Orangists.
“Stop,” replied the Count, “there you at once ask me more
than I can tell you. I was told, ‘Guard the prison,’ and I
guard it. You, gentlemen, who are almost military men
yourselves, you are aware that an order must never be
gainsaid.”
“But this order has been given to you that the traitors may
be enabled to leave the town.”
“Very possibly, as the traitors are condemned to exile,”
replied Tilly.
“But who has given this order?”
“The States, to be sure!”
“The States are traitors.”
“I don’t know anything about that!”
“And you are a traitor yourself!”
“I?”
“Yes, you.”
“Well, as to that, let us understand each other gentlemen.
Whom should I betray? The States? Why, I cannot betray them,
whilst, being in their pay, I faithfully obey their orders.”
As the Count was so indisputably in the right that it was
impossible to argue against him, the mob answered only by
redoubled clamour and horrible threats, to which the Count
opposed the most perfect urbanity.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “uncock your muskets, one of them may
go off by accident; and if the shot chanced to wound one of
my men, we should knock over a couple of hundreds of yours,
for which we should, indeed, be very sorry, but you even
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Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip
more so; especially as such a thing is neither contemplated
by you nor by myself.”
“If you did that,” cried the burghers, “we should have a pop
at you, too.”
“Of course you would; but suppose you killed every man Jack
of us, those whom we should have killed would not, for all
that, be less dead.”
“Then leave the place to us, and you will perform the part
of a good citizen.”
“First of all,” said the Count, “I am not a citizen, but an
officer, which is a very different thing; and secondly, I am
not a Hollander, but a Frenchman, which is more different
still. I have to do with no one but the States, by whom I am
paid; let me see an order from them to leave the place to
you, and I shall only be too glad to wheel off in an
instant, as I am confoundedly bored here.”
“Yes, yes!” cried a hundred voices; the din of which was
immediately swelled by five hundred others; “let us march to
the Town-hall; let us go and see the deputies! Come along!
come along!”
“That’s it,” Tilly muttered between his teeth, as he saw the
most violent among the crowd turning away; “go and ask for a
meanness at the Town-hall, and you will see whether they
will grant it; go, my fine fellows, go!”
The worthy officer relied on the honour of the magistrates,
who, on their side, relied on his honour as a soldier.
“I say, Captain,” the first lieutenant whispered into the
ear of the Count, “I hope the deputies will give these
madmen a flat refusal; but, after all, it would do no harm
if they would send us some reinforcement.”
In the meanwhile, John de Witt, whom we left climbing the
stairs, after the conversation with the jailer Gryphus and
his daughter Rosa, had reached the door of the cell, where
on a mattress his brother Cornelius was resting, after
having undergone the preparatory degrees of the torture. The
sentence of banishment having been pronounced, there was no
occasion for inflicting the torture extraordinary.
Cornelius was stretched on his couch, with broken wrists and
crushed fingers. He had not confessed a crime of which he
was not guilty; and now, after three days of agony, he once
more breathed freely, on being informed that the judges,
from whom he had expected death, were only condemning him to
exile.
Endowed with an iron frame and a stout heart, how would he
have disappointed his enemies if they could only have seen,
in the dark cell of the Buytenhof, his pale face lit up by
the smile of the martyr, who forgets the dross of this earth
after having obtained a glimpse of the bright glory of
heaven.
The warden, indeed, had already recovered his full strength,
much more owing to the force of his own strong will than to