head-dress,
huge purse at girdle, gorgeous train, bare legs. And thus they
came on, the citizen's wife strutting, and the maid gliding after,
holding her mistress's train devoutly in both hands, and bending
and winding her lithe body prettily enough to do it. Imagine (if
not pressed for time) a bantam, with a guineahen stepping
obsequious at its stately heel.

This pageant made straight for the shoemaker's shop. Denys louted
low; the worshipful lady nodded graciously, but rapidly, having
business on hand, or rather on foot; for in a moment she poked the
point of her little shoe into the sleeper, and worked it round in
him like a gimlet, till with a long snarl he woke. The incarnate
shutter rising and grumbling vaguely. the lady swept in and
deigned him no further notice. He retreated to his neighbour's
shop, the tailor's, and sitting on the step, protected it from the
impertinence of morning calls. Neighbours should be neighbourly.

Denys and Gerard followed the dignity into the shop, where sat the
apprentice at dinner; the maid stood outside with her insteps
crossed, leaning against the wall, and tapping it with her nails.

"Those, yonder," said the dignity briefly, pointing with an
imperious little white hand to some yellow shoes gilded at the
toe. While the apprentice stood stock still neutralized by his
dinner and his duty, Denys sprang at the shoes, and brought them
to her; she smiled, and calmly seating herself, protruded her
foot, shod, but hoseless, and scented. Down went Denys on his
knees, and drew off her shoe, and tried the new ones on the white
skin devoutly. Finding she had a willing victim, she abused the
opportunity, tried first one pair, then another, then the first
again, and so on, balancing and hesitating for about half an hour,
to Gerard's disgust, and Denys's weak delight. At last she was
fitted, and handed two pair of yellow and one pair of red shoes
out to her servant. Then was heard a sigh. It burst from the owner
of the shop: he had risen from slumber, and was now hovering
about, like a partridge near her brood in danger.

"There go all my coloured shoes," said he, as they disappeared in
the girl's apron.

The lady departed: Gerard fitted himself with a stout pair, asked
the price, paid it without a word, and gave his old ones to a
beggar in the street, who blessed him in the marketplace, and
threw them furiously down a well in the suburbs. The comrades left
the shop, and in it two melancholy men, that looked, and even
talked, as if they had been robbed wholesale.

"My shoon are sore worn," said Denys, grinding his teeth; "but
I'll go barefoot till I reach France, ere I'll leave my money with
such churls as these."

The Dutchman replied calmly, "They seem indifferent well sewn.

As they drew near the Rhine, they passed through forest after
forest, and now for the first time ugly words sounded in
travellers' mouths, seated around stoves. "Thieves!" "black
gangs!" "cut-throats!" etc.

The very rustics were said to have a custom hereabouts of
murdering the unwary traveller in these gloomy woods, whose dark
and devious winding enabled those who were familiar with them to
do deeds of rapine and blood undetected, or if detected, easily to
baffle pursuit.

Certain it was, that every clown they met carried, whether for
offence or defence, a most formidable weapon; a light axe, with a
short pike at the head, and a long slender handle of ash or yew,
well seasoned. These the natives could all throw with singular
precision, so as to make the point strike an object at several
yard's distance, or could slay a bullock at hand with a stroke of
the blade. Gerard bought one and practised with it. Denys quietly
filed and ground his bolt sharp, whistling the whilst; and when
they entered a gloomy wood, he would unsling his crossbow and
carry it ready for action; but not so much like a traveller
fearing an attack, as a sportsman watchful not to miss a snap shot

One day, being in a forest a few leagues from Dusseldorf, as
Gerard was walking like one in a dream, thinking of Margaret, and
scarce seeing the road he trode, his companion laid a hand on his
shoulder, and strung his crossbow with glittering eye. "Hush!"
said he, in a low whisper that startled Gerard more than thunder.
Gerard grasped his axe tight, and shook a little: he heard a
rustling in the wood hard by, and at the same moment Denys sprang
into the wood, and his crossbow went to his shoulder, even as he
jumped. Twang! went the metal string; and after an instant's
suspense he roared, "Run forward, guard the road, he is hit! he is
hit!"

Gerard darted forward, and as he ran a young bear burst out of the
wood right upon him; finding itself intercepted, it went upon its
hind legs with a snarl, and though not half grown, opened
formidable jaws and long claws. Gerard, in a fury of excitement
and agitation, flung himself on it, and delivered a tremendous
blow on its nose with his axe, and the creature staggered;
another, and it lay grovelling, with Gerard hacking it.

"Hallo! stop! you are mad to spoil the meat."

"I took it for a robber," said Gerard, panting. "I mean, I had
made ready for a robber, so I could not hold my hand."

"Ay, these chattering travellers have stuffed your head full of
thieves and assassins; they have not got a real live robber in
their whole nation. Nay, I'll carry the beast; bear thou my
crossbow."

"We will carry it by turns, then," said Gerard, "for 'tis a heavy
load: poor thing, how its blood drips. Why did we slay it?"

"For supper and the reward the baillie of the next town shall give
us."

"And for that it must die, when it had but just begun to live; and
perchance it hath a mother that will miss it sore this night, and
loves it as ours love us; more than mine does me."

"What, know you not that his mother was caught in a pitfall last
month, and her skin is now at the tanner's? and his father was
stuck full of cloth-yard shafts t'other day, and died like Julius
Caesar, with his hands folded on his bosom, and a dead dog in each
of them?"

But Gerard would not view it jestingly. "Why, then," said he, "we
have killed one of God's creatures that was all alone in the
world-as I am this day, in this strange land."

"You young milksop," roared Denys, "these things must not be
looked at so, or not another bow would be drawn nor quarrel fly in
forest nor battlefield. Why, one of your kidney consorting with a
troop of pikemen should turn them to a row of milk-pails; it is
ended, to Rome thou goest not alone, for never wouldst thou reach
the Alps in a whole skin. I take thee to Remiremont, my native
place, and there I marry thee to my young sister, she is blooming
as a peach. Thou shakest thy head? ah! I forgot; thou lovest
elsewhere, and art a one woman man, a creature to me scarce
conceivable. Well then I shall find thee, not a wife, nor a leman,
but a friend; some honest Burgundian who shall go with thee as far
as Lyons; and much I doubt that honest fellow will be myself, into
whose liquor thou has dropped sundry powders to make me love thee;
for erst I endured not doves in doublet and hose. From Lyons, I
say, I can trust thee by ship to Italy, which being by all
accounts the very stronghold of milksops, thou wilt there be safe:
they will hear thy words, and make thee their duke in a
twinkling."

Gerard sighed. "In sooth I love not to think of this Dusseldorf,
where we are to part company, good friend."

They walked silently, each thinking of the separation at hand; the
thought checked trifling conversation, and at these moments it is
a relief to do something, however insignificant. Gerard asked
Denys to lend him a bolt. "I have often shot with a long bow, but
never with one of these!"

"Draw thy knife and cut this one out of the cub," said Denys
slily.

"Nay, Day, I want a clean one."

Denys gave him three out of his quiver.

