Lysbeth, a Tale of the Dutch by H. Rider Haggard (fantasy books to read txt) 📕

through the icy winds of spring, and now deep into the heart of summer, the city of Haarlem had been closely beleaguered by an army of thirty thousand Spaniards, most of them veteran troops under the command of Don Frederic, the son of Alva, and other generals. Against this disciplined host were opposed the little garrison of four thousand Hollanders and Germans aided by a few Scotch and English soldiers, together with a population of about twenty thousand old men, women and children. From day to day, from week to week, from month to month, the struggle was waged between these unequal forces, marked on either side by the most heroic efforts and by cruelties that would strike our age as monstrous. For in those times the captive prisoner of war could expect no mercy; indeed, he was fortunate if he was not hung from a gibbet by the leg to die slowly within eyeshot of his friends.

There were battles without number, men perished in hecatombs; among the besieging armies alone over twelve thousand lost their lives, so that the neighbourhood of Haarlem became one vast graveyard, and the fish in the lake were poisoned by the dead. Assault, sortie, ambuscade, artifice of war; combats to the death upon the ice between skate-shod soldiers; desperate sea fights, attempts to storm; the explosion of mines and counter-mines that brought death to hundreds—all these became the familiar incidents of daily life.

Then there were other horrors; cold from insufficient fuel, pestilences of various sorts such as always attend a siege, and, worst of all for the beleaguered, hunger. Week by week as the summer aged, the food grew less and less, till at length there was nothing. The weeds that grew in the street, the refuse of tanneries, the last ounce of offal, the mice and the cats, all had been devoured. On the lofty steeple of St. Bavon for days and days had floated a black flag to tell the Prince of Orange in Leyden that below it was despair as black. The last attempt at succour had been made. Batenburg had been defeated and slain, together with the Seigneurs of Clotingen and Carloo, and five or six hundred men. Now there was no more hope.

Desperate expedients were suggested: That the women, children, aged and sick should be left in the city, while the able-bodied men cut a way through the battalions of their besiegers. On these non-combatants it was hoped that the Spaniard would have mercy—as though the Spaniard could have mercy, he who afterwards dragged the wounded and the ailing to the door of the hospital and there slaughtered them in cold blood; aye, and here and elsewhere, did other things too dreadful to write down. Says the old chronicler, “But this being understood by the women, they assembled all together, making the most pitiful cries and lamentations that could be heard, the which would have moved a heart of flint, so as it was not possible to abandon them.”

Next another plan was formed: that all the females and helpless should be set in the centre of a square of the fighting men, to march out and give battle to the foe till everyone was slain. Then the Spaniards hearing this and growing afraid of what these desperate men might do, fell back on guile. If they would surrender, the citizens of Haarlem were told, and pay two hundred and forty thousand florins, no punishment should be inflicted. So, having neither food nor hope, they listened to the voice of the tempter and surrendered, they who had fought until their garrison of four thousand was reduced to eighteen hundred men.

It was noon and past on the fatal twelfth of July. The gates were open, the Spaniards, those who were left alive of them, Don Frederic at their head, with drums beating, banners flying, and swords sharpened for murder, were marching into the city of Haarlem. In a deep niche between two great brick piers of the cathedral were gathered four people whom we know. War and famine had left them all alive, yet they had borne their share of both. In every enterprise, however desperate, Foy and Martin had marched, or stood, or watched side by side, and well did the Spaniards know the weight of the great sword Silence and the red-headed giant who wielded it. Mother Martha, too, had not been idle. Throughout the siege she had served as the lieutenant of the widow Hasselaer, who with a band of three hundred women fought day and night alongside of their husbands and brothers. Even Elsa, who although she was too delicate and by nature timid and unfitted to go out to battle, had done her part, for she laboured at the digging of mines and the building of walls till her soft hands were rough and scarred.

How changed they were. Foy, whose face had been so youthful, looked now like a man on the wrong side of middle age. The huge Martin might have been a great skeleton on which hung clothes, or rather rags and a rent bull’s hide, with his blue eyes shining in deep pits beneath the massive, projecting skull. Elsa too had become quite small, like a child. Her sweet face was no longer pretty, only pitiful, and all the roundness of her figure had vanished—she might have been an emaciated boy. Of the four of them Martha the Mare, who was dressed like a man, showed the least change. Indeed, except that now her hair was snowy, that her features were rather more horse-like, that the yellow, lipless teeth projected even further, and the thin nervous hands had become almost like those of an Egyptian mummy, she was much as she always had been.

Martin leaned upon the great sword and groaned. “Curses on them, the cowards,” he muttered; “why did they not let us go out and die fighting? Fools, mad fools, who would trust to the mercy of the Spaniard.”

“Oh! Foy,” said Elsa, throwing her thin arms about his neck, “you will not let them take me, will you? If it comes to the worst, you will kill me, won’t you? Otherwise I must kill myself, and Foy, I am a coward, I am afraid—to do that.”

“I suppose so,” he answered in a harsh, unnatural voice, “but oh! God, if Thou art, have pity upon her. Oh! God have pity.”

