Chapter 3

On the following day there was not a prouder nor a happier boy in all Holland than Hans Brinker as he watched his sister, with many a dexterous sweep, flying in and out among the skaters who at sundown thronged the canal. A warm jacket had been given her by the kind-hearted Hilda, and the burst-out shoes had been cobbled into decency by Dame Brinker. As the little creature darted backward and forward, flushed with enjoyment and quite unconscious of the many wondering glances bent upon her, she felt that the shining runners beneath her feet had suddenly turned earth into fairyland while “Hans, dear, good Hans!” echoed itself over and over again in her grateful heart.

“By den donder!” exclaimed Peter van Holp to Carl Schummel, “but that little one in the red jacket and patched petticoat skates well. Gunst! She has toes on her heels and eyes in the back of her head! See her! It will be a joke if she gets in the race and beats Katrinka Flack, after all.”

“Hush! not so loud!” returned Carl, rather sneeringly. “That little lady in rags is the special pet of Hilda van Gleck. Those shining skates are her gift, if I make no mistake.”

“So! so!” exclaimed Peter with a radiant smile, for Hilda was his best friend. “She has been at her good work there too!” And Mynheer van Holp, after cutting a double figure eight on the ice, to say nothing of a huge P, then a jump and an H, glided onward until he found himself beside Hilda.

Hand in hand, they skated together, laughingly at first, then staidly talking in a low tone.

Strange to say, Peter van Holp soon arrived at a sudden conviction that his little sister needed a wooden chain just like Hilda’s.

Two days afterwards, on Saint Nicholas’s Eve, Hans, having burned three candle ends and cut his thumb into the bargain, stood in the marketplace at Amsterdam, buying another pair of skates.

Shadows in the Home

Good Dame Brinker! As soon as the scanty dinner had been cleared away that noon, she had arrayed herself in her holiday attire in honor of Saint Nicholas. It will brighten the children, she thought to herself, and she was not mistaken. This festival dress had been worn very seldom during the past ten years; before that time it had done good service and had flourished at many a dance and kermis, when she was known, far and wide, as the pretty Meitje Klenck. The children had sometimes been granted rare glimpses of it as it lay in state in the old oaken chest. Faded and threadbare as it was, it was gorgeous in their eyes, with its white linen tucker, now gathered to her plump throat and vanishing beneath the trim bodice of blue homespun, and its reddish-brown skirt bordered with black. The knitted woolen mitts and the dainty cap showing her hair, which generally was hidden, made her seem almost like a princess to Gretel, while Master Hans grew staid and well-behaved as he gazed.

Soon the little maid, while braiding her own golden tresses, fairly danced around her mother in an ecstasy of admiration.

“Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother, how pretty you are! Look, Hans! Isn’t it just like a picture?”

“Just like a picture,” assented Hans cheerfully. “JUST like a picture--only I don’t like those stocking things on the hands.”

“Not like the mitts, brother Hans! Why, they’re very important. See, they cover up all the red. Oh, Mother, how white your arm is where the mitt leaves off, whiter than mine, oh, ever so much whiter. I declare, Mother, the bodice is tight for you. You’re growing! You’re surely growing!”

Dame Brinker laughed.

“This was made long ago, lovey, when I wasn’t much thicker about the waist than a churn dasher. And how do you like the cap?” she asked, turning her head from side to side.

“Oh, EVER so much, Mother. It’s b-e-a-u-tiful! See, the father is looking!”

Was the father looking? Alas! only with a dull stare. His vrouw turned toward him with a start, something like a blush rising to her cheeks, a questioning sparkle in her eye. The bright look died away in an instant.

“No, no.” She sighed. “He sees nothing. Come, Hans”--and the smile crept faintly back again--“don’t stand gaping at me all day, and the new skates waiting for you at Amsterdam.”

“Ah, Mother,” he answered, “you need so many things. Why should I buy skates?”

“Nonsense, child. The money was given to you on purpose, or the work was--it’s all the same thing. Go while the sun is high.”

“Yes, and hurry back, Hans!” laughed Gretel. “We’ll race on the canal tonight, if the mother lets us.”

At the very threshold he turned to say, “Your spinning wheel wants a new treadle, Mother.”

“You can make it, Hans.”

