He bit his quill and fixed his eyes on M. de Witt, who was standing, not far away, on the gravel path talking to his companion.
The secretary marked with a calculating glance the Grand Pensionary’s stately figure, clothed sombrely in black, his pale oval face, under jawed, the full but curiously firm and clean-cut mouth shaded by the slight moustache, the large, weary brown eyes, the high brow over which fell the soft dark hair that was just beginning to be touched with grey, and contrasted his melancholy, noble air with the vivacious ease of the splendid Englishman whose rich comeliness was enhanced by his elegant and costly dress.
As he looked, the young man from Guelders wondered. M. de Witt had been Grand Pensionary of the United Provinces for seventeen years; the secretary had long taken him for granted as something always there, immovable as the law he represented, and had no more questioned the authority than he had the power of this first magistrate of the Republic.
Only with difficulty and by forcing his mind back to his childhood could he recall something of the famous coup d’état that had made M. de Witt head of the State.
He recollected dimly the excitement that had filled the country when the young Stadtholder, William the Second, had tried to seize Amsterdam and the absolute power of a king. He remembered going with other boys of his own age to break the windows of a house that had sported Orange favours, and being rebuked by the minister, and made to stay longer in the gaunt white church praying for strength to curb his feelings.
He remembered, too, the news of the sudden death of the Prince who had threatened their liberties, and how they had thanked God for it solemnly. After that there had been the Republic, which he had taken unquestioningly. M. de Witt stood for the United Provinces; as for the last Prince of Orange, born after his father’s death, the heir of a fallen House, the secretary had never heard much of him. There had been quarrels as to his education between M. de Witt and his uncle the Elector, between his grandmother and his mother the English Princess.…
The secretary remembered hearing, without interest, of the death of this lady in England, and of how her son, more than ever a State prisoner, was being educated by M. de Witt.
There seemed no reason why he, Florent Van Mander, of the town of Arnheim, a prudent, able young Dutchman, honourably and profitably employed in the service of the Grand Pensionary, should be so laboriously recalling every detail he had ever heard of William of Orange.
But two things had taken hold of a nature naturally observant, cautious, yet energetic and aspiring: the first was the conviction that M. de Witt held a position by no means as secure as it seemed, a position that, despite the treaty of Breda, despite the Triple Alliance, was one that he, the new secretary, must watch carefully if he would not be entangled in a falling cause; and the second was the impression that this youth, the son of the late Stadtholder, was a latent force in Holland that might one day become tremendous, overwhelming.