DONNA É MOBILE
On the Saturday following the Van Trossarts’ garden-party—two days, therefore, previously to the events just narrated—Gerard van Helmont called in the early morning at the house of his betrothed. He could hardly realize, as he impatiently awaited her, that not twenty-four hours had elapsed since this new brightness had come into his life. Already he felt accustomed to the new rôle of a very wealthy man with a very charming wife. How happy his mother would be after the first shock of the unexpected! They must find another match for Otto. Sprightly, sportive Helena would never have married Otto, anyway. He glanced at the clock. Half-past ten. As long as clocks stood in front of mirrors Gerard never saw only the time.
The door opened; a servant entered slowly.
“The Freule was not ready, as yet, to receive him.” Had she sent him no message? “No.” The fiery lover went off to the barracks and worried everybody.
In the afternoon he called again. The sounds of a piano came pouring down upon him from up-stairs during his brief wait on the steps. How brilliantly she played! A little too wildly—like a musical tornado.
He was again shown into the front drawing-room. It was again empty. Again he paced restlessly to and fro, but this time he twisted his mustache.
He heard a footfall in the adjoining apartment; the music, however, had not yet stopped. He was longing for it, now, to do so.
The Baroness van Trossart came bustling in, hot and flurried.“My dear boy,” she began—“my dear boy, sit down.” She caught hold of his hand and drew him down on a low settee by her side. “My dear boy, you and Helena have had a quarrel. The worst quarrels always come first. Now tell me what it is all about.”
Gerard opened his light, innocent eyes. “There has been no quarrel that I know of, Mevrouw,” he answered. “What does Helena say?”
The Baroness’s substantial chaps fell. “Helena says nothing at all. That is the worst of it. She has locked herself in, and she won’t speak to any one. She has been playing the piano for hours—you hear her now—and her uncle trying all the time to learn his speech for next Monday! I’ve been screaming to make her stop, but I can’t, and I got some dust in my eye, as it is, through the key-hole.” She sighed. Gerard, with heightened color, looked down at his spurs.
“Then you don’t know what’s wrong?” the Baroness repeated, helplessly.
“No, indeed, I don’t.”
“The excitement must have got on her nerves; but I wish, at least, she would see Papotier.”
They went out slowly into the hall. “Never mind, Gerard,” said the Baroness, still in that ill-used tone, “it’ll be all right soon. Come back this evening and settle about going to the Horst to-morrow. Oh, will that music never stop!”
It followed him down the street in a reckless jingle and crash of feverish discord, as if all the notes of the instrument together were dancing a devil’s saraband.
He went to the club, and, from sheer nervous vexation, boisterously got together a game ofvingt-et-un. He won nearly a thousand florins in a couple of hours. As a rule, however, gambling was not one of his weaknesses. He had plenty of others.
Then he treated the whole mess to champagne, declaring it was his birthday, and when somebody denied that, he turned almost fiercely on the caviller. “My death-day, then!” he said. “It don’t make any difference in the wine.”
They were all surprised at his irritability, and concluded thatthe extent of his winnings was vexing him. That would be quite like Van Helmont, who was free-handed and free-hearted to a fault. He was the most popular man in the regiment.
“‘THERE HAS BEEN NO QUARREL THAT I KNOW OF, MEVROUW’”
“‘THERE HAS BEEN NO QUARREL THAT I KNOW OF, MEVROUW’”
It was half-past eight when he again rang at the Van Trossarts’ door. He was flushed with excitement and champagne. The piano had ceased; the whole house lay steeped in silence. Almost immediately, as he hesitated under the hall-lamp, the Freule’s maid came forward with a note. He took it and glanced through it on the spot. It was very brief:
“Yes, I have read Maupassant; all night I sat up reading him. Go back to the house-maid. Thank Heaven, Jeanne is not married yet.”
“Yes, I have read Maupassant; all night I sat up reading him. Go back to the house-maid. Thank Heaven, Jeanne is not married yet.”
He went out again into the dusk immediately. Dutch shops are open late, especially on Saturdays. He walked quickly to the High Street, which was full of movement and yellow gas. At a well-known bookseller’s he stopped.
“Have you Maupassant’sUne Vie?” he asked the shopman. Oh yes! half a dozen copies lay on the counter. He carried off the blue paper volume, and locked himself up in his rooms.
