“Meidema, Meidema! pardon, mercy!” he kept on wailing in a voice which told of the most exquisite torture.
But gradually his cries grew weaker, at length they became hardly intelligible—they gurgled like a hoarse and dying rattle in the throat. The pain was beyond endurance. Still the men kept plying their deadly nettle.
At length his head began to dangle helplessly, and it seemed as if the unfortunate sufferer had lost consciousness.
Lim Ho had been fortunate enough to reach that state much earlier, and was thus sooner out of his misery.
Ardjan stood by at the scene, glaring at his victims with revengeful eagerness. He clenched his fists convulsively, he had to exercise the greatest self-control to prevent himself from catching up one of the bunches of kamadoog leaves and having his blow at the wretched beings who had not scrupled to inflict the same barbarous treatment upon himself. No, no, he felt not the smallest grain of pity—he could think only of his own wrongs and his own happiness destroyed for ever. Even if the voice of pity could have spoken within him it would have been stifled by his father, who, standing close behind him, kept on whispering in his ear: “Dalima, Dalima!”
For some time the two victims had been unconscious; but yet Ardjan did not think of putting a stop to the torture. At every blow, at every touch even of those terrible leaves the skin of the sufferers puckered up though the bodies no longer felt the pain. The muscles stretched, then ran up into knots and horrid spasms shot through the entire frames. Soon the bodies could no longer support themselves, but hung in the cords that bound them, limp as empty sacks. The eyes of the tortured men were closed; but every now and then they would spasmodically open for a moment, and would stare with a blood-shot stony gaze which betrayed the extreme suffering which even the senseless body was undergoing.
In their dying agonies they flung their heads convulsively to and fro, dashing them up fearfully against the Niboeng palm while flecks of foam came flying from their lips. But, in this world everything must come to an end, and at length the protracted sufferings were over.
Gradually the convulsive starts of the two bodies began to subside and finally ceased altogether. The soul had left its earthly tenement. Then Ardjan, in tones the most indifferent in the world, said, “Enough!”
At the word, his men looked at him for further instructions. “Untie them,” he said, and without speaking another word, he pointed to the sea.
The instant the ropes were cut through, the bodies fell with a heavy thud to the ground. As he fell van Gulpendam for the last time opened his eyes and, very softly, but quite intelligibly he sighed forth the single word: