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The black tulip

by Alexandre Dumas · English · Gutenberg #965 · 430,408 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The black tulip

Author: Alexandre Dumas
        Auguste Maquet


        
Release date: July 1, 1997 [eBook #965]
                Most recently updated: December 2, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/965

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK TULIP ***




THE BLACK TULIP

By Alexandre Dumas (Pere)




Chapter 1. A Grateful People


On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively,
so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with
its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses,
with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost
Eastern cupolas are reflected,--the city of the Hague, the capital of
the Seven United Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a
black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who,
with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or
sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible
prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, where, on the
charge of attempted murder preferred against him by the surgeon
Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of
Holland was confined.

If the history of that time, and especially that of the year in the
middle of which our narrative commences, were not indissolubly connected
with the two names just mentioned, the few explanatory pages which we
are about to add might appear quite supererogatory; but we will, from
the very first, apprise the reader--our old friend, to whom we are wont
on the first page to promise amusement, and with whom we always try to
keep our word as well as is in our power--that this explanation is as
indispensable to the right understanding of our story as to that of the
great event itself on which it is based.

Cornelius de Witt, Ruart de Pulten, that is to say, warden of the dikes,
ex-burgomaster of Dort, his native town, and member of the Assembly
of the States of Holland, was forty-nine years of age, when the Dutch
people, tired of the Republic such as John de Witt, the Grand Pensionary
of Holland, understood it, at once conceived a most violent affection
for the Stadtholderate, which had been abolished for ever in Holland by
the “Perpetual Edict” forced by John de Witt upon the United Provinces.

As it rarely happens that public opinion, in its whimsical flights,
does not identify a principle with a man, thus the people saw the
personification of the Republic in the two stern figures of the brothers
De Witt, those Romans of Holland, spurning to pander to the fancies
of the mob, and wedding themselves with unbending fidelity to liberty
without licentiousness, and prosperity without the waste of superfluity;
on the other hand, the Stadtholderate recalled to the popular mind the
grave and thoughtful image of the young Prince William of Orange.

The brothers De Witt humoured Louis XIV., whose moral influence was felt
by the whole of Europe, and the pressure of whose material power Holland
had been made to feel in that marvellous campaign on the Rhine, which,
in the space of three months, had laid the power of the United Provinces
prostrate.

Louis XIV. had long been the enemy of the Dutch, who insulted or
ridiculed him to their hearts’ content, although it must be said that
they generally used French refugees for the mouthpiece of their spite.
Their national pride held him up as the Mithridates of the Republic.
The brothers De Witt, therefore, had to strive against a double
difficulty,--against the force of national antipathy, and, besides,
against the feeling of weariness which is natural to all vanquished
people, when they hope that a new chief will be able to save them from
ruin and shame.

This new chief, quite ready to appear on the political stage, and to
measure himself against Louis XIV., however gigantic the fortunes of the
Grand Monarch loomed in the future, was William, Prince of Orange, son
of William II., and grandson, by his mother Henrietta Stuart, of Charles
I. of England. We have mentioned him before as the person by whom the
people expected to see the office of Stadtholder restored.

This young man was, in 1672, twenty-two years of age. John de Witt, who
was his tutor, had brought him up with the view of making him a good
citizen. Loving his country better than he did his disciple, the master
had, by the Perpetual Edict, extinguished the hope which the young
Prince might have entertained of one day becoming Stadtholder. But God
laughs at the presumption of man, who wants to raise and prostrate the
powers on earth without consulting the King above; and the fickleness
and caprice of the Dutch combined with the terror inspired by Louis
XIV., in repealing the Perpetual Edict, and re-establishing the office
of Stadtholder in favour of William of Orange, for whom the hand of
Providence had traced out ulterior destinies on the hidden map of the
future.

The Grand Pensionary bowed before the will of his fellow citizens;
Cornelius de Witt, however, was more obstinate, and notwithstanding all
the threats of death from the Orangist rabble, who besieged him in his
house at Dort, he stoutly refused to sign the act by which the office of
Stadtholder was restored. Moved by the tears and entreaties of his wife,
he at last complied, only adding to his signature the two letters V. C.
(Vi Coactus), notifying thereby that he only yielded to force.

It was a real miracle that on that day he escaped from the doom intended
for him.

John de Witt derived no advantage from his ready compliance with the
wishes of his fellow citizens. Only a few days after, an attempt
was made to stab him, in which he was severely although not mortally
wounded.

This by no means suited the views of the Orange faction. The life of
the two brothers being a constant obstacle to their plans, they changed
their tactics, and tried to obtain by calumny what they had not been
able to effect by the aid of the poniard.

How rarely does it happen that, in the right moment, a great man is
found to head the execution of vast and noble designs; and for that
reason, when such a providential concurrence of circumstances does
occur, history is prompt to record the name of the chosen one, and to
hold him up to the admiration of posterity. But when Satan interposes
in human affairs to cast a shadow upon some happy existence, or to
overthrow a kingdom, it seldom happens that he does not find at his side
some miserable tool, in whose ear he has but to whisper a word to set
him at once about his task.

The wretched tool who was at hand to be the agent of this dastardly
plot was one Tyckelaer whom we have already mentioned, a surgeon by
profession.

He lodged an information against Cornelius de Witt, setting forth that
the warden--who, as he had shown by the letters added to his signature,
was fuming at the repeal of the Perpetual Edict--had, from hatred
against William of Orange, hired an assassin to deliver the new Republic
of its new Stadtholder; and he, Tyckelaer was the person thus chosen;
but that, horrified at the bare idea of the act which he was asked to
perpetrate, he had preferred rather to reveal the crime than to commit
it.

This disclosure was, indeed, well calculated to call forth a furious
outbreak among the Orange faction. The Attorney General caused, on the
16th of August, 1672, Cornelius de Witt to be arrested; and the noble
brother of John de Witt had, like the vilest criminal, to undergo, in
one of the apartments of the town prison, the preparatory degrees of
torture, by means of which his judges expected to force from him the
confession of his alleged plot against William of Orange.

But Cornelius was not only possessed of a great mind, but also of a
great heart. He belonged to that race of martyrs who, indissolubly
wedded to their political convictions as their ancestors were to their
faith, are able to smile on pain: while being stretched on the rack, he
recited with a firm voice, and scanning the lines according to measure,
the first strophe of the “Justum ac tenacem” of Horace, and, making no
confession, tired not only the strength, but even the fanaticism, of his
executioners.

The judges, notwithstanding, acquitted Tyckelaer from every charge; at
the same time sentencing Cornelius to be deposed from all his offices
and dignities; to pay all the costs of the trial; and to be banished
from the soil of the Republic for ever.

This judgment against not only an innocent, but also a great man,
was indeed some gratification to the passions of the people, to whose
interests Cornelius de Witt had always devoted himself: but, as we shall
soon see, it was not enough.

The Athenians, who indeed have left behind them a pretty tolerable
reputation for ingratitude, have in this respect to yield precedence to
the Dutch. They, at least in the case of Aristides, contented themselves
with banishing him.

John de Witt, at the first intimation of the charge brought against his
brother, had resigned his office of Grand Pensionary. He too received
a noble recompense for his devotedness to the best interests of his
country, taking with him into the retirement of private life the
hatred of a host of enemies, and the fresh scars of wounds inflicted by
assassins, only too often the sole guerdon obtained by honest people,
who are guilty of having worked for their country, and of having
forgotten their own private interests.

In the meanwhile William of Orange urged on the course of events by
every means in his power, eagerly waiting for the time when the people,
by whom he was idolised, should have made of the bodies of the brothers
the two steps over which he might ascend to the chair of Stadtholder.

Thus, then, on the 20th of August, 1672, as we have already stated in
the beginning of this chapter, the whole town was crowding towards the
Buytenhof, to witness the departure of Cornelius de Witt from prison,
as he was going to exile; and to see what traces the torture of the rack
had left on the noble frame of the man who knew his Horace so well.

Yet all this multitude was not crowding to the Buytenhof with the
innocent view of merely feasting their eyes with the spectacle; there
were many who went there to play an active part in it, and to take upon
themselves an office which they conceived had been badly filled,--that
of the executioner.

There were, indeed, others with less hostile intentions. All that they
cared for was the spectacle, always so attractive to the mob, whose
instinctive pride is flattered by it,--the sight of greatness hurled
down into the dust.

“Has not,” they would say, “this Cornelius de Witt been locked up and
broken by the rack? Shall we not see him pale, streaming with blood,
covered with shame?” And was not this a sweet triumph for the burghers
of the Hague, whose envy even beat that of the common rabble; a triumph
in which every honest citizen and townsman might be expected to share?

“Moreover,” hinted the Orange agitators interspersed through the crowd,
whom they hoped to manage like a sharp-edged and at the same time
crushing instrument,--“moreover, will there not, from the Buytenhof to
the gate of the town, a nice little opportunity present itself to throw
some handfuls of dirt, or a few stones, at this Cornelius de Witt, who
not only conferred the dignity of Stadtholder on the Prince of Orange
merely vi coactus, but who also intended to have him assassinated?”

“Besides which,” the fierce enemies of France chimed in, “if the work
were done well and bravely at the Hague, Cornelius would certainly not
be allowed to go into exile, where he will renew his intrigues with
France, and live with his big scoundrel of a brother, John, on the gold
of the Marquis de Louvois.”

Being in such a temper, people generally will run rather than walk;
which was the reason why the inhabitants of the Hague were hurrying so
fast towards the Buytenhof.

Honest Tyckelaer, with a heart full of spite and malice, and with no
particular plan settled in his mind, was one of the foremost, being
paraded about by the Orange party like a hero of probity, national
honour, and Christian charity.

This daring miscreant detailed, with all the embellishments and
flourishes suggested by his base mind and his ruffianly imagination, the
attempts which he pretended Cornelius de Witt had made to corrupt him;
the sums of money which were promised, and all the diabolical stratagems
planned beforehand to smooth for him, Tyckelaer, all the difficulties in
the path of murder.

And every phase of his speech, eagerly listened to by the populace,
called forth enthusiastic cheers for the Prince of Orange, and groans
and imprecations of blind fury against the brothers De Witt.

The mob even began to vent its rage by inveighing against the iniquitous
judges, who had allowed such a detestable criminal as the villain
Cornelius to get off so cheaply.

Some of the agitators whispered, “He will be off, he will escape from
us!”

Others replied, “A vessel is waiting for him at Schevening, a French
craft. Tyckelaer has seen her.”

“Honest Tyckelaer! Hurrah for Tyckelaer!” the mob cried in chorus.

“And let us not forget,” a voice exclaimed from the crowd, “that at the
same time with Cornelius his brother John, who is as rascally a traitor
as himself, will likewise make his escape.”

“And the two rogues will in France make merry with our money, with the
money for our vessels, our arsenals, and our dockyards, which they have
sold to Louis XIV.”

“Well, then, don’t let us allow them to depart!” advised one of the
patriots who had gained the start of the others.

“Forward to the prison, to the prison!” echoed the crowd.

Amid these cries, the citizens ran along faster and faster, cocking
their muskets, brandishing their hatchets, and looking death and
defiance in all directions.

No violence, however, had as yet been committed; and the file of
horsemen who were guarding the approaches of the Buytenhof remained
cool, unmoved, silent, much more threatening in their impassibility than
all this crowd of burghers, with their cries, their agitation, and their
threats. The men on their horses, indeed, stood like so many statues,
under the eye of their chief, Count Tilly, the captain of the mounted
troops of the Hague, who had his sword drawn, but held it with its point
downwards, in a line with the straps of his stirrup.

This troop, the only defence of the prison, overawed by its firm
attitude not only the disorderly riotous mass of the populace, but also
the detachment of the burgher guard, which, being placed opposite the
Buytenhof to support the soldiers in keeping order, gave to the rioters
the example of seditious cries, shouting,--

“Hurrah for Orange! Down with the traitors!”

The presence of Tilly and his horsemen, indeed, exercised a salutary
check on these civic warriors; but by degrees they waxed more and more
angry by their own shouts, and as they were not able to understand how
any one could have courage without showing it by cries, they attributed
the silence of the dragoons to pusillanimity, and advanced one step
towards the prison, with all the turbulent mob following in their wake.

In this moment, Count Tilly rode forth towards them single-handed,
merely lifting his sword and contracting his brow whilst he addressed
them:--

“Well, gentlemen of the burgher guard, what are you advancing for, and
what do you wish?”

The burghers shook their muskets, repeating their cry,--

“Hurrah for Orange! Death to the traitors!”

“‘Hurrah for Orange!’ all well and good!” replied Tilly, “although I
certainly am more partial to happy faces than to gloomy ones. ‘Death
to the traitors!’ as much of it as you like, as long as you show your
wishes only by cries. But, as to putting them to death in good earnest,
I am here to prevent that, and I shall prevent it.”

Then, turning round to his men, he gave the word of command,--

“Soldiers, ready!”

The troopers obeyed orders with a precision which immediately caused
the burgher guard and the people to fall back, in a degree of confusion
which excited the smile of the cavalry officer.

“Holloa!” he exclaimed, with that bantering tone which is peculiar to
men of his profession; “be easy, gentlemen, my soldiers will not fire a
shot; but, on the other hand, you will not advance by one step towards
the prison.”

“And do you know, sir, that we have muskets?” roared the commandant of
the burghers.

“I must know it, by Jove, you have made them glitter enough before my
eyes; but I beg you to observe also that we on our side have pistols,
that the pistol carries admirably to a distance of fifty yards, and that
you are only twenty-five from us.”

“Death to the traitors!” cried the exasperated burghers.

“Go along with you,” growled the officer, “you always cry the same thing
over again. It is very tiresome.”

With this, he took his post at the head of his troops, whilst the tumult
grew fiercer and fiercer about the Buytenhof.

And yet the fuming crowd did not know that, at that very moment when
they were tracking the scent of one of their victims, the other, as
if hurrying to meet his fate, passed, at a distance of not more than a
hundred yards, behind the groups of people and the dragoons, to betake
himself to the Buytenhof.

John de Witt, indeed, had alighted from his coach with his servant, and
quietly walked across the courtyard of the prison.

Mentioning his name to the turnkey, who however knew him, he said,--

“Good morning, Gryphus; I am coming to take away my brother, who, as you
know, is condemned to exile, and to carry him out of the town.”

Whereupon the jailer, a sort of bear, trained to lock and unlock the
gates of the prison, had greeted him and admitted him into the building,
the doors of which were immediately closed again.

Ten yards farther on, John de Witt met a lovely young girl, of about
seventeen or eighteen, dressed in the national costume of the Frisian
women, who, with pretty demureness, dropped a curtesy to him. Chucking
her under the chin, he said to her,--

“Good morning, my good and fair Rosa; how is my brother?”

“Oh, Mynheer John!” the young girl replied, “I am not afraid of the harm
which has been done to him. That’s all over now.”

“But what is it you are afraid of?”

“I am afraid of the harm which they are going to do to him.”

“Oh, yes,” said De Witt, “you mean to speak of the people down below,
don’t you?”

“Do you hear them?”

“They are indeed in a state of great excitement; but when they see us
perhaps they will grow calmer, as we have never done them anything but
good.”

“That’s unfortunately no reason, except for the contrary,” muttered the
girl, as, on an imperative sign from her father, she withdrew.

“Indeed, child, what you say is only too true.”

Then, in pursuing his way, he said to himself,--

“Here is a damsel who very likely does not know how to read, who
consequently has never read anything, and yet with one word she has just
told the whole history of the world.”

And with the same calm mien, but more melancholy than he had been on
entering the prison, the Grand Pensionary proceeded towards the cell of
his brother.




Chapter 2. The Two Brothers


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 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 actual aid; and he was
calculating how long the formalities of the law would still detain him
in prison.

This was just at the very moment when the mingled shouts of the
burgher guard and of the mob were raging against the two brothers, and
threatening Captain Tilly, who served as a rampart to them. This noise,
which roared outside of the walls of the prison, as the surf dashing
against the rocks, now reached the ears of the prisoner.

But, threatening as it sounded, Cornelius appeared not to deem it worth
his while to inquire after its cause; nor did he get up to look out
of the narrow grated window, which gave access to the light and to the
noise of the world without.

He was so absorbed in his never-ceasing pain that it had almost become a
habit with him. He felt with such delight the bonds which connected his
immortal being with his perishable frame gradually loosening, that it
seemed to him as if his spirit, freed from the trammels of the body,
were hovering above it, like the expiring flame which rises from the
half-extinguished embers.

He also thought of his brother; and whilst the latter was thus vividly
present to his mind the door opened, and John entered, hurrying to the
bedside of the prisoner, who stretched out his broken limbs and his
hands tied up in bandages towards that glorious brother, whom he now
excelled, not in services rendered to the country, but in the hatred
which the Dutch bore him.

John tenderly kissed his brother on the forehead, and put his sore hands
gently back on the mattress.

“Cornelius, my poor brother, you are suffering great pain, are you not?”

“I am suffering no longer, since I see you, my brother.”

“Oh, my poor dear Cornelius! I feel most wretched to see you in such a
state.”

“And, indeed, I have thought more of you than of myself; and whilst they
were torturing me, I never thought of uttering a complaint, except once,
to say, ‘Poor brother!’ But now that you are here, let us forget all.
You are coming to take me away, are you not?”

“I am.”

“I am quite healed; help me to get up, and you shall see how I can
walk.”

“You will not have to walk far, as I have my coach near the pond, behind
Tilly’s dragoons.”

“Tilly’s dragoons! What are they near the pond for?”

“Well,” said the Grand Pensionary with a melancholy smile which was
habitual to him, “the gentlemen at the Town-hall expect that the
people at the Hague would like to see you depart, and there is some
apprehension of a tumult.”

“Of a tumult?” replied Cornelius, fixing his eyes on his perplexed
brother; “a tumult?”

“Yes, Cornelius.”

“Oh! that’s what I heard just now,” said the prisoner, as if speaking to
himself. Then, turning to his brother, he continued,--

“Are there many persons down before the prison.”

“Yes, my brother, there are.”

“But then, to come here to me----”

“Well?”

“How is it that they have allowed you to pass?”

“You know well that we are not very popular, Cornelius,” said the Grand
Pensionary, with gloomy bitterness. “I have made my way through all
sorts of bystreets and alleys.”

“You hid yourself, John?”

“I wished to reach you without loss of time, and I did what people will
do in politics, or on the sea when the wind is against them,--I tacked.”

At this moment the noise in the square below was heard to roar with
increasing fury. Tilly was parleying with the burghers.

“Well, well,” said Cornelius, “you are a very skilful pilot, John; but I
doubt whether you will as safely guide your brother out of the Buytenhof
in the midst of this gale, and through the raging surf of popular
hatred, as you did the fleet of Van Tromp past the shoals of the Scheldt
to Antwerp.”

“With the help of God, Cornelius, we’ll at least try,” answered John;
“but, first of all, a word with you.”

“Speak!”

The shouts began anew.

“Hark, hark!” continued Cornelius, “how angry those people are! Is it
against you, or against me?”

“I should say it is against us both, Cornelius. I told you, my dear
brother, that the Orange party, while assailing us with their absurd
calumnies, have also made it a reproach against us that we have
negotiated with France.”

“What blockheads they are!”

“But, indeed, they reproach us with it.”

“And yet, if these negotiations had been successful, they would have
prevented the defeats of Rees, Orsay, Wesel, and Rheinberg; the Rhine
would not have been crossed, and Holland might still consider herself
invincible in the midst of her marshes and canals.”

“All this is quite true, my dear Cornelius, but still more certain
it is, that if at this moment our correspondence with the Marquis de
Louvois were discovered, skilful pilot as I am, I should not be able to
save the frail barque which is to carry the brothers De Witt and their
fortunes out of Holland. That correspondence, which might prove to
honest people how dearly I love my country, and what sacrifices I have
offered to make for its liberty and glory, would be ruin to us if it
fell into the hands of the Orange party. I hope you have burned the
letters before you left Dort to join me at the Hague.”