Turning the pages hurriedly, he read the painful story. Even as he read, he revolted at the thought of his cousin’s having come into contact with such scenes as were there described. He flung the book on to the table. “Filth!” he said, angrily. He felt that a woman’s soul may pass pure, if such be her terrible fate, through fact, but not through fiction. And surely he was right. A man can judge of purity, in women.
The work he admiringly despised was like all those of its great author, though by no means equal, of course, in literary value, to his shorter masterpieces. It was a perfectly polished crystal goblet—a splendor of workmanship—full of asafœtida. Few men care for the taste, which might be healthful, but we all enjoy the useless smell.
Somebody whistled outside in the street. He went to the window. Two young officers, attracted by the light of his lamp, stood in the dark with upturned faces. His heart leaped with its impulse of relief.
“Is that you, Troy?” he called back. “Who’s with you? Never mind, I’ll come down. I say, there’s a night-train to Brussels! We’ve just time to catch it. The chief’ll never know, and we’ll have such a burst-up as never was before!”
On the Monday morning in the small hours Gerard returned from his escapade into Belgium. The others, who still valued their commissions, had refused to accompany him. He had left a telegram with Willie for the Horst, to the effect that Helena was unable to come. “The Colonel won’t be any wiser,” he said. And the Colonel never was.
Whether the excursion had been worth its cost—in every sense—was another matter. Such questions are useless, and Gerard preferred not to decide them. He lay down on his bed for a couple of hours, and then—before breakfast, somewhere near seven o’clock—he paid a visit to a lady of his acquaintance whom he had not seen for many months. He had a bad headache, and he felt deeply injured, but also distinctly inclined to indignation and virtue.
“Adeline,” he said, pathetically, “I thought you still loved me.”
“What a fool you must be then,” said Adeline. She lived in a little out-of-the-way house, with a garden and a back entrance. No one was more accurately acquainted than Gerard with her periods of business or leisure.
“Better fool than knave,” replied Gerard, bitterly. “But don’t let’s go on like this. What I wanted to tell you is that our secret’s out. There.”
“I know,” said Adeline, nodding. She sat in her neat little tight-fitting dress in her neat little (tight-fitting) room, with her breakfast in front of her. It was all dainty and attractive. He had seen her sit thus many a time, while he lounged on the little chintz sofa.
“I told,” added Adeline, proudly, biting a stiff crust with her pearly teeth.
“You!” He sprang upright. “You lie!”
“Oh, of course,” she answered,“I was to sit and see you enjoy yourself, while I went to my ruin. I was to letyouwrite letters to my advertisements and then bring other men to laugh at me.” Her voice grew suddenly fierce. “I hate you for that,” she cried, “for that most of all. I could kill you for that.”
“Good heavens! was one of those unlucky advertisements yours? I had nothing to do with answering them, I swear to you. I was only umpire. Why, surely, you’d have recognized my hand!”
“Humph,” said Adeline. “Well, I told.”
“It was a woman’s trick,” retorted Gerard. “But how did you find out, you little devil, about the Freule van Trossart, or about my—my—”
“Your what?” she questioned, sharply. “What’s this about the Freule van Trossart? You’re going to make her miserable, are you, as you did me?” She started up, clapping her hands. “No, you won’t,” she cried. “No, you won’t. I see. He’s gone and told her all about it. Oh, I love him for that!”
“Who? He!” exclaimed Gerard. “Do you mean to say you’ve gone noising our shame about to strangers?”
The words stung her to sudden passion.
“Our shame?” she cried. “Our shame? My shame, you mean. My shame, as Christian laws go in Christian lands. And who are you, of all men, to taunt me with it? I told your brother, if you want to know. And he went and told the girl you were trying to catch, did he? Oh, I’m glad of that; I’m glad of that!”
Gerard sat for some moments with bent brows and clinched fists. His still stare frightened her. She sank into her seat cowed.
“How did you meet my brother?” he asked, at last. His voice was hoarse.
“You passed the shop with him one morning,” she answered, humbly.“I recognized him by your description. And when going to my dinner later on, I met him in the Park alone. I told him everything in half a dozen minutes. That day I was desperate. I asked him if he could do nothing to help me to make you marry me. I had some wild idea your family might. I had never come across any of them. I probably never should have such a chance again.”
“And what did my brother say?” asked Gerard.
