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Page 58
He knelt down, said his prayers, and observed, not without a
feeling of sincere joy, that, laying his head on the block,
and keeping his eyes open, he would be able to his last
moment to see the grated window of the Buytenhof.
At length the fatal moment arrived, and Cornelius placed his
chin on the cold damp block. But at this moment his eyes
closed involuntarily, to receive more resolutely the
terrible avalanche which was about to fall on his head, and
to engulf his life.
A gleam like that of lightning passed across the scaffold:
it was the executioner raising his sword.
Van Baerle bade farewell to the great black tulip, certain
of awaking in another world full of light and glorious
tints.
Three times he felt, with a shudder, the cold current of air
from the knife near his neck, but what a surprise! he felt
neither pain nor shock.
He saw no change in the colour of the sky, or of the world
around him.
Then suddenly Van Baerle felt gentle hands raising him, and
soon stood on his feet again, although trembling a little.
He looked around him. There was some one by his side,
reading a large parchment, sealed with a huge seal of red
wax.
And the same sun, yellow and pale, as it behooves a Dutch
sun to be, was shining in the skies; and the same grated
window looked down upon him from the Buytenhof; and the same
rabble, no longer yelling, but completely thunderstruck,
were staring at him from the streets below.
Van Baerle began to be sensible to what was going on around
him.
His Highness, William, Prince of Orange, very likely afraid
that Van Baerle's blood would turn the scale of judgment
against him, had compassionately taken into consideration
his good character, and the apparent proofs of his
innocence.
His Highness, accordingly, had granted him his life.
Cornelius at first hoped that the pardon would be complete,
and that he would be restored to his full liberty and to his
flower borders at Dort.
But Cornelius was mistaken. To use an expression of Madame
de Sevigne, who wrote about the same time, "there was a
postscript to the letter;" and the most important part of
the letter was contained in the postscript.
In this postscript, William of Orange, Stadtholder of
Holland, condemned Cornelius van Baerle to imprisonment for
life. He was not sufficiently guilty to suffer death, but he
was too much so to be set at liberty.
Cornelius heard this clause, but, the first feeling of
vexation and disappointment over, he said to himself, --
"Never mind, all this is not lost yet; there is some good in
this perpetual imprisonment; Rosa will be there, and also my
three bulbs of the black tulip are there."
But Cornelius forgot that the Seven Provinces had seven
prisons, one for each, and that the board of the prisoner is
anywhere else less expensive than at the Hague, which is a
capital.
His Highness, who, as it seems, did not possess the means to
feed Van Baerle at the Hague, sent him to undergo his
perpetual imprisonment at the fortress of Loewestein, very
near Dort, but, alas! also very far from it; for Loewestein,
as the geographers tell us, is situated at the point of the
islet which is formed by the confluence of the Waal and the
Meuse, opposite Gorcum.
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