“I’m off to Drum. I sha’n’t come back as long as you’ve got Otto. The house can’t hold us both.—G.”
“I’m off to Drum. I sha’n’t come back as long as you’ve got Otto. The house can’t hold us both.—G.”
Father and elder son stood with downcast lids, watching each other through inner eyes. The Freule laid down her newspaper.
“He will think twice,” she said, sharply. “Gerard is not the kind of man to desert the fleshpots of Egypt because Moses has come with a plague or two.”
The Baron’s gloomy face rippled over with sudden sunshine.
“That’s just like you, Louisa,” he cried, “to select the most unfortunate simile in a hundred thousand. The worst of all Moses’s plagues was the removal of the eldest son!” He laughed, looking for the first time at his heir. “I am speaking from Gerard’s point of view,” he added. “Of course, of course, from Gerard’s point of view.” And he laughed again, but half-way the laugh died down into a pathetic little murmur. “It is exceedingly annoying,” he said, plaintively. “And I who detest unpleasantness! We have never had any unpleasantness before.”
“He means it,” interposed the Baroness, in a dull tone. “I know he means it, because of the little hook to the ‘G.’ When Gerard makes that, he is in earnest. It corresponds to a jerk in his voice. None of you understand Gerard. He is so good-natured; you fancy he is all sunshine and no fire.”
“Deplorable!” exclaimed the Baron, stopping, helpless, in the middle of the room. “And incomprehensible. All about a horse. We will buy Louisa’s present, the sooner the better, and send it to bring him back.”
“Ah! but is it all about a horse?” asked the Freule’s high-pitched voice. Once more she emerged from behind her newspaper, her own particular newspapers, theVictory! It would be difficult to say what theVictorywanted to conquer; but you received a general impression from its pages that in this world the battle was always to the strong.
“Ah! but is it all about a horse?” asked the Freule, amid a darkening silence. “Or could Otto tell more if he would? You consider me none too sharp-sighted, my dear brother and sister; but it strikes me you are blind not to perceive that you would have had a daughter-in-law Ursula anyway, whether your eldest had come back or not, eh?” She shot out this last interjection at her nephew, rising, meanwhile, all in one piece, with an abrupt sweep back of her stand-up silk.
Otto was horrified by the sudden condensation of the amorphous suspicions afloat in his brain. Could it be possible that he had ousted a rival? Certainly, Gerard’s fury seemed in excess of the injury to which he owned. For the first time, in the elder brother’s heart also, dislike and distrust joined hands.
“Just so,” said the Freule van Borck, across his irritable uncertainty. She nodded to the others provokingly, and walked out upon the terrace. Otto followed her.
“Aunt Louisa,” he began, “I think you are mistaken.”
“Yes, Otto,” she answered. “Of course you do now. But you didn’t when I first spoke, you see. Let me give you a bit of advice. Eh?”
“Well?” The young man’s voice was not inviting.
“Don’t go back to Java with your wife, as I dare say you want to do. Stop here and fight it out. Ursula’ll fight it out. I don’t give twopence for a married woman who can’t live in the same house with her former lover. Of course they were lovers. I’ve seen it these half a dozen years. Never mind. She was too good for Gerard. There!” She smiled a complimentary smile to her brawny nephew; she liked his brownness and bigness, and straight, square strength.
Otto crept away.
“To-morrow I shall speak about going away,” he said to himself. “To-morrow, not to-night. The Dominé must listen to reason. The shadow of Cain lies between Gerard and me.”
THE DUTY OF A PARENT
Next morning, so it happened, the Dominé awoke to a moderately disagreeable task. While dressing, he grumbled over the speck in his tranquil sky, as mortals will do when unaware of the storm-cloud fringing their horizon.
The Dominé had a parishioner who caused him more annoyance than the rest. This sheep of the flock was, however, not a black sheep. It was serenely white. It never wandered, for it never even got up. Its name was Klomp, and its nature was unmitigated indolence.
This man Klomp inhabited a little cottage of his own, lost among the woods. He shared it with two daughters, aged respectively twelve and eighteen. Like its owner, the cottage lived on, disgraceful but comfortable. Theoretically, it ought to have been pulled down.