“He said he would do what he could. He didn’t think he could do much. I don’t think he likes you, Gerard.” She spoke quite submissively, and, as she finished, her eyes stole across to the looking-glass to arrange a little bow at her neck.
“Oh no,” replied Gerard, furiously. “He’s too good to like me.Hislittle peccadilloes are far away, and black.”
“I’m sure I’ve always liked you, Gerard,” she said, coquettishly. “You’ve treated me very badly. You know you have.”
“I have,” acquiesced Gerard, in a low voice. “Did you tell Otto, Adeline, of those three thousand florins I gave you?”
“No,” she cried, again reverting to her sudden passion. “Do you fling that fact in my face? Do you call that a compensation?”
“No, no. God knows I didn’t mean anything of the kind. I was only thinking—great heavens, I don’t know what to think!” He buried his face in his hands.
“Poor Gerard,” said the girl, softly, after an interval. “I didn’t think you’d take on so. But you’ve treated me very badly, Gerard; you know you have; yet, somehow, I can’t help liking you still. You were very good to me, too, once. And it was very sweet.” She bent forward and timidly touched his neck. “Gerard, I’m sorry,” she said.
But he only shook his head.
“Oh, Gerard, I was so wretched, so fearfully wretched. I couldn’t stand the thought of—of the disgrace. I wanted you to marry me. I would have given my life for you to marry me—only to make an honest woman of me first. Gerard, think of it, there was nothing left for me but marriage, exposure, or death. I tried death once—with my fingers—but—but the water was so very cold.” She began to cry softly, resting her hand on her quondam lover’s knee.
Then Gerard looked up quickly. His face was quite pale and drawn.
“Adeline,” he said, wearily,“it’s no use, you and I can’t be angry with each other. Not seriously, only in flimsy bursts. It’s like our love. We can’t hate each other, either. Great love turns to hate, they say. Ours is of the kind that one can always take up again as if one had never left off. You’ve ruined my life, and, somehow, I can’t even reproach you with doing so.”
“But you’ve ruined mine, too, or very nearly,” she sobbed.
“Yes, that’s true; I don’t want, though, to make you so wretched. You shock me with your horrible talk. Adeline, look here, I don’t care; if you feel as bad as that I’ll marry you. Yes, I will, so help me God. You’re the only woman that ever loved me, besides my mother, and I’ve treated you like a brute. We men don’t always quite understand, but, Adeline, I can’t bear to see you wretched, and to know it’s all my fault. It is all my fault; I’ve behaved like a cad. Adeline, I mean it; I’m awfully sorry and ashamed of myself. I’ll tell my father exactly how matters stand, and I’llmakehim let me marry you. You poor little innocent, to think thatthey’dmakeme!”
Adeline, for only answer, laid her head upon his shoulder, softly crying on.
“Don’t cry like that, dear,” he continued, in the same dreary tone. “It’ll all come right soon. I dare say we shall be fairly happy. We’ve made such a mess of our separate lives that the best thing we can do is to try and combine them.”
“Oh, Gerard,” sobbed the girl, “if I’d only known a day or two sooner. It’s too late now.”
“No, no,” he said, dully, stroking her hair. “I forgive you the trick you played me. I drove you to it, I suppose. Men are brutes.”
“Oh, Gerard,” murmured Adeline again, with closed eyes, “it’s not that. I’m engaged.”
“What?” he cried, edging back, so that her head almost slipped.
She started up then, quite briskly. “Well, and what was I to do?” she said, “with every week bringing me nearer. Other people answered my advertisement besides you, Gerard. And he’s a very nice young man, a lawyer’s clerk. I was out in the country with him all yesterday, and we settled it coming home.”
“Indeed,” said Gerard, scornfully. “And he—he—”
She blushed crimson.
“Yes, he knows,” she murmured. “He thinks you treated me very badly, Gerard.”
“I know.”
And he consents, thought the young man, to accept the plaster I placed on the bruise. He got up from the little chintz sofa of many memories.
“I wish you had waited to give Otto the last chapter of the story,” he said, very wearily. “Poor little girl, I’m not angry with you. Don’t cry. We’ve had enough of that. Good-bye, Adeline. I suppose we need hardly meet again.”
And he held out his hand.
