Louis listened intently, one hand pressing the ruby buttons on his breast, his eyes eagerly on his brother's face.
"I have been like a watchman over this land since King Henry spoke to me in Vincennes wood. I have seen havoc and ruin and desolation coming nearer and nearer," continued the Prince mournfully; "I see it very near now. I see this country overwhelmed as if the dikes had been cut down and the sea were rushing in—a flood no man can withstand—and do you think I wish to see all I love dash forward vainly, to be swept away by the first wave of this deluge? Ah, Louis," he added, in a tone of anguish, "what is your defiance against Philip's might—what are all the gentlemen of Flanders against Alva's army? But a stone in the way to be flung aside and forgotten."
"Are we, then, to submit?" asked Louis in a low voice.
The Prince took a restless turn about the room.
"Philip is not to be defeated by knight-errantry, but by subtle ways, like to his own—by policy, by patience, by long years of endeavour and waiting. He is not to be met openly in the field, but snared in secret places."
"Meanwhile, we shall grow old and palsied," cried Louis, "and all the hot blood in us will go for nothing."
"You see the glory of the combat, I see the anguish of the defeat," said William slowly. "You remember the skryer in Leipsic? How he saw the future in the crystal—and the end, all blood and blackness? To me too it seems like that—darkness ahead and death—the sacrifice of all our house."
"Speak words of good import," cried the Count. "Why should God utterly forsake us? Will He not set high the standard of the good cause?"
William looked at him thoughtfully.
"Yea, if one gave all one had, if one suffered and waited, if one sacrificed—all—for what one dared to think the right, perhaps God might help one—God! But doth He help, or rather leave us to depend on our own poor energies?"