“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.
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.