As it happened, she bore no other children.
BOOK THE SECOND
THE RIPENING
CHAPTER IX
ADRIAN, FOY, AND MARTIN THE RED
Many years had gone by since Lysbeth found her love again upon the island in the Haarlemer Meer. The son that she bore there was now a grown man, as was her second son, Foy, and her own hair showed grey beneath the lappets of her cap.
Fast, fast wove the loom of God during those fateful years, and the web thereof was the story of a people’s agony and its woof was dyed red with their blood. Edict had followed edict, crime had been heaped upon crime. Alva, like some inhuman and incarnate vengeance, had marched his army, quiet and harmless as is the tiger when he stalks his prey, across the fields of France. Now he was at Brussels, and already the heads of the Counts Egmont and Hoorn had fallen; already the Blood Council was established and at its work. In the Low Countries law had ceased to exist, and there anything might happen however monstrous or inhuman. Indeed, with one decree of the Holy Office, confirmed by a proclamation of Philip of Spain, all the inhabitants of the Netherlands, three millions of them, had been condemned to death. Men’s minds were full of terror, for on every side were burnings and hangings and torturings. Without were fightings, within were fears, and none knew whom they could trust, since the friend of to-day might be the informer or judge of to-morrow. All this because they chose to worship God in their own fashion unaided by images and priests.
Although so long a time had passed, as it chanced those personages with whom we have already made acquaintance in this history were still alive. Let us begin with two of them, one of whom we know and one of whom, although we have heard of him before, will require some introduction—Dirk van Goorl and his son Foy.
Scene—an upper room above a warehouse overlooking the market-place of Leyden, a room with small windows and approached by two staircases; time, a summer twilight. The faint light which penetrated into this chamber through the unshuttered windows, for to curtain them would have been to excite suspicion, showed that about twenty people were gathered there, among whom were one or two women. For the most part they were men of the better class, middle-aged burghers of sober mien, some of whom stood about in knots, while others were seated upon stools and benches. At the end of the room addressing them was a man well on in middle life, with grizzled hair and beard, small and somewhat mean of stature, yet one through whose poor exterior goodness seemed to flow like light through some rough casement of horn. This was Jan Arentz, the famous preacher, by trade a basket-maker, a man who showed himself steadfast to the New Religion through all afflictions, and who was gifted with a spirit which could remain unmoved amidst the horrors of perhaps the most terrible persecution that Christians have suffered since the days of the Roman Emperors. He was preaching now and these people were his congregation.
“I come not to bring peace but a sword,” was his text, and certainly this night it was most appropriate and one easy of illustration. For there, on the very market-place beneath them, guarded by soldiers and surrounded with the rabble of the city, two members of his flock, men who a fortnight before had worshipped in that same room, at this moment were undergoing martyrdom by fire!
Arentz preached patience and fortitude. He went back into recent history and told his hearers how he himself had passed a hundred dangers; how he had been hunted like a wolf, how he had been tried, how he had escaped from prisons and from the swords of soldiers, even as St. Paul had done before him, and how yet he lived to minister to them this night. He told them that they must have no fear, that they must go on quite happy, quite confident, taking what it pleased God to send them, feeling that it would all be for the best; yes, that even the worst would be for the best. What was the worst? Some hours of torment and death. And what lay beyond the death? Ah! let them think of that. The whole world was but a brief and varying shadow, what did it matter how or when they walked out of that shadow into the perfect light? The sky was very black, but behind it the sun shone. They must look forward with the eye of faith; perhaps the sufferings of the present generation were part of the scheme of things; perhaps from the earth which they watered with their blood would spring the flower of freedom, that glorious freedom in whose day all men would be able to worship their Creator responsible only to the Bible law and their own conscience, not to the dogmas or doctrines of other men.
As Arentz spoke thus, eloquently, sweetly, spoke like one inspired, the twilight deepened and the flare of those sacrificial fires flickered on the window pane, and the mixed murmurs of the crowd of witnesses broke upon his listeners’ ears. The preacher paused and looked down upon the dreadful scene below, for from where he stood he could behold it all.