Hope Benham Part 13

CHAPTER XIII.

"Tired us out? No, indeed, you haven't," cried the girls in a breath; and one of the girls was Hope, who had come in softly just as Kate had begun to read, and who now added,--

"It's lovely to listen to anything when you read it, Kate."

"Isn't it!" took up Myra. "Miss Marr ought to pay Kate a salary for the good she does in this history business. I hate to _study_ it; I always get all in a wabble with the dates and the names and the places, and by and by, when I try to tell about it or think about it, I get a fifteenth-century king into the sixteenth century just as likely as not.

But when Kate picks out her little nuggets of gold from the ma.s.s, and sets them before me, I begin to see daylight."

"So do I, so do I!" cried Anna Fleming; "and another thing,--I am not ashamed to ask Kate ignorant questions."

"Nor I," declared Myra; and then they all laughed, and Myra followed up the laugh by immediately proceeding to ask two or three of these "ignorant questions,"--the first being, "If Spain had possession of Breda, what does it mean by the Italian infantry and cavalry being there to defend it?"

"It means that at that time," answered Kate, "Philip II., called Philip the Prudent, had possession of the better portion of Italy, with other territory that he had gobbled up, and so, of course, he made use of Italian soldiers."

"Who was Lewis William?"

"He was the stadt of Friesland,--Friesland was part of the Netherlands."

"Oh, and what became of the dare-devil skipper,--Van der Berg,--your ancestor?"

"Oh, he didn't come to anything wonderful,--he 'fought and bled' in freedom's cause like most of those Dutchmen, I suppose."

"But there was a family of Van _den_ Bergs who were cousins to Maurice,"

here spoke up Hope. "Were these any relations to Van der Berg, the skipper?"

"Oh, no,--we didn't descend from princes and counts," laughed Kate.

"I don't believe but that it _is_ the Van den you belong to, anyway,"

said Anna.

"Nonsense," cried Kate; "if we 'belong,' as you say, to a family of that early day, it is to the dare-devil Van der Bergs, and that's good enough for me. My brother Schuyler ought to hear you give preference to the Van _den_ Bergs. He would be ready to fight a duel with you; for, from a little boy, he has been perfectly enchanted with that story of the dare-devil, and when we were all at home five years ago,--little things of ten and eleven and twelve,--we used to play the story, and we called it 'The Siege of Breda.' It was when we were up at our summer place on the Hudson. It was such fun. We had a queer little cottage on the place, that had a lot of gables and turrets. It was unoccupied, except as a sort of storehouse for fruit; and this cottage we called 'the castle.' A rather wide stream of water runs through the grounds, and broadens out into a sort of miniature lake at the foot of the garden. It was just across this broader part, where it was also quite deep, that the cottage showed its turrets and gables, and we got the gardener and one of the stable men to build up a sort of palisade of bricks and stones and boards all about it. Inside this we made a guard-house, and the a.r.s.enal was in the castle itself. Then we knew an old sailor who fixed up our little yacht, made a cabin and hold, where the boys crept in,--the boys who represented the attacking party, the seventy Hollanders,--and we packed around them a lot of dry moss we had prepared, to represent turf.

Mr. Brown--our old sailor--also fixed up something that did duty for a water-gate. Well, when we had got everything as near to our minds as possible, we dressed ourselves up in our costumes,--oh, yes, we had regular costumes. My uncle Schuyler said it was a real history lesson for us, and he should do all he could to help it along; and so he hunted up some books that had the ill.u.s.trations of the costumes of that time, and we got mamma and a seamstress we had to help us make up suits for us."

"And did _you_ take part?" asked Myra.

"Did _I_ take part? Well, I should think I did. _I_ was Captain Charles de Heraugiere, if you please. And oh, the cunning little suit I had,--a regular fighting suit of imitation leather and a rough-looking sort of stuff like frieze, and a sort of waistcoat of chamois skin, and then a dear little hat with a feather;--oh, and boots with tops that came 'way up to the knee-bend. We made the tops ourselves of mock leather, russet color, and sewed them to our russet shoes. Oh, it was _such_ fun!"

"But your brother--what character did he take?"

"Oh, there was but one character that _he_ would take, and that was the dare-devil boatman who stood on the deck and joked with the purchasers of the peat. You should have seen Schuyler as he did it. It was moonlight, for mamma and papa wouldn't let us play it as we wanted to on a dark night, for there might be an accident; but we ran the boat down by some sheltering bushes, and the boys who took the part of the purchasers from the castle stood in the lighter place where the moonlight fell, and that left the place where our hidden soldiers were quite dusky and mysterious. But Schuyler stood in the light, the moon s.h.i.+ning straight in his face. His suit was a good deal rougher than mine, but a good deal like it; only he had a cap on, and that was pushed back, and he looked so handsome and bold when he joked and laughed and answered the purchasers. Then when we soldiers stole out of the s.h.i.+p where we were in hiding--What! how could I see Schuyler when I was hidden? Oh, I peeped through the moss. And how many boys had we? Oh, twenty in all,--about eight in the boat,--it wouldn't hold any more; but the eight of them made _such_ a show in their costumes. They were all our neighbors and close friends, the whole twenty of them. Four were the d.y.k.er brothers, and the Burton boys with _their_ cousins who had come up a-visiting them from Philadelphia; and there were our boys and the Van Loons and Delmars to make up the twenty. But, as I was saying, when we soldiers stole up out of the vessel, and I marched at the head of my band, the dare-devil _would_ lead the way. I told him it was all out of order, but he declared that Captain Heraugiere _couldn't_ know the way as the dare-devil who had carried the peat so often must know it, and that of course he must be guided; so I had to give in.