Gerard strung the bow, and levelled it at a bough that had fallen
into the road at some distance. The power of the instrument
surprised him; the short but thick steel bow jarred him to the
very heel as it went off, and the swift steel shaft was invisible
in its passage; only the dead leaves, with which November had
carpeted the narrow road, flew about on the other side of the
bough.

"Ye aimed a thought too high," said Denys.

"What a deadly thing! no wonder it is driving out the longbow - to
Martin's much discontent."

"Ay, lad," said Denys triumphantly, "it gains ground every day, in
spite of their laws and their proclamations to keep up the yewen
bow, because forsooth their grandsires shot with it, knowing no
better. You see, Gerard, war is not pastime. Men will shoot at
their enemies with the hittingest arm and the killingest, not with
the longest and missingest."

"Then these new engines I hear of will put both bows down; for
these with a pinch of black dust, and a leaden ball, and a child's
finger, shall slay you Mars and Goliath, and the Seven Champions."

"Pooh! pooh!" said Denys warmly; "petrone nor harquebuss shall
ever put down Sir Arbalest. Why, we can shoot ten times while they
are putting their charcoal and their lead into their leathern
smoke belchers, and then kindling their matches. All that is too
fumbling for the field of battle; there a soldier's weapon needs
be aye ready, like his heart."

Gerard did not answer, for his ear was attracted by a sound behind
them. It was a peculiar sound, too, like something heavy, but not
hard, rushing softly over the dead leaves. He turned round with
some little curiosity. A colossal creature was coming down the
road at about sixty paces' distance.

He looked at it in a sort of calm stupor at first, but the next
moment, he turned ashy pale.

"Denys!" he cried. "Oh, God! Denys!"

Denys whirled round.

It was a bear as big as a cart-horse.

It was tearing along with its huge head down, running on a hot
scent.

The very moment he saw it Denys said in a sickening whisper-

"THE CUB!"

Oh! the concentrated horror of that one word, whispered hoarsely,
with dilating eyes! For in that syllable it all flashed upon them
both like a sudden stroke of lightning in the dark - the bloody
trail, the murdered cub, the mother upon them, and it. DEATH.

All this in a moment of time. The next, she saw them. Huge as she
was, she seemed to double herself (it was her long hair bristling
with rage): she raised her head big as a hull's, her swine-shaped
jaws opened wide at them, her eyes turned to blood and flame, and
she rushed upon them, scattering the leaves about her like a
whirlwind as she came.

"Shoot!" screamed Denys, but Gerard stood shaking from head to
foot, useless.

"Shoot, man! ten thousand devils, shoot! too late! Tree! tree!"
and he dropped the cub, pushed Gerard across the road, and flew to
the first tree and climbed it, Gerard the same on his side; and as
they fled, both men uttered inhuman howls like savage creatures
grazed by death.

With all their speed one or other would have been torn to
fragments at the foot of his tree; but the bear stopped a moment
at the cub.

Without taking her bloodshot eyes off those she was hunting, she
smelt it all round, and found, how, her Creator only knows, that
it was dead, quite dead. She gave a yell such as neither of the
hunted ones had ever heard, nor dreamed to be in nature, and flew
after Denys. She reared and struck at him as he climbed. He was
just out of reach.

Instantly she seized the tree, and with her huge teeth tore a
great piece out of it with a crash. Then she reared again, dug her
claws deep into the bark, and began to mount it slowly, but as
surely as a monkey.

Denys's evil star had led him to a dead tree, a mere shaft, and of
no very great height. He climbed faster than his pursuer, and was
soon at the top. He looked this way and that for some bough of
another tree to spring to. There was none; and if he jumped down,
he knew the bear would be upon him ere he could recover the fall,
and make short work of him. Moreover, Denys was little used to
turning his back on danger, and his blood was rising at being
hunted. He turned to bay.

"My hour is come," thought he. "Let me meet death like a man." He
kneeled down and grasped a small shoot to steady himself, drew his
long knife, and clenching his teeth, prepared to jab the huge
brute as soon as it should mount within reach.

Of this combat the result was not doubtful.

The monster's head and neck were scarce vulnerable for bone and
masses of hair. The man was going to sting the bear, and the bear
to crack the man like a nut.

Gerard's heart was better than his nerves. He saw his friend's
mortal danger, and passed at once from fear to blindish rage. He
slipped down his tree in a moment, caught up the crossbow, which
he had dropped in the road, and running furiously up, sent a bolt
into the bear's body with a loud shout. The bear gave a snarl of
rage and pain, and turned its head irresolutely.

"Keep aloof!" cried Denys, "or you are a dead man."

"I care not;" and in a moment he had another bolt ready and shot
it fiercely into the bear, screaming, "Take that! take that!"

Denys poured a volley of oaths down at him. "Get away, idiot!"

He was right: the bear finding so formidable and noisy a foe
behind her, slipped growling down the tree, rending deep furrows
in it as she slipped. Gerard ran back to his tree and climbed it
swiftly. But while his legs were dangling some eight feet from the
ground, the bear came rearing and struck with her fore paw, and
out flew a piece of bloody cloth from Gerard's hose. He climbed,
and climbed; and presently he heard as it were in the air a voice
say, "Go out on the bough!" He looked, and there was a long
massive branch before him shooting upwards at a slight angle: he
threw his body across it, and by a series of convulsive efforts
worked up it to the end.

Then he looked round panting.

The bear was mounting the tree on the other side. He heard her
claws scrape, and saw her bulge on both sides of the massive tree.
Her eye not being very quick, she reached the fork and passed it,
mounting the main stem. Gerard drew breath more freely. The bear
either heard him, or found by scent she was wrong: she paused;
presently she caught sight of him. She eyed him steadily, then
quietly descended to the fork.

Slowly and cautiously she stretched out a paw and tried the bough.
It was a stiff oak branch, sound as iron. Instinct taught the
creature this: it crawled carefully out on the bough, growling
savagely as it came.

Gerard looked wildly down. He was forty feet from the ground.
Death below. Death moving slow but sure on him in a still more
horrible form. His hair bristled. The sweat poured from him. He
sat helpless, fascinated, tongue-tied.

As the fearful monster crawled growling towards him, incongruous
thoughts coursed through his mind. Margaret: the Vulgate, where it
speaks of the rage of a she-bear robbed of her whelps - Rome -
Eternity.

The bear crawled on. And now the stupor of death fell on the
doomed man; he saw the open jaws and bloodshot eyes coming, but in
a mist.

As in a mist he heard a twang; he glanced down; Denys, white and
silent as death, was shooting up at the bear. The bear snarled at
the twang. but crawled on. Again the crossbow twanged, and the
bear snarled, and came nearer. Again the cross bow twanged; and
the next moment the bear was close upon Gerard, where he sat, with
hair standing stiff on end and eyes starting from their sockets,
palsied. The bear opened her jaws like a grave. and hot blood
spouted from them upon Gerard as from a pump. The bough rocked.
The wounded monster was reeling; it clung, it stuck its sickles of
claws deep into the wood; it toppled, its claws held firm, but its
body rolled off, and the sudden shock to the branch shook Gerard
forward on his stomach with his face upon one of the bear's
straining paws. At this, by a convulsive effort, she raised her
head up, up, till he felt her hot fetid breath. Then huge teeth
snapped together loudly close below him in the air, with a last
effort of baffled hate. The ponderous carcass rent the claws out
of the bough, then pounded the earth with a tremendous thump.
There was a shout of triumph below, and the very next instant a
cry of dismay, for Gerard had swooned, and without an attempt to
save himself, rolled headlong from the perilous height.

