The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas (ebook offline reader .txt) 📕

As the fair Rosa, with foreboding doubt, had foretold, so it happened. Whilst John de Witt was climbing the narrow winding stairs which led to the prison of his brother Cornelius, the burghers did their best to have the troop of Tilly, which was in their way, removed.

Seeing this disposition, King Mob, who fully appreciated the laudable intentions of his own beloved militia, shouted most lustily,—

“Hurrah for the burghers!”

As to Count Tilly, who was as prudent as he was firm, he began to parley with the burghers, under the protection of the cocked pistols of his dragoons, explaining to the valiant townsmen, that his order from the States commanded him to guard the prison and its approaches with three companies.

“Wherefore such an order? Why guard the prison?” cried the 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 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