“My dear brother,” Cornelius answered, “your correspondence with M. de
Louvois affords ample proof of your having been of late the greatest,
most generous, and most able citizen of the Seven United Provinces. I
rejoice in the glory of my country; and particularly do I rejoice
in your glory, John. I have taken good care not to burn that
correspondence.”

“Then we are lost, as far as this life is concerned,” quietly said the
Grand Pensionary, approaching the window.

“No, on the contrary, John, we shall at the same time save our lives and
regain our popularity.”

“But what have you done with these letters?”

“I have intrusted them to the care of Cornelius van Baerle, my godson,
whom you know, and who lives at Dort.”

“Poor honest Van Baerle! who knows so much, and yet thinks of nothing
but of flowers and of God who made them. You have intrusted him with
this fatal secret; it will be his ruin, poor soul!”

“His ruin?”

“Yes, for he will either be strong or he will be weak. If he is
strong, he will, when he hears of what has happened to us, boast of
our acquaintance; if he is weak, he will be afraid on account of his
connection with us: if he is strong, he will betray the secret by his
boldness; if he is weak, he will allow it to be forced from him. In
either case he is lost, and so are we. Let us, therefore, fly, fly, as
long as there is still time.”

Cornelius de Witt, raising himself on his couch, and grasping the
hand of his brother, who shuddered at the touch of his linen bandages,
replied,--

“Do not I know my godson? have not I been enabled to read every thought
in Van Baerle’s mind, and every sentiment in his heart? You ask whether
he is strong or weak. He is neither the one nor the other; but that is
not now the question. The principal point is, that he is sure not to
divulge the secret, for the very good reason that he does not know it
himself.”

John turned round in surprise.

“You must know, my dear brother, that I have been trained in the school
of that distinguished politician John de Witt; and I repeat to you,
that Van Baerle is not aware of the nature and importance of the deposit
which I have intrusted to him.”

“Quick then,” cried John, “as there is still time, let us convey to him
directions to burn the parcel.”

“Through whom?”

“Through my servant Craeke, who was to have accompanied us on horseback,
and who has entered the prison with me, to assist you downstairs.”

“Consider well before having those precious documents burnt, John!”

“I consider, above all things, that the brothers De Witt must
necessarily save their lives, to be able to save their character. If
we are dead, who will defend us? Who will have fully understood our
intentions?”

“You expect, then, that they would kill us if those papers were found?”

John, without answering, pointed with his hand to the square, whence, at
that very moment, fierce shouts and savage yells made themselves heard.

“Yes, yes,” said Cornelius, “I hear these shouts very plainly, but what
is their meaning?”

John opened the window.

“Death to the traitors!” howled the populace.

“Do you hear now, Cornelius?”

“To the traitors! that means us!” said the prisoner, raising his eyes to
heaven and shrugging his shoulders.

“Yes, it means us,” repeated John.

“Where is Craeke?”

“At the door of your cell, I suppose.”

“Let him enter then.”

John opened the door; the faithful servant was waiting on the threshold.

“Come in, Craeke, and mind well what my brother will tell you.”

“No, John; it will not suffice to send a verbal message; unfortunately,
I shall be obliged to write.”

“And why that?”

“Because Van Baerle will neither give up the parcel nor burn it without
a special command to do so.”

“But will you be able to write, poor old fellow?” John asked, with a
look on the scorched and bruised hands of the unfortunate sufferer.

“If I had pen and ink you would soon see,” said Cornelius.

“Here is a pencil, at any rate.”

“Have you any paper? for they have left me nothing.”

“Here, take this Bible, and tear out the fly-leaf.”

“Very well, that will do.”

“But your writing will be illegible.”

“Just leave me alone for that,” said Cornelius. “The executioners have
indeed pinched me badly enough, but my hand will not tremble once in
tracing the few lines which are requisite.”

And really Cornelius took the pencil and began to write, when through
the white linen bandages drops of blood oozed out which the pressure of
the fingers against the pencil squeezed from the raw flesh.

A cold sweat stood on the brow of the Grand Pensionary.

Cornelius wrote:--

“My dear Godson,--

“Burn the parcel which I have intrusted to you. Burn it without looking
at it, and without opening it, so that its contents may for ever remain
unknown to yourself. Secrets of this description are death to those
with whom they are deposited. Burn it, and you will have saved John and
Cornelius de Witt.

“Farewell, and love me.

“Cornelius de Witt

“August 20th, 1672.”

John, with tears in his eyes, wiped off a drop of the noble blood which
had soiled the leaf, and, after having handed the despatch to Craeke
with a last direction, returned to Cornelius, who seemed overcome by
intense pain, and near fainting.

“Now,” said he, “when honest Craeke sounds his coxswain’s whistle, it
will be a signal of his being clear of the crowd, and of his having
reached the other side of the pond. And then it will be our turn to
depart.”

Five minutes had not elapsed, before a long and shrill whistle was heard
through the din and noise of the square of the Buytenhof.

John gratefully raised his eyes to heaven.

“And now,” said he, “let us off, Cornelius.”




Chapter 3. The Pupil of John de Witt


Whilst the clamour of the crowd in the square of Buytenhof, which grew
more and more menacing against the two brothers, determined John de
Witt to hasten the departure of his brother Cornelius, a deputation of
burghers had gone to the Town-hall to demand the withdrawal of Tilly’s
horse.

It was not far from the Buytenhof to Hoogstraet (High Street); and a
stranger, who since the beginning of this scene had watched all its
incidents with intense interest, was seen to wend his way with, or
rather in the wake of, the others towards the Town-hall, to hear as soon
as possible the current news of the hour.

This stranger was a very young man, of scarcely twenty-two or three,
with nothing about him that bespoke any great energy. He evidently had
his good reasons for not making himself known, as he hid his face in a
handkerchief of fine Frisian linen, with which he incessantly wiped his
brow or his burning lips.

With an eye keen as that of a bird of prey,--with a long aquiline nose,
a finely cut mouth, which he generally kept open, or rather which was
gaping like the edges of a wound,--this man would have presented to
Lavater, if Lavater had lived at that time, a subject for physiognomical
observations which at the first blush would not have been very
favourable to the person in question.

“What difference is there between the figure of the conqueror and that
of the pirate?” said the ancients. The difference only between the eagle
and the vulture,--serenity or restlessness.

And indeed the sallow physiognomy, the thin and sickly body, and the
prowling ways of the stranger, were the very type of a suspecting
master, or an unquiet thief; and a police officer would certainly have
decided in favour of the latter supposition, on account of the great
care which the mysterious person evidently took to hide himself.

He was plainly dressed, and apparently unarmed; his arm was lean but
wiry, and his hands dry, but of an aristocratic whiteness and delicacy,
and he leaned on the shoulder of an officer, who, with his hand on his
sword, had watched the scenes in the Buytenhof with eager curiosity,
very natural in a military man, until his companion drew him away with
him.

On arriving at the square of the Hoogstraet, the man with the sallow
face pushed the other behind an open shutter, from which corner he
himself began to survey the balcony of the Town-hall.

At the savage yells of the mob, the window of the Town-hall opened, and
a man came forth to address the people.

“Who is that on the balcony?” asked the young man, glancing at the
orator.

“It is the Deputy Bowelt,” replied the officer.

“What sort of a man is he? Do you know anything of him?”

“An honest man; at least I believe so, Monseigneur.”

Hearing this character given of Bowelt, the young man showed signs
of such a strange disappointment and evident dissatisfaction that the
officer could not but remark it, and therefore added,--

“At least people say so, Monseigneur. I cannot say anything about it
myself, as I have no personal acquaintance with Mynheer Bowelt.”

“An honest man,” repeated he who was addressed as Monseigneur; “do
you mean to say that he is an honest man (brave homme), or a brave one
(homme brave)?”

“Ah, Monseigneur must excuse me; I would not presume to draw such a fine
distinction in the case of a man whom, I assure your Highness once more,
I know only by sight.”

“If this Bowelt is an honest man,” his Highness continued, “he will give
to the demand of these furibund petitioners a very queer reception.”

The nervous quiver of his hand, which moved on the shoulder of his
companion as the fingers of a player on the keys of a harpsichord,
betrayed his burning impatience, so ill concealed at certain times, and
particularly at that moment, under the icy and sombre expression of his
face.

The chief of the deputation of the burghers was then heard addressing
an interpellation to Mynheer Bowelt, whom he requested to let them know
where the other deputies, his colleagues, were.

“Gentlemen,” Bowelt repeated for the second time, “I assure you that in
this moment I am here alone with Mynheer d’Asperen, and I cannot take
any resolution on my own responsibility.”

“The order! we want the order!” cried several thousand voices.

Mynheer Bowelt wished to speak, but his words were not heard, and he was
only seen moving his arms in all sorts of gestures, which plainly showed
that he felt his position to be desperate. When, at last, he saw that he
could not make himself heard, he turned round towards the open window,
and called Mynheer d’Asperen.

The latter gentleman now made his appearance on the balcony, where he
was saluted with shouts even more energetic than those with which, ten
minutes before, his colleague had been received.

This did not prevent him from undertaking the difficult task of
haranguing the mob; but the mob preferred forcing the guard of
the States--which, however, offered no resistance to the sovereign
people--to listening to the speech of Mynheer d’Asperen.

“Now, then,” the young man coolly remarked, whilst the crowd was rushing
into the principal gate of the Town-hall, “it seems the question will be
discussed indoors, Captain. Come along, and let us hear the debate.”

“Oh, Monseigneur! Monseigneur! take care!”

“Of what?”

“Among these deputies there are many who have had dealings with you,
and it would be sufficient, that one of them should recognize your
Highness.”

“Yes, that I might be charged with having been the instigator of all
this work, indeed, you are right,” said the young man, blushing for
a moment from regret of having betrayed so much eagerness. “From
this place we shall see them return with or without the order for the
withdrawal of the dragoons, then we may judge which is greater, Mynheer
Bowelt’s honesty or his courage.”

“But,” replied the officer, looking with astonishment at the personage
whom he addressed as Monseigneur, “but your Highness surely does not
suppose for one instant that the deputies will order Tilly’s horse to
quit their post?”

“Why not?” the young man quietly retorted.

“Because doing so would simply be signing the death warrant of Cornelius
and John de Witt.”

“We shall see,” his Highness replied, with the most perfect coolness;
“God alone knows what is going on within the hearts of men.”

The officer looked askance at the impassible figure of his companion,
and grew pale: he was an honest man as well as a brave one.

From the spot where they stood, his Highness and his attendant heard
the tumult and the heavy tramp of the crowd on the staircase of the
Town-hall. The noise thereupon sounded through the windows of the hall,
on the balcony of which Mynheers Bowelt and D’Asperen had presented
themselves. These two gentlemen had retired into the building, very
likely from fear of being forced over the balustrade by the pressure of
the crowd.

After this, fluctuating shadows in tumultuous confusion were seen
flitting to and fro across the windows: the council hall was filling.

Suddenly the noise subsided, and as suddenly again it rose with
redoubled intensity, and at last reached such a pitch that the old
building shook to the very roof.

At length, the living stream poured back through the galleries and
stairs to the arched gateway, from which it was seen issuing like waters
from a spout.

At the head of the first group, man was flying rather than running, his
face hideously distorted with satanic glee: this man was the surgeon
Tyckelaer.

“We have it! we have it!” he cried, brandishing a paper in the air.

“They have got the order!” muttered the officer in amazement.

“Well, then,” his Highness quietly remarked, “now I know what to believe
with regard to Mynheer Bowelt’s honesty and courage: he has neither the
one nor the other.”

Then, looking with a steady glance after the crowd which was rushing
along before him, he continued,--

“Let us now go to the Buytenhof, Captain; I expect we shall see a very
strange sight there.”

The officer bowed, and, without making any reply, followed in the steps
of his master.

There was an immense crowd in the square and about the neighbourhood of
the prison. But the dragoons of Tilly still kept it in check with the
same success and with the same firmness.

It was not long before the Count heard the increasing din of the
approaching multitude, the first ranks of which rushed on with the
rapidity of a cataract.

At the same time he observed the paper, which was waving above the
surface of clenched fists and glittering arms.

“Halloa!” he said, rising in his stirrups, and touching his lieutenant
with the knob of his sword; “I really believe those rascals have got the
order.”

“Dastardly ruffians they are,” cried the lieutenant.

It was indeed the order, which the burgher guard received with a roar
of triumph. They immediately sallied forth, with lowered arms and fierce
shouts, to meet Count Tilly’s dragoons.

But the Count was not the man to allow them to approach within an
inconvenient distance.

“Stop!” he cried, “stop, and keep off from my horse, or I shall give the
word of command to advance.”

“Here is the order!” a hundred insolent voices answered at once.

He took it in amazement, cast a rapid glance on it, and said quite
aloud,--

“Those who have signed this order are the real murderers of Cornelius
de Witt. I would rather have my two hands cut off than have written one
single letter of this infamous order.”

And, pushing back with the hilt of his sword the man who wanted to take
it from him, he added,--

“Wait a minute, papers like this are of importance, and are to be kept.”

Saying this, he folded up the document, and carefully put it in the
pocket of his coat.

Then, turning round towards his troop, he gave the word of command,--

“Tilly’s dragoons, wheel to the right!”

After this, he added, in an undertone, yet loud enough for his words to
be not altogether lost to those about him,--

“And now, ye butchers, do your work!”

A savage yell, in which all the keen hatred and ferocious triumph
rife in the precincts of the prison simultaneously burst forth, and
accompanied the departure of the dragoons, as they were quietly filing
off.

The Count tarried behind, facing to the last the infuriated populace,
which advanced at the same rate as the Count retired.

John de Witt, therefore, had by no means exaggerated the danger,
when, assisting his brother in getting up, he hurried his departure.
Cornelius, leaning on the arm of the Ex-Grand Pensionary, descended the
stairs which led to the courtyard. At the bottom of the staircase he
found little Rosa, trembling all over.

“Oh, Mynheer John,” she said, “what a misfortune!”

“What is it, my child?” asked De Witt.

“They say that they are gone to the Town-hall to fetch the order for
Tilly’s horse to withdraw.”

“You do not say so!” replied John. “Indeed, my dear child, if the
dragoons are off, we shall be in a very sad plight.”

“I have some advice to give you,” Rosa said, trembling even more
violently than before.

“Well, let us hear what you have to say, my child. Why should not God
speak by your mouth?”

“Now, then, Mynheer John, if I were in your place, I should not go out
through the main street.”

“And why so, as the dragoons of Tilly are still at their post?”

“Yes, but their order, as long as it is not revoked, enjoins them to
stop before the prison.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Have you got an order for them to accompany you out of the town?”

“We have not?”

“Well, then, in the very moment when you have passed the ranks of the
dragoons you will fall into the hands of the people.”

“But the burgher guard?”

“Alas! the burgher guard are the most enraged of all.”

“What are we to do, then?”

“If I were in your place, Mynheer John,” the young girl timidly
continued, “I should leave by the postern, which leads into a deserted
by-lane, whilst all the people are waiting in the High Street to see you
come out by the principal entrance. From there I should try to reach the
gate by which you intend to leave the town.”

“But my brother is not able to walk,” said John.

“I shall try,” Cornelius said, with an expression of most sublime
fortitude.

“But have you not got your carriage?” asked the girl.

“The carriage is down near the great entrance.”

“Not so,” she replied. “I considered your coachman to be a faithful man,
and I told him to wait for you at the postern.”

The two brothers looked first at each other, and then at Rosa, with a
glance full of the most tender gratitude.

“The question is now,” said the Grand Pensionary, “whether Gryphus will
open this door for us.”

“Indeed, he will do no such thing,” said Rosa.

“Well, and how then?”

“I have foreseen his refusal, and just now whilst he was talking from
the window of the porter’s lodge with a dragoon, I took away the key
from his bunch.”

“And you have got it?”

“Here it is, Mynheer John.”

“My child,” said Cornelius, “I have nothing to give you in exchange for
the service you are rendering us but the Bible which you will find in
my room; it is the last gift of an honest man; I hope it will bring you
good luck.”

“I thank you, Master Cornelius, it shall never leave me,” replied Rosa.

And then, with a sigh, she said to herself, “What a pity that I do not
know how to read!”

“The shouts and cries are growing louder and louder,” said John; “there
is not a moment to be lost.”

“Come along, gentlemen,” said the girl, who now led the two brothers
through an inner lobby to the back of the prison. Guided by her,
they descended a staircase of about a dozen steps; traversed a small
courtyard, which was surrounded by castellated walls; and, the arched
door having been opened for them by Rosa, they emerged into a lonely
street where their carriage was ready to receive them.

“Quick, quick, my masters! do you hear them?” cried the coachman, in a
deadly fright.

Yet, after having made Cornelius get into the carriage first, the Grand
Pensionary turned round towards the girl, to whom he said,--

“Good-bye, my child! words could never express our gratitude. God will
reward you for having saved the lives of two men.”

Rosa took the hand which John de Witt proffered to her, and kissed it
with every show of respect.

“Go! for Heaven’s sake, go!” she said; “it seems they are going to force
the gate.”

John de Witt hastily got in, sat himself down by the side of his
brother, and, fastening the apron of the carriage, called out to the
coachman,--

“To the Tol-Hek!”

The Tol-Hek was the iron gate leading to the harbor of Schevening, in
which a small vessel was waiting for the two brothers.

The carriage drove off with the fugitives at the full speed of a pair
of spirited Flemish horses. Rosa followed them with her eyes until they
turned the corner of the street, upon which, closing the door after her,
she went back and threw the key into a cell.

The noise which had made Rosa suppose that the people were forcing the
prison door was indeed owing to the mob battering against it after the
square had been left by the military.

Solid as the gate was, and although Gryphus, to do him justice, stoutly
enough refused to open it, yet evidently it could not resist much
longer, and the jailer, growing very pale, put to himself the question
whether it would not be better to open the door than to allow it to be
forced, when he felt some one gently pulling his coat.

He turned round and saw Rosa.

“Do you hear these madmen?” he said.

“I hear them so well, my father, that in your place----”

“You would open the door?”

“No, I should allow it to be forced.”

“But they will kill me!”

“Yes, if they see you.”

“How shall they not see me?”

“Hide yourself.”

“Where?”

“In the secret dungeon.”

“But you, my child?”

“I shall get into it with you. We shall lock the door and when they have
left the prison, we shall again come forth from our hiding place.”

“Zounds, you are right, there!” cried Gryphus; “it’s surprising how much
sense there is in such a little head!”

Then, as the gate began to give way amidst the triumphant shouts of the
mob, she opened a little trap-door, and said,--

“Come along, come along, father.”

“But our prisoners?”

“God will watch over them, and I shall watch over you.”

Gryphus followed his daughter, and the trap-door closed over his head,
just as the broken gate gave admittance to the populace.

The dungeon where Rosa had induced her father to hide himself, and where
for the present we must leave the two, offered to them a perfectly safe
retreat, being known only to those in power, who used to place there
important prisoners of state, to guard against a rescue or a revolt.

The people rushed into the prison, with the cry--

“Death to the traitors! To the gallows with Cornelius de Witt! Death!
death!”




Chapter 4. The Murderers


The young man with his hat slouched over his eyes, still leaning on the
arm of the officer, and still wiping from time to time his brow with his
handkerchief, was watching in a corner of the Buytenhof, in the shade
of the overhanging weather-board of a closed shop, the doings of the
infuriated mob, a spectacle which seemed to draw near its catastrophe.

“Indeed,” said he to the officer, “indeed, I think you were right,
Van Deken; the order which the deputies have signed is truly the
death-warrant of Master Cornelius. Do you hear these people? They
certainly bear a sad grudge to the two De Witts.”

“In truth,” replied the officer, “I never heard such shouts.”

“They seem to have found out the cell of the man. Look, look! is not
that the window of the cell where Cornelius was locked up?”

A man had seized with both hands and was shaking the iron bars of the
window in the room which Cornelius had left only ten minutes before.

“Halloa, halloa!” the man called out, “he is gone.”

