Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip

soil chosen by me. It is sure to flower, if you tend it

according to my directions.”

“I will not lose sight of it for a minute.”

“You will give me another, which I will try to grow here in

my cell, and which will help me to beguile those long weary

hours when I cannot see you. I confess to you I have very

little hope for the latter one, and I look beforehand on

this unfortunate bulb as sacrificed to my selfishness.

However, the sun sometimes visits me. I will, besides, try

to convert everything into an artificial help, even the heat

and the ashes of my pipe, and lastly, we, or rather you,

will keep in reserve the third sucker as our last resource,

in case our first two experiments should prove a failure. In

this manner, my dear Rosa, it is impossible that we should

not succeed in gaining the hundred thousand guilders for

your marriage portion; and how dearly shall we enjoy that

supreme happiness of seeing our work brought to a successful

issue!”

“I know it all now,” said Rosa. “I will bring you the soil

to-morrow, and you will choose it for your bulb and for

mine. As to that in which yours is to grow, I shall have

several journeys to convey it to you, as I cannot bring much

at a time.”

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“There is no hurry for it, dear Rosa; our tulips need not be

put into the ground for a month at least. So you see we have

plenty of time before us. Only I hope that, in planting your

bulb, you will strictly follow all my instructions.”

“I promise you I will.”

“And when you have once planted it, you will communicate to

me all the circumstances which may interest our nursling;

such as change of weather, footprints on the walks, or

footprints in the borders. You will listen at night whether

our garden is not resorted to by cats. A couple of those

untoward animals laid waste two of my borders at Dort.”

“I will listen.”

“On moonlight nights have you ever looked at your garden, my

dear child?”

“The window of my sleeping-room overlooks it.”

“Well, on moonlight nights you will observe whether any rats

come out from the holes in the wall. The rats are most

mischievous by their gnawing everything; and I have heard

unfortunate tulip-growers complain most bitterly of Noah for

having put a couple of rats in the ark.”

“I will observe, and if there are cats or rats —- ”

“You will apprise me of it, — that’s right. And, moreover,”

Van Baerle, having become mistrustful in his captivity,

continued, “there is an animal much more to be feared than

even the cat or the rat.”

“What animal?”

“Man. You comprehend, my dear Rosa, a man may steal a

guilder, and risk the prison for such a trifle, and,

consequently, it is much more likely that some one might

steal a hundred thousand guilders.”

“No one ever enters the garden but myself.”

“Thank you, thank you, my dear Rosa. All the joy of my life

has still to come from you.”

And as the lips of Van Baerle approached the grating with

the same ardor as the day before, and as, moreover, the hour

for retiring had struck, Rosa drew back her head, and

stretched out her hand.

In this pretty little hand, of which the coquettish damsel

was particularly proud, was the bulb.

Cornelius kissed most tenderly the tips of her fingers. Did

he do so because the hand kept one of the bulbs of the great

black tulip, or because this hand was Rosa’s? We shall leave

this point to the decision of wiser heads than ours.

Rosa withdrew with the other two suckers, pressing them to

her heart.

Did she press them to her heart because they were the bulbs

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of the great black tulip, or because she had them from

Cornelius?

This point, we believe, might be more readily decided than

the other.

However that may have been, from that moment life became