“So I can. That will take no money. But you need feathers and wool and meal, and--”

“There, there! That will do. Your silver cannot buy everything. Ah! Hans, if our stolen money would but come back on this bright Saint Nicholas’s Eve, how glad we would be! Only last night I prayed to the good saint--”

“Mother!” interrupted Hans in dismay.

“Why not, Hans? Shame on you to reproach me for that! I’m as true a Protestant, in sooth, as any fine lady that walks into church, but it’s no wrong to turn sometimes to the good Saint Nicholas. Tut! It’s a likely story if one can’t do that, without one’s children flaring up at it--and he the boys’ and girls’ own saint. Hoot! Mayhap the colt is a steadier horse than the mare?”

Hans knew his mother too well to offer a word in opposition when her voice quickened and sharpened as it did now (it was often sharp and quick when she spoke of the missing money), so he said gently, “And what did you ask of good Saint Nicholas, Mother?”

“Why, never to give the thieves a wink of sleep till they brought it back, to be sure, if he has the power to do such things, or else to brighten our wits that we might find it ourselves. Not a sight have I had of it since the day before the dear father was hurt--as you well know, Hans.”

“That I do, Mother,” he answered sadly, “though you have almost pulled down the cottage in searching.”

“Aye, but it was of no use,” moaned the dame. “‘HIDERS make best finders.’”

Hans started. “Do you think the father could tell aught?”

“Aye, indeed,” said Dame Brinker, nodding her head. “I think so, but that is no sign. I never hold the same belief in the matter two days. Mayhap the father paid it off for the great silver watch we have been guarding since that day. But, no--I’ll never believe it.”

“The watch was not worth a quarter of the money, Mother.”

“No, indeed, and your father was a shrewd man up to the last moment. He was too steady and thrifty for silly doings.”

“Where did the watch come from, I wonder,” muttered Hans, half to himself.

Dame Brinker shook her head and looked sadly toward her husband, who sat staring blankly at the floor. Gretel stood near him, knitting.

“That we shall never know, Hans. I have shown it to the father many a time, but he does not know it from a potato. When he came in that dreadful night to supper, he handed the watch to me and told me to take good care of it until he asked for it again. Just as he opened his lips to say more, Broom Klatterboost came flying in with word that the dike was in danger. Ah! The waters were terrible that Pinxter-week! My man, alack, caught up his tools and ran out. That was the last I ever saw of him in his right mind. He was brought in again by midnight, nearly dead, with his poor head all bruised and cut. The fever passed off in time, but never the dullness--THAT grew worse every day. We shall never know.”

Hans had heard all this before. More than once he had seen his mother, in hours of sore need, take the watch from its hiding place, half resolved to sell it, but she had always conquered the temptation.

“No, Hans,” she would say, “we must be nearer starvation than this before we turn faithless to the father!”

A memory of some such scene crossed her son’s mind now, for, after giving a heavy sigh, and flipping a crumb of wax at Gretel across the table, he said, “Aye, Mother, you have done bravely to keep it--many a one would have tossed it off for gold long ago.”

“And more shame for them!” exclaimed the dame indignantly. “I would not do it. Besides, the gentry are so hard on us poor folks that if they saw such a thing in our hands, even if we told all, they might suspect the father of--”

Hans flushed angrily.

“They would not DARE to say such a thing, Mother! If they did, I’d...”

He clenched his fist and seemed to think that the rest of his sentence was too terrible to utter in her presence.

Dame Brinker smiled proudly through her tears at this interruption.

“Ah, Hans, thou’rt a true, brave lad. We will never part company with the watch. In his dying hour the dear father might wake and ask for it.”

“Might WAKE, Mother!” echoed Hans. “Wake--and know us?”

“Aye, child,” almost whispered his mother, “such things have been.”

By this time Hans had nearly forgotten his proposed errand to Amsterdam. His mother had seldom spoken so familiarly to him. He felt himself now to be not only her son, but her friend, her adviser:

“You are right, Mother. We must never give up the watch. For the father’s sake we will guard it always. The money, though, may come to light when we least expect it.”

“Never!” cried Dame Brinker, taking the last stitch from her needle with a jerk and laying the unfinished knitting heavily upon her lap. “There is no chance! One thousand guilders--and all gone in a day! One thousand guilders. Oh, what ever DID become of them? If they went in an evil way, the thief would have confessed it on his dying bed. He would not dare to die with such guilt on his soul!”

