"You cannot go against your father's will," she said tonelessly, like one who has even lost the power to suffer acutely. "God alone knows what would become of us all if you did."
"He can only kill me," retorted Laurence, with fierce, passionate resentment.
"And how should I survive if he did?"
"Would you not rather see me dead, mother dear, than wedded to a woman whose every thought, every aspiration must tend toward the further destruction of our country--she the daughter of the most hideous tyrant that has ever defamed this earth--more hideous even than that execrable Alva himself..."
He paused abruptly in the midst of this passionate outburst, for the old house--which had been so solemn and silent awhile ago, suddenly echoed from end to end with loud and hilarious sounds, laughter and shouts, heavy footsteps, jingle of spurs and snatches of song, immediately followed by one or two piteous cries uttered in a woman's piercing voice. Laurence van Rycke jumped to his feet.
"What was that?" he cried, and made a dash for the door. His mother's imploring cry called him back.
"No, no, Laurence! don't go!" she begged. "It is only the soldiers! They tease Jeanne, and she gets very cross! ... We have six men and a sergeant quartered here now, besides the commandant..."
"Eight Spanish soldiers in the house of the High-Bailiff of Ghent!" exclaimed Laurence, and a prolonged laugh of intense bitterness came from his overburdened heart. "Oh God!" he added, as he stretched out his arms with a gesture of miserable longing and impotence, "to endure all this outrage and all this infamy!--to know as we do, what has happened in Mons and Mechlin and to be powerless to do anything--anything against such hideous, appalling, detestable tyranny--to feel every wrong and every injustice against the country one loves, against one's own kith and kin, eating like the plague into one's very bones and to remain powerless, inert, an insentient log in the face of it all. And all the while to be fawning--always fawning and cringing, kissing the master's hand that wields the flail.... Ugh! And now this new tyranny, this abominable marriage.... Ye Heavens above me! but mine own cowardice in accepting it would fill me with unspeakable loathing!"
"Laurence, for pity's sake!" implored the mother.
At her call he ran to her and knelt at her feet: then burying his head in his hands he sobbed like a child.