Klomp knew better. All summer he lazed over a hedge which mysteriously bore his weight; all winter he dozed by the stove. If any remnant of useless ornamentation fell away from the cottage, the proprietor never winked an eye, but should a tile drop whose fall let in the rain or wind, Klomp would scramble up on the roof and replace it. He was a philosopher.
He never ill-treated his daughters unless they let the fire go out in winter. To keep it lighted during seven months of the year was their whole earthly duty, for house-keeping had long been reduced to an almost imperceptible minimum. The entire family lived on next to nothing very cheerfully, and was a disgrace to the neighborhood.
Vices the father had none. As has already been hinted, he was negatively virtuous. He drowsed at peace with himselfand with all the world above and below him, except when the Dominé came to make trouble.
The Dominé was making trouble just now. By a stroke of unexpected good-fortune an opportunity had occurred of “doing something for those poor girls,” whose one desire was that nothing should be done either for them or by them. Freule van Borck, it must be known, occasionally took a philanthropic interest in the village at her brother’s castle-gates, an interest which manifested itself in spasmodic bursts of tidying up neglected corners. She had suddenly disapproved of that long-standing eyesore, the Klomps’ cottage, and had made a beginning of improvement by getting an energetic person in the north to accept of Pietje, the elder girl, as a possible servant, wages five pounds per annum, all found. This good news had been communicated to Pietje by Hephzibah, the Freule’s maid. Pietje had merely answered, “Let the Freule go herself,” but that retort got modified on its way to Louisa.
So now the Dominé went to try his hand. He especially disliked all intercourse with Klomp, because, during their interviews, one of the two invariably lost his temper, and that one was never the parishioner. That was the worst of Klomp; he had no temper to lose.
To-day, however, the parson rejoiced in notable compensations; these occupied his thoughts as he swung with large steps through the woodlands. After the first shock of abandonment which every parent feels in a daughter’s sudden rapture, he had settled down to complacent contemplation of an eligible son-in-law. For the Dominé, as we know, had never made a secret of his attachment to Otto. And he lacked the requisite affectation to convince himself that the secondary consideration of the young man’s social position was altogether beneath the notice of a humble clergyman like himself.
His darling Ursula would flit from the nest—that is true—but only to another close by, where he still could hear her singing. The Dominé smiled gratefully over this linked perfection of prosperity: wife to the heir of the Horst, and wife to Otto van Helmont.
“Lord God, I thank Thee,” said the Dominé, out aloud,among the fragrance of the solitary lane. His path wound in sandy whiteness beneath the heat-mist of the fir-trees; there was a buzz on all sides of a myriad nothings, invisibly swelling the morning air.
The cottage lay prone upon the ground, asleep. It had sunk as low as it could, and had pulled the ragged branches of the trees over its ears, comfortably hiding in the cool, long shadows, naked and unashamed.
The owner of the cottage lay prone upon the ground also; he had the advantage of the house in that he was consciously—and conscientiously-drowsing. “I sleep, but my heart waketh.” Klomp knew he was not awake. Man has few pleasures here below; has he any to equal that sensation?
“Good-morning, Klomp,” said the parson’s bright, brisk voice at his ear. Klomp did not start; he merely half opened one eye and answered, “Dominé,” which was his abbreviated form of salutation. “Save your breath to spare your life,” was one of his axioms.
“Klomp, I’ve come about Pietje,” continued the Dominé, with that loudness which, in him, was nervousness escaping. “I’ve heard about the place the Freule has found for her. What a splendid opportunity! And so kind of the Freule!”
Klomp nodded assent. Like most country parsons, the Dominé was very sensitive to disrespect. “You might get up, Klomp,” he said, sharply.
“Oh, if you wish it, sir, of course,” replied the man, shuffling to his feet, with an air of contempt for the other’s stupidity. He immediately lounged up against the wall, sinking both hands in his pockets. “Them’s my sentiments to a T,” he ejaculated, and jerked his head in the direction of a paper nailed against the dilapidated shutter, white on the dirty green.