“He may not be dead yet,” said Hans soothingly. “Any day we may hear of him.”

“Ah, child,” she said in a changed tone, “what thief would ever have come HERE? It was always neat and clean, thank God, but not fine, for the father and I saved and saved that we might have something laid by. ‘Little and often soon fills the pouch.’ We found it so, in truth. Besides, the father had a goodly sum already, for service done to the Heernocht lands, at the time of the great inundation. Every week we had a guilder left over, sometimes more; for the father worked extra hours and could get high pay for his labor. Every Saturday night we put something by, except the time when you had the fever, Hans, and when Gretel came. At last the pouch grew so full that I mended an old stocking and commenced again. Now that I look back, it seems that the money was up to the heel in a few sunny weeks. There was great pay in those days if a man was quick at engineer work. The stocking went on filling with copper and silver--aye, and gold. You may well open your eyes, Gretel. I used to laugh and tell the father it was not for poverty I wore my old gown. And the stocking went on filling, so full that sometimes when I woke at night, I’d get up, soft and quiet, and go feel it in the moonlight. Then, on my knees, I would thank our Lord that my little ones could in time get good learning, and that the father might rest from labor in his old age. Sometimes, at supper, the father and I would talk about a new chimney and a good winter room for the cow, but my man had finer plans even than that. ‘A big sail,’ says he, ‘catches the wind--we can do what we will soon,’ and then we would sing together as I washed my dishes. Ah, ‘a smooth wind makes an easy rudder.’ Not a thing vexed me from morning till night. Every week the father would take out the stocking and drop in the money and laugh and kiss me as we tied it up together. Up with you, Hans! There you sit gaping, and the day a-wasting!” added Dame Brinker tartly, blushing to find that she had been speaking too freely to her boy. “It’s high time you were on your way.”

Hans had seated himself and was looking earnestly into her face. He arose and, in almost a whisper, asked, “Have you ever tried, Mother?”

She understood him.

“Yes, child, often. But the father only laughs, or he stares at me so strange that I am glad to ask no more. When you and Gretel had the fever last winter, and our bread was nearly gone, and I could earn nothing, for fear you would die while my face was turned, oh! I tried then! I smoothed his hair and whispered to him soft as a kitten, about the money--where it was, who had it? Alack! He would pick at my sleeve and whisper gibberish till my blood ran cold. At last, while Gretel lay whiter than snow, and you were raving on the bed, I screamed to him--it seemed as if he MUST hear me--‘Raff, where is our money? Do you know aught of the money, Raff? The money in the pouch and the stocking, in the big chest?’ But I might as well have talked to a stone. I might as--”

The mother’s voice sounded so strange, and her eye was so bright, that Hans, with a new anxiety, laid his hand upon her shoulder.

“Come, Mother,” he said, “let us try to forget this money. I am big and strong. Gretel, too, is very quick and willing. Soon all will be prosperous with us again. Why, Mother, Gretel and I would rather see thee bright and happy than to have all the silver in the world, wouldn’t we, Gretel?”

“The mother knows it,” said Gretel, sobbing.

Sunbeams

Dame Brinker was startled at her children’s emotion; glad, too, for it proved how loving and true they were.

Beautiful ladies in princely homes often smile suddenly and sweetly, gladdening the very air around them, but I doubt if their smile be more welcome in God’s sight than that which sprang forth to cheer the roughly clad boy and girl in the humble cottage. Dame Brinker felt that she had been selfish. Blushing and brightening, she hastily wiped her eyes and looked upon them as only a mother can.

“Hoity! Toity! Pretty talk we’re having, and Saint Nicholas’s Eve almost here! What wonder the yarn pricks my fingers! Come, Gretel, take this cent, *{The Dutch cent is worth less than half of an American cent.} and while Hans is trading for the skates you can buy a waffle in the marketplace.”

“Let me stay home with you, Mother,” said Gretel, looking up with eyes that sparkled through their tears. “Hans will buy me the cake.”