CHAPTER XXV

Denys caught at Gerard, and somewhat checked his fall; but it may
be doubted whether this alone would have saved him from breaking
his neck, or a limb. His best friend now was the dying bear, on
whose hairy carcass his head and shoulders descended. Denys tore
him off her. It was needless. She panted still, and her limbs
quivered, but a hare was not so harmless; and soon she breathed
her last; and the judicious Denys propped Gerard up against her,
being soft, and fanned him. He came to by degrees. but confused,
and feeling the bear around him, rolled away, yelling.

"Courage," cried Denys, "le diable est mort."

"Is it dead? quite dead?" inquired Gerard from behind a tree; for
his courage was feverish, and the cold fit was on him just now,
and had been for some time.

"Behold," said Denys, and pulled the brute's ear playfully, and
opened her jaws and put in his head, with other insulting antics;
in the midst of which Gerard was violently sick.

Denys laughed at him.

"What is the matter now?" said he, "also, why tumble off your
perch just when we had won the day?"

"I swooned, I trow."

"But why?"

Not receiving an answer, he continued, "Green girls faint as soon
as look at you, but then they choose time and place. What woman
ever fainted up a tree?"

"She sent her nasty blood all over me. I think the smell must have
overpowered me! Faugh! I hate blood."

"I do believe it potently."

"See what a mess she has made me

"But with her blood, not yours. I pity the enemy that strives to
satisfy you."'

"You need not to brag, Maitre Denys; I saw you under the tree, the
colour of your shirt."

"Let us distinguish," said Denys, colouring; "it is permitted to
tremble for a friend."

Gerard, for answer, flung his arms round Denys's neck in silence.

"Look here," whined the stout soldier, affected by this little
gush of nature and youth, "was ever aught so like a woman? I love
thee, little milksop - go to. Good! behold him on his knees now.
What new caprice is this?"

"Oh, Denys, ought we not to return thanks to Him who has saved
both our lives against such fearful odds?" And Gerard kneeled, and
prayed aloud. And presently he found Denys kneeling quiet beside
him, with his hands across his bosom after the custom of his
nation, and a face as long as his arm. When they rose, Gerard's
countenance was beaming.

"Good Denys," said he, "Heaven will reward thy piety."

"Ah, bah! I did it out of politeness," said the Frenchman. "It was
to please thee, little one. "C'est egal: 'twas well and orderly
prayed, and edified me to the core while it lasted. A bishop had
scarce handled the matter better; so now our evensong being sung,
and the saints enlisted with us - marchons."

Ere they had taken two steps, he stopped. "By-the-by, the cub!"

"Oh, no, no!" cried Gerard.

"You are right. It is late. We have lost time climbing trees, and
tumbling off 'em, and swooning, and vomiting, and praying; and the
brute is heavy to carry. And now I think on't, we shall have papa
after it next; these bears make such a coil about an odd cub. What
is this? you are wounded! you are wounded!"

"Not I."

"He is wounded; miserable that I am!"

"Be calm, Denys. I am not touched; I feel no pain anywhere."

"You? you only feel when another is hurt," cried Denys, with great
emotion; and throwing himself on his knees, he examined Gerard's
leg with glistening eyes.

"Quick! quick! before it stiffens," he cried, and hurried him on.

"Who makes the coil about nothing now?" inquired Gerard
composedly.

Denys's reply was a very indirect one.

"Be pleased to note," said he, "that I have a bad heart. You were
man enough to save my life, yet I must sneer at you, a novice in
war. Was not I a novice once myself? Then you fainted from a
wound, and I thought you swooned for fear, and called you a
milksop. Briefly, I have a bad tongue and a bad heart."

"Denys!"

"Plait-il?"

"You lie."

"You are very good to say so, little one, and I am eternally
obliged to you," mumbled the remorseful Denys.

Ere they had walked many furlongs, the muscles of the wounded leg
contracted and stiffened, till presently Gerard could only just
put his toe to the ground, and that with great pain.

At last he could bear it no longer.

"Let me lie down and die," he groaned, "for this is intolerable."

Denys represented that it was afternoon, and the nights were now
frosty; and cold and hunger ill companions; and that it would be
unreasonable to lose heart, a certain great personage being
notoriously defunct. So Gerard leaned upon his axe, and hobbled
on; but presently he gave in, all of a sudden, and sank helpless
in the road.

Denys drew him aside into the wood, and to his surprise gave him
his crossbow and bolts, enjoining him strictly to lie quiet, and
if any ill-looking fellows should find him out and come to him, to
bid them keep aloof; and should they refuse, to shoot them dead at
twenty paces. "Honest men keep the path; and, knaves in a wood,
none but fools do parley with them." With this he snatched up
Gerard's axe, and set off running - not, as Gerard expected,
towards Dusseldorf, but on the road they had come.

Gerard lay aching and smarting; and to him Rome, that seemed so
near at starting, looked far, far off, now that he was two hundred
miles nearer it. But soon all his thoughts turned
Sevenbergen-wards. How sweet it would be one day to hold
Margaret's hand, and tell her all he had gone through for her! The
very thought of it, and her, soothed him; and in the midst of pain
and irritation of the nerves be lay resigned, and sweetly, though
faintly, smiling.

He had lain thus more than two hours, when suddenly there were
shouts; and the next moment something struck a tree hard by, and
quivered in it.

He looked, it was an arrow.

He started to his feet. Several missiles rattled among the boughs,
and the wood echoed with battle-cries. Whence they came he could
not tell, for noises in these huge woods are so reverberated, that
a stranger is always at fault as to their whereabout; but they
seemed to fill the whole air. Presently there was a lull; then he
heard the fierce galloping of hoofs; and still louder shouts and
cries arose, mingled with shrieks and groans; and above all,
strange and terrible sounds, like fierce claps of thunder,
bellowing loud, and then dying off in cracking echoes; and red
tongues of flame shot out ever and anon among the trees, and
clouds of sulphurous smoke came drifting over his head. And all
was still.

Gerard was struck with awe. "What will become of Denys?" he cried.
"Oh, why did you leave me? Oh, Denys, my friend! my friend!"

Just before sunset Denys returned, almost sinking under a hairy
bundle. It was the bear's skin.

Gerard welcomed him with a burst of joy that astonished him.

"I thought never to see you again, dear Denys. Were you in the
battle?"

"No. What battle?"

"The bloody battle of men, or fiends, that raged in the wood a
while agone;" and with this he described it to the life, and more
fully than I have done.

Denys patted him indulgently on the back.

