Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  I soon forgot the matter in the excitement of landing. A few minutes of bustle and it was over. The boat put out again; and we four were left face to face with two strangers, an elderly man and a girl, who had come down to the pier to meet us. The former, stout, bluff, and red-faced, with a thick gray beard and a gold chain about his neck, had the air of a man of position. He greeted us warmly. His companion, who hung behind him, somewhat shyly, was as pretty a girl as one could find in a month. A second look assured me of something more — that she formed an excellent foil to the piquant brightness and keen vivacity, the dark hair and nervous features of Mistress Anne. For the Dutch girl was fair and plump and of perfect complexion. Her hair was very light, almost flaxen indeed, and her eyes were softly and limpidly blue; grave, innocent, wondering eyes they were, I remember. I guessed rightly that she was the elderly man’s daughter. Later I learned that she was his only child, and that her name was Dymphna.

  He was a Master Lindstrom, a merchant of standing in Arnheim. He had visited England and spoke English fairly, and being under some obligations, it appeared, to the Duchess Katherine, was to be our host.

  We all walked up the little avenue together. Master Lindstrom talking as he went to husband or wife, while his daughter and Mistress Anne came next, gazing each at each in silence, as women when they first meet will gaze, taking stock, I suppose, of a rival’s weapons. I walked last, wondering why they had nothing to say to one another.

  As we entered the house the mystery was explained. “She speaks no English,” said Mistress Anne, with a touch of scorn.

  “And we no Dutch,” I answered, smiling. “Here in Holland I am afraid that she will have somewhat the best of us. Try her with Spanish.”

  “Spanish! I know none.”

  “Well, I do, a little.”

  “What, you know Spanish?” Mistress Anne’s tone of surprise amounted almost to incredulity, and it flattered me, boy that I was. I dare say it would have flattered many an older head than mine. “You know Spanish? Where did you learn it?” she continued sharply.

  “At home.”

  “At home! Where is that?” And she eyed me still more closely. “Where is your home, Master Carey? You have never told me.”

  But I had said already more than I intended, and I shook my head. “I mean,” I explained awkwardly, “that I learned it in a home I once had. Now my home is here. At any rate I have no other.”

  The Dutch girl, standing patiently beside us, had looked first at one face and then at the other as we talked. We were all by this time in a long, low parlor, warmed by a pretty closed fireplace covered with glazed tiles. On the shelves of a great armoire, or dresser, at one end of the room appeared a fine show of silver plate. At the other end stood a tall linen-press of walnut-wood, handsomely carved; and even the gratings of the windows and the handles of the doors were of hammered iron-work. There were no rushes on the floor, which was made of small pieces of wood delicately joined and set together and brightly polished. But everything in sight was clean and trim to a degree which would have shamed our great house at Coton, where the rushes sometimes lay for a week unchanged. With each glance round I felt a livelier satisfaction. I turned to Mistress Dymphna.

  “Señorita!” I said, mustering my noblest accent. “Beso los pies de usted! Habla usted Castillano?”

  Mistress Anne stared, while the effect on the girl whom I addressed was greater than I had looked for, but certainly of a different kind. She started and drew back, an expression of offended dignity and of something like anger ruffling her placid face. Did she not understand? Yes, for after a moment’s hesitation, and with a heightened color, she answered, “Si, Señor.”

  Her constrained manner was not promising, but I was going on to open a conversation if I could — for it looked little grateful of us to stand there speechless and staring — when Mistress Anne interposed. “What did you say to her? What was it?” she asked eagerly.

  “I asked her if she spoke Spanish. That was all,” I replied, my eyes on Dymphna’s face, which still betrayed trouble of some kind, “except that I paid her the usual formal compliment. But what is she saying to her father?”

  It was like the Christmas game of cross-questions. The girl and I had spoken in Spanish. I translated what we had said into English for Mistress Anne, and Mistress Dymphna turned it into Dutch for her father; an anxious look on her face which needed no translation.

  “What is it?” asked Master Bertie, observing that something was wrong.