The parson, advancing curiously, read the following sentences in an illiterate scrawl:
“Standing is better than walking,Sitting is better than standing,Lying is better than sitting,And sleep is the best of all.”1 Corinthians xix., 7.
“Standing is better than walking,Sitting is better than standing,Lying is better than sitting,And sleep is the best of all.”1 Corinthians xix., 7.
Klomp nodded again, as the Dominé turned with a jump. “How dare you put a Bible tag under such nonsense as this?” cried the Dominé, sniffing like a warhorse.
“Yes, yes, the Bible knows,” replied Klomp, imperturbably. “It’s word of Holy Scripture, Dominé, so you can’t say it isn’t true.”
“Word of holy scribbling!” cried the indignant clergyman. “It’s no more in God’s Bible, Klomp, than you are in God’s fold. And you haven’t even got it correct, for it ends ‘And death is the best of all.’”
Suddenly a dark cloud seemed to spread across the sunlit landscape. The surrounding larch-trees shivered, with a long-drawn sigh.
“I wish you would move a little on one side, Dominé,” said Klomp, querulously, though he had never heard of Diogenes. “Thank you. Well, a peddler-man that came showed it me in a book, and he said it was in the Bible, and if it isn’t, it ought to be. Them’s my sentiments. Morning, Dominé.”
His feet slipped forward under the weariness of this long discourse; he recovered himself with a shuffle. Broad as the concluding hint had been, the Dominé ignored it.
“You never do anything, Klomp,” he said, angrily.
“Then I never do anything wrong, Dominé. I don’t drink. I don’t even smoke. I’m too poor.”
“Poverty is not disgraceful to confess,” replied the Dominé, quoting Pericles, “but not to escape it by exertion, that is disgraceful.”
Every child in the parish had heard the quotation.
Klomp yawned: “‘Peace and potatoes is better than a pother and a cow.’ That’s in the Bible, at any rate,” he replied, and suddenly he collapsed again upon the grass before the startled parson’s backward skip.
“Could I see Pietje and speak to her? Perhapsshewill listen to reason,” hazarded the Dominé, controlling his wrath. The father pointed to the cottage door; then, suddenly remembering the vague possibility of future poor-relief, as yet not required, he faintly called his elder daughter’s name.
She crept out with a half-pared potato in her hand. She wasa ruddy-faced girl, not uncomely in her slovenliness, like an apple that has fallen from the tree.
“Well, Pietje,” began Dominé Rovers, patiently, “so you are going to Groningen to a nice home and useful work. It is very kind, indeed, of the good lady who is willing to teach you.”
“Yes, Dominé,” said Pietje.
“Ah, that’s right,” cried the Dominé, with pleased surprise. “I’m glad to see you’ve come to your senses. So you’re going, like a good girl?”
“No, Dominé,” said Pietje.
“What do you mean, you impertinent creature?” exclaimed the minister, exceedingly irate. “Not going when you said you were. Not—”
“No, Dominé,” repeated Pietje, sitting down on the window-sill.
Dominé Rovers turned upon the recumbent father. Of course he had lost his temper; he had known all along that he would do so the consciousness of losing hold caused him to let go all the faster.
“I appeal to you,” he cried—“you, the responsible guardian of this child. Her lot is in your hands to-day for life-long weal or woe. She is incapable of choosing, and unfit to do so. It is only your selfishness, Klomp, that is ruining your daughters’ lives. You say you want them with you, I hear. A pretty excuse.”
“Yes; I love them,” murmured Klomp, sentimentally.
“And what would Mietje do?” interposed Pietje, looking up from vague contemplation of the pendent potato-peel. Mietje was the child of twelve.
This objection not being easy to meet, the Dominé ignored it. “Fine love, indeed,” he shouted to the father. “When a parent loves his child, he sacrifices any inclinations of his own to that child’s real welfare. The parent who doesn’t do that, doesn’t love. Do you understand me?”
“Oh yes,” said Klomp.
“Then take this to heart. If you don’t send Pietje to Groningen, and make her go, you don’t love her. There!”
“Would the Dominé send Juffrouw Ursula to Groningen?” asked Pietje, askance.