“Blaspheme not, doubt not!” broke in the shrill voice of Martha. “Has it not been as I told you last winter in the boat? Have you not been protected, and shall you not be protected to the end? Only blaspheme not, doubt not!”

The niche in which they were standing was out of sight of the great square and those who thronged it, but as Martha spoke a band of victorious Spaniards, seven or eight of them, came round the corner and caught sight of the party in the nook.

“There’s a girl,” said the sergeant in command of them, “who isn’t bad looking. Pull her out, men.”

Some fellows stepped forward to do his bidding. Now Foy went mad. He did not kill Elsa as she had prayed him, he flew straight at the throat of the brute who had spoken, and next instant his sword was standing out a foot behind his neck. Then after him, with a kind of low cry, came Martin, plying the great blade Silence, and Martha after him with her long knife. It was all over in a minute, but before it was done there were five men down, three dead and two sore wounded.

“A tithe and an offering!” muttered Martha as, bounding forward, she bent over the wounded men, and their comrades fled round the corner of the cathedral.

There was a minute’s pause. The bright summer sunlight shone upon the faces and armour of the dead Spaniards, upon the naked sword of Foy, who stood over Elsa crouched to the ground in a corner of the niche, her face hidden in her hands, upon the terrible blue eyes of Martin alight with a dreadful fire of rage. Then there came the sound of marching men, and a company of Spaniards appeared before them, and at their head—Ramiro and Adrian called van Goorl.

“There they are, captain,” said a soldier, one of those who had fled; “shall we shoot them?”

Ramiro looked, carelessly enough at first, then again a long, scrutinising look. So he had caught them at last! Months ago he had learned that Elsa had been rescued from the Red Mill by Foy and Martin, and now, after much seeking, the birds were in his net.

“No,” he said, “I think not. Such desperate characters must be reserved for separate trial.”

“Where can they be kept, captain?” asked the sergeant sulkily.

“I observed, friend, that the house which my son and I have taken as our quarters has excellent cellars; they can be imprisoned there for the present—that is, except the young lady, whom the Señor Adrian will look after. As it chances, she is his wife.”

At this the soldiers laughed openly.

“I repeat—his wife, for whom he has been searching these many months,” said Ramiro, “and, therefore, to be respected. Do you understand, men?”

Apparently they did understand, at least no one made any answer. Their captain, as they had found, was not a man who loved argument.

“Now, then, you fellows,” went on Ramiro, “give up your arms.”

Martin thought a while. Evidently he was wondering whether it would not be best to rush at them and die fighting. At that moment, as he said afterwards indeed, the old saying came into his mind, “A game is not lost until it is won,” and remembering that dead men can never have another chance of winning games, he gave up the sword.

“Hand that to me,” said Ramiro. “It is a curious weapon to which I have taken a fancy.”

So sword Silence was handed to him, and he slung it over his shoulder. Foy looked at the kneeling Elsa, and he looked at his sword. Then an idea struck him, and he looked at the face of Adrian, his brother, whom he had last seen when the said Adrian ran to warn him and Martin at the factory, for though he knew that he was fighting with his father among the Spaniards, during the siege they had never met. Even then, in that dire extremity, with a sudden flash of thought he wondered how it happened that Adrian, being the villain that he was, had taken the trouble to come and warn them yonder in Leyden, thereby giving them time to make a very good defence in the shot tower.

Foy looked up at his brother. Adrian was dressed in the uniform of a Spanish officer, with a breast-plate over his quilted doublet, and a steel cap, from the front of which rose a frayed and weather-worn plume of feathers. The face had changed; there was none of the old pomposity about those handsome features; it looked worn and cowed, like that of an animal which has been trained to do tricks by hunger and the use of the whip. Yet, through all the shame and degradation, Foy seemed to catch the glint of some kind of light, a light of good desire shining behind that piteous mask, as the sun sometimes shines through a sullen cloud. Could it be that Adrian was not quite so bad after all? That he was, in fact, the Adrian that he, Foy, had always believed him to be, vain, silly, passionate, exaggerated, born to be a tool and think himself the master, but beneath everything, well-meaning? Who could say? At the worst, too, was it not better that Elsa should become the wife of Adrian than that her life should cease there and then, and by her lover’s hand?

These things passed through his brain as the lightning passes through the sky. In an instant his mind was made up and Foy flung down his sword at the feet of a soldier. As he did so his eyes met the eyes of Adrian, and to his imagination they seemed to be full of thanks and promise.

They took them all; with gibes and blows the soldiers haled them away through the tumult and the agony of the fallen town and its doomed defenders. Out of the rich sunlight they led them into a house that still stood not greatly harmed by the cannon-shot, but a little way from the shattered Ravelin and the gate which had been the scene of such fearful conflict—a house that was the home of one of the wealthiest merchants in Haarlem. Here Foy and Elsa were parted. She struggled to his arms, whence they tore her and dragged her away up the stairs, but Martin, Martha and Foy were thrust into a dark cellar, locked in and left.

A while later the