  “It is nothing — nothing!” replied the merchant apologetically, though, as he spoke, his eyes dwelt on me curiously. “It is only that I did not know that you had a Spaniard in your company.”

  “A Spaniard?” Master Bertie answered. “We have none. This,” pointing to me, “is our very good friend and faithful follower, Master Carey — an Englishman.”

  “To whom,” added the Duchess, smiling gravely, “I am greatly indebted.”

  I hurriedly explained the mistake, and brought at once a smile of relief to the Mynheer’s face. “Ah! pardon me, I beseech you,” he said. “My daughter was in error.” And he added something in Dutch which caused Mistress Dymphna to blush. “You know,” he continued— “I may speak freely to you, since our enemies are in the main the same — you know that our Spanish rulers are not very popular with us, and grow less popular every day, especially with those who are of the reformed faith. We have learned some of us to speak their language, but we love them none the better for that.”

  “I can sympathize with you, indeed,” cried the Duchess impulsively. “God grant that our country may never be in the same plight: though it looks as if this Spanish marriage were like to put us in it. It is Spain! Spain! Spain! and nothing else nowadays!”

  “Nevertheless, the Emperor is a great and puissant monarch,” rejoined the Arnheimer thoughtfully; “and could he rule us himself, we might do well. But his dominions are so large, he knows little of us. And worse, he is dying, or as good as dying. He can scarcely sit his horse, and rumor says that before the year is out he will resign the throne. Then we hear little good of his successor, your queen’s husband, and look to hear less. I fear that there is a dark time before us, and God only knows the issue.”

  “And alone will rule it,” Master Bertie rejoined piously.

  This saying was in a way the keynote to the life we found our host living on his island estate. Peace, but peace with constant fear for an assailant, and religion for a supporter. Several times a week Master Lindstrom would go to Arnheim to superintend his business, and always after his return he would shake his head, and speak gravely, and Dymphna would lose her color for an hour or two. Things were going badly. The reformers were being more and more hardly dealt with. The Spaniards were growing more despotic. That was his constant report. And then I would see him, as he walked with us in orchard or garden, or sat beside the stove, cast wistful glances at the comfort and plenty round him. I knew that he was asking himself how long they would last. If they escaped the clutches of a tyrannical government, would they be safe in the times that were coming from the violence of an ill-paid soldiery? The answer was doubtful, or rather it was too certain.

  I sometimes wondered how he could patiently foresee such possibilities, and take no steps, whatever the risk, to prevent them. At first I thought his patience sprang from the Dutch character. Later I traced its deeper roots to a simplicity of faith and a deep religious feeling, which either did not at that time exist in England, or existed only among people with whom I had never come into contact. Here they seemed common enough and real enough. These folks’ faith sustained them. It was a part of their lives; a bulwark against the fear that otherwise would have overwhelmed them. And to an extent, too, which then surprised me, I found, as time went on, that the Duchess and Master Bertie shared this enthusiasm, although with them it took a less obtrusive form.

  I was led at the time to think a good deal about this; and just a word I may say of myself, and of those days spent on
the Rhine inland — that whereas before I had taken but a lukewarm interest in religious questions, and, while clinging instinctively to the teaching of my childhood, had conformed with a light heart rather than annoy my uncle, I came to think somewhat differently now; differently and more seriously. And so I have continued to think since, though I have never become a bigot; a fact I owe, perhaps, to Mistress Dymphna, in whose tender heart there was room for charity as well as faith. For she was my teacher.

  Of necessity, since no other of our party could communicate with her, I became more or less the Dutch girl’s companion. I would often, of an evening, join her on a wooden bench which stood under an elm on a little spit of grass looking toward the city, and at some distance from the house. Here, when the weather was warm, she would watch for her father’s return; and here one day, while talking with her, I had the opportunity of witnessing a sight unknown in England, but which year by year was to become more common in the Netherlands, more heavily fraught with menace in Netherland eyes.

  We happened to be so deeply engaged in watching the upper end of the reach at the time in question, where we expected each moment to see Master Lindstrom’s boat round the point, that we saw nothing of a boat coming the other way, until the flapping of its sails, as it tacked, drew our eyes toward it. Even then in the boat itself I saw nothing strange, but in its passengers I did. They were swarthy, mustachioed men, who in the hundred poses they assumed, as they lounged on deck or leaned over the side, never lost a peculiar air of bravado. As they drew nearer to us the sound of their loud voices, their oaths and laughter reached us plainly, and seemed to jar on the evening stillness. Their bold, fierce eyes, raking the banks unceasingly, reached us at last. The girl by my side uttered a cry of alarm, and rose as if to retreat. But she sat down again, for behind us was an open stretch of turf, and to escape unseen was impossible. Already a score of eyes had marked her beauty, and as the boat drew abreast of us, I had to listen to the ribald jests and laughter of those on board. My ears tingled and my cheeks burned. But I could do nothing. I could only glare at them, and grind my teeth.

  “Who are they?” I muttered. “The cowardly knaves!’

  “Oh, hush! hush!” the girl pleaded. She had retreated behind me. And indeed I need not have put my question, for though I had never seen the Spanish soldiery, I had heard enough about them to recognize them now. In the year 1555 their reputation was at its height. Their fathers had overcome the Moors after a contest of centuries, and they themselves had overrun Italy and lowered the pride of France. As a result they had many military virtues and all the military vices. Proud, bloodthirsty, and licentious everywhere, it may be imagined that in the subject Netherlands, with their pay always in arrear, they were, indeed, people to be feared. It was seldom that even their commanders dared to check their excesses.

  Yet, when the first flush of my anger had subsided, I looked after them, odd as it may seem, with mingled feelings. With all their faults they were few against many, a conquering race in a foreign land. They could boast of blood and descent. They were proud to call themselves the soldiers and gentlemen of Europe. I was against them, yet I admired them with a boy’s admiration for the strong and reckless.

  Of course I said nothing of this to my companion. Indeed, when she spoke to me I did not hear her. My thoughts had flown far from the burgher’s daughter sitting by me, and were with my grandmother’s people. I saw, in imagination, the uplands of Old Castile, as I had often heard them described, hot in summer and bleak in winter. I pictured the dark, frowning walls of Toledo, with its hundred Moorish trophies, the castles that crowned the hills around, the gray olive groves, and the box-clad slopes. I saw Palencia, where my grandmother, Petronilla de Vargas, was born; Palencia, dry and brown and sun-baked, lying squat and low on its plain, the eaves of its cathedral a man’s height from the ground. All this I saw. I suppose the Spanish blood in me awoke and asserted itself at sight of those other Spaniards. And then — then I forgot it all as I heard behind me an alien voice, and I turned and found Dymphna had stolen from me and was talking to a stranger.

  CHAPTER IX.

  PLAYING WITH FIRE.

  He was a young man, and a Dutchman, but not a Dutchman of the stout, burly type which I had most commonly seen in the country. He had, it is true, the usual fair hair and blue eyes, and he was rather short than tall; but his figure was thin and meager, and he had a pointed nose and chin, and a scanty fair beard. I took him to be nearsighted: at a second glance I saw that he was angry. He was talking fast to Dymphna — of course in Dutch — and my first impulse, in face of his excited gestures and queer appearance, was to laugh. But I had a notion what his relationship to the girl was, and I smothered this, and instead asked, as soon as I could get a word in, whether I should leave them.

  “Oh, no!” Dymphna answered, blushing slightly, and turning to me with a troubled glance. I believe she had clean forgotten my presence. “This is Master Jan Van Tree, a good friend of ours. And this,” she continued, still in Spanish, but speaking to him, “is Master Carey, one of my father’s guests.”

  We bowed, he formally, for he had not recovered his temper, and I — I dare say I still had my Spanish ancestors in my head — with condescension. We disliked one another at sight, I think. I dubbed him a mean little fellow, a trader, a peddler; and, however he classed me, it was not favorably. So it was no particular desire to please him which led me to say with outward solicitude, “I fear you are annoyed at something, Master Van Tree?”

  “I am!” he said bluntly, meeting me half-way.

  “And am I to know the cause?” I asked, “or is it a secret?”

  “It is no secret!” he retorted. “Mistress Lindstrom should have been more careful. She should not have exposed herself to the chance of being seen by those miserable foreigners.”

  “The foreigners — in the boat?” I said dryly.

  “Yes, of course — in the boat,” he answered. He was obliged to say that, but he glared at me across her as he spoke. We had turned and were walking back to the house, the poplars casting long shadows across our path.

  “They were rude,” I observed carelessly, my chin very high. “But there is no particular harm done that I can see, Master Van Tree.”

  “Perhaps not, as far as you can see,” he retorted in great excitement. “But perhaps also you are not very far-sighted. You may not see it now, yet harm will follow.”

  “Possibly,” I said, and I was going to follow up this seemingly candid admission by something very boorish, when Mistress Dymphna struck in nervously.

  “My father is anxious,” she explained, speaking to me, “that I should have as little to do with our Spanish governors as possible, Master Carey. It always vexes him to hear that I have fallen in their way, and that is why my friend feels annoyed. It was not, of course, your fault, since you did not know of this. It was I,” she continued hurriedly, “who should not have ventured to the elm tree without seeing that the coast was clear.”

  I knew that she was timidly trying, her color coming and going, to catch my eye; to appease me as the greater stranger, and to keep the peace between her ill-matched companions, who, indeed, stalked along eying one another much as a wolf-hound and a badger-dog might regard each other across a choice bone. But the young Dutchman’s sudden appearance had put me out. I was not in love with her, yet I liked to talk to her, and I grudged her to him, he seemed so mean a fellow. And so — churl that I was — in answer to her speech I let drop some sneer about the great fear of the Spaniards which seemed to prevail in these parts.

  “You are not afraid of them, then?” Van Tree said, with a smile.

  “No, I am not,” I answered, my lip curling also.

  “Ah!” with much meaning. “Perhaps you do not know them very well.”

  “Perhaps not,” I replied. “Still, my grandmother was a Spaniard.”

  “So I should have thought,” he retorted swiftly.

  So swiftly that I felt the words as I should have felt a bl
ow. “What do you mean?” I blurted out, halting before him, with my cheek crimson. In vain were all Dymphna’s appealing glances, all her signs of distress. “I will have you explain, Master Van Tree, what you mean by that?” I repeated fiercely.

  “I mean what I said,” he answered, confronting me stubbornly, and shaking off Dymphna’s hand. His blue eyes twinkled with rage, his thin beard bristled; he was the color of a turkey-cock’s comb. At home we should have thought him a comical little figure; but he did not seem so absurd here. For one thing, he looked spiteful enough for anything; and for another, though I topped him by a head and shoulders, I could not flatter myself that he was afraid of me. On the contrary, I felt that in the presence of his mistress, small and short-sighted as he was, he would have faced a lion without winking.

  His courage was not to be put to the proof. I was still glaring at him, seeking some retort which should provoke him beyond endurance, when a hand was laid on my shoulder, and I turned to find that Master Bertie and the Duchess had joined us.

  “So here are the truants,” the former said pleasantly, speaking in English, and showing no consciousness whatever of the crisis in the middle of which he had come up, though he must have discerned in our defiant attitudes, and in Dymphna’s troubled face, that something was wrong. “You know who this is, Master Francis,” he continued heartily. “Or have you not been introduced to Master Van Tree, the betrothed of our host’s daughter?”

  “Mistress Dymphna has done me that honor,” I said stiffly, recovering myself in appearance, while at heart sore and angry with everybody. “But I fear the Dutch gentleman has not thanked her for the introduction, since he learned that my grandmother was Spanish.”

  “Your grandmother, do you mean?” cried the Duchess, much astonished.

  “Yes, madam.”