“Gerard,” she said, taking it, “I’m so glad you’re not angry. I like you very much, but, do you know, I fancy I should be happier with him. He isn’t as good-looking as you, Gerard—not anything like—but he looks very nice.” She raised the young officer’s hand to her lips. “Thank you,” she said, “for offering to marry me.”
“Oh, no thanks,” he replied, taking his hat.
“Gerard!” she called him back, her eyes reverted swiftly from the mirror to his face. “You never said anything about my new dress which I had to make. Don’t you think it suits me?”
“Oh, everything suits you,” he cried, making his escape. There were tears in his eyes as he turned into the street.
A FOOL AND HIS FOLLY
The dog gave a yelp.
“Do take care, Otto,” cried the Baroness, sharply. Her voice was shrill with irritation. “I wish you would sit down. You have trodden on poor Plush’s tail! And there really was no reason for that. Not even if I take in earnest, as I have no intention of doing, the exceedingly poor joke you have just concocted.”
“I assure you it is no joke, mother, but very sober earnest.”
“I am to believe that you have this morning asked Ursula Rovers to be your wife, and that she has deigned to accept you?”
“She has deigned to accept me, mother.”
“Then there are other things you can tread on besides little dogs.” She was too angry to continue. An embarrassing silence had thickened between them before she added, looking straight in front of her, “But I shall not afford you the satisfaction of a yelp.”
“Mother!” he cried, with a pathetic ring of pain in his virile voice. He held out his arms. The movement was an appeal.
But she waved him back.
“Between mothers and sons,” she said, “there is a union of sympathy, of interest, not only of intercourse. Dogs have mothers, Otto, and love them and forget them. And when they meet again, after twelve weeks—mother and son walk side by side,but the pup doesn’t know.”
She held out her trembling fingers to the little animal beside her.
“The mother does,” she said, tremulously.“The mother does.”
Otto stood by the Dresden gimcracks of the mantel-piece. His head was bent, but across the level eyebrows lay a bar of resolve.
“If you would only let me explain—” he began.
“Surely I can do that for myself. You are ‘in love’ with the girl, to use the cant phrase. There is no more beautiful word in the world, and none more insulted. With you it simply means that you have been caught by the charms of a piquant brown face.You, who are nearly forty, whose calf period might surely be past. Faugh! you men are all the same, like dogs again! You talk of piety, affection, ambition, but when the moment comes you run after the nearest cur. Otto, I won’t say any more. I have said too much already. In truth, there is nothing to say. There is only a curse to bear. Nowadays, it seems, the children curse the parents. It may be less melodramatic, but the results are far more visible to the naked eye.”
Then he broke down before her hard, her hopeless misery, and knelt by her side.
“Mother, I love her,” he said. “Never mind what the word means to me, it need mean but little to you. I will take her away to some place where you need but rarely see her.”
“And the Horst!” she cried, looking at him for the first time. The despair in her eyes cut straight to his soul. “You have not even thought of that! And you hardly know the girl. The old house—the old home—you have not even thought of that!”
“I have thought of it,” he answered, sternly, returning to his place on the hearth. “It is not gone yet. I will work and make money. Father may still live twenty years.”
But she did not heed him. “Only a good-looking face!” she said. “Only half a dozen glimpses of a good-looking face and—pfst!” She snapped her fingers. “Does your father know?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he answered. “I came to you first. I had hoped that you—”
“Would join with the happy pair in imploring his blessing. Did I not say rightly, Otto, that a certain amount of mutual understanding is essential to the preservation of natural ties! That you should succeed in making a philosopher of such a crack-brained creature as I am! I hear your father’s step in the entrance-hall. The poor fellow is whistling! Never mind, it can’t be helped. Call him in.” Otto obeyed.
“Well, what is it, my dear?” asked the Baron, entering. “Are you still enjoying your new-found son?”
“Yes, that is it,” replied the old lady. “Exactly. My new-found son still prepares me fresh surprises. Otto, tell your father to-day’s.”
“I have engaged myself,” said Otto, steadying his voice, “to Juffrouw Ursula Rovers.”
The Baron’s thin cheek flushed. He resumed the tune he had been whistling, and carefully finished it. Then he said, “I suppose that is quite definite?”
“Oh, yes,” interposed the Baroness, “a fool’s decisions always are.”
“Hush, my dear. I mean, Otto, that you have fully considered and weighed the matter, and have made up your mind to go through with it at all costs?” The Baron spoke very quietly.