“Indeed I should,” replied the Dominé, triumphantly, thinking of the Horst. “Never should I allow my own interests to influence me. Be sensible, Klomp.”
But at this moment a welcome diversion occurred. Mietje, the child, came running round the cottage with pitiful cries.
“Pussy!” she screamed from afar; “oh, father, pussy! The rope broke, and she’s dropped into the well!”
She was sobbing and shrieking; nobody scolded her for her mischief-making. Pietje started up with eager words of comfort.
“Father would get the ladder. Father would go down into the water. Father would fish out pussy.”
Klomp was already up and away. The two girls hurried after him. The Dominé was left alone.
“Well, I have done my duty,” he mused, retracing his steps. “The best of us can do no more.” He was a very good man. He had a good man’s weakness for consciously doing his duty.
As he turned into a little brown hollow all checkered with sunlit tracery, he saw Otto van Helmont come vaulting over a stile.
“Ah, Dominé, I was looking for you,” said Otto. Then they walked on side by side, and gradually an embarrassing silence settled down between them. The Dominé broke it.
“It is a very fine day,” said the Dominé.
“Yes,” replied Otto. “Dominé, when Ursula and I are married, we must go back to Java.”
“Never,” said the Dominé, and with a sweep of his walking-stick he knocked down a thistle.
“I—I am aware that perhaps I have hardly acted quite fairly,” began Otto, speaking with some agitation. “It has all come so suddenly; I have allowed myself to be overwhelmed. Apart from her general condemnation of India, which I have never treated quite seriously, the subject has not yet been mooted between us. I wished first to speak of it to you. I feel that I am asking—”
The Dominé had stopped in the middle of the narrow path.
“It was the condition,” he interrupted, hoarsely. “She made it the condition. Never.”
“No, indeed, we have not spoken of it,” cried Otto, in distress.
The Dominé stamped his foot. “Women always forget everything,” he said.
Otto hurried on. “I want to explain,” he continued, eagerly. “I hope you will let me explain. It is a most painful thing for all of us. I cannot stay at the Horst, Dominé; that is quite out of the question. In fact, the sooner I leave it the better.”
“Why?” broke in the Dominé, vehemently. “What nonsense! Of course you can stay at the Horst!”
“I cannot bear the idea of earning my living in this country; you yourself have always discouraged it. Besides, I must earn much more than my living. That is imperative. Especially now.” He checked himself; he was not going to speak to the Dominé of the Baroness’s shattered hopes. But Ursula’s father understood.
Involuntarily both men’s eyes wandered away across the fields towards the chimneys of the Horst embedded in foliage. Then their glances met.
“Never. Never. Never,” repeated the Dominé, passionately.
“In a few years I shall probably want money,” declared Otto, decisively. “I shall want a good deal of money, I expect. I must do what I can to earn it. You will say, perhaps, like my father, that till now I have tried and failed. All the more reason to try again.”
“No, I don’t say that,” responded the Dominé, honestly. “You know I don’t. But, Otto, I can’t let my Ursula go to Java.”
Otto did not immediately return to the charge. Presently he began again, in quite a low voice, almost a whisper, under the laughing blue sky,
“More than fifteen years ago a young man came to you, complaining bitterly that he was sick of his empty, meaningless existence. He was tired of life, he said. And you answered, ‘Go and work. The people who work have no time to get tired.’”
“But I never said, ‘Go and amass money,’” interrupted the old man, lifting a shaky arm.
“You said, ‘Spend your own money.’ How well I remember your saying that the night I came to you! ‘You are a grown man. Don’t spend any one’s money but your own.’ It came to me like a revelation. It was so directly opposed to what I had been taught from my youth. In my world they say, ‘Only don’t earn money. You may do anything except that.’”
“Well, you have obeyed that precept,” replied the Dominé, a little bitterly. Then he repented immediately.
“Otto, you’re a good fellow. I can’t let my Ursula go away to Java.”
“I was wrong, perhaps,” said Otto, “to demand so great a sacrifice. I ought to have spoken more plainly of my intentions beforehand—”
“You ought, indeed,” interjected the Dominé, glad of every vent. “You have behaved exceedingly badly.”