"It is well," said he; "thou art a good limner; and fever is a
great spur to the imagination. One day I lay in a cart-shed with a
cracked skull, and saw two hosts manoeuvre and fight a good hour
on eight feet square, the which I did fairly describe to my
comrade in due order, only not so gorgeously as thou, for want of
book learning.

"What, then, you believe me not? when I tell you the arrows
whizzed over my head, and the combatants shouted, and - "

"May the foul fiends fly away with me if I believe a word of it."

Gerard took his arm, and quietly pointed to a tree close by.

"Why, it looks like - it is-a broad arrow, as I live!" And he went
close, and looked up at it.

"It came out of the battle. I heard it, and saw it."

"An English arrow."

"How know you that?"

"Marry, by its length. The English bowmen draw the bow to the ear,
others only to the right breast. Hence the English loose a
three-foot shaft, and this is one of them, perdition seize them!
Well, if this is not glamour, there has been a trifle of a battle.
And if there has been a battle in so ridiculous a place for a
battle as this, why then 'tis no business of mine, for my Duke
hath no quarrel hereabouts. So let's to bed," said the
professional. And with this he scraped together a heap of leaves,
and made Gerard lie on it, his axe by his side. He then lay down
beside him, with one hand on his arbalest, and drew the bear-skin
over them, hair inward. They were soon as warm as toast, and fast
asleep.

But long before the dawn Gerard woke his comrade.

"What shall I do, Denys, I die of famine?"

"Do? why. go to sleep again incontinent: qui dort dine."

"But I tell you I am too hungry to sleep," snapped Gerard.

"Let us march, then," replied Denys, with paternal indulgence.

He had a brief paroxysm of yawns; then made a small bundle of
bears' ears, rolling them up in a strip of the skin, cut for the
purpose; and they took the road.

Gerard leaned on his axe, and propped by Denys on the other side,
hobbled along, not without sighs.

"I hate pain." said Gerard viciously.

"Therein you show judgment," replied papa smoothly.

It was a clear starlight night; and soon the moon rising revealed
the end of the wood at no great distance: a pleasant sight, since
Dusseldorf they knew was but a short league further.

At the edge of the wood they came upon something so mysterious
that they stopped to gaze at it, before going up to it. Two white
pillars rose in the air, distant a few paces from each other; and
between them stood many figures, that looked like human forms.

"I go no farther till I know what this is," said Gerard, in an
agitated whisper. "Are they effigies of the saints, for men to
pray to on the road? or live robbers waiting to shoot down honest
travellers? Nay, living men they cannot be, for they stand on
nothing that I see. Oh! Denys, let us turn back till daybreak;
this is no mortal sight."

Denys halted, and peered long and keenly. "They are men," said he,
at last. Gerard was for turning back all the more. "But men that
will never hurt us, nor we them. Look not to their feet, for that
they stand on!"

"Where, then, i' the name of all the saints?"

"Look over their heads," said Denys gravely.

Following this direction, Gerard presently discerned the outline
of a dark wooden beam passing from pillar to pillar; and as the
pair got nearer, walking now on tiptoe, one by one dark snake-like
cords came out in the moonlight, each pendent from the beam to a
dead man, and tight as wire.

Now as they came under this awful monument of crime and wholesale
vengeance a light air swept by, and several of the corpses swung,
or gently gyrated. and every rope creaked. Gerard shuddered at
this ghastly salute. So thoroughly had the gibbet, with its
sickening load, seized and held their eyes, that it was but now
they perceived a fire right underneath, and a living figure
sitting huddled over it. His axe lay beside him, the bright blade
shining red in the glow. He was asleep.

Gerard started, but Denys only whispered, "courage, comrade, here
is a fire."

"Ay! but there is a man at it."

"There will soon be three;" and he began to heap some wood on it
that the watcher had prepared; during which the prudent Gerard
seized the man's axe, and sat down tight on it, grasping his own,
and examining the sleeper. There was nothing outwardly distinctive
in the man. He wore the dress of the country folk, and the hat of
the district, a three-cornered hat called a Brunswicker, stiff
enough to turn a sword cut, and with a thick brass hat-band. The
weight of the whole thing had turned his ears entirely down, like
a fancy rabbit's in our century; but even this, though it spoiled
him as a man, was nothing remarkable. They had of late met scores
of these dog's-eared rustics. The peculiarity was, this clown
watching under a laden gallows. What for?

Denys, if he felt curious, would not show it; he took out two
bears' ears from his bundle, and running sticks through them,
began to toast them. "'Twill be eating coined money," said he;
"for the burgomaster of Dusseldorf had given us a rix-dollar for
these ears, as proving the death of their owners; but better a
lean purse than a lere stomach."

"Unhappy man!" cried Gerard, "could you eat food here?"

"Where the fire is lighted there must the meat roast, and where it
roasts there must it be eaten; for nought travels worse than your
roasted meat."

"Well, eat thou, Denys, an thou canst! but I am cold and sick;
there is no room for hunger in my heart after what mine eyes have
seen," and he shuddered over the fire. "Oh! how they creak! and
who is this man, I wonder? what an ill-favoured churl!"

Denys examined him like a connoisseur looking at a picture, and in
due course delivered judgment. "I take him to be of the refuse of
that company, whereof these (pointing carelessly upward) were the
cream, and so ran their heads into danger.

"At that rate, why not stun him before he wakes?" and Gerard
fidgeted where he sat.

Denys opened his eyes with humorous surprise. "For one who sets up
for a milksop you have the readiest hand. Why should two stun one?
tush! he wakes: note now what he says at waking, and tell me."

These last words were hardly whispered when the watcher opened his
eyes. At sight of the fire made up, and two strangers eyeing him
keenly, he stared, and there was a severe and pretty successful
effort to be calm; still a perceptible tremor ran all over him.
Soon he manned himself, and said gruffly. "Good morrow. But at the
very moment of saying it he missed his axe, and saw how Gerard was
sitting upon it, with his own laid ready to his hand. He lost
countenance again directly. Denys smiled grimly at this bit of
byplay.

"Good morrow!" said Gerard quietly. keeping his eye on him.

The watcher was now too ill at ease to be silent. "You make free
with my fire," said he; but he added in a somewhat faltering
voice, "you are welcome."

Denys whispered Gerard. The watcher eyed them askant.

"My comrade says. sith we share your fire, you shall share his
meat."

"So be it," said the man warmly. "I have half a kid hanging on a
bush hard by, I'll go fetch it;" and he arose with a cheerful and
obliging countenance, and was retiring.

Denys caught up his crossbow, and levelled it at his head. The man
fell on his knees.

Denys lowered his weapon, and pointed him back to his place. He
rose and went back slowly and unsteadily, like one disjointed; and
sick at heart as the mouse, that the cat lets go a little way, and
then darts and replaces.

"Sit down, friend," said Denys grimly, in French.

The man obeyed finger and tone, though he knew not a word of
French.

"Tell him the fire is not big enough for more than thee. He will
take my meaning."

This being communicated by Gerard, the man grinned; ever since
Denys spoke he had seemed greatly relieved. "I wist not ye were
strangers," said he to Gerard.

Denys cut a piece of bear's ear, and offered it with grace to him
he had just levelled crossbow at.

