THE night was fair and fresh. The flat green shores of Zealand lay in the offing, a league or so away. The foamy crests of the waves were glittering in the moonbeams, and catching here and there the lights from dark ships, moving slowly before the wind. To a modem eye these would have looked, for fighting purposes, miserably, absurdly small; utterly devoid of the pomp and pageantry of war they certainly were. Brown sails, torn or mended with ill-matched colors—brown sides, showing, through a port-hole or two the grim mouth of a carronade—masts and rigging not much to look at, but good enough to trust in a storm—shaggy, grimy figures moving to and fro upon the decks—made up the picture. The men wore no pretense of uniform; only they were marked out as ‘Beggars of the Sea,’ by the crescent on each man’s cap, the medal of the Gueux round each man’s neck, and floating from the mast-head above them the Orange pennon.
One of the smaller craft, which indeed was no more than an armed fishing-smack, had fallen (for some reason) a little behind the rest. The group on its deck was thrown out clearly, not by the moonlight alone, but by the redder rays of a torch hung from the rigging. The men were Zealanders, or volunteers from other places, all bold Sea Beggars, fierce eyed, shaggy-haired, weather-beaten. All, that is to say, save one, who made a sharp contrast with the rest, a youth of two or three-and-twenty, fair of face, with chestnut hair and blue eyes. He was telling his companions, who seemed to regard him with respect, in indifferent Dutch or Flemish, how a certain thing was always done on board English ships. He was in fact an English volunteer, who had left the ineffective force of Colonel Chester, that he might see—and do— real service in the cause of freedom.
There is something black, bobbing about on the waves. ‘See there!’ said a Zealander, interrupting his discourse.
All looked where he pointed. ‘I’ faith, it’s a boy,’ said another seaman. ‘He has something on his head, and he’s swimming to the ship.’
‘He’s a bold swimmer, to have come so far—unless he fell out of a boat,’ suggested a third.
Meanwhile, with strong swift strokes the swimmer drew near, a dark-haired lad, with a bundle strapped on his shoulder.
‘Throw him a line, Hans,’ the mate commanded when he came within reach.
The boy caught it deftly, scrambled up the side of the ship, and stood amidst the group, with bare head and feet, in dripping shirt and trousers. The captain, a gray-haired old mariner, with a face like tanned leather and a patch over one eye, limped up from the cabin, for he was lame from a recent wound, ‘Art a messenger, boy?’ he asked.
‘No one’s but my own,’ said Dirk Willemszoon, as he unstrapped the bundle that held the rest of his clothing, and threw it on the deck. ‘I pray of you, captain, let me go with you and kill Spaniards.’
‘Well said, young sea-dog. But thou’rt not big enough, just yet. Best go home to thy mother for a year or two.’
‘My mother is dead. Take me with you, captain.’
The skipper looked at him critically, and shook his head.
‘This is work for men, not for boys,’ he said. ‘Dost know, my child that we fight to the death? We give no quarter, and we take none. He who goes with as has done with fear, and with pity.’
‘As to fear—you have sword and fire. Try if I fear either. As to pity—I am Dirk Willemszoon.’
‘What has that to do with it?’
‘Have you not heard the story of my father, of Dirk Willemszoon, the Anabaptist of Asperen?’
‘If it be a story of Spanish cruelty, we may well have heard and forgotten. No man’s memory can hold them all. Only, each keeps his own, to strike by. Do we not, my mates?’
‘Ay, captain. I strike for my father, hanged at Haarlem, in spite of the capitulation,’ said one.
‘And I for my brother, burned as a heretic.’
‘And I for my mother, buried alive.’
‘And I,’ spoke an older man who was sitting apart from the rest, ‘I for my wife and children, all slain in the Bloodbath of Naarden.’ He covered his face with both his wrinkled hands, as if to shut out the sight.
Dirk looked from one to the other. ‘Hear my tale, and own my right to strike too,’ he said. ‘It was a twelvemonth ago last March. My father, a quiet, peaceful man who never hurt any one—not a preacher even—got warning that the Inquisition hounds were on his trail. He fled—not a moment too soon—across the frozen mere, one of the pursuers close at his heels. But he was safe, within a step of freedom, when he heard the ice crack behind him. Turning, he saw that the other—his pursuer—had fallen in. He went back, saved his life at the risk of his own—and would to God he had died for him there!’