"We started our play at the point where the officer of the guard puts off from the castle in a skiff, and comes on board our vessel; then, after that, we slip down through the water-gate,--of course we don't have any leak,--the Burton boys and the Van Loons come to the sh.o.r.e and drag us into the harbor and make the vessel fast, close to the guard-house. It was just after that, you know, that the dare-devil receives the purchasers, and goes through all that joking and sending the people off, saying that he was tired. And then I followed as Captain Heraugiere; and what do you think!--Schuyler at first wanted to be Captain Heraugiere too. He said he could easily manage it; but it was when he found he wouldn't be allowed to gobble up the two characters, he insisted upon showing the captain the way, and so he stuck to me all through, flouris.h.i.+ng his wooden sword on the slightest excuse. But how we did lay about us! Whack, whack, we knocked over the Burtons, and all the rest of the Italians, with the young Lanzavecchia at their head; and then came the great end of the victory, the arrival of Hohenlo with the vanguard of Maurice's troops, and then Prince Maurice himself with his fine attendants,--his counts and admirals, and these were the Van Loons and the Burtons again, who had rigged themselves up in other clothes,--nice honest Dutch clothes to play the Netherlander parts. So we turned and twisted our twenty boys, just as they do on the stage, and you'd have thought there were a host of them. Well, when the vanguard arrived, we all joined together and marched into the town--that is, around our grounds and into the castle, the d.y.k.er brothers, who are musical, playing the national air with a drum and fife and cornet, and some of the rest of us, breaking out now and then at the top of our voices into the chorus,--

'Wilhelmus van Na.s.souwen Ben ick van Duytsem bloed,'

which means,

'William from Na.s.sau, I am from German blood.'

William from Na.s.sau, you know, was the great Prince of Orange.

"And marching to this playing and singing, we entered the castle,--our cottage,--where a table had been set with a lot of Dutch dainties, made by our German cook, Wilhelmina, who had lived in Holland and knew everything about the dear little Dutch cakes and things they eat there.

Then, after we had partaken of the feast, the table was carried out, and we danced to our heart's content. Oh, we did have such a good time, and we kept it up every year until we got too old for it."

"What fun it _must_ have been!" cried Myra. "I wish I could have been there; but didn't you have any other girl but yourself in the play with those twenty boys?"

"No, not in the play; but we had plenty of girls as spectators and at the feast and dancing."

"And did you ever make a play out of any other historical incident?"

asked Anna Fleming.

"Yes, several; and I think that is the reason why historical events became so fixed in my mind, and I got so interested in reading history.

It began by accident, as you might say,--that is, by Schuyler's delight in the Van der Berg story, and insisting on playing it. It's the best way in the world, let me tell you, to play history like this,--it teaches you more than any ordinary study possibly can, and you find that through it you get events and epochs perfectly clear in your mind, and everything by and by spreads out before you like reality."

"I wish Miss Marr would let us have history lessons this way," said Myra.

"Perhaps she will, some time, if Kate tells her what she has told us,"

said Anna, hopefully; "and you _will_ tell her some time, won't you, Kate?"

"Yes, I'll tell her, but I don't think it is the thing to do in school days; you ought to get it up in the summer, during vacations. It would interfere with other studies to go into all the preparation and work of such performances in school."

"Did you ever like any other of your plays as well as the Siege?" asked Hope.

"No, never; but what made you ask that, Hope?"

"Because it was so stirring and out-door-sy, and the boatman was so jolly and brave, I thought it wasn't possible that there could have been another story quite so playable as that."

"I said the Van der Bergs were proud of only one thing,--this performance of the boatman; but there was another of our ancestors of a later day who is very interesting, I think, and just as plucky and brave in another way."

"Oh!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Anna Fleming, with such an air of antic.i.p.ation that they all laughed, for they all knew Anna's weakness for ancestors; and this "Oh," said very plainly, "Now we are to hear of something more worth while than an old boatman, something probably about those aristocratic Knickerbocker ancestors of Kate's."

Kate herself, thoroughly appreciating Anna's state of mind, went on demurely: "This ancestor was my mother's great-great-grandfather. He was the son of a small farmer in England, and he came to New York a poor boy, with only a few s.h.i.+llings in his pocket; and with these few s.h.i.+llings he started, and, working at all sorts of things,--as a stevedore, and anything else he could find to do,--he at last worked his way up to a little clerks.h.i.+p in a little mercantile house, and from there he climbed step by step into a bigger clerks.h.i.+p, in the same little house, and then step by step into a clerks.h.i.+p in a big house, until after a while, after all sorts of working and waiting and hards.h.i.+ps, he came to be at the head of the big house, and one of the first merchants of the day in New York. We have in our family now one of those English s.h.i.+llings that he brought over and saved for luck when he was working on the wharves, and we keep it for luck; and there is a packet of old letters and a diary he kept, telling the whole story, that we have too. Oh, yes, we are very proud of our great-great-great-grandfather, I can tell you," smiling up at the girls.

"But where did those lovely old shoe-buckles and gold b.u.t.tons, and that old silver with the V. der B. engraved on it, that I saw when I visited you,--where did those come from, if that boatman was the only Dutch ancestor you had that you were proud of?" anxiously and disappointedly asked Anna here.

"Oh, they came from some of the later V. der B.'s; some descendants that had nothing specially interesting about them,--were not heroes of any kind, but just rich old burghers."

"But weren't they what are called the Knickerbocker families?"

"Yes; but you know how that name came to be given to them, don't you?"

"No, not exactly," answered Anna, shamefacedly.

"And _I_ haven't the least idea. I know I ought to know, but I don't,"