He took it calmly, and drew a piece of bread from his wallet, and
divided it with the pair. Nay, more, he winked and thrust his hand
into the heap of leaves he sat on (Gerard grasped his axe ready to
brain him) and produced a leathern bottle holding full two
gallons. He put it to his mouth, and drank their healths, then
handed it to Gerard; he passed it untouched to Denys.

"Mort de ma vie!" cried the soldier, "it is Rhenish wine, and fit
for the gullet of an archbishop. Here's to thee, thou prince of
good fellows, wishing thee a short life and a merry one! Come,
Gerard, sup! sup! Pshaw, never heed them, man! they heed not thee.
Natheless, did I hang over such a skin of Rhenish as this, and
three churls sat beneath a drinking it and offered me not a drop,
I'd soon be down among them."

"Denys! Denys!"

"My spirit would cut the cord, and womp would come my body amongst
ye, with a hand on the bottle, and one eye winking, t'other."

Gerard started up with a cry of horror and his fingers to his
ears, and was running from the place, when his eye fell on the
watcher's axe. The tangible danger brought him back. He sat down
again on the axe with his fingers in his ears.

"Courage, l'ami, le diable est mort!" shouted Denys gaily, and
offered him a piece of bear's ear, put it right under his nose as
he stopped his ears. Gerard turned his head away with loathing.

"Wine!" he gasped. "Heaven knows I have much need of it, with such
companions as thee and - "

He took a long draught of the Rhenish wine: it ran glowing through
his veins, and warmed and strengthened his heart, but could not
check his tremors whenever a gust of wind came. As for Denys and
the other, they feasted recklessly, and plied the bottle
unceasingly, and drank healths and caroused beneath that creaking
sepulchre and its ghastly tenants.

"Ask him how they came here," said Denys, with his mouth full, and
pointing up without looking.

On this question being interpreted to the watcher, he replied that
treason had been their end, diabolical treason and priest- craft.
He then, being rendered communicative by drink, delivered a long
prosy narrative, the purport of which was as follows. These honest
gentlemen who now dangled here so miserably were all stout men and
true, and lived in the forest by their wits. Their independence
and thriving state excited the jealousy and hatred of a large
portion of mankind, and many attempts were made on their lives and
liberties; these the Virgin and their patron saints, coupled with
their individual skill and courage constantly baffled. But yester
eve a party of merchants came slowly on their mules from
Dusseldorf. The honest men saw them crawling, and let them
penetrate near a league into the forest, then set upon them to
make them disgorge a portion of their ill-gotten gains. But alas!
the merchants were no merchants at all, but soldiers of more than
one nation, in the pay of the Archbishop of Cologne; haubergeons
had they beneath their gowns, and weapons of all sorts at hand;
natheless, the honest men fought stoutly, and pressed the traitors
hard, when lo! horsemen, that had been planted in ambush many
hours before, galloped up, and with these new diabolical engines
of war, shot leaden bullets, and laid many an honest fellow low,
and so quelled the courage of others that they yielded them
prisoners. These being taken red-handed, the victors, who with
malice inconceivable had brought cords knotted round their waists,
did speedily hang, and by their side the dead ones, to make the
gallanter show. "That one at the end was the captain. He never
felt the cord. He was riddled with broad arrows and leaden balls
or ever they could take him: a worthy man as ever cried, 'Stand
and deliver!' but a little hasty, not much: stay! I forgot; he is
dead. Very hasty, and obstinate as a pig. That one in the -buff
jerkin is the lieutenant, as good a soul as ever lived: he was
hanged alive. This one here, I never could abide; no (not that
one; that is Conrad, my bosom friend); I mean this one right
overhead in the chicken-toed shoon; you were always carrying
tales, ye thief, and making mischief; you know you were; and,
sirs, I am a man that would rather live united in a coppice than
in a forest with backbiters and tale-bearers: strangers, I drink
to you." And so he went down the whole string, indicating with the
neck of the bottle, like a showman with his pole, and giving a
neat description of each, which though pithy was invariably false;
for the showman had no real eye for character, and had
misunderstood every one of these people.

"Enough palaver!" cried Denys. "Marchons! Give me his axe: now
tell him he must help you along."

The man's countenance fell, but he saw in Denys's eye that
resistance would be dangerous; he submitted. Gerard it was who
objected. He said, "Y pensez-vous? to put my hand on a thief, it
maketh my flesh creep."

"Childishness! all trades must live. Besides, I have my reasons.
Be not you wiser than your elder."

"No. Only if I am to lean on him I must have my hand in my bosom,
still grasping the haft of my knife."

"It is a new attitude to walk in; but please thyself."

And in that strange and mixed attitude of tender offices and
deadly suspicion the trio did walk. I wish I could draw them - I
would not trust to the pen.

The light of the watch-tower at Dusseldorf was visible as soon as
they cleared the wood, and cheered Gerard. When, after an hour's
march, the black outline of the tower itself and other buildings
stood out clear to the eye, their companion halted and said
gloomily, "You may as well slay me out of hand as take me any
nearer the gates of Dusseldorf town."

On this being communicated to Denys, he said at once, "Let him go
then, for in sooth his neck will be in jeopardy if he wends much
further with us." Gerard acquiesced as a matter of course. His
horror of a criminal did not in the least dispose him to active
co-operation with the law. But the fact is, that at this epoch no
private citizen in any part of Europe ever meddled with criminals
but in self-defence, except, by-the-by, in England, which, behind
other nations in some things, was centuries before them all in
this.

The man's personal liberty being restored, he asked for his axe.
It was given him. To the friends' surprise he still lingered. Was
he to have nothing for coming so far out of his way with them?

"Here are two batzen, friend.

"Add the wine, the good Rhenish?"

"Did you give aught for it?"

"Ay! the peril of my life."

"Hum! what say you, Denys?"

"I say it was worth its weight in gold. Here, lad, here be silver
groshen, one for every acorn on that gallows tree; and here is one
more for thee, who wilt doubtless be there in due season."

The man took the coins, but still lingered.

"Well! what now?" cried Gerard, who thought him shamefully
overpaid already. "Dost seek the hide off our bones?"

"Nay, good sirs, but you have seen to-night how parlous a life is
mine. Ye be true men, and your prayers avail; give me then a small
trifle of a prayer, an't please you; for I know not one."

Gerard's choler began to rise at the egotistical rogue; moreover,
ever since his wound he had felt gusts of irritability. However,
he bit his lip and said, "There go two words to that bargain; tell
me first, is it true what men say of you Rhenish thieves, that ye
do murder innocent and unresisting travellers as well as rob
them?"

The other answered sulkily, "They you call thieves are not to
blame for that; the fault lies with the law."

"Gramercy! so 'tis the law's fault that ill men break it?"

"I mean not so; but the law in this land slays an honest man an if
he do but steal. What follows? he would be pitiful, but is
discouraged herefrom; pity gains him no pity, and doubles his
peril: an he but cut a purse his life is forfeit; therefore
cutteth he the throat to boot, to save his own neck: dead men tell
no tales. Pray then for the poor soul who by bloody laws is driven
to kill or else be slaughtered; were there less of this
unreasonable gibbeting on the highroad, there should be less
enforced cutting of throats in dark woods, my masters."

