Page:The black tulip (IA 10892334.2209.emory.edu).pdf/84

 hour when the Orange party at the Hague were roasting the bleeding shreds of flesh torn from the corpses of Cornelius and John De Witte.

But, whether from a feeling of shame, or from craven weakness, Isaac Boxtel did not venture that day to point his telescope either at the garden, or at the laboratory, or at the dry-room.

He knew too well what was about to happen in the house of the poor doctor, as that he should have felt a desire to look into it. He did not even get up when his only servant—who envied the lot of the servants of Cornelius just as bitterly as Boxtel did that of their master—entered his bedroom. He said to the man,—

“I shall not get up to-day; I am ill.”

About nine o’clock he heard a great noise in the street, which made him tremble; at this moment, he was paler than a real invalid, and shook more violently than a man in the height of fever.

His servant entered the room; Boxtel hid himself under the counterpane.

“Oh, sir!” cried the servant, not without some inkling that, whilst deploring the mishap which had befallen Van Baerle, he was announcing agreeable news to his master—“oh, sir! you do not know, then, what is happening at this moment?”

“How can I know it?” answered Boxtel, with an almost unintelligible voice.

“Well, Mynheer Boxtel, at this moment your neighbour Cornelius Van Baerle is arrested for high treason.”

“Nonsense!” Boxtel muttered, with a faltering voice; “the thing is impossible.”

“Faith! sir, at any rate that’s what people say; and, besides, I have seen Judge Van Spennen with the archers entering the house.”