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Updated: May 24, 2025
The procession stopped, and the flower was placed on a pedestal, while the people cheered with wild enthusiasm. At the solemn moment when the Prince of Orange was to acclaim the triumphant owner of the black tulip and present the prize of 100,000 guilders, the coach with the unhappy prisoner Cornelius van Baerle drew up in the market-place.
"I'll tell you what I want," answered Gryphus; "I want you to restore to me my daughter Rosa." "Your daughter?" cried Van Baerle. "Yes, my daughter Rosa, whom you have taken from me by your devilish magic. Now, will you tell me where she is?" And the attitude of Gryphus became more and more threatening. "Rosa is not at Loewestein?" cried Cornelius. "You know well she is not.
Nothing could persuade him that if Van Baerle was not a traitor he was certainly in league with the devil, like all learned men, and he did all he could to mortify and annoy his prisoner. But Rosa would come every night when her father, stupefied by gin, was asleep, and talk to Cornelius through the barred grating of his cell door.
The deposit intrusted to Van Baerle, and carefully locked up by him, was nothing more nor less than John de Witt's correspondence with the Marquis de Louvois, the war minister of the King of France; only the godfather forbore giving to his godson the least intimation concerning the political importance of the secret, merely desiring him not to deliver the parcel to any one but to himself, or to whomsoever he should send to claim it in his name.
These letters, entirely creditable though they were to the statesmanship of the Grand Pensionary, would have been accepted as evidence of treason by the maddened Orangists, and Cornelius, instead of burning them, had left them in the keeping of his godson, Van Baerle, a quiet, scholarly young man of Dordrecht, who was utterly unaware of the nature of the packet.
Outside, in the market-place, the bodies of the De Witts were hanging, and Van Baerle read with horror the inscription, "Here hang that great rascal John de Witt and the little rascal Cornelius de Witt, enemies of their country." Gryphus laughed when the prisoner asked him what it meant, and replied, "That's what happens to those that write secret letters to the enemies of the Prince of Orange."
And thus Van Baerle was to have the most admirably fitted aspect, and, besides, a large, airy, and well ventilated chamber where to preserve his bulbs and seedlings; while he, Boxtel, had been obliged to give up for this purpose his bedroom, and, lest his sleeping in the same apartment might injure his bulbs and seedlings, had taken up his abode in a miserable garret.
"Well, Mynheer Boxtel, at this moment your neighbour Cornelius van Baerle is arrested for high treason." "Nonsense!" Boxtel muttered, with a faltering voice; "the thing is impossible." "Faith, sir, at any rate that's what people say; and, besides, I have seen Judge van Spennen with the archers entering the house." "Well, if you have seen it with your own eyes, that's a different case altogether."
It will be remembered that, with the help of his telescope, not even the least detail of the private meeting between Cornelius de Witt and Van Baerle had escaped him.
And, besides, if the parcel had been made up of bulbs, Boxtel knew his neighbour too well not to expect that Van Baerle would not have lost one moment in satisfying his curiosity and feasting his eyes on the present which he had received.
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