He stopped. ‘Go on! go on!’ said his hearers.
‘The man he saved would fain have let him go, but another came up, and bade him do his duty, or take the consequences. So my father was led back, a captive. A year ago, to-day, the end came. It was the worst, the very worst, that men—that fiends—could do. God help me, I can tell no more! The long, long agony—’
His voice dropped into a silence so intense that the throbbing of those strong, wild hearts was almost audible. The Englishman broke it.— ‘Which was but for a moment, and wrought out for him an exceeding and eternal weight of glory,’ he said.
Dirk turned and looked at him, his eyelids trembling and his lips quivering. But the softened look passed quickly. He turned back to the captain. ‘Have I proved my right to go with you, and strike a sword into the hearts of the men who do such things?’
‘Ay, my lad, that hast thou,’ said he, with a fierce oath. ‘Welcome on board the Scorpion. We are all brothers here.’
So Dirk cast in his lot with these fierce Sea Beggars, and wrought and fought beside them. An active, fearless boy is always useful at sea, but neither he nor they meant him to be a mere sailor. They soon gave him a chance of fulfilling his heart’s desire and killing Spaniards, and his coolness and daring won the praise of all. This was, however, only a little affair with a Spanish merchantman. ‘Wait till we come at their fleet,’ said Captain Schoet, ‘then shall you see sport.’
There existed, from the first, a strange attraction between the Englishman and the boy, if indeed it was not all on the Englishman’s side. He may have felt rather solitary among the wild, rough Sea Beggars, for he was of gentle birth and liberal education. He told Dirk that his name was Wallingford—Edward Wallingford—that his father had broad lands not far away from London town, where there were fields of corn and great pastures, with hills and valleys, which last Dirk thought must be very ugly, and quite spoil the look of the country. He even went as far as to tell him, in a quiet watch of the night, as they looked together at the track of the moonbeams on the water, that he had a mother and three sisters, one of them still but a little Then Dirk repaid the confidence by showing him the cap his little lady had made for him, his one carefully-guarded treasure.
It represented the only softening influence left in his life. More and more, as time went on, was he entirely dominated by one passion—the thirst for vengeance. He was surrounded with men driven mad by cruelty and oppression, and that sometimes in no modified sense, no figure of speech. Who shall say where madness begins? Dark is the border land, the debatable ground of that ‘realm of dreadful night;’ and no doubt, in those evil souls were driven across the wavering line that divides the ferocity of vengeance from the frenzy of insanity.
Well was it for those who fought to save, rather than to avenge! Great need was there now, greater than ever before, of the pikes and cutlasses of the bold Sea Beggars. A most disastrous battle had been fought at Mookerheide, ending in the total overthrow of Count Louis’s little army, and his own death, with that of his gallant young brother Henry. There was only one man in the world who would have been a greater lose to the cause of freedom. Count Louis was the flower of the house of Nassau, the best loved son of his mother, the best loved brother of the solitary and silent hero, who hence-forth almost alone, stood fronting the storms of fate, and shielding with his own breast the helpless millions that trusted him.
The disaster of Mookerheide set the Spanish army free to recommence the siege of the most important town in the northern provinces. Before the end of May, Leyden was invested thoroughly, no less than sixty-two Spanish redoubts engirdling the city, while a great and ever-increasing Spanish force cut off every chance of ingress or egress.
One thought was in the heart and on the lips of every patriot, whether within or without the menaced city, ‘Leyden must not fall.’ But how to save it? Those within had brave hearts and strong hands, but it was their task—the hardest task of all, perhaps—to suffer rather than to do. Those without had their lives to give, and they would not spare them. But they could not call armies from the ground, or turn the dust of the earth into soldiers to drive away the Spaniards.
No; but there was another power, terrible and resistless, the power of the sea. Might they, at direst need, summon the free unfettered sea to the aid of freedom? It was many miles away, and between it and Leyden lay the fairest and most fruitful fields of Holland. Still, if the case grew desperate, dykes might be pierced and fields overflowed.
‘Better a drowned land than a lost land,’ said William the Silent.