Then the laughter died out from his eyes, they became intent, searching, desperately anxious.
"Madonna," he whispered--and he who for three days had faced every kind of danger, trembled now with apprehension--"what you said to my mother--a moment ago--did you mean it?"
"Your love, Mark," she murmured in reply, "is all that I live for now."
Then he folded her in his arms once more.
"Mother, dear," he said, "you must love her too. My whole happiness hangs upon her kiss."
EPILOGUE
Many there are who hold to the belief that the death of Alva would have saved the unfortunate Netherlanders many more months of woe and oppression at his hands, and that mayhap it would have deterred the royal despot over in Madrid from further acts of perfidious tyranny.
Therefore Mark van Rycke--the responsible leader of the successful insurrection of Ghent--has often been blamed for his leniency to a man who--if he had been victorious--would not have spared a single woman or child in the city.
With the right and wrongs of that contention this chronicle hath no concern. Mark van Rycke led the men of Ghent to victory, and having done that he fell sick from wounds and exhaustion, and after being hastily tended by his friends, he was taken home where for many days he hovered between life and death.
It was the civic dignitaries--the High-Bailiff, the Aldermen and Sheriffs of the Keure who a.s.sumed the responsibility of dealing with the tyrant, and they remained true apparently to their principles of conciliation and of loyalty, for within two days of their heroic and desperate stand for liberty and while the ruins of their beautiful city were still smouldering, the men of Ghent had the mortification of seeing the Duke of Alva ride--humiliated but unscathed--out of the town.
Just as fifty years ago the town of Bruges held the Archduke Maximilian, King of the Romans, a prisoner till he ordered the withdrawal of all foreign troops from their gates, so did the men of Ghent now exact the same undertaking from the Duke of Alva.
For the moment Ghent was freed from the immediate danger of annihilation, and the departure of Alva from Belgium less than a year later saved her perhaps altogether from the fate of many of her sister cities; certain it is that the High-Bailiff and the older burghers extracted from their prisoners--among whom was senor de Vargas and several members of the Blood Council--concessions and privileges for which they had clamoured in vain for half a century; but beyond that the tyrant was allowed to go free, and against this decision of their magistrates and their Griet Mannen the heroes of the insurrection did not raise a protest. Perhaps they had suffered too much to thirst for active revenge.
END