ELIZABETH HOOFDEN, familiarly called Betteken, servant of the church in Antwerp, was a small, spare, shriveled woman of sixty. Left a widow whilst still young, she was known and esteemed in former days for the industry, self-denial, and ability with which she supported and brought up her large family. As the children grew to manhood and womanhood, they received the new doctrines, and sought to impart them to their mother. But she was slow to learn—very slow—thought the eager, quick-witted young people. It took years not a few, and sorrows all too many (as she thought them then), to teach her to lay aside her rosary and crucifix, and trust alone in the unseen, yet ever-present Lord and Saviour. Even then her faith was never as clear and intelligent as that of her own children. She called herself a Calvinist, as did the greater number of Flemish Protestants, but if asked what she meant by the name, she could only have answered, ‘One who loves the Lord Jesus Christ, and reads or listens to the Holy Scriptures; and who does not go to Mass or confession, or pray to the saints.’
In the course of time her daughters married, her sons also had homes of their own; excepting one, her favorite, whose home, as he said himself, was ‘the New Jerusalem;’ for he died the martyr’s death, being hanged for aiding the escape of a proscribed pastor. From that hour a new life began for Betteken; she found her vocation in the work for which her son had died. Her great practical ability, her untiring energy and industry, had full scope in ministering to the necessities or providing for the concealment and escape of the persecuted servants of Christ. Her position and circumstances favored her efforts, she was respected by all who knew her as an honest, upright, hard-working woman, and had not yet been much talked of as a Calvinist. Henceforth, although she saw ‘death come and choose about’ her, and her ‘dearest ones depart without’ her, although she herself led a life of constant hardship and peril, she was emphatically a happy woman. She had congenial work—work that absorbed all her faculties, and drew forth all her powers—and she worked for a Master who pays His servants well.
In fulfillment of her promise to Adrian, she made her appearance duly in, the Place aux Gants, in the coarse but neat dress of a Flemish serving woman, and carrying a bundle containing clothes of a similar kind for Rose. Adrian brought her into his desecrated study, where Marchemont lay upon the bed, and Rose sat beside him. The skeleton in its recess, though hidden by its curtain, was vividly present to the minds of all, and seemed to assist unseen in the conference that followed.
‘Here is what I have to say, Mynheer,’ said Betteken, addressing the doctor. ‘The pastor must remain where he is.’
Adrian repressed an involuntary shiver, and magnanimously held his place; while, with the strange inconsistency of human nature, Marchemont, who had faced martyrdom so bravely, cast an uneasy glance at the curtained recess. Betteken went on calmly, seeing neither glance nor shiver, ‘Juffrouw Rose must put on these things, and the sooner the better.’ She opened the bundle, displaying a bodice and petticoat, a starched white cap and kerchief, cloth stockings and wooden shoes. ‘She is my daughter, who has come to bear me company. Oh, ‘tis safe enough. Very few have seen her, to know her, since she came here, and for aught any one is the wiser, you may have let her in with me, Mynheer, for you opened the door yourself, and no one else saw us. She and I are your humble servants, to attend upon you in all ways. It is right there should be two of us. People say Mynheer keeps strange things about him here, which might frighten the censes out of a poor woman if she were left alone with them.’
‘That is true,’ assented Marchemont; ‘but,’ he added, ‘if we put our trust in the Lord, no terror, either spiritual or corporeal, need make us afraid.’
‘Ay, Mynheer pastor, as you said in one of your sermons, the same pillar of fire helped the Israelites and frightened their enemies. I shall be very much afraid of the doctor’s things, and I advise Juffrouw Rose—that is, my daughter Liesken—to be no braver. This will remove suspicion, and keep off outsiders, while in private we can do everything the pastor needs. If the doctor consents, we can sleep in the next room, to be within call, and his worthiness can take the room below this.’
Things were finally arranged ‘upon this basis,’ as diplomatists would say. But eventually the lower room had to be given up to those who came to consult the doctor, and who could not safely be allowed to come upstairs. As Marchemont slept well, or appeared to do so, at all events requiring no attendance during the night, Adrian resumed his habit of sleeping in his study, using his pupil’s pallet, in place of the bed which he had resigned to his guest.
At first that silent presence, during all his hours of study and retirement, was unutterably irksome to him; once and again he thought he must put an end to the situation somehow, or it would put an end to him. It would kill, if not his physical, at least his mental life; destroying his power of thought, paralyzing his passion for knowledge, and his faculty of acquiring and digesting it. These things were more to him than the breath of his nostrils; and they seemed to be fading from him day by day, as the disturbing, irritating sense of an alien presence broke continually upon his trains of thought, and could not be got rid of. But his honor, his premise, and the pleading face of Rose, so prevailed with him that he went on bearing his burden, a burden far worse than that of bodily pain; and though he often bewailed himself inwardly, outwardly he made no sign. He was rewarded by a gradual and insensible lightening of the weight. Marchemont was very quiet, very unexacting: the long silent hours, whether of the day or the night, he beguiled by holding communion with the Unseen, or repeating to himself the passages of Scripture or the sacred songs with which his mind was stored. After the few simple earnest words in which at first he expressed his gratitude, he never spoke to Adrian, unless addressed by him; and so the two lives flowed on, in closest proximity, yet in as utter separateness as if oceans rolled between them.
Adrian had now abandoned for the present his speculations on the use of the veins and arteries, and returned to his study of the hand. He was endeavoring to throw his observations into the form of a Latin treatise, or dissertation, which Plantin had promised to print for him, and which would serve as an introduction to a larger work. The universities, especially his own university of Padua, would receive it with interest, perhaps with enthusiasm.
He was engaged upon it one morning, seated as usual in his study, when Marchemont’s voice fell suddenly on his ear—none the less solemn and striking for the occasional impediment in his speech, ‘And now, Lord, what wait I for? They have all gone before me, the friends I knew and loved—and but so lately, in this blood-stained city, the brother of my heart, the good and holy Fabricius. How long, O Lord, how long? Look upon me as I lie here a useless log—doing naught for Thee, and for Thy kingdom. I cannot work, and yet I am not at rest. Take me to Thy rest, O Lord, at last—at last!’ There was a pause, and then the voice went on— ‘But only if it be Thy will, and when it is Thy will.’
Adrian’s pen from the beginning had been held suspended. He waited in silence for the end, then he turned towards the bed, saying in the voice of one surprised, ‘To whom have you been speaking, M. de Marchemont?’
Marchemont opened his closed eyes, and looked at him confused and startled. ‘I thought I was alone,’ he said. ‘I was praying.’
‘Nay? I supposed you were speaking to some one whom you believed to be in the room with you.’
‘Is not that prayer?’
‘I never thought so. I knew men said prayers; often when they were religious, sometimes even when they were not. I am not religious, as you must have seen ere now. Men of my profession learn a few things, monsieur, which go not well with priests and prayers. If I thrust my hand into the fire it will burn, if I misuse my body it will die, or be diseased, spite of all the Paternosters in the world, and spite of all the candles I might offer to St. Christopher, or the spangled robes I might give to our Lady of Sorrows. Things go on according to their kind and their law; and I do not see the invisible hands you pious folk believe in thrust in at every turn to alter them.’
‘The law of things is the Law of the living God who made them,’ said Marchemont earnestly. ‘I do not, any more than you, believe in invisible hands thrust in to answer selfish or superstitious prayers, addressed as often to the creature as to the Creator. But I believe in one Hand, His who lives and loves, whose ear is open to my cry, and whose heart has compassion on this weakness and this anguish of mine.’
‘And you think the Infinite and Eternal —’
“Like as a father pitieth his children, even so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.”
Adrian was silent. At least he knew that this was no superstition born of ignorance, no weak, shadowy belief that would snap beneath the strain of circumstances, but the strong faith of a singularly strong nature, able to withstand the most tremendous tests. After a thoughtful pause, he said, ‘I cannot see what you see, I cannot be even sure that I understand you. A man like you have I never met before. At Padua we had plenty of open scoffers, plenty of indifferent scholars like myself, who cared nothing for religion, —and, as everywhere, more than plenty of ignorant superstitious folk who believed any folly they were told. But amongst them all, no one with such faith as yours. Even its sustaining you in the face of death I can partly understand; but I marvel far more at the calmness and patience it gives you during these long, silent, dreary gays of inaction.’
‘And I,’ said Marchemont with a shade of eagerness, ‘was just regretting these words of mine which you overheard accidentally, lest they should make you think I was not patient.’