“As you will, child, and Hans--wait a moment. Three turns of this needle will finish this toe, and then you may have as good a pair of hose as ever were knitted (owning the yarn is a grain too sharp) to sell to the hosier on the Harengracht. *{A street in Amsterdam.} That will give us three quarter-guilders if you make good trade; and as it’s right hungry weather, you may buy four waffles. We’ll keep the Feast of Saint Nicholas after all.”

Gretel clapped her hands. “That will be fine! Annie Bouman told me what grand times they will have in the big houses tonight. But we will be merry too. Hans will have beautiful new skates--and then there’ll be the waffles! Oh! Don’t break them, brother Hans. Wrap them well, and button them under your jacket very carefully.”

“Certainly,” replied Hans, quite gruff with pleasure and importance.

“Oh! Mother!” cried Gretel in high glee, “soon you will be busied with the father, and now you are only knitting. Do tell us all about Saint Nicholas!”

Dame Brinker laughed to see Hans hang up his hat and prepare to listen. “Nonsense, children,” she said. “I have told it to you often.”

“Tell us again! Oh, DO tell us again!” cried Gretel, throwing herself upon the wonderful wooden bench that her brother had made on the mother’s last birthday. Hans, not wishing to appear childish, and yet quite willing to hear the story, stood carelessly swinging his skates against the fireplace.

“Well, children, you shall hear it, but we must never waste the daylight again in this way. Pick up your ball, Gretel, and let your sock grow as I talk. Opening your ears needn’t shut your fingers. Saint Nicholas, you must know, is a wonderful saint. He keeps his eye open for the good of sailors, but he cares most of all for boys and girls. Well, once upon a time, when he was living on the earth, a merchant of Asia sent his three sons to a great city, called Athens, to get learning.”

“Is Athens in Holland, Mother?” asked Gretel.

“I don’t know, child. Probably it is.”

“Oh, no, Mother,” said Hans respectfully. “I had that in my geography lessons long ago. Athens is in Greece.”

“Well,” resumed the mother, “what matter? Greece may belong to the king, for aught we know. Anyhow, this rich merchant sent his sons to Athens. While they were on their way, they stopped one night at a shabby inn, meaning to take up their journey in the morning. Well, they had very fine clothes--velvet and silk, it may be, such as rich folks’ children all over the world think nothing of wearing--and their belts, likewise, were full of money. What did the wicked landlord do but contrive a plan to kill the children and take their money and all their beautiful clothes himself. So that night, when all the world was asleep, he got up and killed the three young gentlemen.”

Gretel clasped her hands and shuddered, but Hans tried to look as if killing and murder were everyday matters to him.

“That was not the worst of it,” continued Dame Brinker, knitting slowly and trying to keep count of her stitches as she talked. “That was not near the worst of it. The dreadful landlord went and cut up the young gentlemen’s bodies into little pieces and threw them into a great tub of brine, intending to sell them for pickled pork!”

“Oh!” cried Gretel, horror-stricken, though she had often heard the story before. Hans was still unmoved and seemed to think that pickling was the best that could be done under the circumstances.

“Yes, he pickled them, and one might think that would have been the last of the young gentlemen. But no. That night Saint Nicholas had a wonderful vision, and in it he saw the landlord cutting up the merchant’s children. There was no need of his hurrying, you know, for he was a saint, but in the morning he went to the inn and charged the landlord with murder. Then the wicked landlord confessed it from beginning to end and fell down on his knees, begging forgiveness. He felt so sorry for what he had done that he asked the saint to bring the young masters to life.”

“And did the saint do it?” asked Gretel, delighted, well knowing what the answer would be.

“Of course he did. The pickled pieces flew together in an instant, and out jumped the young gentlemen from the brine tub. They cast themselves at the feet of Saint Nicholas, and he gave them his blessing, and--oh! mercy on us, Hans, it will be dark before you get back if you don’t start this minute!”

By this time Dame Brinker was almost out of breath and quite out of commas. She could not remember when she had seen the children idle away an hour of daylight in this manner, and the thought of such luxury quite appalled her. By way of compensation she now flew about the room in extreme haste. Tossing a block of peat upon the fire, blowing invisible fire from the table, and handing the finished hose to Hans, all in an instant...

“Comes, Hans,” she said as her boy lingered by the door. “What keeps thee?”

Hans kissed his mother’s plump cheek, rosy and fresh yet, in spite of all her troubles.