“How is that? gone?” asked those of the mob who had not been able to get
into the prison, crowded as it was with the mass of intruders.

“Gone, gone,” repeated the man in a rage, “the bird has flown.”

“What does this man say?” asked his Highness, growing quite pale.

“Oh, Monseigneur, he says a thing which would be very fortunate if it
should turn out true!”

“Certainly it would be fortunate if it were true,” said the young man;
“unfortunately it cannot be true.”

“However, look!” said the officer.

And indeed, some more faces, furious and contorted with rage, showed
themselves at the windows, crying,--

“Escaped, gone, they have helped them off!”

And the people in the street repeated, with fearful imprecations,--

“Escaped! gone! After them, and catch them!”

“Monseigneur, it seems that Mynheer Cornelius has really escaped,” said
the officer.

“Yes, from prison, perhaps, but not from the town; you will see, Van
Deken, that the poor fellow will find the gate closed against him which
he hoped to find open.”

“Has an order been given to close the town gates, Monseigneur?”

“No,--at least I do not think so; who could have given such an order?”

“Indeed, but what makes your Highness suppose?”

“There are fatalities,” Monseigneur replied, in an offhand manner; “and
the greatest men have sometimes fallen victims to such fatalities.”

At these words the officer felt his blood run cold, as somehow or other
he was convinced that the prisoner was lost.

At this moment the roar of the multitude broke forth like thunder, for
it was now quite certain that Cornelius de Witt was no longer in the
prison.



Cornelius and John, after driving along the pond, had taken the main
street, which leads to the Tol-Hek, giving directions to the coachman to
slacken his pace, in order not to excite any suspicion.

But when, on having proceeded half-way down that street, the man felt
that he had left the prison and death behind, and before him there was
life and liberty, he neglected every precaution, and set his horses off
at a gallop.

All at once he stopped.

“What is the matter?” asked John, putting his head out of the coach
window.

“Oh, my masters!” cried the coachman, “it is----”

Terror choked the voice of the honest fellow.

“Well, say what you have to say!” urged the Grand Pensionary.

“The gate is closed, that’s what it is.”

“How is this? It is not usual to close the gate by day.”

“Just look!”

John de Witt leaned out of the window, and indeed saw that the man was
right.

“Never mind, but drive on,” said John, “I have with me the order for the
commutation of the punishment, the gate-keeper will let us through.”

The carriage moved along, but it was evident that the driver was no
longer urging his horses with the same degree of confidence.

Moreover, as John de Witt put his head out of the carriage window, he
was seen and recognized by a brewer, who, being behind his companions,
was just shutting his door in all haste to join them at the Buytenhof.
He uttered a cry of surprise, and ran after two other men before him,
whom he overtook about a hundred yards farther on, and told them what he
had seen. The three men then stopped, looking after the carriage, being
however not yet quite sure as to whom it contained.

The carriage in the meanwhile arrived at the Tol-Hek.

“Open!” cried the coachman.

“Open!” echoed the gatekeeper, from the threshold of his lodge; “it’s
all very well to say ‘Open!’ but what am I to do it with?”

“With the key, to be sure!” said the coachman.

“With the key! Oh, yes! but if you have not got it?”

“How is that? Have not you got the key?” asked the coachman.

“No, I haven’t.”

“What has become of it?”

“Well, they have taken it from me.”

“Who?”

“Some one, I dare say, who had a mind that no one should leave the
town.”

“My good man,” said the Grand Pensionary, putting out his head from the
window, and risking all for gaining all; “my good man, it is for me,
John de Witt, and for my brother Cornelius, who I am taking away into
exile.”

“Oh, Mynheer de Witt! I am indeed very much grieved,” said the
gatekeeper, rushing towards the carriage; “but, upon my sacred word, the
key has been taken from me.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“By whom?”

“By a pale and thin young man, of about twenty-two.”

“And wherefore did you give it up to him?”

“Because he showed me an order, signed and sealed.”

“By whom?”

“By the gentlemen of the Town-hall.”

“Well, then,” said Cornelius calmly, “our doom seems to be fixed.”

“Do you know whether the same precaution has been taken at the other
gates?”

“I do not.”

“Now then,” said John to the coachman, “God commands man to do all that
is in his power to preserve his life; go, and drive to another gate.”

And whilst the servant was turning round the vehicle the Grand
Pensionary said to the gatekeeper,--

“Take our thanks for your good intentions; the will must count for the
deed; you had the will to save us, and that, in the eyes of the Lord, is
as if you had succeeded in doing so.”

“Alas!” said the gatekeeper, “do you see down there?”

“Drive at a gallop through that group,” John called out to the coachman,
“and take the street on the left; it is our only chance.”

The group which John alluded to had, for its nucleus, those three men
whom we left looking after the carriage, and who, in the meanwhile, had
been joined by seven or eight others.

These new-comers evidently meant mischief with regard to the carriage.

When they saw the horses galloping down upon them, they placed
themselves across the street, brandishing cudgels in their hands, and
calling out,--

“Stop! stop!”

The coachman, on his side, lashed his horses into increased speed, until
the coach and the men encountered.

The brothers De Witt, enclosed within the body of the carriage, were not
able to see anything; but 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 to his face; and this time the shot took effect, blowing out
his brains. John de Witt fell to rise no more.

On this, every one of the miscreants, emboldened by his fall, wanted to
fire his gun at him, or strike him with blows of the sledge-hammer,
or stab him with a knife or swords, every one wanted to draw a drop of
blood from the fallen hero, and tear off a shred from his garments.

And after having mangled, and torn, and completely stripped the
two brothers, the mob dragged their naked and bloody bodies to an
extemporised gibbet, where amateur executioners hung them up by the
feet.

Then came the most dastardly scoundrels of all, who not having dared to
strike the living flesh, cut the dead in pieces, and then went about
the town selling small slices of the bodies of John and Cornelius at ten
sous a piece.

We cannot take upon ourselves to say whether, through the almost
imperceptible chink of the shutter, the young man witnessed the
conclusion of this shocking scene; but at the very moment when they were
hanging the two martyrs on the gibbet he passed through the terrible
mob, which was too much absorbed in the task, so grateful to its taste,
to take any notice of him, and thus he reached unobserved the Tol-Hek,
which was still closed.

“Ah! sir,” said the gatekeeper, “do you bring me the key?”

“Yes, my man, here it is.”

“It is most unfortunate that you did not bring me that key only one
quarter of an hour sooner,” said the gatekeeper, with a sigh.

“And why that?” asked the other.

“Because I might have opened the gate to Mynheers de Witt; whereas,
finding the gate locked, they were obliged to retrace their steps.”

“Gate! gate!” cried a voice which seemed to be that of a man in a hurry.

The Prince, turning round, observed Captain Van Deken.

“Is that you, Captain?” he said. “You are not yet out of the Hague? This
is executing my orders very slowly.”

“Monseigneur,” replied the Captain, “this is the third gate at which I
have presented myself; the other two were closed.”

“Well, this good man will open this one for you; do it, my friend.”

The last words were addressed to the gatekeeper, who stood quite
thunderstruck on hearing Captain Van Deken addressing by the title of
Monseigneur this pale young man, to whom he himself had spoken in such a
familiar way.

As it were to make up for his fault, he hastened to open the gate, which
swung creaking on its hinges.

“Will Monseigneur avail himself of my horse?” asked the Captain.

“I thank you, Captain, I shall use my own steed, which is waiting for me
close at hand.”

And taking from his pocket a golden whistle, such as was generally used
at that time for summoning the servants, he sounded it with a shrill
and prolonged call, on which an equerry on horseback speedily made his
appearance, leading another horse by the bridle.

William, without touching the stirrup, vaulted into the saddle of the
led horse, and, setting his spurs into its flanks, started off for the
Leyden road. Having reached it, he turned round and beckoned to the
Captain who was far behind, to ride by his side.

“Do you know,” he then said, without stopping, “that those rascals have
killed John de Witt as well as his brother?”

“Alas! Monseigneur,” the Captain answered sadly, “I should like it much
better if these two difficulties were still in your Highness’s way of
becoming de facto Stadtholder of Holland.”

“Certainly, it would have been better,” said William, “if what did
happen had not happened. But it cannot be helped now, and we have had
nothing to do with it. Let us push on, Captain, that we may arrive at
Alphen before the message which the States-General are sure to send to
me to the camp.”

The Captain bowed, allowed the Prince to ride ahead and, for the
remainder of the journey, kept at the same respectful distance as he had
done before his Highness called him to his side.

“How I should wish,” William of Orange malignantly muttered to himself,
with a dark frown and setting the spurs to his horse, “to see the figure
which Louis will cut when he is apprised of the manner in which his dear
friends De Witt have been served! Oh thou Sun! thou Sun! as truly as
I am called William the Silent, thou Sun, thou hadst best look to thy
rays!”

And the young Prince, the relentless rival of the Great King, sped away
upon his fiery steed,--this future Stadtholder who had been but the day
before very uncertainly established in his new power, but for whom the
burghers of the Hague had built a staircase with the bodies of John and
Cornelius, two princes as noble as he in the eyes of God and man.




Chapter 5. The Tulip-fancier and his Neighbour


Whilst the burghers of the Hague were tearing in pieces the bodies of
John and Cornelius de Witt, and whilst William of Orange, after having
made sure that his two antagonists were really dead, was galloping over
the Leyden road, followed by Captain van Deken, whom he found a little
too compassionate to honour him any longer with his confidence, Craeke,
the faithful servant, mounted on a good horse, and little suspecting
what terrible events had taken place since his departure, proceeded
along the high road lined with trees, until he was clear of the town and
the neighbouring villages.

Being once safe, he left his horse at a livery stable in order not
to arouse suspicion, and tranquilly continued his journey on the
canal-boats, which conveyed him by easy stages to Dort, pursuing their
way under skilful guidance by the shortest possible routes through
the windings of the river, which held in its watery embrace so many
enchanting little islands, edged with willows and rushes, and abounding
in luxurious vegetation, whereon flocks of fat sheep browsed in peaceful
sleepiness. Craeke from afar off recognised Dort, the smiling city,
at the foot of a hill dotted with windmills. He saw the fine red brick
houses, mortared in white lines, standing on the edge of the water, and
their balconies, open towards the river, decked out with silk tapestry
embroidered with gold flowers, the wonderful manufacture of India and
China; and near these brilliant stuffs, large lines set to catch the
voracious eels, which are attracted towards the houses by the garbage
thrown every day from the kitchens into the river.

Craeke, standing on the deck of the boat, saw, across the moving sails
of the windmills, on the slope of the hill, the red and pink house which
was the goal of his errand. The outlines of its roof were merging in the
yellow foliage of a curtain of poplar trees, the whole habitation having
for background a dark grove of gigantic elms. The mansion was situated
in such a way that the sun, falling on it as into a funnel, dried up,
warmed, and fertilised the mist which the verdant screen could not
prevent the river wind from carrying there every morning and evening.

Having disembarked unobserved amid the usual bustle of the city,
Craeke at once directed his steps towards the house which we have just
described, and which--white, trim, and tidy, even more cleanly scoured
and more carefully waxed in the hidden corners than in the places which
were exposed to view--enclosed a truly happy mortal.

This happy mortal, rara avis, was Dr. van Baerle, the godson of
Cornelius de Witt. He had inhabited the same house ever since his
childhood, for it was the house in which his father and grandfather, old
established princely merchants of the princely city of Dort, were born.

Mynheer van Baerle the father had amassed in the Indian trade three or
four hundred thousand guilders, which Mynheer van Baerle the son, at the
death of his dear and worthy parents, found still quite new, although
one set of them bore the date of coinage of 1640, and the other that
of 1610, a fact which proved that they were guilders of Van Baerle the
father and of Van Baerle the grandfather; but we will inform the reader
at once that these three or four hundred thousand guilders were only the
pocket money, or sort of purse, for Cornelius van Baerle, the hero of
this story, as his landed property in the province yielded him an income
of about ten thousand guilders a year.

When the worthy citizen, the father of Cornelius, passed from time into
eternity, three months after having buried his wife, who seemed to have
departed first to smooth for him the path of death as she had smoothed
for him the path of life, he said to his son, as he embraced him for the
last time,--

“Eat, drink, and spend your money, if you wish to know what life really
is, for as to toiling from morn to evening on a wooden stool, or a
leathern chair, in a counting-house or a laboratory, that certainly is
not living. Your time to die will also come; and if you are not then so
fortunate as to have a son, you will let my name grow extinct, and my
guilders, which no one has ever fingered but my father, myself, and
the coiner, will have the surprise of passing to an unknown master. And
least of all, imitate the example of your godfather, Cornelius de Witt,
who has plunged into politics, the most ungrateful of all careers, and
who will certainly come to an untimely end.”

Having given utterance to this paternal advice, the worthy Mynheer van
Baerle died, to the intense grief of his son Cornelius, who cared very
little for the guilders, and very much for his father.

Cornelius then remained alone in his large house. In vain his godfather
offered to him a place in the public service,--in vain did he try
to give him a taste for glory,--although Cornelius, to gratify his
godfather, did embark with De Ruyter upon “The Seven Provinces,” the
flagship of a fleet of one hundred and thirty-nine sail, with which
the famous admiral set out to contend singlehanded against the combined
forces of France and England. When, guided by the pilot Leger, he had
come within musket-shot of the “Prince,” with the Duke of York (the
English king’s brother) aboard, upon which De Ruyter, his mentor, made
so sharp and well directed an attack that the Duke, perceiving that his
vessel would soon have to strike, made the best of his way aboard the
“Saint Michael”; when he had seen the “Saint Michael,” riddled and
shattered by the Dutch broadside, drift out of the line; when he had
witnessed the sinking of the “Earl of Sandwich,” and the death by fire
or drowning of four hundred sailors; when he realized that the result of
all this destruction--after twenty ships had been blown to pieces, three
thousand men killed and five thousand injured--was that nothing was
decided, that both sides claimed the victory, that the fighting would
soon begin again, and that just one more name, that of Southwold Bay,
had been added to the list of battles; when he had estimated how much
time is lost simply in shutting his eyes and ears by a man who likes
to use his reflective powers even while his fellow creatures are
cannonading one another;--Cornelius bade farewell to De Ruyter, to the
Ruart de Pulten, and to glory, kissed the knees of the Grand Pensionary,
for whom he entertained the deepest veneration, and retired to his house
at Dort, rich in his well-earned repose, his twenty-eight years, an iron
constitution and keen perceptions, and his capital of more than four
hundred thousands of florins and income of ten thousand, convinced that
a man is always endowed by Heaven with too much for his own happiness,
and just enough to make him miserable.

Consequently, and to indulge his own idea of happiness, Cornelius began
to be interested in the study of plants and insects, collected and
classified the Flora of all the Dutch islands, arranged the whole
entomology of the province, on which he wrote a treatise, with plates
drawn by his own hands; and at last, being at a loss what to do with
his time, and especially with his money, which went on accumulating at a
most alarming rate, he took it into his head to select for himself, from
all the follies of his country and of his age, one of the most elegant
and expensive,--he became a tulip-fancier.

It was the time when the Dutch and the Portuguese, rivalling each other
in this branch of horticulture, had begun to worship that flower, and
to make more of a cult of it than ever naturalists dared to make of the
human race for fear of arousing the jealousy of God.

Soon people from Dort to Mons began to talk of Mynheer van Baerle’s
tulips; and his beds, pits, drying-rooms, and drawers of bulbs
were visited, as the galleries and libraries of Alexandria were by
illustrious Roman travellers.

Van Baerle began by expending his yearly revenue in laying the
groundwork of his collection, after which he broke in upon his new
guilders to bring it to perfection. His exertions, indeed, were crowned
with a most magnificent result: he produced three new tulips, which he
called the “Jane,” after his mother; the “Van Baerle,” after his father;
and the “Cornelius,” after his godfather; the other names have escaped
us, but the fanciers will be sure to find them in the catalogues of the
times.

In the beginning of the year 1672, Cornelius de Witt came to Dort for
three months, to live at his old family mansion; for not only was he
born in that city, but his family had been resident there for centuries.

Cornelius, at that period, as William of Orange said, began to enjoy the
most perfect unpopularity. To his fellow citizens, the good burghers of
Dort, however, he did not appear in the light of a criminal who deserved
to be hung. It is true, they did not particularly like his somewhat
austere republicanism, but they were proud of his valour; and when he
made his entrance into their town, the cup of honour was offered to him,
readily enough, in the name of the city.

After having thanked his fellow citizens, Cornelius proceeded to his old
paternal house, and gave directions for some repairs, which he wished to
have executed before the arrival of his wife and children; and thence
he wended his way to the house of his godson, who perhaps was the only
person in Dort as yet unacquainted with the presence of Cornelius in the
town.

In the same degree as Cornelius de Witt had excited the hatred of the
people by sowing those evil seeds which are called political passions,
Van Baerle had gained the affections of his fellow citizens by
completely shunning the pursuit of politics, absorbed as he was in the
peaceful pursuit of cultivating tulips.

Van Baerle was truly beloved by his servants and labourers; nor had
he any conception that there was in this world a man who wished ill to
another.

And yet it must be said, to the disgrace of mankind, that Cornelius
van Baerle, without being aware of the fact, had a much more ferocious,
fierce, and implacable enemy than the Grand Pensionary and his brother
had among the Orange party, who were most hostile to the devoted
brothers, who had never been sundered by the least misunderstanding
during their lives, and by their mutual devotion in the face of death
made sure the existence of their brotherly affection beyond the grave.

At the time when Cornelius van Baerle began to devote himself to
tulip-growing, expending on this hobby his yearly revenue and the
guilders of his father, there was at Dort, living next door to him, a
citizen of the name of Isaac Boxtel who from the age when he was able to
think for himself had indulged the same fancy, and who was in ecstasies
at the mere mention of the word “tulban,” which (as we are assured
by the “Floriste Francaise,” the most highly considered authority in
matters relating to this flower) is the first word in the Cingalese
tongue which was ever used to designate that masterpiece of floriculture
which is now called the tulip.

Boxtel had not the good fortune of being rich, like Van Baerle. He
had therefore, with great care and patience, and by dint of strenuous
exertions, laid out near his house at Dort a garden fit for the culture
of his cherished flower; he had mixed the soil according to the most
approved prescriptions, and given to his hotbeds just as much heat and
fresh air as the strictest rules of horticulture exact.

Isaac knew the temperature of his frames to the twentieth part of a
degree. He knew the strength of the current of air, and tempered it so
as to adapt it to the wave of the stems of his flowers. His productions
also began to meet with the favour of the public. They were beautiful,
nay, distinguished. Several fanciers had come to see Boxtel’s tulips.
At last he had even started amongst all the Linnaeuses and Tourneforts a
tulip which bore his name, and which, after having travelled all through
France, had found its way into Spain, and penetrated as far as Portugal;
and the King, Don Alfonso VI.--who, being expelled from Lisbon, had
retired to the island of Terceira, where he amused himself, not,
like the great Condé, with watering his carnations, but with growing
tulips--had, on seeing the Boxtel tulip, exclaimed, “Not so bad, by any
means!”

All at once, Cornelius van Baerle, who, after all his learned pursuits,
had been seized with the tulipomania, made some changes in his house
at Dort, which, as we have stated, was next door to that of Boxtel. He
raised a certain building in his court-yard by a story, which shutting
out the sun, took half a degree of warmth from Boxtel’s garden, and, on
the other hand, added half a degree of cold in winter; not to mention
that it cut the wind, and disturbed all the horticultural calculations
and arrangements of his neighbour.

After all, this mishap appeared to Boxtel of no great consequence. Van
Baerle was but a painter, a sort of fool who tried to reproduce and
disfigure on canvas the wonders of nature. The painter, he thought, had
raised his studio by a story to get better light, and thus far he had
only been in the right. Mynheer van Baerle was a painter, as Mynheer
Boxtel was a tulip-grower; he wanted somewhat more sun for his
paintings, and he took half a degree from his neighbour’s tulips.

The law was for Van Baerle, and Boxtel had to abide by it.

