Page:The black tulip (IA 10892334.2209.emory.edu).pdf/259

 his custom, he pronounced with a voice full of emotion, gave his hands to the lovers to kiss, whilst they were kneeling before him.

Then, heaving a sigh, he said,—

“Alas! you are happy, who, dreaming only of what perhaps is the true glory of Holland, and forms especially her true happiness, do not attempt to acquire for her anything beyond the true colours of a tulip.”

And, casting a glance towards that point of the compass where France lay, as if he saw new clouds gathering there, he entered his carriage and drove off.

Cornelius, on his part, started on the same day to Dort with Rosa, who sent her lover’s old housekeeper as a messenger to her father, to apprise him of all that had taken place.

Old Gryphus was by no means ready to be reconciled to his son-in-law. He had not yet forgotten the blows which he received in that famous encounter. To judge from the weals which he counted, their number, he said, amounted to forty-one; but, at last, in order, as he declared, not to be less generous than His Highness the Stadtholder, he consented to make his peace.

Appointed to watch over the tulips, the old man made the rudest keeper of flowers in the whole of the Seven Provinces.

It was indeed a sight to see him watching the obnoxious moths and butterflies, killing slugs, and driving away the hungry bees.

As he had heard Boxtel’s story, and was furious at having been the dupe of the pretended Jacob, he destroyed the sycamore behind which the envious Isaac had spied into the garden; for the plot of ground belonging to him had been bought by Cornelius, and taken into his own garden.

Rosa, growing not only in beauty but in wisdom also, after two years of her married life, could read and write so well, that she was able to undertake by herself the education of two beautiful children which she had borne in 1674 and 1675, both in May, the month of flowers.

As a matter of course, one was a boy, the other a