“Yes,” said Otto, and their eyes met.
“So I thought. Your decision will not be altered in any way by my pointing out that, as long as I live (which I hope to do for a quarter of a century longer), you will never receive a penny from me towards supporting Ursula Rovers? You probably understood that before?”
“I did,” replied Otto. “I don’t want any money. I’m going to work.”
“Quite so. More tea, I suppose? Java?”
Otto’s face fell.
“No,” he said, awkwardly. “Not Java. Ursula doesn’t want to go there.”
The Baroness, who had been beating a silent tattoo with her foot, broke into an impatient exclamation.
“Really, Otto,” said the Baron, with a thin little smile,“you must admit that you are rather provoking. When everybody wants you here, you insist upon living in the tropics, and when—well, the whole thing, therefore, is settled, is it, and practically beyond recall? Mistakes, as your mother just now remarked, usually are. This, of course, is a huge mistake—a life mistake. However, perhaps you are aware of that, too?”
“Perhaps it is,” replied Otto, “in some respects. But it seems to me worth making.”
“Possibly. There are no bounds to human selfishness. Men have thrown away an empire for a night of dalliance. And the heritage of the Helmonts is not an empire by any means. I am sure I wish you a more protracted period of enjoyment. Then, at least, one person will get satisfaction out of this miserable business. Yes, as there is no help for it, I may as well wish you joy. Wish him joy, Cécile.”
“No,” said the Baroness.
“Anyhow, I suppose it won’t make much difference to you, Otto? Nor, alas, to us. And now that all the preliminaries are settled, and you know our mind exactly and we yours—excuse my putting you last—we had better swallow down the rest of the unpleasantness as soon as possible. Bring up Ursula at once, and we will give her our blessing. Bring her before dinner if you can. I’m sure I wish you had her waiting in the drawing-room. I will say this: she is a good-looking girl, and, I honestly believe, a good one. But what a reason for marrying her!”
He threw up his hands with his familiar gesture of comical dismay, and turning his back on his son and heir, went and sat down by the Baroness. Otto walked slowly from the room, leaving the old couple together.
The little turret-chamber, all flowered silk and china shepherds, looked strangely unreal, like a painting on porcelain. The light crept in through its rounded window with a curve that lent to everything a glamour as of glaze. The occupants themselves, bending near to each other, the toy-dog between them, their delicate features still touched, as it seemed, with eighteenth-century powder, had the appearance of Dresden figures seen under a shiny glass case. But their sorrow was very real, none the less so because the Baron was endeavoring, as it buzzed around them, to catch and kill it in the folds of a cambric handkerchief.
“Theodore,” began the Baroness, twisting her rings, “you are always right. I do not mean to doubt your judgment. But it seems to me that you almost encouraged him to do what you disapproved. You—you told him how bad it was, howwicked, and then you wished him joy.”
“My dear,” replied the Baron, “you cannot push over the precipice a man who has already leaped. His mind was made up, and nothing would have changed it. I know Otto. This is just the kind of idiotic thing he might be expected to do. Some men cannot keep away from any folly which has an appearance of elevation. Their souls positively itch to commit it, whether it be useful or pleasant or not. Otto has always been like that. He is a Don Quixote of foolishness. Had Ursula not existed, he would have been bound to invent her.”
“Unfortunately she exists,” replied the Baroness. “But you might have argued, protested—”
“My dear, he is thirty-nine. And to argue with Don Quixote is to break a straw against armor. There is no strength like the conviction, ‘the thing is so utterly asinine that I’m sure it must be right’, especially when the thing is also pleasant. Modern Quixotes are not above distinguishing that.”
“Oh, don’t reason it out in that quiet way,” cried the Baroness, passionately. “It’s too horrible for that. I can’t bear it.”
Her husband took her hand. “Dearest,” he asked, “since when have we left off grinning over the things we could not bear?”
The only answer was Plush’s grating bark, which she always started as soon as the Baron grew affectionate to the Baroness.
“As for quarrels, they are always a discomfort, but useless quarrels are a folly as well. And a dispute with Otto would soon develop into a quarrel. He knows what we think without further telling; be sure of that. For Heaven’s sake let there not be a row. I have not been present at a row since I was twenty. Gerard ran the thing close the other day. We may just as well treat Ursula civilly. I only hope he will bring her at once. The prospect makes me nervous, and I don’t see why my dinner should be spoiled because my eldest son is a fool.”