Besides, Isaac had made the discovery that too much sun was injurious to
tulips, and that this flower grew quicker, and had a better colouring,
with the temperate warmth of morning, than with the powerful heat of the
midday sun. He therefore felt almost grateful to Cornelius van Baerle
for having given him a screen gratis.

Maybe this was not quite in accordance with the true state of things in
general, and of Isaac Boxtel’s feelings in particular. It is certainly
astonishing what rich comfort great minds, in the midst of momentous
catastrophes, will derive from the consolations of philosophy.

But alas! What was the agony of the unfortunate Boxtel on seeing the
windows of the new story set out with bulbs and seedlings of tulips for
the border, and tulips in pots; in short, with everything pertaining to
the pursuits of a tulip-monomaniac!

There were bundles of labels, cupboards, and drawers with compartments,
and wire guards for the cupboards, to allow free access to the air
whilst keeping out slugs, mice, dormice, and rats, all of them very
curious fanciers of tulips at two thousand francs a bulb.

Boxtel was quite amazed when he saw all this apparatus, but he was not
as yet aware of the full extent of his misfortune. Van Baerle was known
to be fond of everything that pleases the eye. He studied Nature in all
her aspects for the benefit of his paintings, which were as minutely
finished as those of Gerard Dow, his master, and of Mieris, his
friend. Was it not possible, that, having to paint the interior of a
tulip-grower’s, he had collected in his new studio all the accessories
of decoration?

Yet, although thus consoling himself with illusory suppositions, Boxtel
was not able to resist the burning curiosity which was devouring him.
In the evening, therefore, he placed a ladder against the partition
wall between their gardens, and, looking into that of his neighbour Van
Baerle, he convinced himself that the soil of a large square bed, which
had formerly been occupied by different plants, was removed, and the
ground disposed in beds of loam mixed with river mud (a combination
which is particularly favourable to the tulip), and the whole surrounded
by a border of turf to keep the soil in its place. Besides this,
sufficient shade to temper the noonday heat; aspect south-southwest;
water in abundant supply, and at hand; in short, every requirement to
insure not only success but also progress. There could not be a doubt
that Van Baerle had become a tulip-grower.

Boxtel at once pictured to himself this learned man, with a capital
of four hundred thousand and a yearly income of ten thousand guilders,
devoting all his intellectual and financial resources to the cultivation
of the tulip. He foresaw his neighbour’s success, and he felt such a
pang at the mere idea of this success that his hands dropped powerless,
his knees trembled, and he fell in despair from the ladder.

And thus it was not for the sake of painted tulips, but for real ones,
that Van Baerle took from him half a degree of warmth. And thus Van
Baerle was to have the most admirably fitted aspect, and, besides, a
large, airy, and well ventilated chamber where to preserve his bulbs
and seedlings; while he, Boxtel, had been obliged to give up for this
purpose his bedroom, and, lest his sleeping in the same apartment might
injure his bulbs and seedlings, had taken up his abode in a miserable
garret.

Boxtel, then, was to have next door to him a rival and successful
competitor; and his rival, instead of being some unknown, obscure
gardener, was the godson of Mynheer Cornelius de Witt, that is to say, a
celebrity.

Boxtel, as the reader may see, was not possessed of the spirit of
Porus, who, on being conquered by Alexander, consoled himself with the
celebrity of his conqueror.

And now if Van Baerle produced a new tulip, and named it the John de
Witt, after having named one the Cornelius? It was indeed enough to
choke one with rage.

Thus Boxtel, with jealous foreboding, became the prophet of his own
misfortune. And, after having made this melancholy discovery, he passed
the most wretched night imaginable.




Chapter 6. The Hatred of a Tulip-fancier


From that moment Boxtel’s interest in tulips was no longer a stimulus to
his exertions, but a deadening anxiety. Henceforth all his thoughts ran
only upon the injury which his neighbour would cause him, and thus his
favourite occupation was changed into a constant source of misery to
him.

Van Baerle, as may easily be imagined, had no sooner begun to apply his
natural ingenuity to his new fancy, than he succeeded in growing the
finest tulips. Indeed, he knew better than any one else at Haarlem or
Leyden--the two towns which boast the best soil and the most congenial
climate--how to vary the colours, to modify the shape, and to produce
new species.

He belonged to that natural, humorous school who took for their motto in
the seventeenth century the aphorism uttered by one of their number in
1653,--“To despise flowers is to offend God.”

From that premise the school of tulip-fanciers, the most exclusive of
all schools, worked out the following syllogism in the same year:--

“To despise flowers is to offend God.

“The more beautiful the flower is, the more does one offend God in
despising it.

“The tulip is the most beautiful of all flowers.

“Therefore, he who despises the tulip offends God beyond measure.”

By reasoning of this kind, it can be seen that the four or five thousand
tulip-growers of Holland, France, and Portugal, leaving out those of
Ceylon and China and the Indies, might, if so disposed, put the whole
world under the ban, and condemn as schismatics and heretics and
deserving of death the several hundred millions of mankind whose hopes
of salvation were not centred upon the tulip.

We cannot doubt that in such a cause Boxtel, though he was Van Baerle’s
deadly foe, would have marched under the same banner with him.

Mynheer van Baerle and his tulips, therefore, were in the mouth of
everybody; so much so, that Boxtel’s name disappeared for ever from the
list of the notable tulip-growers in Holland, and those of Dort were now
represented by Cornelius van Baerle, the modest and inoffensive savant.

Engaging, heart and soul, in his pursuits of sowing, planting, and
gathering, Van Baerle, caressed by the whole fraternity of tulip-growers
in Europe, entertained nor the least suspicion that there was at his
very door a pretender whose throne he had usurped.

He went on in his career, and consequently in his triumphs; and in
the course of two years he covered his borders with such marvellous
productions as no mortal man, following in the tracks of the Creator,
except perhaps Shakespeare and Rubens, have equalled in point of
numbers.

And also, if Dante had wished for a new type to be added to his
characters of the Inferno, he might have chosen Boxtel during the period
of Van Baerle’s successes. Whilst Cornelius was weeding, manuring,
watering his beds, whilst, kneeling on the turf border, he analysed
every vein of the flowering tulips, and meditated on the modifications
which might be effected by crosses of colour or otherwise, Boxtel,
concealed behind a small sycamore which he had trained at the top of the
partition wall in the shape of a fan, watched, with his eyes starting
from their sockets and with foaming mouth, every step and every gesture
of his neighbour; and whenever he thought he saw him look happy, or
descried a smile on his lips, or a flash of contentment glistening in
his eyes, he poured out towards him such a volley of maledictions
and furious threats as to make it indeed a matter of wonder that
this venomous breath of envy and hatred did not carry a blight on the
innocent flowers which had excited it.

When the evil spirit has once taken hold of the heart of man, it urges
him on, without letting him stop. Thus Boxtel soon was no longer content
with seeing Van Baerle. He wanted to see his flowers, too; he had
the feelings of an artist, the master-piece of a rival engrossed his
interest.

He therefore bought a telescope, which enabled him to watch as
accurately as did the owner himself every progressive development of
the flower, from the moment when, in the first year, its pale seed-leaf
begins to peep from the ground, to that glorious one, when, after five
years, its petals at last reveal the hidden treasures of its chalice.
How often had the miserable, jealous man to observe in Van Baerle’s beds
tulips which dazzled him by their beauty, and almost choked him by their
perfection!

And then, after the first blush of the admiration which he could not
help feeling, he began to be tortured by the pangs of envy, by that slow
fever which creeps over the heart and changes it into a nest of vipers,
each devouring the other and ever born anew. How often did Boxtel, in
the midst of tortures which no pen is able fully to describe,--how
often did he feel an inclination to jump down into the garden during the
night, to destroy the plants, to tear the bulbs with his teeth, and to
sacrifice to his wrath the owner himself, if he should venture to stand
up for the defence of his tulips!

But to kill a tulip was a horrible crime in the eyes of a genuine
tulip-fancier; as to killing a man, it would not have mattered so very
much.

Yet Van Baerle made such progress in the noble science of growing
tulips, which he seemed to master with the true instinct of genius, that
Boxtel at last was maddened to such a degree as to think of throwing
stones and sticks into the flower-stands of his neighbour. But,
remembering that he would be sure to be found out, and that he would not
only be punished by law, but also dishonoured for ever in the face of
all the tulip-growers of Europe, he had recourse to stratagem, and, to
gratify his hatred, tried to devise a plan by means of which he might
gain his ends without being compromised himself.

He considered a long time, and at last his meditations were crowned with
success.

One evening he tied two cats together by their hind legs with a string
about six feet in length, and threw them from the wall into the midst of
that noble, that princely, that royal bed, which contained not only the
“Cornelius de Witt,” but also the “Beauty of Brabant,” milk-white,
edged with purple and pink, the “Marble of Rotterdam,” colour of flax,
blossoms feathered red and flesh colour, the “Wonder of Haarlem,” the
“Colombin obscur,” and the “Columbin clair terni.”

The frightened cats, having alighted on the ground, first tried to fly
each in a different direction, until the string by which they were tied
together was tightly stretched across the bed; then, however, feeling
that they were not able to get off, they began to pull to and fro, and
to wheel about with hideous caterwaulings, mowing down with their string
the flowers among which they were struggling, until, after a furious
strife of about a quarter of an hour, the string broke and the
combatants vanished.

Boxtel, hidden behind his sycamore, could not see anything, as it was
pitch-dark; but the piercing cries of the cats told the whole tale, and
his heart overflowing with gall now throbbed with triumphant joy.

Boxtel was so eager to ascertain the extent of the injury, that he
remained at his post until morning to feast his eyes on the sad state in
which the two cats had left the flower-beds of his neighbour. The mists
of the morning chilled his frame, but he did not feel the cold, the hope
of revenge keeping his blood at fever heat. The chagrin of his rival was
to pay for all the inconvenience which he incurred himself.

At the earliest dawn the door of the white house opened, and Van Baerle
made his appearance, approaching the flower-beds with the smile of a
man who has passed the night comfortably in his bed, and has had happy
dreams.

All at once he perceived furrows and little mounds of earth on the beds
which only the evening before had been as smooth as a mirror, all at
once he perceived the symmetrical rows of his tulips to be completely
disordered, like the pikes of a battalion in the midst of which a shell
has fallen.

He ran up to them with blanched cheek.

Boxtel trembled with joy. Fifteen or twenty tulips, torn and crushed,
were lying about, some of them bent, others completely broken and
already withering, the sap oozing from their bleeding bulbs: how gladly
would Van Baerle have redeemed that precious sap with his own blood!

But what were his surprise and his delight! what was the disappointment
of his rival! Not one of the four tulips which the latter had meant to
destroy was injured at all. They raised proudly their noble heads above
the corpses of their slain companions. This was enough to console Van
Baerle, and enough to fan the rage of the horticultural murderer, who
tore his hair at the sight of the effects of the crime which he had
committed in vain.

Van Baerle could not imagine the cause of the mishap, which,
fortunately, was of far less consequence than it might have been. On
making inquiries, he learned that the whole night had been disturbed
by terrible caterwaulings. He besides found traces of the cats,
their footmarks and hairs left behind on the battle-field; to guard,
therefore, in future against a similar outrage, he gave orders that
henceforth one of the under gardeners should sleep in the garden in a
sentry-box near the flower-beds.

Boxtel heard him give the order, and saw the sentry-box put up that
very day; but he deemed himself lucky in not having been suspected, and,
being more than ever incensed against the successful horticulturist, he
resolved to bide his time.

Just then the Tulip Society of Haarlem offered a prize for the discovery
(we dare not say the manufacture) of a large black tulip without a
spot of colour, a thing which had not yet been accomplished, and was
considered impossible, as at that time there did not exist a flower of
that species approaching even to a dark nut brown. It was, therefore,
generally said that the founders of the prize might just as well have
offered two millions as a hundred thousand guilders, since no one would
be able to gain it.

The tulip-growing world, however, was thrown by it into a state of most
active commotion. Some fanciers caught at the idea without believing it
practicable, but such is the power of imagination among florists, that
although considering the undertaking as certain to fail, all their
thoughts were engrossed by that great black tulip, which was looked upon
to be as chimerical as the black swan of Horace or the white raven of
French tradition.

Van Baerle was one of the tulip-growers who were struck with the idea;
Boxtel thought of it in the light of a speculation. Van Baerle, as soon
as the idea had once taken root in his clear and ingenious mind, began
slowly the necessary planting and cross-breeding to reduce the tulips
which he had grown already from red to brown, and from brown to dark
brown.

By the next year he had obtained flowers of a perfect nut-brown, and
Boxtel espied them in the border, whereas he had himself as yet only
succeeded in producing the light brown.

It might perhaps be interesting to explain to the gentle reader the
beautiful chain of theories which go to prove that the tulip borrows its
colors from the elements; perhaps we should give him pleasure if we were
to maintain and establish that nothing is impossible for a florist who
avails himself with judgment and discretion and patience of the sun’s
heat, the clear water, the juices of the earth, and the cool breezes.
But this is not a treatise upon tulips in general; it is the story of
one particular tulip which we have undertaken to write, and to that we
limit ourselves, however alluring the subject which is so closely allied
to ours.

Boxtel, once more worsted by the superiority of his hated rival, was
now completely disgusted with tulip-growing, and, being driven half mad,
devoted himself entirely to observation.

The house of his rival was quite open to view; a garden exposed to the
sun; cabinets with glass walls, shelves, cupboards, boxes, and ticketed
pigeon-holes, which could easily be surveyed by the telescope. Boxtel
allowed his bulbs to rot in the pits, his seedlings to dry up in their
cases, and his tulips to wither in the borders and henceforward occupied
himself with nothing else but the doings at Van Baerle’s. He breathed
through the stalks of Van Baerle’s tulips, quenched his thirst with the
water he sprinkled upon them, and feasted on the fine soft earth which
his neighbour scattered upon his cherished bulbs.

But the most curious part of the operations was not performed in the
garden.

It might be one o’clock in the morning when Van Baerle went up to his
laboratory, into the glazed cabinet whither Boxtel’s telescope had such
an easy access; and here, as soon as the lamp illuminated the walls and
windows, Boxtel saw the inventive genius of his rival at work.

He beheld him sifting his seeds, and soaking them in liquids which were
destined to modify or to deepen their colours. He knew what Cornelius
meant when heating certain grains, then moistening them, then combining
them with others by a sort of grafting,--a minute and marvellously
delicate manipulation,--and when he shut up in darkness those which were
expected to furnish the black colour, exposed to the sun or to the
lamp those which were to produce red, and placed between the endless
reflections of two water-mirrors those intended for white, the pure
representation of the limpid element.

This innocent magic, the fruit at the same time of child-like musings
and of manly genius--this patient untiring labour, of which Boxtel knew
himself to be incapable--made him, gnawed as he was with envy, centre
all his life, all his thoughts, and all his hopes in his telescope.

For, strange to say, the love and interest of horticulture had not
deadened in Isaac his fierce envy and thirst of revenge. Sometimes,
whilst covering Van Baerle with his telescope, he deluded himself into a
belief that he was levelling a never-failing musket at him; and then he
would seek with his finger for the trigger to fire the shot which was
to have killed his neighbour. But it is time that we should connect with
this epoch of the operations of the one, and the espionage of the other,
the visit which Cornelius de Witt came to pay to his native town.




Chapter 7. The Happy Man makes Acquaintance with Misfortune


Cornelius de Witt, after having attended to his family affairs, reached
the house of his godson, Cornelius van Baerle, one evening in the month
of January, 1672.

De Witt, although being very little of a horticulturist or of an
artist, went over the whole mansion, from the studio to the green-house,
inspecting everything, from the pictures down to the tulips. He thanked
his godson for having joined him on the deck of the admiral’s ship “The
Seven Provinces,” during the battle of Southwold Bay, and for having
given his name to a magnificent tulip; and whilst he thus, with the
kindness and affability of a father to a son, visited Van Baerle’s
treasures, the crowd gathered with curiosity, and even respect, before
the door of the happy man.

All this hubbub excited the attention of Boxtel, who was just taking his
meal by his fireside. He inquired what it meant, and, on being informed
of the cause of all this stir, climbed up to his post of observation,
where in spite of the cold, he took his stand, with the telescope to his
eye.

This telescope had not been of great service to him since the autumn of
1671. The tulips, like true daughters of the East, averse to cold, do
not abide in the open ground in winter. They need the shelter of the
house, the soft bed on the shelves, and the congenial warmth of the
stove. Van Baerle, therefore, passed the whole winter in his laboratory,
in the midst of his books and pictures. He went only rarely to the room
where he kept his bulbs, unless it were to allow some occasional rays
of the sun to enter, by opening one of the movable sashes of the glass
front.

On the evening of which we are speaking, after the two Corneliuses had
visited together all the apartments of the house, whilst a train of
domestics followed their steps, De Witt said in a low voice to Van
Baerle,--

“My dear son, send these people away, and let us be alone for some
minutes.”

The younger Cornelius, bowing assent, said aloud,--

“Would you now, sir, please to see my dry-room?”

The dry-room, this pantheon, this sanctum sanctorum of the
tulip-fancier, was, as Delphi of old, interdicted to the profane
uninitiated.

Never had any of his servants been bold enough to set his foot there.
Cornelius admitted only the inoffensive broom of an old Frisian
housekeeper, who had been his nurse, and who from the time when he
had devoted himself to the culture of tulips ventured no longer to put
onions in his stews, for fear of pulling to pieces and mincing the idol
of her foster child.

At the mere mention of the dry-room, therefore, the servants who were
carrying the lights respectfully fell back. Cornelius, taking the
candlestick from the hands of the foremost, conducted his godfather into
that room, which was no other than that very cabinet with a glass front
into which Boxtel was continually prying with his telescope.

The envious spy was watching more intently than ever.

First of all he saw the walls and windows lit up.

Then two dark figures appeared.

One of them, tall, majestic, stern, sat down near the table on which Van
Baerle had placed the taper.

In this figure, Boxtel recognised the pale features of Cornelius de
Witt, whose long hair, parted in front, fell over his shoulders.

De Witt, after having said some few words to Cornelius, the meaning of
which the prying neighbour could not read in the movement of his lips,
took from his breast pocket a white parcel, carefully sealed, which
Boxtel, judging from the manner in which Cornelius received it, and
placed it in one of the presses, supposed to contain papers of the
greatest importance.

His first thought was that this precious deposit enclosed some newly
imported bulbs from Bengal or Ceylon; but he soon reflected that
Cornelius de Witt was very little addicted to tulip-growing, and that
he only occupied himself with the affairs of man, a pursuit by far less
peaceful and agreeable than that of the florist. He therefore came to
the conclusion that the parcel contained simply some papers, and that
these papers were relating to politics.

But why should papers of political import be intrusted to Van Baerle,
who not only was, but also boasted of being, an entire stranger to
the science of government, which, in his opinion, was more occult than
alchemy itself?

It was undoubtedly a deposit which Cornelius de Witt, already threatened
by the unpopularity with which his countrymen were going to honour him,
was placing in the hands of his godson; a contrivance so much the more
cleverly devised, as it certainly was not at all likely that it should
be searched for at the house of one who had always stood aloof from
every sort of intrigue.

And, besides, if the parcel had been made up of bulbs, Boxtel knew his
neighbour too well not to expect that Van Baerle would not have lost one
moment in satisfying his curiosity and feasting his eyes on the present
which he had received.

But, on the contrary, Cornelius had received the parcel from the hands
of his godfather with every mark of respect, and put it by with the same
respectful manner in a drawer, stowing it away so that it should not
take up too much of the room which was reserved to his bulbs.

The parcel thus being secreted, Cornelius de Witt got up, pressed the
hand of his godson, and turned towards the door, Van Baerle seizing the
candlestick, and lighting him on his way down to the street, which was
still crowded with people who wished to see their great fellow citizen
getting into his coach.

Boxtel had not been mistaken in his supposition. The deposit intrusted
to Van Baerle, and carefully locked up by him, was nothing more nor less
than John de Witt’s correspondence with the Marquis de Louvois, the war
minister of the King of France; only the godfather forbore giving to his
godson the least intimation concerning the political importance of the
secret, merely desiring him not to deliver the parcel to any one but to
himself, or to whomsoever he should send to claim it in his name.

And Van Baerle, as we have seen, locked it up with his most precious
bulbs, to think no more of it, after his godfather had left him; very
unlike Boxtel, who looked upon this parcel as a clever pilot does on the
distant and scarcely perceptible cloud which is increasing on its way
and which is fraught with a storm.

Little dreaming of the jealous hatred of his neighbour, Van Baerle
had proceeded step by step towards gaining the prize offered by the
Horticultural Society of Haarlem. He had progressed from hazel-nut shade
to that of roasted coffee, and on the very day when the frightful events
took place at the Hague which we have related in the preceding chapters,
we find him, about one o’clock in the day, gathering from the border the
young suckers raised from tulips of the colour of roasted coffee; and
which, being expected to flower for the first time in the spring of
1675, would undoubtedly produce the large black tulip required by the
Haarlem Society.

On the 20th of August, 1672, at one o’clock, Cornelius was therefore in
his dry-room, with his feet resting on the foot-bar of the table, and
his elbows on the cover, looking with intense delight on three suckers
which he had just detached from the mother bulb, pure, perfect,
and entire, and from which was to grow that wonderful produce of
horticulture which would render the name of Cornelius van Baerle for
ever illustrious.

“I shall find the black tulip,” said Cornelius to himself, whilst
detaching the suckers. “I shall obtain the hundred thousand guilders
offered by the Society. I shall distribute them among the poor of Dort;
and thus the hatred which every rich man has to encounter in times of
civil wars will be soothed down, and I shall be able, without fearing
any harm either from Republicans or Orangists, to keep as heretofore my
borders in splendid condition. I need no more be afraid lest on the day
of a riot the shopkeepers of the town and the sailors of the port should
come and tear out my bulbs, to boil them as onions for their families,
as they have sometimes quietly threatened when they happened to remember
my having paid two or three hundred guilders for one bulb. It is
therefore settled I shall give the hundred thousand guilders of the
Haarlem prize to the poor. And yet----”

Here Cornelius stopped and heaved a sigh. “And yet,” he continued,
“it would have been so very delightful to spend the hundred thousand
guilders on the enlargement of my tulip-bed or even on a journey to the
East, the country of beautiful flowers. But, alas! these are no thoughts
for the present times, when muskets, standards, proclamations, and
beating of drums are the order of the day.”

Van Baerle raised his eyes to heaven and sighed again. Then turning his
glance towards his bulbs,--objects of much greater importance to him
than all those muskets, standards, drums, and proclamations, which he
conceived only to be fit to disturb the minds of honest people,--he
said:--

“These are, indeed, beautiful bulbs; how smooth they are, how well
formed; there is that air of melancholy about them which promises to
produce a flower of the colour of ebony. On their skin you cannot
even distinguish the circulating veins with the naked eye. Certainly,
certainly, not a light spot will disfigure the tulip which I have called
into existence. And by what name shall we call this offspring of my
sleepless nights, of my labour and my thought? Tulipa nigra Barlœnsis?

“Yes Barlœnsis: a fine name. All the tulip-fanciers--that is to say,
all the intelligent people of Europe--will feel a thrill of excitement
when the rumour spreads to the four quarters of the globe: The
grand black tulip is found! ‘How is it called?’ the fanciers will
ask.--‘Tulipa nigra Barlœnsis!’--‘Why Barlœnsis?’--‘After its grower,
Van Baerle,’ will be the answer.--‘And who is this Van Baerle?’--‘It is
the same who has already produced five new tulips: the Jane, the John
de Witt, the Cornelius de Witt, etc.’ Well, that is what I call my
ambition. It will cause tears to no one. And people will talk of
my Tulipa nigra Barlœnsis when perhaps my godfather, this sublime
politician, is only known from the tulip to which I have given his name.

“Oh! these darling bulbs!

“When my tulip has flowered,” Baerle continued in his soliloquy, “and
when tranquillity is restored in Holland, I shall give to the poor only
fifty thousand guilders, which, after all, is a goodly sum for a man who
is under no obligation whatever. Then, with the remaining fifty thousand
guilders, I shall make experiments. With them I shall succeed in
imparting scent to the tulip. Ah! if I succeed in giving it the odour of
the rose or the carnation, or, what would be still better, a completely
new scent; if I restored to this queen of flowers its natural
distinctive perfume, which she has lost in passing from her Eastern to
her European throne, and which she must have in the Indian peninsula at
Goa, Bombay, and Madras, and especially in that island which in olden
times, as is asserted, was the terrestrial paradise, and which is called
Ceylon,--oh, what glory! I must say, I would then rather be Cornelius
van Baerle than Alexander, Cæsar, or Maximilian.

“Oh the admirable bulbs!”

Thus Cornelius indulged in the delights of contemplation, and was
carried away by the sweetest dreams.

Suddenly the bell of his cabinet was rung much more violently than
usual.

Cornelius, startled, laid his hands on his bulbs, and turned round.

“Who is here?” he asked.

“Sir,” answered the servant, “it is a messenger from the Hague.”

“A messenger from the Hague! What does he want?”

“Sir, it is Craeke.”

“Craeke! the confidential servant of Mynheer John de Witt? Good, let him
wait.”

“I cannot wait,” said a voice in the lobby.

And at the same time forcing his way in, Craeke rushed into the
dry-room.

This abrupt entrance was such an infringement on the established rules
of the household of Cornelius van Baerle, that the latter, at the sight
of Craeke, almost convulsively moved his hand which covered the bulbs,
so that two of them fell on the floor, one of them rolling under a small
table, and the other into the fireplace.

“Zounds!” said Cornelius, eagerly picking up his precious bulbs, “what’s
the matter?”

“The matter, sir!” said Craeke, laying a paper on the large table, on
which the third bulb was lying,--“the matter is, that you are requested
to read this paper without losing one moment.”

And Craeke, who thought he had remarked in the streets of Dort symptoms
of a tumult similar to that which he had witnessed before his departure
from the Hague, ran off without even looking behind him.

“All right! all right! my dear Craeke,” said Cornelius, stretching his
arm under the table for the bulb; “your paper shall be read, indeed it
shall.”

Then, examining the bulb which he held in the hollow of his hand, he
said: “Well, here is one of them uninjured. That confounded Craeke! thus
to rush into my dry-room; let us now look after the other.”

And without laying down the bulb which he already held, Baerle went to
the fireplace, knelt down and stirred with the tip of his finger the
ashes, which fortunately were quite cold.

He at once felt the other bulb.

“Well, here it is,” he said; and, looking at it with almost fatherly
affection, he exclaimed, “Uninjured as the first!”

At this very instant, and whilst Cornelius, still on his knees, was
examining his pets, the door of the dry-room was so violently shaken,
and opened in such a brusque manner, that Cornelius felt rising in his
cheeks and his ears the glow of that evil counsellor which is called
wrath.

“Now, what is it again,” he demanded; “are people going mad here?”

“Oh, sir! sir!” cried the servant, rushing into the dry-room with a much
paler face and with a much more frightened mien than Craeke had shown.

“Well!” asked Cornelius, foreboding some mischief from the double breach
of the strict rule of his house.

“Oh, sir, fly! fly quick!” cried the servant.

“Fly! and what for?”

“Sir, the house is full of the guards of the States.”

“What do they want?”

“They want you.”

“What for?”

“To arrest you.”

“Arrest me? arrest me, do you say?”

“Yes, sir, and they are headed by a magistrate.”

“What’s the meaning of all this?” said Van Baerle, grasping in his hands
the two bulbs, and directing his terrified glance towards the staircase.

“They are coming up! they are coming up!” cried the servant.

“Oh, my dear child, my worthy master!” cried the old housekeeper, who
now likewise made her appearance in the dry-room, “take your gold, your
jewelry, and fly, fly!”

“But how shall I make my escape, nurse?” said Van Baerle.

“Jump out of the window.”

“Twenty-five feet from the ground!”

“But you will fall on six feet of soft soil!”

“Yes, but I should fall on my tulips.”

“Never mind, jump out.”

Cornelius took the third bulb, approached the window and opened it, but
seeing what havoc he would necessarily cause in his borders, and, more
than this, what a height he would have to jump, he called out, “Never!”
 and fell back a step.

At this moment they saw across the banister of the staircase the points
of the halberds of the soldiers rising.

The housekeeper raised her hands to heaven.

As to Cornelius van Baerle, it must be stated to his honour, not as a
man, but as a tulip-fancier, his only thought was for his inestimable
bulbs.

Looking about for a paper in which to wrap them up, he noticed the
fly-leaf from the Bible, which Craeke had laid upon the table, took it
without in his confusion remembering whence it came, folded in it the
three bulbs, secreted them in his bosom, and waited.

At this very moment the soldiers, preceded by a magistrate, entered the
room.

“Are you Dr. Cornelius van Baerle?” demanded the magistrate (who,
although knowing the young man very well, put his question according to
the forms of justice, which gave his proceedings a much more dignified
air).

“I am that person, Master van Spennen,” answered Cornelius, politely, to
his judge, “and you know it very well.”

“Then give up to us the seditious papers which you secrete in your
house.”

“The seditious papers!” repeated Cornelius, quite dumfounded at the
imputation.

“Now don’t look astonished, if you please.”

“I vow to you, Master van Spennen,” Cornelius replied, “that I am
completely at a loss to understand what you want.”

“Then I shall put you in the way, Doctor,” said the judge; “give up to
us the papers which the traitor Cornelius de Witt deposited with you in
the month of January last.”

A sudden light came into the mind of Cornelius.

“Halloa!” said Van Spennen, “you begin now to remember, don’t you?”

“Indeed I do, but you spoke of seditious papers, and I have none of that
sort.”

“You deny it then?”

“Certainly I do.”

The magistrate turned round and took a rapid survey of the whole
cabinet.

“Where is the apartment you call your dry-room?” he asked.

“The very same where you now are, Master van Spennen.”

The magistrate cast a glance at a small note at the top of his papers.

“All right,” he said, like a man who is sure of his ground.

Then, turning round towards Cornelius, he continued, “Will you give up
those papers to me?”

“But I cannot, Master van Spennen; those papers do not belong to me;
they have been deposited with me as a trust, and a trust is sacred.”

“Dr. Cornelius,” said the judge, “in the name of the States, I order you
to open this drawer, and to give up to me the papers which it contains.”

Saying this, the judge pointed with his finger to the third drawer of
the press, near the fireplace.

In this very drawer, indeed the papers deposited by the Warden of the
Dikes with his godson were lying; a proof that the police had received
very exact information.

“Ah! you will not,” said Van Spennen, when he saw Cornelius standing
immovable and bewildered, “then I shall open the drawer myself.”

And, pulling out the drawer to its full length, the magistrate at first
alighted on about twenty bulbs, carefully arranged and ticketed, and
then on the paper parcel, which had remained in exactly the same state
as it was when delivered by the unfortunate Cornelius de Witt to his
godson.

The magistrate broke the seals, tore off the envelope, cast an eager
glance on the first leaves which met his eye and then exclaimed, in a
terrible voice,--

“Well, justice has been rightly informed after all!”

“How,” said Cornelius, “how is this?”

“Don’t pretend to be ignorant, Mynheer van Baerle,” answered the
magistrate. “Follow me.”

“How’s that! follow you?” cried the Doctor.

“Yes, sir, for in the name of the States I arrest you.”

Arrests were not as yet made in the name of William of Orange; he had
not been Stadtholder long enough for that.

“Arrest me!” cried Cornelius; “but what have I done?”

“That’s no affair of mine, Doctor; you will explain all that before your
judges.”

“Where?”

“At the Hague.”

Cornelius, in mute stupefaction, embraced his old nurse, who was in
a swoon; shook hands with his servants, who were bathed in tears, and
followed the magistrate, who put him in a coach as a prisoner of state
and had him driven at full gallop to the Hague.




Chapter 8. An Invasion


The incident just related was, as the reader has guessed before this,
the diabolical work of Mynheer Isaac Boxtel.

It will be remembered that, with the help of his telescope, not even the
least detail of the private meeting between Cornelius de Witt and Van
Baerle had escaped him. He had, indeed, heard nothing, but he had seen
everything, and had rightly concluded that the papers intrusted by the
Warden to the Doctor must have been of great importance, as he saw Van
Baerle so carefully secreting the parcel in the drawer where he used to
keep his most precious bulbs.

The upshot of all this was that when Boxtel, who watched the course of
political events much more attentively than his neighbour Cornelius was
used to do, heard the news of the brothers De Witt being arrested on a
charge of high treason against the States, he thought within his heart
that very likely he needed only to say one word, and the godson would be
arrested as well as the godfather.

Yet, full of happiness as was Boxtel’s heart at the chance, he at first
shrank with horror from the idea of informing against a man whom this
information might lead to the scaffold.

But there is this terrible thing in evil thoughts, that evil minds soon
grow familiar with them.

Besides this, Mynheer Isaac Boxtel encouraged himself with the following
sophism:--

“Cornelius de Witt is a bad citizen, as he is charged with high treason,
and arrested.

“I, on the contrary, am a good citizen, as I am not charged with
anything in the world, as I am as free as the air of heaven.

“If, therefore, Cornelius de Witt is a bad citizen,--of which there
can be no doubt, as he is charged with high treason, and arrested,--his
accomplice, Cornelius van Baerle, is no less a bad citizen than himself.

“And, as I am a good citizen, and as it is the duty of every good
citizen to inform against the bad ones, it is my duty to inform against
Cornelius van Baerle.”

Specious as this mode of reasoning might sound, it would not perhaps
have taken so complete a hold of Boxtel, nor would he perhaps have
yielded to the mere desire of vengeance which was gnawing at his heart,
had not the demon of envy been joined with that of cupidity.

Boxtel was quite aware of the progress which Van Baerle had made towards
producing the grand black tulip.

Dr. Cornelius, notwithstanding all his modesty, had not been able to
hide from his most intimate friends that he was all but certain to win,
in the year of grace 1673, the prize of a hundred thousand guilders
offered by the Horticultural Society of Haarlem.

It was just this certainty of Cornelius van Baerle that caused the fever
which raged in the heart of Isaac Boxtel.

If Cornelius should be arrested there would necessarily be a great upset
in his house, and during the night after his arrest no one would think
of keeping watch over the tulips in his garden.

Now in that night Boxtel would climb over the wall and, as he knew the
position of the bulb which was to produce the grand black tulip, he
would filch it; and instead of flowering for Cornelius, it would flower
for him, Isaac; he also, instead of Van Baerle, would have the prize
of a hundred thousand guilders, not to speak of the sublime honour of
calling the new flower Tulipa nigra Boxtellensis,--a result which would
satisfy not only his vengeance, but also his cupidity and his ambition.

Awake, he thought of nothing but the grand black tulip; asleep, he
dreamed of it.

At last, on the 19th of August, about two o’clock in the afternoon,
the temptation grew so strong, that Mynheer Isaac was no longer able to
resist it.

Accordingly, he wrote an anonymous information, the minute exactness of
which made up for its want of authenticity, and posted his letter.

Never did a venomous paper, slipped into the jaws of the bronze lions at
Venice, produce a more prompt and terrible effect.

On the same evening the letter reached the principal magistrate, who
without a moment’s delay convoked his colleagues early for the next
morning. On the following morning, therefore, they assembled, and
decided on Van Baerle’s arrest, placing the order for its execution in
the hands of Master van Spennen, who, as we have seen, performed his
duty like a true Hollander, and who arrested the Doctor at the very hour
when the Orange party at the Hague were roasting the bleeding shreds of
flesh torn from the corpses of Cornelius and John de Witt.

But, whether from a feeling of shame or from craven weakness, Isaac
Boxtel did not venture that day to point his telescope either at the
garden, or at the laboratory, or at the dry-room.

He knew too well what was about to happen in the house of the poor
doctor to feel any desire to look into it. He did not even get up when
his only servant--who envied the lot of the servants of Cornelius just
as bitterly as Boxtel did that of their master--entered his bedroom. He
said to the man,--

“I shall not get up to-day, I am ill.”

About nine o’clock he heard a great noise in the street which made him
tremble, at this moment he was paler than a real invalid, and shook more
violently than a man in the height of fever.

His servant entered the room; Boxtel hid himself under the counterpane.

“Oh, sir!” cried the servant, not without some inkling that, whilst
deploring the mishap which had befallen Van Baerle, he was announcing
agreeable news to his master,--“oh, sir! you do not know, then, what is
happening at this moment?”

“How can I know it?” answered Boxtel, with an almost unintelligible
voice.

“Well, Mynheer Boxtel, at this moment your neighbour Cornelius van
Baerle is arrested for high treason.”

“Nonsense!” Boxtel muttered, with a faltering voice; “the thing is
impossible.”

“Faith, sir, at any rate that’s what people say; and, besides, I have
seen Judge van Spennen with the archers entering the house.”

“Well, if you have seen it with your own eyes, that’s a different case
altogether.”

“At all events,” said the servant, “I shall go and inquire once more. Be
you quiet, sir, I shall let you know all about it.”

Boxtel contented himself with signifying his approval of the zeal of his
servant by dumb show.

The man went out, and returned in half an hour.

“Oh, sir, all that I told you is indeed quite true.”

“How so?”

“Mynheer van Baerle is arrested, and has been put into a carriage, and
they are driving him to the Hague.”

“To the Hague!”

“Yes, to the Hague, and if what people say is true, it won’t do him much
good.”

“And what do they say?” Boxtel asked.

“Faith, sir, they say--but it is not quite sure--that by this hour the
burghers must be murdering Mynheer Cornelius and Mynheer John de Witt.”

“Oh,” muttered, or rather growled Boxtel, closing his eyes from the
dreadful picture which presented itself to his imagination.

“Why, to be sure,” said the servant to himself, whilst leaving the room,
“Mynheer Isaac Boxtel must be very sick not to have jumped from his bed
on hearing such good news.”

And, in reality, Isaac Boxtel was very sick, like a man who has murdered
another.

But he had murdered his man with a double object; the first was
attained, the second was still to be attained.

Night closed in. It was the night which Boxtel had looked forward to.

As soon as it was dark he got up.

He then climbed into his sycamore.

He had calculated correctly; no one thought of keeping watch over the
garden; the house and the servants were all in the utmost confusion.

He heard the clock strike--ten, eleven, twelve.

At midnight, with a beating heart, trembling hands, and a livid
countenance, he descended from the tree, took a ladder, leaned it
against the wall, mounted it to the last step but one, and listened.

All was perfectly quiet, not a sound broke the silence of the night; one
solitary light, that of the housekeeper, was burning in the house.

This silence and this darkness emboldened Boxtel; he got astride the
wall, stopped for an instant, and, after having ascertained that there
was nothing to fear, he put his ladder from his own garden into that of
Cornelius, and descended.

Then, knowing to an inch where the bulbs which were to produce the black
tulip were planted, he ran towards the spot, following, however, the
gravelled walks in order not to be betrayed by his footprints, and,
on arriving at the precise spot, he proceeded, with the eagerness of a
tiger, to plunge his hand into the soft ground.

He found nothing, and thought he was mistaken.

In the meanwhile, the cold sweat stood on his brow.

He felt about close by it,--nothing.

He felt about on the right, and on the left,--nothing.

He felt about in front and at the back,--nothing.

He was nearly mad, when at last he satisfied himself that on that very
morning the earth had been disturbed.

In fact, whilst Boxtel was lying in bed, Cornelius had gone down to his
garden, had taken up the mother bulb, and, as we have seen, divided it
into three.

Boxtel could not bring himself to leave the place. He dug up with his
hands more than ten square feet of ground.

At last no doubt remained of his misfortune. Mad with rage, he returned
to his ladder, mounted the wall, drew up the ladder, flung it into his
own garden, and jumped after it.