"Fewer words had served," replied Gerard coldly. "I asked a
question, I am answered," and suddenly doffing his bonnet -

"'Obsecro Deum omnipotentem, ut, qua cruce jam pendent isti
quindecim latrones fures et homicidae, in ea homicida fur et latro
tu pependeris quam citissime, pro publica salute, in honorem justi
Dei cui sit gloria, in aeternum, Amen.'"

"And so good day."

The greedy outlaw was satisfied last. "That is Latin," he
muttered, "and more than I bargained for." So indeed it was.

And he returned to his business with a mind at ease. The friends
pondered in silence the many events of the last few hours.

At last Gerard said thoughtfully, "That she-bear saved both our
lives-by God's will."

"Like enough," replied Denys; "and talking of that, it was lucky
we did not dawdle over our supper."

"What mean you?"

"I mean they are not all hanged; I saw a refuse of seven or eight
as black as ink around our fire."

"When? when?"

"Ere we had left it five minutes."

"Good heavens! and you said not a word."

"It would but have worried you, and had set our friend a looking
back, and mayhap tempted him to get his skull split. All other
danger was over; they could not see us, we were out of the
moonshine, and indeed, just turning a corner. Ah! there is the
sun; and here are the gates of Dusseldorf. Courage, l'ami, le
diable est mort!"

"My head! my head!" was all poor Gerard could reply.

So many shocks, emotions, perils, horrors, added to the wound, his
first, had tried his youthful body and sensitive nature too
severely.

It was noon of the same day.

In a bedroom of "The Silver Lion" the rugged Denys sat anxious,
watching his young friend.

And he lay raging with fever, delirious at intervals, and one word
for ever on his lips.

"Margaret! - Margaret Margaret!"

CHAPTER XXVI

It was the afternoon of the next day. Gerard was no longer
lightheaded, but very irritable and full of fancies; and in one of
these he begged Denys to get him a lemon to suck. Denys, who from
a rough soldier had been turned by tender friendship into a kind
of grandfather, got up hastily, and bidding him set his mind at
ease, "lemons he should have in the twinkling of a quart pot,"
went and ransacked the shops for them.

They were not so common in the North as they are now, and he was
absent a long while, and Gerard getting very impatient, when at
last the door opened. But it was not Denys. Entered softly an
imposing figure; an old gentleman in a long sober gown trimmed
with rich fur, cherry-coloured hose, and pointed shoes, with a
sword by his side in a morocco scabbard, a ruff round his neck not
only starched severely, but treacherously stiffened in furrows by
rebatoes, or a little hidden framework of wood; and on his head a
four-cornered cap with a fur border; on his chin and bosom a
majestic white beard. Gerard was in no doubt as to the vocation of
his visitor, for, the sword excepted, this was familiar to him as
the full dress of a physician. Moreover, a boy followed at his
heels with a basket, where phials, lint, and surgical tools rather
courted than shunned observation. The old gentleman came softly to
the bedside, and said mildly and sotto voce, "How is't with thee,
my son?"

Gerard answered gratefully that his wound gave him little pain
now; but his throat was parched, and his head heavy.

"A wound! they told me not of that. Let me see it. Ay, ay, a good
clean bite. The mastiff had sound teeth that took this out, I
warrant me;" and the good doctor's sympathy seemed to run off to
the quadruped he had conjured, his jackal.

"This must be cauterized forthwith, or we shall have you starting
back from water, and turning somersaults in bed under our hands.
'Tis the year for raving curs, and one hath done your business;
but we will baffle him yet. Urchin, go heat thine iron."

"But, sir," edged in Gerard, "'twas no dog, but a bear."

"A bear! Young man," remonstrated the senior severely, "think what
you say; 'tis ill jesting with the man of art who brings his grey
hairs and long study to heal you. A bear, quotha! Had you
dissected as many bears as I, or the tithe, and drawn their teeth
to keep your hand in, you would know that no bear's jaw ever made
this foolish trifling wound. I tell you 'twas a dog, and since you
put me to it, I even deny that it was a dog of magnitude, but
neither more nor less than one of these little furious curs that
are so rife, and run devious, biting each manly leg, and laying
its wearer low, but for me and my learned brethren, who still stay
the mischief with knife and cautery."

"Alas, sir! when said I 'twas a bear's jaw? I said, 'A bear:' it
was his paw, now."

"And why didst not tell me that at once?"

"Because you kept telling me instead."

"Never conceal aught from your leech, young man," continued the
senior, who was a good talker, but one of the worst listeners in
Europe. "Well, it is an ill business. All the horny excrescences
of animals, to wit, claws of tigers, panthers, badgers, cats,
bears, and the like, and horn of deer, and nails of humans,
especially children, are imbued with direst poison. Y'had better
have been bitten by a cur, whatever you may say, than gored by
bull or stag, or scratched by bear. However, shalt have a good
biting cataplasm for thy leg; meantime keep we the body cool: put
out thy tongue!-good!-fever. Let me feel thy pulse: good! - fever.
I ordain flebotomy, and on the instant."

"Flebotomy! that is bloodletting: humph! Well, no matter, if 'tis
sure to cure me, for I will not lie idle here." The doctor let him
know that flebotomy was infallible, especially in this case.

"Hans, go fetch the things needful, and I will entertain the
patient meantime with reasons."

The man of art then explained to Gerard that in disease the blood
becomes hot and distempered and more or less poisonous; but a
portion of this unhealthy liquid removed, Nature is fain to create
a purer fluid to fill its place. Bleeding, therefore, being both a
cooler and a purifier, was a specific in all diseases, for all
diseases were febrile, whatever empirics might say.

"But think not," said he warmly, "that it suffices to bleed; any
paltry barber can open a vein (though not all can close it again).
The art is to know what vein to empty for what disease. T'other
day they brought me one tormented with earache. I let him blood in
the right thigh, and away flew his earache. By-the-by, he has died
since then. Another came with the toothache. I bled him behind the
ear, and relieved him in a jiffy. He is also since dead as it
happens. I bled our bailiff between the thumb and forefinger for
rheumatism. Presently he comes to me with a headache and drumming
in the ears, and holds out his hand over the basin; but I smiled
at his folly, and bled him in the left ankle sore against his
will, and made his head as light as a nut."

Diverging then from the immediate theme after the manner of
enthusiasts, the reverend teacher proceeded thus:

"Know, young man, that two schools of art contend at this moment
throughout Europe. The Arabian, whose ancient oracles are
Avicenna, Rhazes, Albucazis; and its revivers are Chauliac and
Lanfranc; and the Greek school, whose modern champions are
Bessarion, Platinus, and Marsilius Ficinus, but whose pristine
doctors were medicine's very oracles, Phoebus, Chiron,
Aesculapius, and his sons Podalinus and Machaon, Pythagoras,
Democritus, Praxagoras, who invented the arteries, and Dioctes,
'qui primus urinae animum dedit.' All these taught orally. Then
came Hippocrates, the eighteenth from Aesculapius, and of him we
have manuscripts; to him we owe 'the vital principle.' He also
invented the bandage, and tapped for water on the chest; and above
all he dissected; yet only quadrupeds, for the brutal prejudices
of the pagan vulgar withheld the human body from the knife of
science. Him followed Aristotle, who gave us the aorta, the
largest blood-vessel in the human body."

