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Page 84
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
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.
"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.
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