All at once, a last ray of hope presented itself to his mind: the
seedling bulbs might be in the dry-room; it was therefore only requisite
to make his entry there as he had done into the garden.

There he would find them, and, moreover, it was not at all difficult, as
the sashes of the dry-room might be raised like those of a greenhouse.
Cornelius had opened them on that morning, and no one had thought of
closing them again.

Everything, therefore, depended upon whether he could procure a ladder
of sufficient length,--one of twenty-five feet instead of ten.

Boxtel had noticed in the street where he lived a house which was being
repaired, and against which a very tall ladder was placed.

This ladder would do admirably, unless the workmen had taken it away.

He ran to the house: the ladder was there. Boxtel took it, carried it
with great exertion to his garden, and with even greater difficulty
raised it against the wall of Van Baerle’s house, where it just reached
to the window.

Boxtel put a lighted dark lantern into his pocket, mounted the ladder,
and slipped into the dry-room.

On reaching this sanctuary of the florist he stopped, supporting himself
against the table; his legs failed him, his heart beat as if it would
choke him. Here it was even worse than in the garden; there Boxtel was
only a trespasser, here he was a thief.

However, he took courage again: he had not gone so far to turn back with
empty hands.

But in vain did he search the whole room, open and shut all the drawers,
even that privileged one where the parcel which had been so fatal to
Cornelius had been deposited; he found ticketed, as in a botanical
garden, the “Jane,” the “John de Witt,” the hazel-nut, and the
roasted-coffee coloured tulip; but of the black tulip, or rather the
seedling bulbs within which it was still sleeping, not a trace was
found.

And yet, on looking over the register of seeds and bulbs, which Van
Baerle kept in duplicate, if possible even with greater exactitude and
care than the first commercial houses of Amsterdam their ledgers, Boxtel
read these lines:--

“To-day, 20th of August, 1672, I have taken up the mother bulb of the
grand black tulip, which I have divided into three perfect suckers.”

“Oh these bulbs, these bulbs!” howled Boxtel, turning over everything in
the dry-room, “where could he have concealed them?”

Then, suddenly striking his forehead in his frenzy, he called out, “Oh
wretch that I am! Oh thrice fool Boxtel! Would any one be separated from
his bulbs? Would any one leave them at Dort, when one goes to the Hague?
Could one live far from one’s bulbs, when they enclose the grand black
tulip? He had time to get hold of them, the scoundrel, he has them about
him, he has taken them to the Hague!”

It was like a flash of lightning which showed to Boxtel the abyss of a
uselessly committed crime.

Boxtel sank quite paralyzed on that very table, and on that very spot
where, some hours before, the unfortunate Van Baerle had so leisurely,
and with such intense delight, contemplated his darling bulbs.

“Well, then, after all,” said the envious Boxtel,--raising his livid
face from his hands in which it had been buried--“if he has them, he can
keep them only as long as he lives, and----”

The rest of this detestable thought was expressed by a hideous smile.

“The bulbs are at the Hague,” he said, “therefore, I can no longer live
at Dort: away, then, for them, to the Hague! to the Hague!”

And Boxtel, without taking any notice of the treasures about him, so
entirely were his thoughts absorbed by another inestimable treasure, let
himself out by the window, glided down the ladder, carried it back to
the place whence he had taken it, and, like a beast of prey, returned
growling to his house.




Chapter 9. The Family Cell


It was about midnight when poor Van Baerle was locked up in the prison
of the Buytenhof.

What Rosa foresaw had come to pass. On finding the cell of Cornelius
de Witt empty, the wrath of the people ran very high, and had Gryphus
fallen into the hands of those madmen he would certainly have had to pay
with his life for the prisoner.

But this fury had vented itself most fully on the two brothers when
they were overtaken by the murderers, thanks to the precaution which
William--the man of precautions--had taken in having the gates of the
city closed.

A momentary lull had therefore set in whilst the prison was empty, and
Rosa availed herself of this favourable moment to come forth from her
hiding place, which she also induced her father to leave.

The prison was therefore completely deserted. Why should people remain
in the jail whilst murder was going on at the Tol-Hek?

Gryphus came forth trembling behind the courageous Rosa. They went to
close the great gate, at least as well as it would close, considering
that it was half demolished. It was easy to see that a hurricane of
mighty fury had vented itself upon it.

About four o’clock a return of the noise was heard, but of no
threatening character to Gryphus and his daughter. The people were only
dragging in the two corpses, which they came back to gibbet at the usual
place of execution.

Rosa hid herself this time also, but only that she might not see the
ghastly spectacle.

At midnight, people again knocked at the gate of the jail, or rather
at the barricade which served in its stead: it was Cornelius van Baerle
whom they were bringing.

When the jailer received this new inmate, and saw from the warrant the
name and station of his prisoner, he muttered with his turnkey smile,--

“Godson of Cornelius de Witt! Well, young man, we have the family cell
here, and we will give it to you.”

And quite enchanted with his joke, the ferocious Orangeman took his
cresset and his keys to conduct Cornelius to the cell, which on that
very morning Cornelius de Witt had left to go into exile, or what in
revolutionary times is meant instead by those sublime philosophers who
lay it down as an axiom of high policy, “It is the dead only who do not
return.”

On the way which the despairing florist had to traverse to reach that
cell he heard nothing but the barking of a dog, and saw nothing but the
face of a young girl.

The dog rushed forth from a niche in the wall, shaking his heavy
chain, and sniffing all round Cornelius in order so much the better to
recognise him in case he should be ordered to pounce upon him.

The young girl, whilst the prisoner was mounting the staircase, appeared
at the narrow door of her chamber, which opened on that very flight of
steps; and, holding the lamp in her right hand, she at the same time
lit up her pretty blooming face, surrounded by a profusion of rich
wavy golden locks, whilst with her left she held her white night-dress
closely over her breast, having been roused from her first slumber by
the unexpected arrival of Van Baerle.

It would have made a fine picture, worthy of Rembrandt, the gloomy
winding stairs illuminated by the reddish glare of the cresset of
Gryphus, with his scowling jailer’s countenance at the top, the
melancholy figure of Cornelius bending over the banister to look down
upon the sweet face of Rosa, standing, as it were, in the bright frame
of the door of her chamber, with embarrassed mien at being thus seen by
a stranger.

And at the bottom, quite in the shade, where the details are absorbed
in the obscurity, the mastiff, with his eyes glistening like carbuncles,
and shaking his chain, on which the double light from the lamp of Rosa
and the lantern of Gryphus threw a brilliant glitter.

The sublime master would, however, have been altogether unable to
render the sorrow expressed in the face of Rosa, when she saw this pale,
handsome young man slowly climbing the stairs, and thought of the full
import of the words, which her father had just spoken, “You will have
the family cell.”

This vision lasted but a moment,--much less time than we have taken to
describe it. Gryphus then proceeded on his way, Cornelius was forced to
follow him, and five minutes afterwards he entered his prison, of which
it is unnecessary to say more, as the reader is already acquainted with
it.

Gryphus pointed with his finger to the bed on which the martyr had
suffered so much, who on that day had rendered his soul to God. Then,
taking up his cresset, he quitted the cell.

Thus left alone, Cornelius threw himself on his bed, but he slept not,
he kept his eye fixed on the narrow window, barred with iron, which
looked on the Buytenhof; and in this way saw from behind the trees that
first pale beam of light which morning sheds on the earth as a white
mantle.

Now and then during the night horses had galloped at a smart pace over
the Buytenhof, the heavy tramp of the patrols had resounded from the
pavement, and the slow matches of the arquebuses, flaring in the east
wind, had thrown up at intervals a sudden glare as far as to the panes
of his window.

But when the rising sun began to gild the coping stones at the gable
ends of the houses, Cornelius, eager to know whether there was any
living creature about him, approached the window, and cast a sad look
round the circular yard before him.

At the end of the yard a dark mass, tinted with a dingy blue by the
morning dawn, rose before him, its dark outlines standing out in
contrast to the houses already illuminated by the pale light of early
morning.

Cornelius recognised the gibbet.

On it were suspended two shapeless trunks, which indeed were no more
than bleeding skeletons.

The good people of the Hague had chopped off the flesh of its victims,
but faithfully carried the remainder to the gibbet, to have a pretext
for a double inscription written on a huge placard, on which Cornelius;
with the keen sight of a young man of twenty-eight, was able to read the
following lines, daubed by the coarse brush of a sign-painter:--

“Here are hanging the great rogue of the name of John de Witt, and the
little rogue Cornelius de Witt, his brother, two enemies of the people,
but great friends of the king of France.”

Cornelius uttered a cry of horror, and in the agony of his frantic
terror knocked with his hands and feet at the door so violently and
continuously, that Gryphus, with his huge bunch of keys in his hand, ran
furiously up.

The jailer opened the door, with terrible imprecations against the
prisoner who disturbed him at an hour which Master Gryphus was not
accustomed to be aroused.

“Well, now, by my soul, he is mad, this new De Witt,” he cried, “but all
those De Witts have the devil in them.”

“Master, master,” cried Cornelius, seizing the jailer by the arm and
dragging him towards the window,--“master, what have I read down there?”

“Where down there?”

“On that placard.”

And, trembling, pale, and gasping for breath, he pointed to the gibbet
at the other side of the yard, with the cynical inscription surmounting
it.

Gryphus broke out into a laugh.

“Eh! eh!” he answered, “so, you have read it. Well, my good sir, that’s
what people will get for corresponding with the enemies of his Highness
the Prince of Orange.”

“The brothers De Witt are murdered!” Cornelius muttered, with the cold
sweat on his brow, and sank on his bed, his arms hanging by his side,
and his eyes closed.

“The brothers De Witt have been judged by the people,” said Gryphus;
“you call that murdered, do you? well, I call it executed.”

And seeing that the prisoner was not only quiet, but entirely prostrate
and senseless, he rushed from the cell, violently slamming the door, and
noisily drawing the bolts.

Recovering his consciousness, Cornelius found himself alone, and
recognised the room where he was,--“the family cell,” as Gryphus had
called it,--as the fatal passage leading to ignominious death.

And as he was a philosopher, and, more than that, as he was a Christian,
he began to pray for the soul of his godfather, then for that of the
Grand Pensionary, and at last submitted with resignation to all the
sufferings which God might ordain for him.

Then turning again to the concerns of earth, and having satisfied
himself that he was alone in his dungeon, he drew from his breast the
three bulbs of the black tulip, and concealed them behind a block of
stone, on which the traditional water-jug of the prison was standing, in
the darkest corner of his cell.

Useless labour of so many years! such sweet hopes crushed! His discovery
was, after all, to lead to naught, just as his own career was to be cut
short. Here, in his prison, there was not a trace of vegetation, not an
atom of soil, not a ray of sunshine.

At this thought Cornelius fell into a gloomy despair, from which he was
only aroused by an extraordinary circumstance.

What was this circumstance?

We shall inform the reader in our next chapter.




Chapter 10. The Jailer’s Daughter


On the same evening Gryphus, as he brought the prisoner his mess,
slipped on the damp flags whilst opening the door of the cell, and fell,
in the attempt to steady himself, on his hand; but as it was turned the
wrong way, he broke his arm just above the wrist.

Cornelius rushed forward towards the jailer, but Gryphus, who was not
yet aware of the serious nature of his injury, called out to him,--

“It is nothing: don’t you stir.”

He then tried to support himself on his arm, but the bone gave way; then
only he felt the pain, and uttered a cry.

When he became aware that his arm was broken, this man, so harsh to
others, fell swooning on the threshold, where he remained motionless and
cold, as if dead.

During all this time the door of the cell stood open and Cornelius found
himself almost free. But the thought never entered his mind of profiting
by this accident; he had seen from the manner in which the arm was bent,
and from the noise it made in bending, that the bone was fractured, and
that the patient must be in great pain; and now he thought of nothing
else but of administering relief to the sufferer, however little
benevolent the man had shown himself during their short interview.

At the noise of Gryphus’s fall, and at the cry which escaped him, a
hasty step was heard on the staircase, and immediately after a lovely
apparition presented itself to the eyes of Cornelius.

It was the beautiful young Frisian, who, seeing her father stretched on
the ground, and the prisoner bending over him, uttered a faint cry, as
in the first fright she thought Gryphus, whose brutality she well knew,
had fallen in consequence of a struggle between him and the prisoner.

Cornelius understood what was passing in the mind of the girl, at the
very moment when the suspicion arose in her heart.

But one moment told her the true state of the case and, ashamed of her
first thoughts, she cast her beautiful eyes, wet with tears, on the
young man, and said to him,--

“I beg your pardon, and thank you, sir; the first for what I have
thought, and the second for what you are doing.”

Cornelius blushed, and said, “I am but doing my duty as a Christian in
helping my neighbour.”

“Yes, and affording him your help this evening, you have forgotten the
abuse which he heaped on you this morning. Oh, sir! this is more than
humanity,--this is indeed Christian charity.”

Cornelius cast his eyes on the beautiful girl, quite astonished to hear
from the mouth of one so humble such a noble and feeling speech.

But he had no time to express his surprise. Gryphus recovered from his
swoon, opened his eyes, and as his brutality was returning with his
senses, he growled “That’s it, a fellow is in a hurry to bring to a
prisoner his supper, and falls and breaks his arm, and is left lying on
the ground.”

“Hush, my father,” said Rosa, “you are unjust to this gentleman, whom I
found endeavouring to give you his aid.”

“His aid?” Gryphus replied, with a doubtful air.

“It is quite true, master! I am quite ready to help you still more.”

“You!” said Gryphus, “are you a medical man?”

“It was formerly my profession.”

“And so you would be able to set my arm?”

“Perfectly.”

“And what would you need to do it? let us hear.”

“Two splinters of wood, and some linen for a bandage.”

“Do you hear, Rosa?” said Gryphus, “the prisoner is going to set my arm,
that’s a saving; come, assist me to get up, I feel as heavy as lead.”

Rosa lent the sufferer her shoulder; he put his unhurt arm around her
neck, and making an effort, got on his legs, whilst Cornelius, to save
him a walk, pushed a chair towards him.

Gryphus sat down; then, turning towards his daughter, he said,--

“Well, didn’t you hear? go and fetch what is wanted.”

Rosa went down, and immediately after returned with two staves of a
small barrel and a large roll of linen bandage.

Cornelius had made use of the intervening moments to take off the man’s
coat, and to tuck up his shirt sleeve.

“Is this what you require, sir?” asked Rosa.

“Yes, mademoiselle,” answered Cornelius, looking at the things she had
brought,--“yes, that’s right. Now push this table, whilst I support the
arm of your father.”

Rosa pushed the table, Cornelius placed the broken arm on it so as
to make it flat, and with perfect skill set the bone, adjusted the
splinters, and fastened the bandages.

At the last touch, the jailer fainted a second time.

“Go and fetch vinegar, mademoiselle,” said Cornelius; “we will bathe his
temples, and he will recover.”

But, instead of acting up to the doctor’s prescription, Rosa, after
having satisfied herself that her father was still unconscious,
approached Cornelius and said,--

“Service for service, sir.”

“What do you mean, my pretty child?” said Cornelius.

“I mean to say, sir, that the judge who is to examine you to-morrow has
inquired to-day for the room in which you are confined, and, on being
told that you are occupying the cell of Mynheer Cornelius de Witt,
laughed in a very strange and very disagreeable manner, which makes me
fear that no good awaits you.”

“But,” asked Cornelius, “what harm can they do to me?”

“Look at that gibbet.”

“But I am not guilty,” said Cornelius.

“Were they guilty whom you see down there gibbeted, mangled, and torn to
pieces?”

“That’s true,” said Cornelius, gravely.

“And besides,” continued Rosa, “the people want to find you guilty. But
whether innocent or guilty, your trial begins to-morrow, and the day
after you will be condemned. Matters are settled very quickly in these
times.”

“Well, and what do you conclude from all this?”

“I conclude that I am alone, that I am weak, that my father is lying in
a swoon, that the dog is muzzled, and that consequently there is nothing
to prevent your making your escape. Fly, then; that’s what I mean.”

“What do you say?”

“I say that I was not able to save Mynheer Cornelius or Mynheer John
de Witt, and that I should like to save you. Only be quick; there, my
father is regaining his breath, one minute more, and he will open his
eyes, and it will be too late. Do you hesitate?”

In fact, Cornelius stood immovable, looking at Rosa, yet looking at her
as if he did not hear her.

“Don’t you understand me?” said the young girl, with some impatience.

“Yes, I do,” said Cornelius, “but----”

“But?”

“I will not, they would accuse you.”

“Never mind,” said Rosa, blushing, “never mind that.”

“You are very good, my dear child,” replied Cornelius, “but I stay.”

“You stay, oh, sir! oh, sir! don’t you understand that you will be
condemned to death, executed on the scaffold, perhaps assassinated
and torn to pieces, just like Mynheer John and Mynheer Cornelius. For
heaven’s sake, don’t think of me, but fly from this place. Take care, it
bears ill luck to the De Witts!”

“Halloa!” cried the jailer, recovering his senses, “who is talking of
those rogues, those wretches, those villains, the De Witts?”

“Don’t be angry, my good man,” said Cornelius, with his good-tempered
smile, “the worst thing for a fracture is excitement, by which the blood
is heated.”

Thereupon, he said in an undertone to Rosa--

“My child, I am innocent, and I shall await my trial with tranquillity
and an easy mind.”

“Hush,” said Rosa.

“Why hush?”

“My father must not suppose that we have been talking to each other.”

“What harm would that do?”

“What harm? He would never allow me to come here any more,” said Rosa.

Cornelius received this innocent confidence with a smile; he felt as if
a ray of good fortune were shining on his path.

“Now, then, what are you chattering there together about?” said Gryphus,
rising and supporting his right arm with his left.

“Nothing,” said Rosa; “the doctor is explaining to me what diet you are
to keep.”

“Diet, diet for me? Well, my fine girl, I shall put you on diet too.”

“On what diet, my father?”

“Never to go to the cells of the prisoners, and, if ever you should
happen to go, to leave them as soon as possible. Come, off with me, lead
the way, and be quick.”

Rosa and Cornelius exchanged glances.

That of Rosa tried to express,--

“There, you see?”

That of Cornelius said,--

“Let it be as the Lord wills.”




Chapter 11. Cornelius van Baerle’s Will


Rosa had not been mistaken; the judges came on the following day to the
Buytenhof, and proceeded with the trial of Cornelius van Baerle. The
examination, however, did not last long, it having appeared on evidence
that Cornelius had kept at his house that fatal correspondence of the
brothers De Witt with France.

He did not deny it.

The only point about which there seemed any difficulty was whether this
correspondence had been intrusted to him by his godfather, Cornelius de
Witt.

But as, since the death of those two martyrs, Van Baerle had no longer
any reason for withholding the truth, he not only did not deny that the
parcel had been delivered to him by Cornelius de Witt himself, but he
also stated all the circumstances under which it was done.

This confession involved the godson in the crime of the godfather;
manifest complicity being considered to exist between Cornelius de Witt
and Cornelius van Baerle.

The honest doctor did not confine himself to this avowal, but told the
whole truth with regard to his own tastes, habits, and daily life. He
described his indifference to politics, his love of study, of the fine
arts, of science, and of flowers. He explained that, since the day when
Cornelius de Witt handed to him the parcel at Dort, he himself had never
touched, nor even noticed it.

To this it was objected, that in this respect he could not possibly be
speaking the truth, since the papers had been deposited in a press in
which both his hands and his eyes must have been engaged every day.

Cornelius answered that it was indeed so; that, however, he never put
his hand into the press but to ascertain whether his bulbs were dry,
and that he never looked into it but to see if they were beginning to
sprout.

To this again it was objected, that his pretended indifference
respecting this deposit was not to be reasonably entertained, as he
could not have received such papers from the hand of his godfather
without being made acquainted with their important character.

He replied that his godfather Cornelius loved him too well, and, above
all, that he was too considerate a man to have communicated to him
anything of the contents of the parcel, well knowing that such a
confidence would only have caused anxiety to him who received it.

