“No other exit at all?”
“None whatever, Mynheer,” admitted the frightened gaoler.
John de Witt bit his lower lip.
“Very well, I am going back to my brother,” he said
He had already been in the prison nearly two hours.
As he mounted the stairs he could hear, clearly enough, the shouts and cries of the mob.
Johanna’s fears and the tears of Anna—the placard of last night—were all very clear in his mind. He shuddered despite himself. There was an atmosphere about the dull, confined spaces of the prison sufficient in itself to depress the heart and check the delusions of hope.
The gaoler, alarmed by the turn things were taking, confided to M. de Witt that Michael Tichelaer, before his release that morning (he had been in prison during the trial of Cornelius) had uttered the most horrid threats against the brothers, so that he, Van Bossi, had sent to ask the judges to keep him in the prison until the Ruard was in safety.
But the judges had ordered Tichelaer to be released, declaring that they would see that order was preserved. But all the morning Tichelaer had been going up and down the Hague, inflaming the people by saying they were like to lose their victim through the foolish clemency of His Highness.
Van Bossi added that he would send his servant to the States, who were now sitting, asking them to dispatch a force to hold the people in check.