Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip

too late, or of its not having been planted at all!

These two vexations combined might well make him leave off

eating and drinking.

This was the case on the fourth day.

It was pitiful to see Cornelius, dumb with grief, and pale

from utter prostration, stretch out his head through the

iron bars of his window, at the risk of not being able to

draw it back again, to try and get a glimpse of the garden

on the left spoken of by Rosa, who had told him that its

parapet overlooked the river. He hoped that perhaps he might

see, in the light of the April sun, Rosa or the tulip, the

two lost objects of his love.

In the evening, Gryphus took away the breakfast and dinner

of Cornelius, who had scarcely touched them.

On the following day he did not touch them at all, and

Gryphus carried the dishes away just as he had brought them.

Cornelius had remained in bed the whole day.

“Well,” said Gryphus, coming down from the last visit, “I

think we shall soon get rid of our scholar.”

Rosa was startled.

“Nonsense!” said Jacob. “What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t leave his bed.

He will get out of it, like Mynheer Grotius, in a chest,

only the chest will be a coffin.”

Rosa grew pale as death.

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“Ah!” she said to herself, “he is uneasy about his tulip.”

And, rising with a heavy heart, she returned to her chamber,

where she took a pen and paper, and during the whole of that

night busied herself with tracing letters.

On the following morning, when Cornelius got up to drag

himself to the window, he perceived a paper which had been

slipped under the door.

He pounced upon it, opened it, and read the following words,

in a handwriting which he could scarcely have recognized as

that of Rosa, so much had she improved during her short

absence of seven days, —

“Be easy; your tulip is going on well.”

Although these few words of Rosa’s somewhat soothed the

grief of Cornelius, yet he felt not the less the irony which

was at the bottom of them. Rosa, then, was not ill, she was

offended; she had not been forcibly prevented from coming,

but had voluntarily stayed away. Thus Rosa, being at

liberty, found in her own will the force not to come and see

him, who was dying with grief at not having seen her.

Cornelius had paper and a pencil which Rosa had brought to

him. He guessed that she expected an answer, but that she

would not come before the evening to fetch it. He therefore

wrote on a piece of paper, similar to that which he had

received, —

“It was not my anxiety about the tulip that has made me ill,

but the grief at not seeing you.”

After Gryphus had made his last visit of the day, and

darkness had set in, he slipped the paper under the door,

and listened with the most intense attention, but he neither

heard Rosa’s footsteps nor the rustling of her gown.

He only heard a voice as feeble as a breath, and gentle like

a caress, which whispered through the grated little window

in the door the word, —

“To-morrow!”

Now to-morrow was the eighth day. For eight days Cornelius

and Rosa had not seen each other.

Chapter 20

The Events which took place during those Eight Days

On the following evening, at the usual hour, Van Baerle

heard some one scratch at the grated little window, just as

Rosa had been in the habit of doing in the heyday of their

friendship.

Cornelius being, as may easily be imagined, not far off from

the door, perceived Rosa, who at last was waiting again for

him with her lamp in her hand.

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Seeing him so sad and pale, she was startled, and said, —

“You are ill, Mynheer Cornelius?”

“Yes, I am,” he answered, as indeed he was suffering in mind

and in body.

“I saw that you did not eat,” said Rosa; “my father told me