"Surely, sir, the Almighty gave us all that is in our bodies, and
not Aristotle, nor any Grecian man," objected Gerard humbly.

"Child! of course He gave us the thing; but Aristotle did more, he
gave us the name of the thing. But young men will still be
talking. The next great light was Galen; he studied at Alexandria,
then the home of science. He, justly malcontent with quadrupeds,
dissected apes, as coming nearer to man, and bled like a Trojan.
Then came Theophilus, who gave us the nerves, the lacteal vessels,
and the pia mater."

This worried Gerard. "I cannot lie still and hear it said that
mortal man bestowed the parts which Adam our father took from Him,
who made him of the clay, and us his sons."

"Was ever such perversity?" said the doctor, his colour rising.
"Who is the real donor of a thing to man? he who plants it
secretly in the dark recesses of man's body, or the learned wight
who reveals it to his intelligence, and so enriches his mind with
the knowledge of it? Comprehension is your only true possession.
Are you answered?"

"I am put to silence, sir."

"And that is better still; for garrulous patients are ill to cure,
especially in fever; I say, then, that Eristratus gave us the
cerebral nerves and the milk vessels; nay, more, he was the
inventor of lithotomy, whatever you may say. Then came another
whom I forget; you do somewhat perturb me with your petty
exceptions. Then came Ammonius, the author of lithotrity, and here
comes Hans with the basin-to stay your volubility. Blow thy
chafer, boy, and hand me the basin; 'tis well. Arabians, quotha!
What are they but a sect of yesterday who about the year 1000 did
fall in with the writings of those very Greeks, and read them
awry, having no concurrent light of their own? for their demigod,
and camel-driver, Mahound, impostor in science as in religion, had
strictly forbidden them anatomy, even of the lower animals, the
which he who severeth from medicine, 'tollit solem e mundo,' as
Tully quoth. Nay, wonder not at my fervour, good youth; where the
general weal stands in jeopardy, a little warmth is civic, humane,
and honourable. Now there is settled of late in this town a
pestilent Arabist, a mere empiric, who, despising anatomy, and
scarce knowing Greek from Hebrew, hath yet spirited away half my
patients; and I tremble for the rest. Put forth thine ankle; and
thou, Hans, breathe on the chafer."

Whilst matters were in this posture, in came Denys with the
lemons, and stood surprised. "What sport is toward?" said he,
raising his brows.

Gerard coloured a little, and told him the learned doctor was
going to flebotomize him and cauterize him; that was all.

"Ay! indeed; and yon imp, what bloweth he hot coals for?"

"What should it be for," said the doctor to Gerard, "but to
cauterize the vein when opened and the poisonous blood let free?
'Tis the only safe way. Avicenna indeed recommends a ligature of
the vein; but how 'tis to be done he saith not, nor knew he
himself I wot, nor any of the spawn of Ishmael. For me, I have no
faith in such tricksy expedients; and take this with you for a
safe principle: 'Whatever an Arab or Arabist says is right, must
be wrong.'"

"oh, I see now what 'tis for," said Denys; "and art thou so simple
as to let him put hot iron to thy living flesh? didst ever keep
thy little finger but ten moments in a candle? and this will be as
many minutes. Art not content to burn in purgatory after thy
death? must thou needs buy a foretaste on't here?"

"I never thought of that," said Gerard gravely; "the good doctor
spake not of burning, but of cautery; to be sure 'tis all one, but
cautery sounds not so fearful as burning."

"Imbecile! That is their art; to confound a plain man with dark
words, till his hissing flesh lets him know their meaning. Now
listen to what I have seen. When a soldier bleeds from a wound in
battle, these leeches say, 'Fever. Blood him!' and so they burn
the wick at t'other end too. They bleed the bled. Now at fever's
heels comes desperate weakness; then the man needs all his blood
to live; but these prickers and burners, having no forethought,
recking nought of what is sure to come in a few hours, and seeing
like brute beasts only what is under their noses, having meantime
robbed him of the very blood his hurt had spared him to battle
that weakness withal; and so he dies exhausted. Hundreds have I
seen so scratched and pricked out of the world, Gerard, and tall
fellows too; but lo! if they have the luck to be wounded where no
doctor can be had, then they live; this too have I seen. Had I
ever outlived that field in Brabant but for my most lucky
mischance, lack of chirurgery? The frost chocked all my bleeding
wounds, and so I lived. A chirurgeon had pricked yet one more hole
in this my body with his lance, and drained my last drop out, and
my spirit with it. Seeing them thus distraught in bleeding of the
bleeding soldier, I place no trust in them; for what slays a
veteran may well lay a milk-and-water bourgeois low."

"This sounds like common sense," sighed Gerard languidly, "but no
need to raise your voice so; I was not born deaf, and just now I
hear acutely."

"Common sense! very common sense indeed," shouted the bad
listener; "why, this is a soldier; a brute whose business is to
kill men, not cure them." He added in very tolerable French, "Woe
be to you, unlearned man, if you come between a physician and his
patient; and woe be to you, misguided youth, if you listen to that
man of blood."

"Much obliged," said Denys, with mock politeness; "but I am a true
man, and would rob no man of his name. I do somewhat in the way of
blood, but not worth mention in this presence. For one I slay, you
slay a score; and for one spoonful of blood I draw, you spill a
tubful. The world is still gulled by shows. We soldiers vapour
with long swords, and even in war be-get two foes for every one we
kill; but you smooth gownsmen, with soft phrases and bare bodkins,
'tis you that thin mankind."

"A sick chamber is no place for jesting," cried the physician.

"No, doctor, nor for bawling," said the patient peevishly.

"Come, young man," said the senior kindly, "be reasonable.
Cuilibet in sua arte credendum est. My whole life has been given
to this art. I studied at Montpelier; the first school in France,
and by consequence in Europe. There learned I Dririmancy,
Scatomancy, Pathology, Therapeusis, and, greater than them all,
Anatomy. For there we disciples of Hippocrates and Galen had
opportunities those great ancients never knew. Goodbye, quadrupeds
and apes, and paganism, and Mohammedanism; we bought of the
churchwardens, we shook the gallows; we undid the sexton's work of
dark nights, penetrated with love of science and our kind; all the
authorities had their orders from Paris to wink; and they winked.
Gods of Olympus, how they winked! The gracious king assisted us:
he sent us twice a year a living criminal condemned to die, and
said, 'Deal ye with him as science asks; dissect him alive, if ye
think fit.'"

"By the liver of Herod, and Nero's bowels, he'll make me blush for
the land that bore me, an' if he praises it any more," shouted
Denys at the top of his voice.

Gerard gave a little squawk, and put his fingers in his ears; but
speedily drew them out and shouted angrily, and as loudly, "you
great roaring, blaspheming bull of Basan, hold your noisy tongue!"