“My mother is the best in the world, and I would be right glad to have a pair of skates, but”--and as he buttoned his jacket he looked, in a troubled way, toward a strange figure crouching by the hearthstone--“if my money would bring a meester *{Doctor (dokter in Dutch), called meester by the lower class.} from Amsterdam to see the father, something might yet be done.”

“A meester would not come, Hans, for twice that money, and it would do no good if he did. Ah, how many guilders I once spent for that, but the dear, good father would not waken. It is God’s will. Go, Hans, and buy the skates.”

Hans started with a heavy heart, but since the heart was young and in a boy’s bosom, it set him whistling in less than five minutes. His mother had said “thee” to him, and that was quite enough to make even a dark day sunny. Hollanders do not address each other, in affectionate intercourse, as the French and Germans do. But Dame Brinker had embroidered for a Heidelberg family in her girlhood, and she had carried its thee and thou into her rude home, to be used in moments of extreme love and tenderness.

Therefore, “What keeps thee, Hans?” sang an echo song beneath the boy’s whistling and made him feel that his errand was blest.

Hans Has His Way

Broek, with its quiet, spotless streets, its frozen rivulets, its yellow brick pavements and bright wooden houses, was nearby. It was a village where neatness and show were in full blossom, but the inhabitants seemed to be either asleep or dead.

Not a footprint marred the sanded paths where pebbles and seashells lay in fanciful designs. Every window shutter was tightly closed as though air and sunshine were poison, and the massive front doors were never opened except on the occasion of a wedding, a christening, or a funeral.

Serene clouds of tobacco smoke were floating through hidden corners, and children, who otherwise might have awakened the place, were studying in out-of-the-way corners or skating upon the neighboring canal. A few peacocks and wolves stood in the gardens, but they had never enjoyed the luxury of flesh and blood. They were made out of boxwood hedges and seemed to be guarding the grounds with a sort of green ferocity. Certain lively automata, ducks, women, and sportsmen, were stowed away in summer houses, waiting for the spring-time when they could be wound up and rival their owners in animation; and the shining tiled roofs, mosaic courtyards, and polished house trimmings flashed up a silent homage to the sky, where never a speck of dust could dwell.

Hans glanced toward the village, as he shook his silver kwartjes and wondered whether it were really true, as he had often heard, that some of the people of Broek were so rich that they used kitchen utensils of solid gold.

He had seen Mevrouw van Stoop’s sweet cheeses in market, and he knew that the lofty dame earned many a bright silver guilder in selling them. But did she set the cream to rise in golden pans? Did she use a golden skimmer? When her cows were in winter quarters, were their tails really tied up with ribbons?

These thoughts ran through his mind as he turned his face toward Amsterdam, not five miles away, on the other side of the frozen Y. *{Pronounced eye, an arm of the Zuider Zee.} The ice upon the canal was perfect, but his wooden runners, so soon to be cast aside, squeaked a dismal farewell as he scraped and skimmed along.

When crossing the Y, whom should he see skating toward him but the great Dr. Boekman, the most famous physician and surgeon in Holland. Hans had never met him before, but he had seen his engraved likeness in many of the shop windows in Amsterdam. It was a face that one could never forget. Thin and lank, though a born Dutchman, with stern blue eyes, and queer compressed lips that seemed to say “No smiling permitted,” he certainly was not a very jolly or sociable-looking personage, nor one that a well-trained boy would care to accost unbidden.

But Hans WAS bidden, and that, too, by a voice he seldom disregarded--his own conscience.

“Here comes the greatest doctor in the world,” whispered the voice. “God has sent him. You have no right to buy skates when you might, with the same money, purchase such aid for your father!”

The wooden runners gave an exultant squeak. Hundreds of beautiful skates were gleaming and vanishing in the air above him. He felt the money tingle in his fingers. The old doctor looked fearfully grim and forbidding. Hans’s heart was in his throat, but he found voice enough to cry out, just as he was passing, “Mynheer Boekman!”

The great man halted and, sticking out his thin underlip, looked scowling about him.

Hans was in for it now.

“Mynheer,” he panted, drawing close to the fierce-looking doctor, “I knew you could be none other than the famous Boekman. I have to ask a great favor--”