To this it was objected that, if De Witt had wished to act in such
a way, he would have added to the parcel, in case of accidents, a
certificate setting forth that his godson was an entire stranger to the
nature of this correspondence, or at least he would during his
trial have written a letter to him, which might be produced as his
justification.

Cornelius replied that undoubtedly his godfather could not have thought
that there was any risk for the safety of his deposit, hidden as it
was in a press which was looked upon as sacred as the tabernacle by the
whole household of Van Baerle; and that consequently he had considered
the certificate as useless. As to a letter, he certainly had some
remembrance that some moments previous to his arrest, whilst he was
absorbed in the contemplation of one of the rarest of his bulbs, John de
Witt’s servant entered his dry-room, and handed to him a paper, but the
whole was to him only like a vague dream; the servant had disappeared,
and as to the paper, perhaps it might be found if a proper search were
made.

As far as Craeke was concerned, it was impossible to find him, as he had
left Holland.

The paper also was not very likely to be found, and no one gave himself
the trouble to look for it.

Cornelius himself did not much press this point, since, even supposing
that the paper should turn up, it could not have any direct connection
with the correspondence which constituted the crime.

The judges wished to make it appear as though they wanted to urge
Cornelius to make a better defence; they displayed that benevolent
patience which is generally a sign of the magistrate’s being interested
for the prisoner, or of a man’s having so completely got the better of
his adversary that he needs no longer any oppressive means to ruin him.

Cornelius did not accept of this hypocritical protection, and in a last
answer, which he set forth with the noble bearing of a martyr and the
calm serenity of a righteous man, he said,--

“You ask me things, gentlemen, to which I can answer only the exact
truth. Hear it. The parcel was put into my hands in the way I have
described; I vow before God that I was, and am still, ignorant of its
contents, and that it was not until my arrest that I learned that this
deposit was the correspondence of the Grand Pensionary with the Marquis
de Louvois. And lastly, I vow and protest that I do not understand how
any one should have known that this parcel was in my house; and,
above all, how I can be deemed criminal for having received what my
illustrious and unfortunate godfather brought to my house.”

This was Van Baerle’s whole defence; after which the judges began to
deliberate on the verdict.

They considered that every offshoot of civil discord is mischievous,
because it revives the contest which it is the interest of all to put
down.

One of them, who bore the character of a profound observer, laid down
as his opinion that this young man, so phlegmatic in appearance, must
in reality be very dangerous, as under this icy exterior he was sure to
conceal an ardent desire to avenge his friends, the De Witts.

Another observed that the love of tulips agreed perfectly well with that
of politics, and that it was proved in history that many very dangerous
men were engaged in gardening, just as if it had been their profession,
whilst really they occupied themselves with perfectly different
concerns; witness Tarquin the Elder, who grew poppies at Gabii, and the
Great Condé, who watered his carnations at the dungeon of Vincennes at
the very moment when the former meditated his return to Rome, and the
latter his escape from prison.

The judge summed up with the following dilemma:--

“Either Cornelius van Baerle is a great lover of tulips, or a great
lover of politics; in either case, he has told us a falsehood; first,
because his having occupied himself with politics is proved by the
letters which were found at his house; and secondly, because his having
occupied himself with tulips is proved by the bulbs which leave no doubt
of the fact. And herein lies the enormity of the case. As Cornelius
van Baerle was concerned in the growing of tulips and in the pursuit of
politics at one and the same time, the prisoner is of hybrid character,
of an amphibious organisation, working with equal ardour at politics and
at tulips, which proves him to belong to the class of men most dangerous
to public tranquillity, and shows a certain, or rather a complete,
analogy between his character and that of those master minds of which
Tarquin the Elder and the Great Condé have been felicitously quoted as
examples.”

The upshot of all these reasonings was, that his Highness the Prince
Stadtholder of Holland would feel infinitely obliged to the magistracy
of the Hague if they simplified for him the government of the Seven
Provinces by destroying even the least germ of conspiracy against his
authority.

This argument capped all the others, and, in order so much the more
effectually to destroy the germ of conspiracy, sentence of death was
unanimously pronounced against Cornelius van Baerle, as being
arraigned, and convicted, for having, under the innocent appearance of
a tulip-fancier, participated in the detestable intrigues and abominable
plots of the brothers De Witt against Dutch nationality and in their
secret relations with their French enemy.

A supplementary clause was tacked to the sentence, to the effect that
“the aforesaid Cornelius van Baerle should be led from the prison of the
Buytenhof to the scaffold in the yard of the same name, where the public
executioner would cut off his head.”

As this deliberation was a most serious affair, it lasted a full
half-hour, during which the prisoner was remanded to his cell.

There the Recorder of the States came to read the sentence to him.

Master Gryphus was detained in bed by the fever caused by the fracture
of his arm. His keys passed into the hands of one of his assistants.
Behind this turnkey, who introduced the Recorder, Rosa, the fair Frisian
maid, had slipped into the recess of the door, with a handkerchief to
her mouth to stifle her sobs.

Cornelius listened to the sentence with an expression rather of surprise
than sadness.

After the sentence was read, the Recorder asked him whether he had
anything to answer.

“Indeed, I have not,” he replied. “Only I confess that, among all the
causes of death against which a cautious man may guard, I should never
have supposed this to be comprised.”

On this answer, the Recorder saluted Van Baerle with all that
consideration which such functionaries generally bestow upon great
criminals of every sort.

But whilst he was about to withdraw, Cornelius asked, “By the bye, Mr.
Recorder, what day is the thing--you know what I mean--to take place?”

“Why, to-day,” answered the Recorder, a little surprised by the
self-possession of the condemned man.

A sob was heard behind the door, and Cornelius turned round to look from
whom it came; but Rosa, who had foreseen this movement, had fallen back.

“And,” continued Cornelius, “what hour is appointed?”

“Twelve o’clock, sir.”

“Indeed,” said Cornelius, “I think I heard the clock strike ten about
twenty minutes ago; I have not much time to spare.”

“Indeed you have not, if you wish to make your peace with God,” said
the Recorder, bowing to the ground. “You may ask for any clergyman you
please.”

Saying these words he went out backwards, and the assistant turnkey was
going to follow him, and to lock the door of Cornelius’s cell, when a
white and trembling arm interposed between him and the heavy door.

Cornelius saw nothing but the golden brocade cap, tipped with lace, such
as the Frisian girls wore; he heard nothing but some one whispering into
the ear of the turnkey. But the latter put his heavy keys into the
white hand which was stretched out to receive them, and, descending
some steps, sat down on the staircase which was thus guarded above
by himself, and below by the dog. The head-dress turned round, and
Cornelius beheld the face of Rosa, blanched with grief, and her
beautiful eyes streaming with tears.

She went up to Cornelius, crossing her arms on her heaving breast.

“Oh, sir, sir!” she said, but sobs choked her utterance.

“My good girl,” Cornelius replied with emotion, “what do you wish? I may
tell you that my time on earth is short.”

“I come to ask a favour of you,” said Rosa, extending her arms partly
towards him and partly towards heaven.

“Don’t weep so, Rosa,” said the prisoner, “for your tears go much more
to my heart than my approaching fate, and you know, the less guilty a
prisoner is, the more it is his duty to die calmly, and even joyfully,
as he dies a martyr. Come, there’s a dear, don’t cry any more, and tell
me what you want, my pretty Rosa.”

She fell on her knees. “Forgive my father,” she said.

“Your father, your father!” said Cornelius, astonished.

“Yes, he has been so harsh to you; but it is his nature, he is so to
every one, and you are not the only one whom he has bullied.”

“He is punished, my dear Rosa, more than punished, by the accident that
has befallen him, and I forgive him.”

“I thank you, sir,” said Rosa. “And now tell me--oh, tell me--can I do
anything for you?”

“You can dry your beautiful eyes, my dear child,” answered Cornelius,
with a good-tempered smile.

“But what can I do for you,--for you I mean?”

“A man who has only one hour longer to live must be a great Sybarite
still to want anything, my dear Rosa.”

“The clergyman whom they have proposed to you?”

“I have worshipped God all my life, I have worshipped Him in His works,
and praised Him in His decrees. I am at peace with Him and do not wish
for a clergyman. The last thought which occupies my mind, however has
reference to the glory of the Almighty, and, indeed, my dear, I should
ask you to help me in carrying out this last thought.”

“Oh, Mynheer Cornelius, speak, speak!” exclaimed Rosa, still bathed in
tears.

“Give me your hand, and promise me not to laugh, my dear child.”

“Laugh,” exclaimed Rosa, frantic with grief, “laugh at this moment! do
you not see my tears?”

“Rosa, you are no stranger to me. I have not seen much of you, but that
little is enough to make me appreciate your character. I have never seen
a woman more fair or more pure than you are, and if from this moment I
take no more notice of you, forgive me; it is only because, on leaving
this world, I do not wish to have any further regret.”

Rosa felt a shudder creeping over her frame, for, whilst the prisoner
pronounced these words, the belfry clock of the Buytenhof struck eleven.

Cornelius understood her. “Yes, yes, let us make haste,” he said, “you
are right, Rosa.”

Then, taking the paper with the three suckers from his breast, where he
had again put it, since he had no longer any fear of being searched,
he said: “My dear girl, I have been very fond of flowers. That was at a
time when I did not know that there was anything else to be loved. Don’t
blush, Rosa, nor turn away; and even if I were making you a declaration
of love, alas! poor dear, it would be of no more consequence. Down there
in the yard, there is an instrument of steel, which in sixty minutes
will put an end to my boldness. Well, Rosa, I loved flowers dearly, and
I have found, or at least I believe so, the secret of the great black
tulip, which it has been considered impossible to grow, and for which,
as you know, or may not know, a prize of a hundred thousand guilders
has been offered by the Horticultural Society of Haarlem. These hundred
thousand guilders--and Heaven knows I do not regret them--these hundred
thousand guilders I have here in this paper, for they are won by the
three bulbs wrapped up in it, which you may take, Rosa, as I make you a
present of them.”

“Mynheer Cornelius!”

“Yes, yes, Rosa, you may take them; you are not wronging any one, my
child. I am alone in this world; my parents are dead; I never had a
sister or a brother. I have never had a thought of loving any one with
what is called love, and if any one has loved me, I have not known it.
However, you see well, Rosa, that I am abandoned by everybody, as
in this sad hour you alone are with me in my prison, consoling and
assisting me.”

“But, sir, a hundred thousand guilders!”

“Well, let us talk seriously, my dear child: those hundred thousand
guilders will be a nice marriage portion, with your pretty face; you
shall have them, Rosa, dear Rosa, and I ask nothing in return but your
promise that you will marry a fine young man, whom you love, and who
will love you, as dearly as I loved my flowers. Don’t interrupt me, Rosa
dear, I have only a few minutes more.”

The poor girl was nearly choking with her sobs.

Cornelius took her by the hand.

“Listen to me,” he continued: “I’ll tell you how to manage it. Go to
Dort and ask Butruysheim, my gardener, for soil from my border number
six, fill a deep box with it, and plant in it these three bulbs. They
will flower next May, that is to say, in seven months; and, when you see
the flower forming on the stem, be careful at night to protect them
from the wind, and by day to screen them from the sun. They will flower
black, I am quite sure of it. You are then to apprise the President of
the Haarlem Society. He will cause the color of the flower to be proved
before a committee and these hundred thousand guilders will be paid to
you.”

Rosa heaved a deep sigh.

“And now,” continued Cornelius,--wiping away a tear which was glistening
in his eye, and which was shed much more for that marvellous black
tulip which he was not to see than for the life which he was about to
lose,--“I have no wish left, except that the tulip should be called Rosa
Barlœnsis, that is to say, that its name should combine yours and mine;
and as, of course, you do not understand Latin, and might therefore
forget this name, try to get for me pencil and paper, that I may write
it down for you.”

Rosa sobbed afresh, and handed to him a book, bound in shagreen, which
bore the initials C. W.

“What is this?” asked the prisoner.

“Alas!” replied Rosa, “it is the Bible of your poor godfather, Cornelius
de Witt. From it he derived strength to endure the torture, and to bear
his sentence without flinching. I found it in this cell, after the death
of the martyr, and have preserved it as a relic. To-day I brought it to
you, for it seemed to me that this book must possess in itself a divine
power. Write in it what you have to write, Mynheer Cornelius; and
though, unfortunately, I am not able to read, I will take care that what
you write shall be accomplished.”

Cornelius took the Bible, and kissed it reverently.

“With what shall I write?” asked Cornelius.

“There is a pencil in the Bible,” said Rosa.

This was the pencil which John de Witt had lent to his brother, and
which he had forgotten to take away with him.

Cornelius took it, and on the second fly leaf (for it will be remembered
that the first was torn out), drawing near his end like his godfather,
he wrote with a no less firm hand:--

“On this day, the 23d of August, 1672, being on the point of rendering,
although innocent, my soul to God on the scaffold, I bequeath to Rosa
Gryphus the only worldly goods which remain to me of all that I have
possessed in this world, the rest having been confiscated; I bequeath, I
say, to Rosa Gryphus three bulbs, which I am convinced must produce,
in the next May, the Grand Black Tulip for which a prize of a hundred
thousand guilders has been offered by the Haarlem Society, requesting
that she may be paid the same sum in my stead, as my sole heiress, under
the only condition of her marrying a respectable young man of about
my age, who loves her, and whom she loves, and of her giving the black
tulip, which will constitute a new species, the name of Rosa Barlœnsis,
that is to say, hers and mine combined.

“So may God grant me mercy, and to her health and long life!

“Cornelius van Baerle.”

The prisoner then, giving the Bible to Rosa, said,--

“Read.”

“Alas!” she answered, “I have already told you I cannot read.”

Cornelius then read to Rosa the testament that he had just made.

The agony of the poor girl almost overpowered her.

“Do you accept my conditions?” asked the prisoner, with a melancholy
smile, kissing the trembling hands of the afflicted girl.

“Oh, I don’t know, sir,” she stammered.

“You don’t know, child, and why not?”

“Because there is one condition which I am afraid I cannot keep.”

“Which? I should have thought that all was settled between us.”

“You give me the hundred thousand guilders as a marriage portion, don’t
you?”

“Yes.”

“And under the condition of my marrying a man whom I love?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, then, sir, this money cannot belong to me. I shall never love any
one; neither shall I marry.”

And, after having with difficulty uttered these words, Rosa almost
swooned away in the violence of her grief.

Cornelius, frightened at seeing her so pale and sinking, was going
to take her in his arms, when a heavy step, followed by other dismal
sounds, was heard on the staircase, amidst the continued barking of the
dog.

“They are coming to fetch you. Oh God! Oh God!” cried Rosa, wringing her
hands. “And have you nothing more to tell me?”

She fell on her knees with her face buried in her hands and became
almost senseless.

“I have only to say, that I wish you to preserve these bulbs as a
most precious treasure, and carefully to treat them according to the
directions I have given you. Do it for my sake, and now farewell, Rosa.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, without raising her head, “I will do anything you
bid me, except marrying,” she added, in a low voice, “for that, oh! that
is impossible for me.”

She then put the cherished treasure next her beating heart.

The noise on the staircase which Cornelius and Rosa had heard was caused
by the Recorder, who was coming for the prisoner. He was followed by
the executioner, by the soldiers who were to form the guard round the
scaffold, and by some curious hangers-on of the prison.

Cornelius, without showing any weakness, but likewise without any
bravado, received them rather as friends than as persecutors, and
quietly submitted to all those preparations which these men were obliged
to make in performance of their duty.

Then, casting a glance into the yard through the narrow iron-barred
window of his cell, he perceived the scaffold, and, at twenty paces
distant from it, the gibbet, from which, by order of the Stadtholder,
the outraged remains of the two brothers De Witt had been taken down.

When the moment came to descend in order to follow the guards, Cornelius
sought with his eyes the angelic look of Rosa, but he saw, behind the
swords and halberds, only a form lying outstretched near a wooden bench,
and a deathlike face half covered with long golden locks.

But Rosa, whilst falling down senseless, still obeying her friend, had
pressed her hand on her velvet bodice and, forgetting everything in
the world besides, instinctively grasped the precious deposit which
Cornelius had intrusted to her care.

Leaving the cell, the young man could still see in the convulsively
clinched fingers of Rosa the yellowish leaf from that Bible on which
Cornelius de Witt had with such difficulty and pain written these few
lines, which, if Van Baerle had read them, would undoubtedly have been
the saving of a man and a tulip.




Chapter 12. The Execution


Cornelius had not three hundred paces to walk outside the prison to
reach the foot of the scaffold. At the bottom of the staircase, the dog
quietly looked at him whilst he was passing; Cornelius even fancied
he saw in the eyes of the monster a certain expression as it were of
compassion.

The dog perhaps knew the condemned prisoners, and only bit those who
left as free men.

The shorter the way from the door of the prison to the foot of the
scaffold, the more fully, of course, it was crowded with curious people.

These were the same who, not satisfied with the blood which they had
shed three days before, were now craving for a new victim.

And scarcely had Cornelius made his appearance than a fierce groan ran
through the whole street, spreading all over the yard, and re-echoing
from the streets which led to the scaffold, and which were likewise
crowded with spectators.

The scaffold indeed looked like an islet at the confluence of several
rivers.

In the midst of these threats, groans, and yells, Cornelius, very likely
in order not to hear them, had buried himself in his own thoughts.

And what did he think of in his last melancholy journey?

Neither of his enemies, nor of his judges, nor of his executioners.

He thought of the beautiful tulips which he would see from heaven above,
at Ceylon, or Bengal, or elsewhere, when he would be able to look with
pity on this earth, where John and Cornelius de Witt had been murdered
for having thought too much of politics, and where Cornelius van Baerle
was about to be murdered for having thought too much of tulips.

“It is only one stroke of the axe,” said the philosopher to himself,
“and my beautiful dream will begin to be realised.”

Only there was still a chance, just as it had happened before to M. de
Chalais, to M. de Thou, and other slovenly executed people, that the
headsman might inflict more than one stroke, that is to say, more than
one martyrdom, on the poor tulip-fancier.

Yet, notwithstanding all this, Van Baerle mounted the scaffold not the
less resolutely, proud of having been the friend of that illustrious
John, and godson of that noble Cornelius de Witt, whom the ruffians, who
were now crowding to witness his own doom, had torn to pieces and burnt
three days before.

He knelt down, said his prayers, and observed, not without a feeling of
sincere joy, that, laying his head on the block, and keeping his eyes
open, he would be able to his last moment to see the grated window of
the Buytenhof.

At length the fatal moment arrived, and Cornelius placed his chin on the
cold damp block. But at this moment his eyes closed involuntarily, to
receive more resolutely the terrible avalanche which was about to fall
on his head, and to engulf his life.

A gleam like that of lightning passed across the scaffold: it was the
executioner raising his sword.

Van Baerle bade farewell to the great black tulip, certain of awaking in
another world full of light and glorious tints.

Three times he felt, with a shudder, the cold current of air from the
knife near his neck, but what a surprise! he felt neither pain nor
shock.

He saw no change in the colour of the sky, or of the world around him.

Then suddenly Van Baerle felt gentle hands raising him, and soon stood
on his feet again, although trembling a little.

He looked around him. There was some one by his side, reading a large
parchment, sealed with a huge seal of red wax.

And the same sun, yellow and pale, as it behooves a Dutch sun to be, was
shining in the skies; and the same grated window looked down upon
him from the Buytenhof; and the same rabble, no longer yelling, but
completely thunderstruck, were staring at him from the streets below.

Van Baerle began to be sensible to what was going on around him.

His Highness, William, Prince of Orange, very likely afraid that
Van Baerle’s blood would turn the scale of judgment against him, had
compassionately taken into consideration his good character, and the
apparent proofs of his innocence.

His Highness, accordingly, had granted him his life.

Cornelius at first hoped that the pardon would be complete, and that he
would be restored to his full liberty and to his flower borders at Dort.

But Cornelius was mistaken. To use an expression of Madame de Sévigné,
who wrote about the same time, “there was a postscript to the letter;”
 and the most important part of the letter was contained in the
postscript.

In this postscript, William of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, condemned
Cornelius van Baerle to imprisonment for life. He was not sufficiently
guilty to suffer death, but he was too much so to be set at liberty.

Cornelius heard this clause, but, the first feeling of vexation and
disappointment over, he said to himself,--

“Never mind, all this is not lost yet; there is some good in this
perpetual imprisonment; Rosa will be there, and also my three bulbs of
the black tulip are there.”

But Cornelius forgot that the Seven Provinces had seven prisons, one for
each, and that the board of the prisoner is anywhere else less expensive
than at the Hague, which is a capital.

His Highness, who, as it seems, did not possess the means to feed Van
Baerle at the Hague, sent him to undergo his perpetual imprisonment at
the fortress of Loewestein, very near Dort, but, alas! also very far
from it; for Loewestein, as the geographers tell us, is situated at the
point of the islet which is formed by the confluence of the Waal and the
Meuse, opposite Gorcum.

Van Baerle was sufficiently versed in the history of his country to know
that the celebrated Grotius was confined in that castle after the
death of Barneveldt; and that the States, in their generosity to the
illustrious publicist, jurist, historian, poet, and divine, had granted
to him for his daily maintenance the sum of twenty-four stivers.

“I,” said Van Baerle to himself, “I am worth much less than Grotius.
They will hardly give me twelve stivers, and I shall live miserably; but
never mind, at all events I shall live.”

Then suddenly a terrible thought struck him.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, “how damp and misty that part of the country is,
and the soil so bad for the tulips! And then Rosa will not be at
Loewestein!”




Chapter 13. What was going on all this Time in the Mind of one of the
Spectators


Whilst Cornelius was engaged with his own thoughts, a coach had driven
up to the scaffold. This vehicle was for the prisoner. He was invited to
enter it, and he obeyed.

His last look was towards the Buytenhof. He hoped to see at the window
the face of Rosa, brightening up again.

But the coach was drawn by good horses, who soon carried Van Baerle
away from among the shouts which the rabble roared in honour of the most
magnanimous Stadtholder, mixing with it a spice of abuse against the
brothers De Witt and the godson of Cornelius, who had just now been
saved from death.

This reprieve suggested to the worthy spectators remarks such as the
following:--

“It’s very fortunate that we used such speed in having justice done to
that great villain John, and to that little rogue Cornelius, otherwise
his Highness might have snatched them from us, just as he has done this
fellow.”

Among all the spectators whom Van Baerle’s execution had attracted to
the Buytenhof, and whom the sudden turn of affairs had disagreeably
surprised, undoubtedly the one most disappointed was a certain
respectably dressed burgher, who from early morning had made such a
good use of his feet and elbows that he at last was separated from the
scaffold only by the file of soldiers which surrounded it.

Many had shown themselves eager to see the perfidious blood of the
guilty Cornelius flow, but not one had shown such a keen anxiety as the
individual just alluded to.

The most furious had come to the Buytenhof at daybreak, to secure a
better place; but he, outdoing even them, had passed the night at the
threshold of the prison, from whence, as we have already said, he had
advanced to the very foremost rank, unguibus et rostro,--that is to say,
coaxing some, and kicking the others.

And when the executioner had conducted the prisoner to the scaffold, the
burgher, who had mounted on the stone of the pump the better to see and
be seen, made to the executioner a sign which meant,--

“It’s a bargain, isn’t it?”

The executioner answered by another sign, which was meant to say,--

“Be quiet, it’s all right.”

This burgher was no other than Mynheer Isaac Boxtel, who since the
arrest of Cornelius had come to the Hague to try if he could not get
hold of the three bulbs of the black tulip.

Boxtel had at first tried to gain over Gryphus to his interest, but the
jailer had not only the snarling fierceness, but likewise the fidelity,
of a dog. He had therefore bristled up at Boxtel’s hatred, whom he had
suspected to be a warm friend of the prisoner, making trifling inquiries
to contrive with the more certainty some means of escape for him.

Thus to the very first proposals which Boxtel made to Gryphus to filch
the bulbs which Cornelius van Baerle must be supposed to conceal, if not
in his breast, at least in some corner of his cell, the surly jailer had
only answered by kicking Mynheer Isaac out, and setting the dog at him.

The piece which the mastiff had torn from his hose did not discourage
Boxtel. He came back to the charge, but this time Gryphus was in bed,
feverish, and with a broken arm. He therefore was not able to admit the
petitioner, who then addressed himself to Rosa, offering to buy her a
head-dress of pure gold if she would get the bulbs for him. On this, the
generous girl, although not yet knowing the value of the object of the
robbery, which was to be so well remunerated, had directed the tempter
to the executioner, as the heir of the prisoner.

In the meanwhile the sentence had been pronounced. Thus Isaac had no
more time to bribe any one. He therefore clung to the idea which Rosa
had suggested: he went to the executioner.

Isaac had not the least doubt that Cornelius would die with the bulbs on
his heart.

But there were two things which Boxtel did not calculate upon:--

Rosa, that is to say, love;

William of Orange, that is to say, clemency.

But for Rosa and William, the calculations of the envious neighbour
would have been correct.

But for William, Cornelius would have died.

But for Rosa, Cornelius would have died with his bulbs on his heart.

Mynheer Boxtel went to the headsman, to whom he gave himself out as
a great friend of the condemned man; and from whom he bought all the
clothes of the dead man that was to be, for one hundred guilders; rather
an exorbitant sum, as he engaged to leave all the trinkets of gold and
silver to the executioner.

But what was the sum of a hundred guilders to a man who was all but sure
to buy with it the prize of the Haarlem Society?

It was money lent at a thousand per cent., which, as nobody will deny,
was a very handsome investment.

The headsman, on the other hand, had scarcely anything to do to earn his
hundred guilders. He needed only, as soon as the execution was over, to
allow Mynheer Boxtel to ascend the scaffold with his servants, to remove
the inanimate remains of his friend.

The thing was, moreover, quite customary among the “faithful brethren,”
 when one of their masters died a public death in the yard of the
Buytenhof.

A fanatic like Cornelius might very easily have found another fanatic
who would give a hundred guilders for his remains.

The executioner also readily acquiesced in the proposal, making only one
condition,--that of being paid in advance.

Boxtel, like the people who enter a show at a fair, might be
disappointed, and refuse to pay on going out.

Boxtel paid in advance, and waited.

After this, the reader may imagine how excited Boxtel was; with what
anxiety he watched the guards, the Recorder, and the executioner; and
with what intense interest he surveyed the movements of Van Baerle. How
would he place himself on the block? how would he fall? and would he
not, in falling, crush those inestimable bulbs? had not he at least
taken care to enclose them in a golden box,--as gold is the hardest of
all metals?

Every trifling delay irritated him. Why did that stupid executioner thus
lose time in brandishing his sword over the head of Cornelius, instead
of cutting that head off?

But when he saw the Recorder take the hand of the condemned, and raise
him, whilst drawing forth the parchment from his pocket,--when he heard
the pardon of the Stadtholder publicly read out,--then Boxtel was no
more like a human being; the rage and malice of the tiger, of the hyena,
and of the serpent glistened in his eyes, and vented itself in his yell
and his movements. Had he been able to get at Van Baerle, he would have
pounced upon him and strangled him.

And so, then, Cornelius was to live, and was to go with him to
Loewestein, and thither to his prison he would take with him his bulbs;
and perhaps he would even find a garden where the black tulip would
flower for him.

Boxtel, quite overcome by his frenzy, fell from the stone upon some
Orangemen, who, like him, were sorely vexed at the turn which affairs
had taken. They, mistaking the frantic cries of Mynheer Isaac for
demonstrations of joy, began to belabour him with kicks and cuffs, such
as could not have been administered in better style by any prize-fighter
on the other side of the Channel.

Blows were, however, nothing to him. He wanted to run after the coach
which was carrying away Cornelius with his bulbs. But in his hurry
he overlooked a paving-stone in his way, stumbled, lost his centre of
gravity, rolled over to a distance of some yards, and only rose again,
bruised and begrimed, after the whole rabble of the Hague, with their
muddy feet, had passed over him.

One would think that this was enough for one day, but Mynheer Boxtel did
not seem to think so, as, in addition to having his clothes torn, his
back bruised, and his hands scratched, he inflicted upon himself the
further punishment of tearing out his hair by handfuls, as an offering
to that goddess of envy who, as mythology teaches us, wears a head-dress
of serpents.




Chapter 14. The Pigeons of Dort


It was indeed in itself a great honour for Cornelius van Baerle to be
confined in the same prison which had once received the learned master
Grotius.

But on arriving at the prison he met with an honour even greater. As
chance would have it, the cell formerly inhabited by the illustrious
Barneveldt happened to be vacant, when the clemency of the Prince of
Orange sent the tulip-fancier Van Baerle there.

The cell had a very bad character at the castle since the time when
Grotius, by means of the device of his wife, made escape from it in that
famous book-chest which the jailers forgot to examine.

On the other hand, it seemed to Van Baerle an auspicious omen that this
very cell was assigned to him, for according to his ideas, a jailer
ought never to have given to a second pigeon the cage from which the
first had so easily flown.

The cell had an historical character. We will only state here that,
with the exception of an alcove which was contrived there for the use
of Madame Grotius, it differed in no respect from the other cells of the
prison; only, perhaps, it was a little higher, and had a splendid view
from the grated window.

Cornelius felt himself perfectly indifferent as to the place where he
had to lead an existence which was little more than vegetation. There
were only two things now for which he cared, and the possession of which
was a happiness enjoyed only in imagination.

A flower, and a woman; both of them, as he conceived, lost to him for
ever.

Fortunately the good doctor was mistaken. In his prison cell the most
adventurous life which ever fell to the lot of any tulip-fancier was
reserved for him.

One morning, whilst at his window inhaling the fresh air which came from
the river, and casting a longing look to the windmills of his dear
old city Dort, which were looming in the distance behind a forest of
chimneys, he saw flocks of pigeons coming from that quarter to perch
fluttering on the pointed gables of Loewestein.

These pigeons, Van Baerle said to himself, are coming from Dort, and
consequently may return there. By fastening a little note to the wing of
one of these pigeons, one might have a chance to send a message there.
Then, after a few moments’ consideration, he exclaimed,--

“I will do it.”

A man grows very patient who is twenty-eight years of age, and condemned
to a prison for life,--that is to say, to something like twenty-two or
twenty-three thousand days of captivity.

Van Baerle, from whose thoughts the three bulbs were never absent,
made a snare for catching the pigeons, baiting the birds with all the
resources of his kitchen, such as it was for eight slivers (sixpence
English) a day; and, after a month of unsuccessful attempts, he at last
caught a female bird.

It cost him two more months to catch a male bird; he then shut them up
together, and having about the beginning of the year 1673 obtained some
eggs from them, he released the female, which, leaving the male behind
to hatch the eggs in her stead, flew joyously to Dort, with the note
under her wing.

She returned in the evening. She had preserved the note.

Thus it went on for fifteen days, at first to the disappointment, and
then to the great grief, of Van Baerle.

On the sixteenth day, at last, she came back without it.

Van Baerle had addressed it to his nurse, the old Frisian woman; and
implored any charitable soul who might find it to convey it to her as
safely and as speedily as possible.

In this letter there was a little note enclosed for Rosa.

Van Baerle’s nurse had received the letter in the following way.

Leaving Dort, Mynheer Isaac Boxtel had abandoned, not only his house,
his servants, his observatory, and his telescope, but also his pigeons.

The servant, having been left without wages, first lived on his little
savings, and then on his master’s pigeons.

Seeing this, the pigeons emigrated from the roof of Isaac Boxtel to that
of Cornelius van Baerle.

The nurse was a kind-hearted woman, who could not live without something
to love. She conceived an affection for the pigeons which had thrown
themselves on her hospitality; and when Boxtel’s servant reclaimed them
with culinary intentions, having eaten the first fifteen already, and
now wishing to eat the other fifteen, she offered to buy them from him
for a consideration of six stivers per head.

This being just double their value, the man was very glad to close the
bargain, and the nurse found herself in undisputed possession of the
pigeons of her master’s envious neighbour.

In the course of their wanderings, these pigeons with others visited
the Hague, Loewestein, and Rotterdam, seeking variety, doubtless, in the
flavour of their wheat or hempseed.

Chance, or rather God, for we can see the hand of God in everything, had
willed that Cornelius van Baerle should happen to hit upon one of these
very pigeons.

Therefore, if the envious wretch had not left Dort to follow his
rival to the Hague in the first place, and then to Gorcum or to
Loewestein,--for the two places are separated only by the confluence of
the Waal and the Meuse,--Van Baerle’s letter would have fallen into his
hands and not the nurse’s: in which event the poor prisoner, like
the raven of the Roman cobbler, would have thrown away his time, his
trouble, and, instead of having to relate the series of exciting events
which are about to flow from beneath our pen like the varied hues of a
many coloured tapestry, we should have naught to describe but a weary
waste of days, dull and melancholy and gloomy as night’s dark mantle.

The note, as we have said, had reached Van Baerle’s nurse.

And also it came to pass, that one evening in the beginning of February,
just when the stars were beginning to twinkle, Cornelius heard on the
staircase of the little turret a voice which thrilled through him.

He put his hand on his heart, and listened.

It was the sweet harmonious voice of Rosa.

Let us confess it, Cornelius was not so stupefied with surprise, or
so beyond himself with joy, as he would have been but for the pigeon,
which, in answer to his letter, had brought back hope to him under her
empty wing; and, knowing Rosa, he expected, if the note had ever reached
her, to hear of her whom he loved, and also of his three darling bulbs.

He rose, listened once more, and bent forward towards the door.

Yes, they were indeed the accents which had fallen so sweetly on his
heart at the Hague.

The question now was, whether Rosa, who had made the journey from the
Hague to Loewestein, and who--Cornelius did not understand how--had
succeeded even in penetrating into the prison, would also be fortunate
enough in penetrating to the prisoner himself.

Whilst Cornelius, debating this point within himself, was building all
sorts of castles in the air, and was struggling between hope and fear,
the shutter of the grating in the door opened, and Rosa, beaming with
joy, and beautiful in her pretty national costume--but still more
beautiful from the grief which for the last five months had blanched her
cheeks--pressed her little face against the wire grating of the window,
saying to him,--

“Oh, sir, sir! here I am!”

Cornelius stretched out his arms, and, looking to heaven, uttered a cry
of joy,--

“Oh, Rosa, Rosa!”

“Hush! let us speak low: my father follows on my heels,” said the girl.

“Your father?”

“Yes, he is in the courtyard at the bottom of the staircase, receiving
the instructions of the Governor; he will presently come up.”

“The instructions of the Governor?”

“Listen to me, I’ll try to tell you all in a few words. The Stadtholder
has a country-house, one league distant from Leyden, properly speaking a
kind of large dairy, and my aunt, who was his nurse, has the management
of it. As soon as I received your letter, which, alas! I could not read
myself, but which your housekeeper read to me, I hastened to my aunt;
there I remained until the Prince should come to the dairy; and when he
came, I asked him as a favour to allow my father to exchange his post at
the prison of the Hague with the jailer of the fortress of Loewestein.
The Prince could not have suspected my object; had he known it, he would
have refused my request, but as it is he granted it.”

“And so you are here?”

“As you see.”

“And thus I shall see you every day?”

“As often as I can manage it.”

“Oh, Rosa, my beautiful Rosa, do you love me a little?”

“A little?” she said, “you make no great pretensions, Mynheer
Cornelius.”

Cornelius tenderly stretched out his hands towards her, but they were
only able to touch each other with the tips of their fingers through the
wire grating.

“Here is my father,” said she.

Rosa then abruptly drew back from the door, and ran to meet old Gryphus,
who made his appearance at the top of the staircase.




Chapter 15. The Little Grated Window


Gryphus was followed by the mastiff.

The turnkey took the animal round the jail, so that, if needs be, he
might recognize the prisoners.

“Father,” said Rosa, “here is the famous prison from which Mynheer
Grotius escaped. You know Mynheer Grotius?”

“Oh, yes, that rogue Grotius, a friend of that villain Barneveldt,
whom I saw executed when I was a child. Ah! so Grotius; and that’s the
chamber from which he escaped. Well, I’ll answer for it that no one
shall escape after him in my time.”

And thus opening the door, he began in the dark to talk to the prisoner.

The dog, on his part, went up to the prisoner, and, growling, smelled
about his legs just as though to ask him what right he had still to be
alive, after having left the prison in the company of the Recorder and
the executioner.

But the fair Rosa called him to her side.

“Well, my master,” said Gryphus, holding up his lantern to throw a
little light around, “you see in me your new jailer. I am head turnkey,
and have all the cells under my care. I am not vicious, but I’m not to
be trifled with, as far as discipline goes.”

“My good Master Gryphus, I know you perfectly well,” said the prisoner,
approaching within the circle of light cast around by the lantern.

“Halloa! that’s you, Mynheer van Baerle,” said Gryphus. “That’s you;
well, I declare, it’s astonishing how people do meet.”

“Oh, yes; and it’s really a great pleasure to me, good Master Gryphus,
to see that your arm is doing well, as you are able to hold your lantern
with it.”

Gryphus knitted his brow. “Now, that’s just it,” he said, “people always
make blunders in politics. His Highness has granted you your life; I’m
sure I should never have done so.”

“Don’t say so,” replied Cornelius; “why not?”

“Because you are the very man to conspire again. You learned people have
dealings with the devil.”

“Nonsense, Master Gryphus. Are you dissatisfied with the manner in
which I have set your arm, or with the price that I asked you?” said
Cornelius, laughing.

“On the contrary,” growled the jailer, “you have set it only too well.
There is some witchcraft in this. After six weeks, I was able to use
it as if nothing had happened, so much so, that the doctor of the
Buytenhof, who knows his trade well, wanted to break it again, to set it
in the regular way, and promised me that I should have my blessed three
months for my money before I should be able to move it.”

“And you did not want that?”

“I said, ‘Nay, as long as I can make the sign of the cross with that
arm’ (Gryphus was a Roman Catholic), ‘I laugh at the devil.’”

“But if you laugh at the devil, Master Gryphus, you ought with so much
more reason to laugh at learned people.”

“Ah, learned people, learned people! Why, I would rather have to guard
ten soldiers than one scholar. The soldiers smoke, guzzle, and get
drunk; they are gentle as lambs if you only give them brandy or Moselle,
but scholars, and drink, smoke, and fuddle--ah, yes, that’s altogether
different. They keep sober, spend nothing, and have their heads always
clear to make conspiracies. But I tell you, at the very outset, it won’t
be such an easy matter for you to conspire. First of all, you will
have no books, no paper, and no conjuring book. It’s books that helped
Mynheer Grotius to get off.”

“I assure you, Master Gryphus,” replied Van Baerle, “that if I have
entertained the idea of escaping, I most decidedly have it no longer.”

“Well, well,” said Gryphus, “just look sharp: that’s what I shall do
also. But, for all that, I say his Highness has made a great mistake.”

“Not to have cut off my head? thank you, Master Gryphus.”

“Just so, look whether the Mynheer de Witt don’t keep very quiet now.”

“That’s very shocking what you say now, Master Gryphus,” cried Van
Baerle, turning away his head to conceal his disgust. “You forget that
one of those unfortunate gentlemen was my friend, and the other my
second father.”

“Yes, but I also remember that the one, as well as the other, was a
conspirator. And, moreover, I am speaking from Christian charity.”

“Oh, indeed! explain that a little to me, my good Master Gryphus. I do
not quite understand it.”

“Well, then, if you had remained on the block of Master Harbruck----”

“What?”

“You would not suffer any longer; whereas, I will not disguise it from
you, I shall lead you a sad life of it.”

“Thank you for the promise, Master Gryphus.”

And whilst the prisoner smiled ironically at the old jailer, Rosa, from
the outside, answered by a bright smile, which carried sweet consolation
to the heart of Van Baerle.

Gryphus stepped towards the 

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