“But Ursula should be made to feel—”
He interrupted her, a thing he was not in the habit of doing.
“Be sure that Ursula will be made to feel,” he said, “whatever we do. Trust human nature for that.”
“Had it only been Gerard,” she moaned. “And just as I had arranged about Helena!”
“Ah, had it been Gerard, I should have reasoned with him. Gerard can be made to laugh at follies, and the man who laughs can be made to abandon. Fool! Folly! You see, those are the only words I am able to think of. Answer a fool according to his folly. That is excellent advice. Molière’s, is it not? I tried to bring it into practice to-day.”
“Deeds like his,” she said, “should still be preventable by lettres de cachet. They are worse than crimes. A name such as ours may be scotched by the reprobates who bear it, but it takes a fool, such as you laugh at, to kill it outright.”
“Whom would you lock up? Ursula? Do you know, I fancy Ursula is in no way to blame. She is really a good little girl.”
But the Baroness shook her head. The Baron rose.
“Well, it can’t be helped,” he said, yawning. “That is the beginning and the end. I wonder what Louisa will say. At any rate, the house is still ours; après nous le déluge. Otto is such an exemplary Noah; he is sure to be saved when it comes. By-the-bye, I had written to Labary about rehanging the west bedroom, but such experiences as this take away all one’s pleasure in things of that kind. What’s the use of working for such a son as Otto?”
With which momentous but unanswerable question he strolled out into the grounds.
Louisa, when informed shortly after by her sister of what had happened, took off her spectacles, laid down the book she was reading, and said,
“Otto is, at least, the only member of this family possessed of marked originality.”
The Freule van Borck’s view of the question was not withoutimportance, for she had some money to leave where she liked. She was exceedingly stingy, and her savings were presumed to be large.
“Yes,” replied the Baroness, tartly, “but all his originality is original sin. However, I am glad, Louisa, if you can find extenuations, which I openly confess myself as yet unable to see.”
The thin Freule rested an angular elbow on her knees.
“Ah, but that is because you are so entirely conventional,” she said, gravely. “You are altogether hereditary, my dear; you cannot step out of your groove.”
“Je ne déraille pas,” replied the Baroness. “No. Dieu merci. Must Otto, to be happy?”
The Freule van Borck sighed.
“My dear, it is no use,” she said. “We shall never understand each other. It is of the very essence of man’s making that he shouldnotrun on rails. Machines run on rails. All the misery of the world has been caused by our doing so, and generally in batches, after one locomotive. When two of our locomotives met, there was a smash and bloodshed.”
“But that,” said the Baroness, evidently bored, “is exactly opposed to your favorite theory of hero-worship.”
“So it is,” replied her sister, cheerfully. “We must all be inconsistent at times, except you people on the rails. I was thinking of the hereditary leaders, not the hero-leaders of men. No hero ever—”
“But, Louisa, don’t you understand? I have just told you that Otto—our Otto—is going to marry Ursula Rovers.”
“Yes, my dear, and I reply that he makes a distinctly new departure. To judge of its expediency, we must know the result.”
“The result can only be misery to all concerned.”
“You think that because your heredity tells you so. Now, I shall be an interested and unprejudiced spectator. Everything depends upon Ursula. Is she an entity or a nonentity?Thatis the question. I agree with Carlyle—”
“Carlyle was a ploughboy!” cried the Baroness, still too impatient to be polite.“Of course, he would rejoice to hear of milkmaids marrying marquises! Nothing is more lamentable in these levelling days than that all the geniuses are born without grandfathers. The odds in the fight are unfair.”
“Just so,” replied the Freule, grimly. “Now, who knows what a genius the son of Otto and Ursula may be! My dear, I have been reading a most interesting volume, entitledLe Croisement des Races. I could give you some exceedingly curious details—”
“Spare me even the mention of your horrible reading, Louisa!” exclaimed the Baroness. “It is like passing down the streets where they hang out thePolice News. Dear me, that is Gerard’s voice speaking to his father. How excited he seems! I suppose Theodore has already told him. He must calm down a little, for the happy pair will be here in a minute. I saw the carriage turn into the avenue from the road.”
Gerard came rushing in, followed more leisurely by his father.
“Mamma!” he gasped. “Mamma, Otto has shot Beauty! It isn’t possible; I can’t believe it. Shot Beauty! Shot Beauty! Great God, what have I done to him that he should treat me like this!” He clinched his fist to his forehead. “Shot Beauty!” he cried again, in a choking voice. “Oh, I hope I sha’n’t see him! I won’t see him! I’ll go back to Drum. If I see him I shall kill him!”
“Gerard!”
“Don’t speak to me, any of you. I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!”
“My dear boy, don’t be so absurd,” began the Baron. “It really couldn’t be helped. Your aunt has most kindly offered to get you another horse.”
“In recognition of Otto’s prompt and spirited action,” said the Freule; “it was very dreadful, Gerard, but unavoidable, and he rose to the occasion. That is what I admire. And though I am not in the habit of giving expensive presents, and haven’t the means to do so—”
“I won’t have another horse,” burst out Gerard.“I mean to say, that’s not what I care about. He—he—oh, you don’t know what he’s done to me. And now he’s killed Beauty as well! I hate him! I won’t, I daren’t meet him at dinner!”
“There’s the hall-bell,” cried the Baroness. “Shut the door, Theodore. Gerard, you had better go out by the anteroom. Otto is bringing home his betrothed for us to welcome as such!”
“His betrothed!” stammered Gerard, looking from one to the other. “What? Helena? Already?”
“Helena? No, indeed. The young lady is Ursula Rovers.”
Otto and Ursula, pausing outside the door, heard Gerard’s laugh of malevolent contempt, as well as the words that immediately followed it.
“Ursula Rovers!” he cried. “The future Baroness van Helmont! My Lady Nobody!”
BROTHERLY HATE
The two brothers stood face to face by the stables. Otto, running round for Ursula’s carriage, after the brief interview with his parents, had almost knocked up against Gerard. He started back.
“Damn you!” said Gerard. He said the hideous words with deep conviction—almost conscientiously, as if acquitting himself of a painful duty. For the last quarter of an hour, ever since he had fled from the boudoir before the approach of the betrothed pair, Gerard had been striding hither and thither, like one possessed, in the close vicinity of the stables. He was hardly aware what he said or thought. Otto had shot Beauty; Otto had estranged Helena, actuated not even by sneaking jealousy (as had first seemed probable), but by wanton ill-nature. He hated Otto. He would never look upon his hateful face again. He would hurry back to Drum.
Suddenly his elder brother stood before him, almost jostling him in a hasty recoil. All Gerard’s confusion of anger and sorrow cooled into one clear thunder-bolt.
“Damn you!” he said. There could be no doubt in his own heart or any other of his concentrated hate of the intruder. What says Tacitus? “With more than brotherly hate.” Tacitus read the inner souls of men.
From the moment when he fired the fatal shot, Otto had felt that he owed Gerard most humble and affectionate apology. Concerning the episode with Helena he was, of course, serenely ignorant. But his attitude had stiffened just now under the cruelly careless words which had fallen like a shadow across the home-bringing of the betrothed.
“Silence, Gerard,” he replied, haughtily. “No one can be more sorry than myself. If you will listen reasonably, I will try to explain—”
“No one more sorry than yourself!” burst in Gerard, his whole frame trembling with passion. “No one more sorry! You loved Beauty, I suppose? You loved Beauty better than anything else except—except—” He bit back the word “mother.” “You loved Beauty, and first drove her mad by your insane bungling, and then shot her!—shot her! Oh, my God!” The words choked him. Suddenly he grew white and calm. He advanced upon Otto.
“If only you were not my brother!” he said, in a whisper.
Otto met his anger-troubled gaze, unflinching.
“You are a first-rate shot,” continued Gerard, with bitter meaning. “Oh, a first-rate shot! Ursula was right. But I, too, can shoot straight.”
Then he broke off short, and struck his forehead, bewildered among the madness of his own conceptions.
“Leave me to myself,” he gasped. “Only leave me. Go back to Helena—or Ursula—which is it? Tell Ursula also. Be sure and tell Ursula everything about me. Go and be happy, you and your charming—”
“Not a word more,” interrupted Otto, forewarned by the other’s tone. “I am very sorry, Gerard, and willing to make every allowance. But I will not hear a word against my future wife.”
Gerard rushed away.
