Page:The black tulip (IA 10892334.2209.emory.edu).pdf/119

 fidious blood of the guilty Cornelius flow, but not one had shown such a keen anxiety as the individual just alluded to.

The most furious had come to the Buitenhof at day-break, to secure a better place; but he, outdoing even them, had passed the night at the threshold of the prison, from whence, as we have already said, he had advanced to the very foremost rank, unguibus et rostro; that is to say, coaxing some, and kicking the others.

And when the executioner had brought the prisoner to the scaffold, the burgher who had mounted on the stone of the pump, the better to see and be seen, made to the executioner a sign, which meant,—

“It’s a bargain, isn’t it?”

The executioner answered by another sign, which was meant to say,—

“Be quiet, it’s all right.”

This burgher was no other than Mynheer Isaac Boxtel, who, since the arrest of Cornelius, had come to the Hague, to try if he could not get hold of the three suckers of the black tulip.

Boxtel had at first tried to bring over Gryphus to his interest, but the jailor had not only the snarling fierceness, but likewise the fidelity, of a dog. He had therefore bristled up at Boxtel’s hatred, whom he suspected to be a warm friend of the prisoner, making trifling inquiries, to contrive, with the more certainty, some means of escape for him.

Thus to the very first proposals which Boxtel made to Gryphus to filch the bulbs, which Cornelius Van Baerle must be supposed to conceal, if not in his breast, at least in some corner of his cell, the surly jailor had only answered by kicking Mynheer Isaac out, and setting the dog at him H2