you do, let nobody help you, and don’t confide your secret
to any one in the world; do you see, a connoisseur by merely
looking at the bulb would be able to distinguish its value;
and so, my dearest Rosa, be careful in locking up the third
sucker which remains to you.”
“It is still wrapped up in the same paper in which you put
it, and just as you gave it me. I have laid it at the bottom
of my chest under my point lace, which keeps it dry, without
pressing upon it. But good night, my poor captive
gentleman.”
“How? already?”
“It must be, it must be.”
“Coming so late and going so soon.”
“My father might grow impatient not seeing me return, and
that precious lover might suspect a rival.”
Here she listened uneasily.
“What is it?” asked Van Baerle. “I thought I heard
something.”
“What, then?”
“Something like a step, creaking on the staircase.”
“Surely,” said the prisoner, “that cannot be Master Gryphus,
he is always heard at a distance”
“No, it is not my father, I am quite sure, but —- ”
“But?”
“But it might be Mynheer Jacob.”
Rosa rushed toward the staircase, and a door was really
heard rapidly to close before the young damsel had got down
the first ten steps.
Cornelius was very uneasy about it, but it was after all
only a prelude to greater anxieties.
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The flowing day passed without any remarkable incident.
Gryphus made his three visits, and discovered nothing. He
never came at the same hours as he hoped thus to discover
the secrets of the prisoner. Van Baerle, therefore, had
devised a contrivance, a sort of pulley, by means of which
he was able to lower or to raise his jug below the ledge of
tiles and stone before his window. The strings by which this
was effected he had found means to cover with that moss
which generally grows on tiles, or in the crannies of the
walls.
Gryphus suspected nothing, and the device succeeded for
eight days. One morning, however, when Cornelius, absorbed
in the contemplation of his bulb, from which a germ of
vegetation was already peeping forth, had not heard old
Gryphus coming upstairs as a gale of wind was blowing which
shook the whole tower, the door suddenly opened.
Gryphus, perceiving an unknown and consequently a forbidden
object in the hands of his prisoner, pounced upon it with
the same rapidity as the hawk on its prey.
As ill luck would have it, his coarse, hard hand, the same
which he had broken, and which Cornelius van Baerle had set
so well, grasped at once in the midst of the jug, on the
spot where the bulb was lying in the soil.
“What have you got here?” he roared. “Ah! have I caught
you?” and with this he grabbed in the soil.
“I? nothing, nothing,” cried Cornelius, trembling.
“Ah! have I caught you? a jug and earth in it There is some
criminal secret at the bottom of all this.”
“Oh, my good Master Gryphus,” said Van Baerle, imploringly,
and anxious as the partridge robbed of her young by the
reaper.
In fact, Gryphus was beginning to dig the soil with his
crooked fingers.
“Take care, sir, take care,” said Cornelius, growing quite
pale.
“Care of what? Zounds! of what?” roared the jailer.
“Take care, I say, you will crush it, Master Gryphus.”
And with a rapid and almost frantic movement he snatched the
jug from the hands of Gryphus, and hid it like a treasure
under his arms.
But Gryphus, obstinate, like an old man, and more and more
convinced that he was discovering here a conspiracy against
the Prince of Orange, rushed up to his prisoner, raising his
stick; seeing, however, the impassible resolution of the
captive to protect his flower-pot he was convinced that
Cornelius trembled much less for his head than for his jug.
He therefore tried to wrest it from him by force.
“Halloa!” said the jailer, furious, “here, you see, you are
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rebelling.”
“Leave me my tulip,” cried Van Baerle.