Lysbeth, a Tale of the Dutch

by H. Rider Haggard

“Hidden in the church, hidden in the church.”

“We knew that, you traitorous dog. Now then for the soul-saving. Catch hold there and run away with it. A horse should be ridden, father—your own saying—and an angel must learn to fly.”

Thus ended the life of the Abbe Dominic at the hands of avenging men. Without a doubt they were fierce and bloody-minded, for the reader must not suppose that all the wickedness of those days lies on the heads of the Inquisition and the Spaniards. The adherents of the New Religion did evil things also, things that sound dreadful in our ears. In excuse of them, however, this can be urged, that, compared to those of their oppressors, they were as single trees to a forest full; also that they who worked them had been maddened by their sufferings. If our fathers, husbands and brothers had been burned at the stake, or done to death under the name of Jesus in the dens of the Inquisition, or slaughtered by thousands in the sack of towns; if our wives and daughters had been shamed, if our houses had been burned, our goods taken, our liberties trampled upon, and our homes made a desolation, then, my reader, is it not possible that even in these different days you and I might have been cruel when our hour came? God knows alone, and God be thanked that so far as we can foresee, except under the pressure, perhaps, of invasion by semi-barbarian hordes, or of dreadful and sudden social revolutions, civilized human nature will never be put to such a test again.

Far aloft in the gloom there, swinging from the arm of the Cross, whose teachings his life had mocked, like some mutinous sailor at the yard of the vessel he had striven to betray, the priest hung dead, but his life did not appease the fury of the triumphant mob.

“The others,” they cried, “find the others,” and with torches and lanterns they hunted round the great church. They ascended the belfry, they rummaged the chapels, they explored the crypt; then, baffled, drew together in a countless crowd in the nave, shouting, gesticulating, suggesting.

“Get dogs,” cried a voice; “dogs will smell them out;” and dogs were brought, which yapped and ran to and fro, but, confused by the multitude, and not knowing what to seek, found nothing. Then some one threw an image from a niche, and next minute, with a cry of “Down with the idols,” the work of destruction began.

Fanatics sprang at the screens and the altars, “all the carved work thereof they break down with hatchet and hammer,” they tore the hangings from the shrines, they found the sacred cups, and filling them with sacramental wine, drank with gusts of ribald laughter. In the centre of the choir they built a bonfire, and fed it with pictures, carvings, and oaken benches, so that it blazed and roared furiously. On to it—for this mob did not come to steal but to work vengeance—they threw utensils of gold and silver, the priceless jewelled offerings of generations, and danced around its flames in triumph, while from every side came the crash of falling statues and the tinkling of shattered glass.

The light of that furnace shone through the lattice stonework of the tomb, and in its lurid and ominous glare Adrian beheld the faces of those who refuged with him. What a picture it was; the niches filled with mouldering boxes, the white gleam of human bones that here and there had fallen from them, the bright furnishings and velvet pall of the coffin of the newcomer on which he stood—and then those faces. The priests, still crouched in corners, rolling on the ground, their white lips muttering who knows what; the sacristan in a swoon, Hague Simon hugging a coffin in a niche, as a drowning man hugs a plank, and, standing in the midst of them, calm, sardonic and watchful, a drawn rapier in his hand, his father Ramiro.

“We are lost,” moaned a priest, losing control of himself. “We are lost. They will kill us as they have killed the holy Abbe.”

“We are not lost,” hissed Ramiro, “we are quite safe, but, friend, if you open that cursed mouth of yours again it shall be for the last time,” and he lifted his sword, adding, “Silence; he who speaks, dies.”