Denys summoned a contrite look.

"Tush, slight man," said the doctor, with calm contempt, and
vibrated a hand over him as in this age men make a pointer dog
down charge; then flowed majestic on. "We seldom or never
dissected the living criminal, except in part. We mostly
inoculated them with such diseases as the barren time afforded,
selecting of course the more interesting ones."

"That means the foulest," whispered Denys meekly.

"These we watched through all their stages to maturity."

"Meaning the death of the poor rogue," whispered Denys meekly.

"And now, my poor sufferer, who best merits your confidence, this
honest soldier with his youth, his ignorance, and his prejudices,
or a greybeard laden with the gathered wisdom of ages

"That is," cried Denys impatiently, "will you believe what a
jackdaw' in a long gown has heard from a starling in a long gown,
who heard it from a jay-pie, who heard it from a magpie, who heard
it from a popinjay; or will you believe what I, a man with nought
to gain by looking awry, nor speaking false, have seen; nor heard
with the ears which are given us to gull us, but seen with these
sentinels mine eye, seen, seen; to wit, that fevered and blooded
men die, that fevered men not blooded live? stay, who sent for
this sang-sue? Did you?"

"Not I. I thought you had."

"Nay," explained the doctor, "the good landlord told me one was
'down' in his house; so I said to myself, 'A stranger, and in need
of my art,' and came incontinently."

"It was the act of a good Christian, sir."

"of a good bloodhound," cried Denys contemptuously. "What, art
thou so green as not to know that all these landlords are in
league with certain of their fellow-citizens, who pay them toll on
each booty? Whatever you pay this ancient for stealing your life
blood, of that the landlord takes his third for betraying you to
him. Nay, more, as soon as ever your blood goes down the stair in
that basin there, the landlord will see it or smell it, and send
swiftly to his undertaker and get his third out of that job. For
if he waited till the doctor got downstairs, the doctor would be
beforehand and bespeak his undertaker, and then he would get the
black thirds. Say I sooth, old Rouge et Noir? dites!"

"Denys, Denys, who taught you to think so ill of man?"

"Mine eyes, that are not to be gulled by what men say, seeing this
many a year what they do, in all the lands I travel."

The doctor with some address made use of these last words to
escape the personal question. "I too have eyes as well as thou,
and go not by tradition only, but by what I have seen, and not
only seen, but done. I have healed as many men by bleeding as that
interloping Arabist has killed for want of it. 'Twas but t'other
day I healed one threatened with leprosy; I but bled him at the
tip of the nose. I cured last year a quartan ague: how? bled its
forefinger. Our cure lost his memory. I brought it him back on the
point of my lance; I bled him behind the ear. I bled a dolt of a
boy, and now he is the only one who can tell his right hand from
his left in a whole family of idiots. When the plague was here
years ago, no sham plague, such as empyrics proclaim every six
years or so, but the good honest Byzantine pest, I blooded an
alderman freely, and cauterized the symptomatic buboes, and so
pulled him out of the grave; whereas our then chirurgeon, a most
pernicious Arabist, caught it himself, and died of it, aha,
calling on Rhazes, Avicenna, and Mahound, who, could they have
come, had all perished as miserably as himself."

"Oh, my poor ears," sighed Gerard.

"And am I fallen so low that one of your presence and speech
rejects my art. and listens to a rude soldier, so far behind even
his own miserable trade as to bear an arbalest, a worn- out
invention, that German children shoot at pigeons with, but German
soldiers mock at since ever arquebusses came and put them down?"

"You foul-mouthed old charlatan," cried Denys, "the arbalest is
shouldered by taller men than ever stood in Rhenish hose, and even
now it kills as many more than your noisy, stinking arquebus, as
the lancet does than all our toys together. Go to! He was no fool
who first called you 'leeches.' Sang-sues! va!"

Gerard groaned. "By the holy virgin, I wish you were both at
Jericho, bellowing.'

"Thank you comrade. Then I'll bark no more, but at need I'll bite.
If he has a lance, I have a sword; if he bleeds you, I'll bleed
him. The moment his lance pricks your skin, little one, my
sword-hilt knocks against his ribs; I have said it."

And Denys turned pale, folded his arms, and looked gloomy and
dangerous.

Gerard sighed wearily. "Now, as all this is about me, give me
leave to say a word."

"Ay! let the young man choose life or death for himself."

Gerard then indirectly rebuked his noisy counsellors by contrast
and example. He spoke with unparalleled calmness, sweetness, and
gentleness. And these were the words of Gerard the son of Eli. "I
doubt not you both mean me well; but you assassinate me between
you. Calmness and quiet are everything to me; but you are like two
dogs growling over a bone. "And in sooth, bone I should be, did
this uproar last long."

There was a dead silence, broken only by the silvery voice of
Gerard, as he lay tranquil, and gazed calmly at the ceiling, and
trickled into words.

"First, venerable sir, I thank you for coming to see me, whether
from humanity, or in the way of honest gain; all trades must live.

"Your learning, reverend sir, seems great, to me at least, and for
your experience, your age voucheth it.

"You say you have bled many, and of these many, many have not died
thereafter, but lived, and done well. I must needs believe you."

The physician bowed; Denys grunted.

"Others, you say, you have bled, and-they are dead. I must needs
believe you.

"Denys knows few things compared with you, but he knows them well.
He is a man not given to conjecture. This I myself have noted. He
says he has seen the fevered and blooded for the most part die;
the fevered and not blooded live. I must needs believe him.

"Here, then, all is doubt.

"But thus much is certain; if I be bled, I must pay you a fee, and
be burnt and excruciated with a hot iron, who am no felon.

"Pay a certain price in money and anguish for a doubtful remedy,
that will I never.

"Next to money and ease, peace and quiet are certain goods, above
all in a sick-room; but 'twould seem men cannot argue medicine
without heat and raised voices; therefore, sir, I will essay a
little sleep, and Denys will go forth and gaze on the females of
the place, and I will keep you no longer from those who can afford
to lay out blood and money in flebotomy and cautery."

The old physician had naturally a hot temper; he had often during
this battle of words mastered it with difficulty, and now it
mastered him. The most dignified course was silence; he saw this,
and drew himself up, and made loftily for the door, followed close
by his little boy and big basket.

But at the door he choked, he swelled, he burst. He whirled and
came back open-mouthed, and the little boy and big basket had to
whisk semicircularly not to be run down, for de minimis non curat
Medicina-even when not in a rage.

"Ah! you reject my skill, you scorn my art. My revenge shall be to
leave you to yourself; lost idiot, take your last look at me, and
at the sun. Your blood be on your head!" And away he stamped.

But on reaching the door he whirled and came back; his wicker tail
twirling round after him like a cat's.

"In twelve hours at furthest you will be in the secondary stage of
fever. Your head will split. Your carotids will thump. Aha! And
let but a pin fall, you will jump to the ceiling. Then send for
me; and I'll not come." He departed. But at the door- handle
gathered fury, wheeled and came flying, with pale, terror-stricken
boy and wicker tail whisking after him. "Next will come - CRAMPS
of the STOMACH. Aha!