"What I revenge would take?" he said boldly. "Nay! let me rather ask: what revenge must we take, citizens of Ghent? The tyrant even now has abused the most sacred laws of humanity which bid every man to respect the messengers of peace. He is disloyal and ignoble and false. Why should we be honourable and just? He neither appreciates our loyalty nor respects our valour--let us then act in the only way which he can understand. Citizens, we have two thousand prisoners in the cellars of our guildhouses---two thousand Walloons who under the banner of our common tyrant have fought against us ... their nearest kindred. I propose that we kill those two thousand prisoners and send their heads to the tyrant as a direct answer to this last outrage." "Yes! yes! Well said!" came from every side, from the younger artisans and the apprentices, the hot-headed faction amongst all these brave men--brave themselves but writhing under the terrible humiliation which they had just endured and thirsting for anything that savoured of revenge. "Yes! yes! the axe for them! send their heads to the tyrant! Well spoken, Peter Balde," they cried. The others remained silent. Many even amongst the older men perhaps would have echoed the younger ones’ call: cruelty breeds cruelty and oppression breeds callous thoughts of revenge. Individually there was hardly a man there who was capable of such an act of atrocious barbarism as the murder of a defenceless prisoner, but for years now these people had groaned under such abominable tyranny, had seen such acts of wanton outrage perpetrated against them and all those they held dear, that--collectively--their sense of rightful retribution had been warped and they had imbibed some of the lessons of reprisals from their execrable masters. At the foot of the altar rails the group of leaders who stood as a phalanx around Mark van Rycke their chief, waited quietly whilst the wave of enthusiasm for Balde’s proposal rose and swelled and mounted higher and higher until it seemed to pervade the whole of the sacred edifice, and then gradually subsided into more restrained if not less enthusiastic determination. "We will do it," said one of Balde’s most fervent adherents. "It is only justice, and it is the only law which the tyrant understands--the law of might." "It is the law which he himself has taught us," said another, "the law of retributive justice." "The law of treachery, of rapine, and of outrage," now broke in Mark’s firm, clear voice once more; it rose above the tumult, above the hubbub which centred round the person of Peter Balde; it rang against the pillars and echoed from end to end of the aisle. "Are we miserable rabble that we even dream of murder?" "Not of murder," cried Balde in challenge, "only of vengeance!" "Your vengeance!" thundered Mark, "do you dare speak of it in the house of Him who says ’I will repay!’" "God is on our side, He will forgive!" cried some of them.