“Why not, after all?” he asked himself. Brothers had met before in honorable combat alone beneath the moonlight shadows of Rhenish castle walls. He laughed aloud, and when the coachman’s dog ran out, barking, to greet him, he kicked the brute away.
Ursula could not but notice Otto’s silence—nay, more, his depression—as they drove back again to the Parsonage. She explained it by the Baroness’s reception of the engagement. For not even the most laborious amiability could make the two women misunderstand each other.
“Otto, I hope,” stammered the girl, with sudden heart-sinking,as they paused under the little veranda, “oh, I hope you will never repent.”
He hesitated, and, with human inconsistency, she resented the momentary delay in his denial.
“No, I shall never repent,” he replied, “unless—”
He checked himself; he was going to say she must make up her mind to leave Horstwyk, but he realized the unfairness of too precipitate appeal.
“Unless?” she repeated, looking into his eyes.
“We will talk about it some other day,” he answered, hastily. “For the moment you and I are simply happy; let that suffice us. I am proud of you, my darling, and it seems too good, you caring for an old fellow like me.”
He kissed her, and she blushed, half unwilling, under the unwonted familiarity from a man she barely knew. Love and marriage seemed so strange to her—not unpleasant, but so strange.
She watched him down the road, and her eyes grew misty. “Unless?” she softly repeated to herself. Then she went and found her father in his study.
“Papa,” she said, “you are sure that Otto loves me?”
“Why else should he ask you to marry him?” retorted the Dominé, turning abruptly in his round desk-chair.
“Yes, that is true,” replied Ursula, humbly. “But they cannot say the same of me.”
“How? What?” queried the Dominé, with troubled eyebrows.
She turned full to the light.
“Papa,” she said, impetuously, “it’s not that I want to be Baroness van Helmont. I’m sure, I’m sure it’s not.”
The Dominé struck his hand on the table before him.
“No, indeed,” he cried, in a loud voice. “Who says that? Who dares to say that?”
Ursula sighed wearily.
“Oh, no one does,” she answered. “Never mind. Life is very complicated. I wish one always knew exactly what was right.”
“One always does,” said the simple-thoughted Dominé.
“‘NO ONE MORE SORRY THAN YOURSELF!’ BURST IN GERARD”
“‘NO ONE MORE SORRY THAN YOURSELF!’ BURST IN GERARD”
“Obey marching orders. Forward. Do the nearest duty at once, and with all your might.”
Ursula sighed again, still more wearily, and, going out into the passage, happed upon her aunt. Miss Mopius passed on her way to the store-cupboard, her joined hands overweighted with eggs. At sight of her successful rival she started, and one of the eggs flopped down on the stones in slimy collapse.
“I can understand your exultation, Ursula,” said Miss Mopius, all a-quiver, “but don’t sneer at me like that. I won’t stand it. Some day, perhaps, you also will know the curse of Eve.”
Ursula, in the cruelty of her youth and beauty, barely pitied her aunt.
“What was the curse of Eve?” she inquired.
“Adam,” retorted Miss Mopius, and dropped another egg.
“I’ll wipe up the mess,” said Ursula, sweetly.
Miss Mopius beat a hasty retreat. She spent the rest of the afternoon diluting one solitary globule of a patent medicine through a series of thirteen brimming decanters of water. A tumbler from the first decanter was poured into the second, and so on through the lot. The thirteenth solution, said the advertisement, was the most “potent.” Miss Mopius believed the advertisement. The magnificent name of the small globule had an ever-recurring charm for her. It was called “Sympathetico Lob.” “Lob,” especially, struck her as so delightfully mysterious. And it cured dizziness, palpitation, bad taste in the mouth, liver complaint, rheumatism, St. Vitus’ dance, stitch in the side, and heartburn, besides being highly recommended for cases of agitation, nervous depression, sudden bereavement, and disappointed love. Miss Mopius found it very helpful. She sat in her darkened room, amid the falling twilight, sipping.
That evening there was consternation in the big drawing-room at the Horst. It spread itself like a great mist between the occupants of the apartment, and prevented their looking into each other’s eyes. The oppression had begun round Gerard’s vacant chair at the dinner-table; it now deepened about the Baroness, where she sat apart from the rest, straightenedamong the soft silks of hercauseuse. In the lap of her pearl gray evening-dress lay a crumpled white scrap from Gerard: