The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas (lightweight ebook reader txt) 📗

they felt a severe shock, occasioned by the rearing of the horses. The whole vehicle for a moment shook and stopped; but immediately after, passing over something round and elastic, which seemed to be the body of a prostrate man set off again amidst a volley of the fiercest oaths.

“Alas!” said Cornelius, “I am afraid we have hurt some one.”

“Gallop! gallop!” called John.

But, notwithstanding this order, the coachman suddenly came to a stop.

“Now, then, what is the matter again?” asked John.

“Look there!” said the coachman.

John looked. The whole mass of the populace from the Buytenhof appeared at the extremity of the street along which the carriage was to proceed, and its stream moved roaring and rapid, as if lashed on by a hurricane.

“Stop and get off,” said John to the coachman; “it is useless to go any farther; we are lost!”

“Here they are! here they are!” five hundred voices were crying at the same time.

“Yes, here they are, the traitors, the murderers, the assassins!” answered the men who were running after the carriage to the people who were coming to meet it. The former carried in their arms the bruised body of one of their companions, who, trying to seize the reins of the horses, had been trodden down by them.

This was the object over which the two brothers had felt their carriage pass.

The coachman stopped, but, however strongly his master urged him, he refused to get off and save himself.

In an instant the carriage was hemmed in between those who followed and those who met it. It rose above the mass of moving heads like a floating island. But in another instant it came to a dead stop. A blacksmith had with his hammer struck down one of the horses, which fell in the traces.

At this moment, the shutter of a window opened, and disclosed the sallow face and the dark eyes of the young man, who with intense interest watched the scene which was preparing. Behind him appeared the head of the officer, almost as pale as himself.

“Good heavens, Monseigneur, what is going on there?” whispered the officer.

“Something very terrible, to a certainty,” replied the other.

“Don’t you see, Monseigneur, they are dragging the Grand Pensionary from the carriage, they strike him, they tear him to pieces!”

“Indeed, these people must certainly be prompted by a most violent indignation,” said the young man, with the same impassible tone which he had preserved all along.

“And here is Cornelius, whom they now likewise drag out of the carriage,—Cornelius, who is already quite broken and mangled by the torture. Only look, look!”

“Indeed, it is Cornelius, and no mistake.”

The officer uttered a feeble cry, and turned his head away; the brother of the Grand Pensionary, before having set foot on the ground, whilst still on the bottom step of the carriage, was struck down with an iron bar which broke his skull. He rose once more, but immediately fell again.

Some fellows then seized him by the feet, and dragged him into the crowd, into the middle of which one might have followed his bloody track, and he was soon closed in among the savage yells of malignant exultation.

The young man—a thing which would have been thought impossible—grew even paler than before, and his eyes were for a moment veiled behind the lids.

The officer saw this sign of compassion, and, wishing to avail himself of this softened tone of his feelings, continued,—

“Come, come, Monseigneur, for here they are also going to murder the Grand Pensionary.”

But the young man had already opened his eyes again.

“To be sure,” he said. “These people are really implacable. It does no one good to offend them.”

“Monseigneur,” said the officer, “may not one save this poor man, who has been your Highness’s instructor? If there be any means, name it, and if I should perish in the attempt——”

William of Orange—for he it was—knit his brows in a very forbidding manner, restrained the glance of gloomy malice which glistened in his half-closed eye, and answered,—

“Captain Van Deken, I request you to go and look after my troops, that they may be armed for any emergency.”

“But am I to leave your Highness here, alone, in the presence of all these murderers?”

“Go, and don’t you trouble yourself about me more than I do myself,” the Prince gruffly replied.

The officer started off with a speed which was much less owing to his sense of military obedience than to his pleasure at being relieved from the necessity of witnessing the shocking spectacle of the murder of the other brother.

He had scarcely left the room, when John—who, with an almost superhuman effort, had reached the stone steps of a house nearly opposite that where his former pupil concealed himself—began to stagger under the blows which were inflicted on him from all sides, calling out,—

“My brother! where is my brother?”

One of the ruffians knocked off his hat with a blow of his clenched fist.

Another showed to him his bloody hands; for this fellow had ripped open Cornelius and disembowelled him, and was now hastening to the spot in order not to lose the opportunity of serving the Grand Pensionary in the same manner, whilst they were dragging the dead body of Cornelius to the gibbet.

John uttered a cry of agony and grief, and put one of his hands before his eyes.

“Oh, you close your eyes, do you?” said one of the soldiers of the burgher guard; “well, I shall open them for you.”

And saying this he stabbed him with his pike in the face, and the blood spurted forth.

“My brother!” cried John de Witt, trying to see through the stream of blood which blinded him, what had become of Cornelius; “my brother, my brother!”

“Go and run after him!” bellowed another murderer, putting his musket to his temples and pulling the trigger.

But the gun did not go off.

The fellow then turned his musket round, and, taking it by the barrel with both hands, struck John de Witt down with the butt-end. John staggered and fell down at his feet, but, raising himself with a last effort, he once more called out,—

“My brother!” with a voice so full of anguish that the young man opposite closed the shutter.

There remained little more to see; a third murderer fired a pistol with the muzzle