Lysbeth, a Tale of the DutchHaggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
History
Lysbeth, a Tale of the Dutch
Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Netherlands -- History -- House of Habsburg, 1477-1556 -- Fiction
When Adrian had seen the wounded Spanish soldiers and their bearers
torn to pieces by the rabble, and had heard the great door of the
Gevangenhuis close upon Foy and Martin, he turned to go home with his
evil news. But for a long while the mob would not go home, and had it
not been that the drawbridge over the moat in front of the prison was
up, and that they had no means of crossing it, probably they would have
attacked the building then and there. Presently, however, rain began to
fall and they melted away, wondering, not too happily, whether, in that
time of daily slaughter, the Duke of Alva would think a few common
soldiers worth while making a stir about.
Adrian entered the upper room to tell his tidings, since they must be
told, and found it occupied by his mother alone. She was sitting
straight upright in her chair, her hands resting upon her knees,
staring out of the window with a face like marble.
“I cannot find him,” he began, “but Foy and Martin are taken after a
great fight in which Foy was wounded. They are in the Gevangenhuis.”
“I know all,” interrupted Lysbeth in a cold, heavy voice. “My husband
is taken also. Someone must have betrayed them. May God reward him!
Leave me, Adrian.”
Then Adrian turned and crept away to his own chamber, his heart so full
of remorse and shame that at times he thought that it must burst. Weak
as he was, wicked as he was, he had never intended this, but now, oh
Heaven! his brother Foy and the man who had been his benefactor, whom
his mother loved more than her life, were through him given over to a
death worse than the mind could conceive. Somehow that night wore away,
and of this we may be sure, that it did not go half as heavily with the
victims in their dungeon as with the betrayer in his free comfort.
Thrice during its dark hours, indeed, Adrian was on the point of
destroying himself; once even he set the hilt of his sword upon the
floor and its edge against his breast, and then at the prick of steel
shrank back.
Better would it have been for him, perhaps, could he have kept his
courage; at least he would have been spared much added shame and
misery.
So soon as Adrian had left her Lysbeth rose, robed herself, and took
her way to the house of her cousin, van de Werff, now a successful
citizen of middle age and the burgomaster-elect of Leyden.
“You have heard the news?” she said.
“Alas! cousin, I have,” he answered, “and it is very terrible. Is it
true that this treasure of Hendrik Brant’s is at the bottom of it all?”
She nodded, and answered, “I believe so.”
“Then could they not bargain for their lives by surrendering its
secret?”
“Perhaps. That is, Foy and Martin might—Dirk does not know its
whereabouts—he refused to know, but they have sworn that they will die
first.”
“Why, cousin?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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