Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip

This was the hour at which Rosa generally used to leave

Cornelius. The hour had struck, but Rosa had not come.

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Thus then his foreboding had not deceived him; Rosa, being

vexed, shut herself up in her room and left him to himself.

“Alas!” he thought, “I have deserved all this. She will come

no more, and she is right in staying away; in her place I

should do just the same.”

Yet notwithstanding all this, Cornelius listened, waited,

and hoped until midnight, then he threw himself upon the

bed, with his clothes on.

It was a long and sad night for him, and the day brought no

hope to the prisoner.

At eight in the morning, the door of his cell opened; but

Cornelius did not even turn his head; he had heard the heavy

step of Gryphus in the lobby, but this step had perfectly

satisfied the prisoner that his jailer was coming alone.

Thus Cornelius did not even look at Gryphus.

And yet he would have been so glad to draw him out, and to

inquire about Rosa. He even very nearly made this inquiry,

strange as it would needs have appeared to her father. To

tell the truth, there was in all this some selfish hope to

hear from Gryphus that his daughter was ill.

Except on extraordinary occasions, Rosa never came during

the day. Cornelius therefore did not really expect her as

long as the day lasted. Yet his sudden starts, his listening

at the door, his rapid glances at every little noise towards

the grated window, showed clearly that the prisoner

entertained some latent hope that Rosa would, somehow or

other, break her rule.

At the second visit of Gryphus, Cornelius, contrary to all

his former habits, asked the old jailer, with the most

winning voice, about her health; but Gryphus contented

himself with giving the laconical answer, —

“All’s well.”

At the third visit of the day, Cornelius changed his former

inquiry: —

“I hope nobody is ill at Loewestein?”

“Nobody,” replied, even more laconically, the jailer,

shutting the door before the nose of the prisoner.

Gryphus, being little used to this sort of civility on the

part of Cornelius, began to suspect that his prisoner was

about to try and bribe him.

Cornelius was now alone once more; it was seven o’clock in

the evening, and the anxiety of yesterday returned with

increased intensity.

But another time the hours passed away without bringing the

sweet vision which lighted up, through the grated window,

the cell of poor Cornelius, and which, in retiring, left

light enough in his heart to last until it came back again.

Van Baerle passed the night in an agony of despair. On the

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following day Gryphus appeared to him even more hideous,

brutal, and hateful than usual; in his mind, or rather in

his heart, there had been some hope that it was the old man

who prevented his daughter from coming.

In his wrath he would have strangled Gryphus, but would not

this have separated him for ever from Rosa?

The evening closing in, his despair changed into melancholy,

which was the more gloomy as, involuntarily, Van Baerle

mixed up with it the thought of his poor tulip. It was now

just that week in April which the most experienced gardeners

point out as the precise time when tulips ought to be

planted. He had said to Rosa, —

“I shall tell you the day when you are to put the bulb in

the ground.”

He had intended to fix, at the vainly hoped for interview,

the following day as the time for that momentous operation.

The weather was propitious; the air, though still damp,

began to be tempered by those pale rays of the April sun

which, being the first, appear so congenial, although so

pale. How if Rosa allowed the right moment for planting the

bulb to pass by, — if, in addition to the grief of seeing

her no more, he should have to deplore the misfortune of

seeing his tulip fail on account of its having been planted