‘Then you are not too stoical to care what men think of you?’
‘What one man thinks of me I have a good right to care, when that man has saved my life, and is even now sheltering me at the hazard of his own. Monsieur, the words you overheard might make you think your generous sacrifices were made in vain’
‘No, indeed, I knew you did not mean that. It was quite natural you should wish for death,’ said Adrian, in the true physician’s voice, soothing, yet calm and reasonable. ‘Even that prayer I take back,’ pursued Marchemont. ‘Let Him do with me as seemeth good in His sight: I see not how I can serve Him lying here; but that is His business, not mine.’
‘Still, I think you could not wish to return to your former life, with its continual hardships and its terrible dangers,’ said Adrian.
‘Ah, monsieur, you little know the joys that made those hardships and perils seem lighter than thistle-down!’ said the sick man, with a kindling eye and a glow on his faded cheeks.
‘True indeed is the Master’s word, “He that reapeth receiveth wages,” here and now, as well as gathering fruit unto life eternal. The rapid, secret journeys, the daring enterprises, the snares evaded, the perils escaped, had their pleasures and their triumphs even for the flash, and especially for the flash of an eager, adventurous youth, such as I was when I first went forth from Geneva, full of Master Calvin’s teaching, and longing to win the whole world for Christ. It is true, found presently that, in Dr. Melanchthon’s phrase, the old serpent was too strong for young Gille de Marchemont—still, my ministry in France was not without seals, for which I thank God. Later, when I came to these countries to go up and down preaching the Word, in spite of the Placards and the Inquisition, I found the laborers few, but the harvest indeed abundant. And I found the truth of our Lord’s words, when He promised fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, to those who give up all for Him. You can have no conception of the strength of the bond which unites us, the secret followers of a proscribed and persecuted faith. Ah, how joyous were our meetings, stolen though they were, and shadowed with the fear of discovery or betrayal—how sweet and holy our communing together—how lovingly we strengthened one another’s hands in God—how heartily we rejoiced in the joy of each new convert brought into the fold!’
‘The joy?’ Adrian repeated, wondering, for all this was to him like the language of a new world. ‘What joy can you speak of? You and your converts lose all—wealth, honor, comfort, safety, often life itself, and I never heard that you got instead even the value of a brass denier.’
‘What joy, Monsieur Adrian?’ said the old man, with a ring in his voice and a light in his eye which Adrian had never seen before. ‘The knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, “Whom not having seen we love, and in whom, though now we see Him not, yet believing, we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”’
Adrian had the look in his eyes of one who is trying to see through a glass, but can discern nothing; and gradually there came into them also the look of one who very much wishes he could see. At last he said: ‘I do not understand you; I feel as if you were speaking Hebrew to me.’
‘There is only one Master who can teach you that tongue, Monsieur.’
‘My friend, you are an enthusiast, but a noble one. I admire your enthusiasm, though I cannot understand; and as to sharing it!—’
‘That you may share it one day is my prayer day and night, as I lie here. It is all I can do for you, who have done so much for me.’
‘I thank you for your prayer, though I cannot wish it answered,’ said Adrian, with a curious smile. ‘Like the renowned scholar Erasmus, whose name you venerate, I feel have no vocation for martyrdom.’
‘Do not fear, monsieur, God never asks any man to give up aught for Him until He has first given him something far better, which makes him fain to do it. Besides, if I read aright the sings of the times, a day is coming, and that soon, when the execution of the Placards will no more be possible here. You know how the indignant people had almost rescued my dear friend Fabricius from the very stake. I hoped, indeed, that night, when but for you I would have been taken, that I might perhaps be the last victim. You will tell me that the king, in his Spanish bigotry, is inexorable, and that the Regent Duchess dare not disobey him. True, but the people have their rights, and believe me, they have the power to enforce them, if they only knew it. It is to the people of these countries, under God, that I look for deliverance for His persecuted Church. But it is His way to work slowly. The end is not yet.’
Adrian made no answer, for he knew not the signs of the times, nor understood either his own age or any other. Presently, he went out to visit a patient.
But he felt that some kind of barrier between him and Marchemont had been removed, and he even began to entertain towards him something approaching to friendship. It seemed as if his difficulties were about, in a manner, to clear away. He was wrong—his difficulties were only beginning.
For he was a man, and he was young.