“So be it. Well, I leave the matter in your hands. Personally, of course, I consider I ought to return. I have a fresh offer—a really advantageous opening on a sugar plantation, a large distillery—”
The Dominé looked at him.
“That means rough work,” said the Dominé.
“But you must decide,” continued Otto, evasively. “If you distinctly prefer it, I shall look for occupation in Holland. Only in no case can I remain at the Horst.”
“You can,” cried the Dominé, quite angrily.
Otto had stopped. His eyes were following a distant swallow’s trackless dips.
“And even if I could,” he said, slowly, “my wife could not—Ursula could not.”
The Dominé’s eyes sought his in long inquiry.
“With Gerard,” said Otto at last.
“Ah!”
Then the Dominé cried, “Stuff and nonsense! stuff and nonsense! I don’t believe a word of it. Nor do you.”
“I leave the decision in your hands,” repeated Otto.“Some employment of some kind in some Dutch town, if you so wish.”
The Dominé leaned up against a tree; he closed his eyes; his bronzed face was quite white. The wood seemed to hold its breath under the sneering sky.
“When a father loves his child,” began the Dominé; then his voice broke. “My Ursula,” he said. “God have mercy on me! The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.” He stopped.
Otto, thoughtfully wending his way homeward, reached a spot where the Manor-house burst into view all at once through the park. Unconsciously he stood still. The moments passed by; he remained without moving; a yellow butterfly came foolishly hovering among the bushes; he did not see it.
Suddenly a single tear lay heavy on his cheek.
FORFEITS ALL ROUND
For the next three months Otto worked in a sugar-distillery at Boxlo, a little town among the wilds of Brabant. It was rough work, indeed, as the Dominé had foretold. Night after night the Jonker stood, stripped to the waist, before the blazing furnaces; in the small hours he came home to his lodgings and strove to snatch from the daylight such sleep as he could. Fortunately he was very robust, but that, although an alleviation, can hardly be considered an excuse. Sometimes even he wondered whether such slaving, amid grime and oil-stench and sick throbs, was his natural fate, but his father had truly described him as animated by a passion of self-torture. Out-of-the-way horrors were probably one’s duty. Besides, what other career was open to him at the moment? Once in India, with his friend’s assistance, he would stand an excellent chance of making a fortune by sugar, as that friend had done before him, in half a dozen years.
So he worked, night after night, month after month, with set lips and still eyes. Occasionally he spent a Sunday at the Manor-house, as if a traveller traversing mountain solitudes had halted from time to time at a Parisian café. His father and mother accepted him without comment, adverse or otherwise; in the smooth design of their lives he was an arabesque run mad. During his stay the Baroness chiefly regretted Gerard.
The only person who stuck to him through it all, stanch and true, was Roderick Rovers. Once having accepted the duty of sacrifice, the Dominé delighted in its pain. He rejoiced in proving to himself how, like the old soldier he was, he could probe his own wound without wincing.
“It is a great thing in Otto to go,” he said. “It is a great thing in me to let him take Ursula. Great souls do great things gladly.” Then he laughed at himself: “Pshaw,” he said, “‘Men always imagine the struggle of the moment, while they are engaged in it, to be the greatest that ever was.’ You will find that in Thucydides, Ursula. Thucydides was a very wise man.”
Ursula acquiesced a little impatiently. She did not want to go to Java. She thought Otto should have made known his intentions in time. Placed between the two, she immediately discarded her brand-new lover for the father on whose affection her whole life had been built up. In the sudden certainty of separation from the Dominé, she discovered, with alarming unexpectedness, that she could very well have continued to exist without Otto. For several days their engagement dangled on a thread.
Her irritated hesitancy filled her lover with dismay, for it strengthened all his doubts of Gerard. An honest maiden’s accepted lover does not ask her if she loves another man. Indignantly Otto wiped the momentary film from the pure reflection he bore in his heart. But there are actions we barely commit, yet remember a lifetime.
