ALTHOUGH Rainout’s pack was quite a secondary concern, still, in a place so remote and secluded, its contents were very welcome. All were glad to supply themselves with small articles of clothing or convenience; the men especially with buckles, nails, and knives, the women with implements of needlework. Rose was lavish in her purchases, both to supply herself and Roskŏ, and to make presents to her kind friends, which she was able to do, as Adrian had with him a little store of gold, saved from his professional earnings in Rotterdam. She and Roske had an important private consultation, after which she asked Reinout if he had any blue cloth. He produced a small square of fine texture, which she took.
‘Have you got any orange ribbon?’ was the next inquiry.
‘Have I got any other?’ asked the peddler, with something more broad than a smile and more serious than a laugh on his weather-beaten face. ‘Save only a little blue and white, to set it off, I sell naught else in these parts.’ (Orange, blue, and white, were the colors of the Prince.) At a sign from her mother, and with an air of immense importance, Roskĕ handed him a silver florin to pay for cloth and ribbon, receiving in exchange a few small coins or ‘tokens.’
When he was gone, her mother told her she would cut the cloth for her into a cap for Dirk, and make an orange cockade to adorn it, but that no doubt she would like to do the sewing herself, that it might be all her own gift. Roskĕ did not love sewing, but she loved Dirk, so she readily agreed. Eventually, the cap was made somehow, though it is to be feared that for every stitch the child put in the mother put in twenty. However, it gave unbounded satisfaction, both to giver and receiver; although it looked so gay, and so different from the rest of Dirk’s sombre habiliments, that Joanna feared it was ‘worldly.’
The peaceful days glided on; days that in after years some of the party would very gladly have recalled. Frost and snow were gone away, and the life of spring was stirring in forest and garden, when Reinout came again.
‘This time the contents of my pack are all white,’ he said.
With joy and gladness, he told of the expedition of brave Count Louis of Nassau, who had come to the aid of the Prince at the head of a small army of Germans, and accompanied by his young brother, Count Henry. So far entirely successful, he had advanced upon Maestricht, and the siege of Leyden was raised in consequence, the Spanish army marching south to oppose him. Reinout told the tale with the addition of many particulars and many rumors, true and false. Then he produced a letter, which he handed to Adrian. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is for Dr. Adrian Pernet, from Master Kruytsoon, the apothecary, of Rotterdam.’
The doctor cut the strings that fastened his letter, broke the seals, and read, in much surprise at the contents.
During the first days of Adrian’s married life, when the Prince had restored order in Antwerp, he had written to his parents, entreating them to send him his youngest and favorite sister, Marie, and promising to provide for her suitably. They refused, however, having heard of his change of faith, and he had now almost forgotten the matter. But this letter of Kruytsoon’s informed him that Marie, driven to desperation by the determination of her parents to give her in marriage to a man she disliked, had taken the bold step of making her escape, with the assistance of a friendly brother-in-law, who put her on board a Flemish ship, sailing for Rotterdam. She meant to throw herself on her brother’s protection, and thought she would find him there, in the house of Kruytsoon, but heard, on her arrival, to her dismay, that he had gone to Leyden. The way by sea being now open, however, it was easy to follow him there in one of the many vessels passing to and fro. No doubt she had arrived by this time, solitary and friendless, save for a recommendation Kruytsoon had given her to the friend Adrian had intended to join, one Floriszoon, an apothecary.
Adrian and Rose held a consultation on the letter. Rose’s compassion for the lonely, friendless girl was very great; and she urged Adrian to go at once to Leyden and join her.
‘And let you and Roskĕ follow after?’ said he.
‘No, indeed—oh no, we will all go together,’ Rose answered earnestly. That was not a time for unnecessary partings. Adrian himself was concerned tenderly for his ‘little sister,’ as he called her, having only known her as a child, his pet and plaything. He had all along intended to go on to Leyden as soon as it was safe to do so; and he now readily agreed to hasten his departure.
Every one at Jäsewyk was sorry to lose the guests. Dirk pleaded earnestly to be allowed to drive their cart (which he had long ago repaired), at least part of the way; but the honor was given to Koos, who besides had business in Leyden, and was glad to go there. Old Jäsewyk, though he deplored in Adrian what he called a ‘lack of savor’ in spiritual things, yet felt that he was losing in him something between a brother and a son, and in Rase a dear daughter. For Roskĕ the whole house was in mourning. She kissed Dirk over and over again, and told him, with a fine disregard of the effects of time in ‘leveling up,’ that she would have him always for her big brother, and they should live together; which did him much more good than the broad piece of gold Adrian bestowed on him. The last thing they saw, as they disappeared into the forest, was the farewell wave of his precious holiday cap.
No one else at Jäsewyk missed any of the party as Dirk missed Roskĕ. The young have an infinite capacity for suffering, and suffering, with them, lies very near despair.
‘Manhood rears
A haughty brow, and Age has done with tears,
But Youth bows down to misery, in amaze.’
Dirk was older than his years, even as years counted then, and of unusually deep, strong character. There had come upon him a horror of great darkness, which overwhelmed him utterly. Only one thing held him from that blank despair of the young which would have left him crushed and powerless, a mere machine. Raga, passing quickly into hate, kept his heart alive; though it was a bitter, burning, joyless life. To avenge the agonies of his father, the tears of his mother, became his one thought night and day; to kill Papists and Spaniards his one passionate longing. This, and the reflection that his father’s faith had differed from theirs, held him aloof from his kindred, for hate always isolates. Besides, they were accustomed to pray for their persecutors; and he could not pray for his father’s murderers. He ceased by-and-by to pray at all. Against the wrongs that were eating out his heart he had cried to God—wildly, passionately—and God had not heard. So he thought then. A dread suspicion, worse than the worst agony of pain, was stealing over him that God, if He were there at all, was on the side of the Spaniards and the Inquisition.
Out of this horrible pit he was drawn, gradually and unawares, by the touch of a little hand, the whisper of a little voice. Unconsciously life began to grow pleasant to him. No amount of formal consolation could have done him as much good as Roskĕ’s childish caresses and imperious little behests. They took him out of himself: they awakened in him the sense of kindliness, the instinct of protection for the weak, with which by nature he was largely gifted. The love that grew up in his heart for his little lady was all the deeper because it was dumb.
Her departure sent him back to the gloomy prison of his own dark thoughts. It was worse than ever with him now. ‘The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,’ the relapse of an illness more dangerous than the first attack. At last he could bear his life at Jäsewyk no longer. He spoke one day to his grandfather. ‘Don’t think any worse of me than you can help,’ he said. ‘You have all been good to me, but I cannot stay here. I am going to be a Sea Beggar, and to kill Spaniards.’
So he went.