"If I had a wife like you to cook them for me!" the Frenchman gallantly replied. "But, tell me, are all the girls from Herstal as handsome as you?"
"Handsomer," the peasant girl replied lightly. "My sister to wit. Buy some eggs from me, corporal."
"Seeing a strange look in the girl's
eyes, he changed the word he was
about to utter"--p. 852.
"I have no money, and eggs are dear here now. Give me one for----" Then, seeing a strange look in the girl's eyes, he changed the word he was about to utter into "luck."
But since the peasant was now outside the gate it may be that, even if he had said "love" instead "luck," it would have made little difference to her. For she was out of Liége; she was free--free to begin her efforts, her attempt, mad as it might be, to rescue the one man on earth with whom and whose name the word and meaning of love could ever be associated in her mind.
Free to stride on in her coarse, rain-soaked peasant dress towards the village of Herstal, and, when two hundred yards from it, to fling herself into the arms of another peasant woman some few years older than herself and to murmur, "Outside and free, Radegonde! Oh, thank God! thank God! Free to attempt to save him."
"Ay, and free to set out at once. Mynheer Van Ryk's old domestic still keeps the inn here. The charrette is ready. We have but to remove these peasants' clothes and sabots, and we can depart. Come, Sylvia, come!"
[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
Had Philip Wouvermans lived half a century later than he did, the splendid brush he wielded would have found greater scope in the region he knew so well than it ever obtained, superb as his work was. For now, over all that portion of Europe known generically as the Netherlands, or Low Countries, there was the movement and the colouring this master delighted in--armies marching and fro, encamping one night at one place and at another on the next, bivouacking here to-day and there to-morrow, attacking or attacked, conquering or being repulsed. Armies, regiments, even small detachments, were clad sometimes in the royal blue of France, sometimes in the scarlet of England; while, intermixed with the former, might be seen the yellow grey of Spain or the dark green of Bavaria; and, with the latter, the snuff-brown of Holland or the pale blue of Austria. As they marched along the roads, singing the songs of the lands from which they drew their birth, or across fields, the ripened corn and wheat were trampled under their and their chargers' feet or beneath the coarse, iron-bound wheels of their gun carriages, since, now that war was over and around all, the luckless peasants and landowners found but little opportunity of reaping those fields.