It was the Dominé, after all, who married Ursula to Otto, with deep commiseration for himself. His dear child’s filial loyalty, while it wakened all his pride, showed him his own path the more clearly. “A woman shall leave father and mother and shall cleave unto her husband,” he said. “Never shall I allow you to desert Otto for my sake. You do not know your own heart, child. Your magnanimity leads you astray.” Ultimately Ursula almost believed this. But she conditioned for a two years’ absence only.
“I, had such been my lofty mission, would have proved myself faithful unto death,” said Miss Mopius, to whom came outer echoes of the struggle. “A great love, like blazing sunlight, hides the whole world in its own bright mist. Van Helmont has dropped a diamond to play with a pebble. So like a man.” Miss Mopius, since her disappointment, had grown very romantic in her talk. According to the advertisements it was theSympathetico Lob; according to her own account it was her mighty sorrow. “Ah, my dear, do not let us speak of it. Every woman’s heart is a sanctuary with a crypt.”
She snorted at Ursula’s heavy eyes. “Every man gets the wife he deserves,” she said. “With women that is not the case, their choice being limited.” Ursula was incapable of small, spiteful retorts; she made up her mind that she would prove to Aunt Josine and the world how worthily Otto had chosen.
So she set to work on her trousseau, and was very affectionate to her father. There was something exceedingly painful in this latter-day softness between two hitherto undemonstrative characters. When Ursula laid down a neglected needle to look across at the Dominé, the old man would jump up with swift repression, and angrily bid her go on. The days shortened: perhaps that made them seem to pass so swiftly, and the appointed wedding-morn drew near.
Meanwhile another wedding was also announced as imminent, and various members of the Helmont family gnashed their teeth over the prospect. The whole of Drum, however, jabbered fairly good-natured approval, which is surely saying a good deal, and more than most young couples can hope for.
“Yes, Gerard, it is quite true,” said Helena van Trossart, stopping, in a crowded ballroom, a white vision among the glitter and hum. “You could have assured yourself it was true without insulting me by the question.” Her clear eyes flashed. “I am going to marry Willie van Troyen.”
Gerard was very hot—the room was hot. “No,” he said, thickly, “I should never have believed it, unless I had heard it from your own lips.” He drew a little aside, almost secure, yet not quite, among the restless throng.
“I cannot make you out at all,” he went on, in great agitation; “I—I don’t want to say anything, but—” He checked himself; his eyebrows twitched; his whole face grew troubled with suppressed meaning.
She understood him perfectly. For a few moments—perhaps half a minute—she remained quite silent, with eyes downcast, her bosom heaving, her graceful figure a-tremble, like her lips. At last, amid the rhythmic flow of gayety around, she lifted hersolemn gaze to his, and spoke with slow distinctness. “I know what you would taunt me with,” she said. “You think me inconsistent. But in his case it doesn’t matter. I do not love him.”
And then the room swam round in a whirl, and she was gone.
After that they were more than ever unwilling to meet. Yet, in a little circle like theirs the thing was unavoidable, and Gerard had constantly to face what was almost more painful—the tacit misery of the fat Baroness, Helena’s comfortable aunt, who understood, with a woman’s insight in all such matters, that everything ought, somehow, to have been different to what it was.
The Baroness van Trossart complained to her husband, but the Baron said that the Van Troyens were as good a family as the Van Helmonts, and he didn’t see that it mattered.
“Personally,” he added, “I am unable to perceive much difference between the two young men. They are both fair-complexioned and gentlemanly, and ill-mannered, like their companions. I wonder that Nellie should have thought the exchange worth her while.”
The lady would have protested.
“My dear, I cannot help it. HadIbeen consulted I should have requested Helena to marry your three nephews Van Asveld. Their mother is pestering me to find the whole three of them places with a start of two hundred a year. The thing is impossible!” He coughed testily, and before his important eyes he held a blue-book upside down.
Equally bootless was the Baroness’s attempt to seek refuge in the sympathy of Mademoiselle Papotier. That impenetrable Frenchwoman only replied,
“Mon Dieu, Madame, le mariage n’est pas l’amour!” taking the name of three holy things in vain within one short sentence, after the manner of her race.
But one evening towards dusk, as Gerard was dressing for dinner, he heard some one enter his little front sitting-room, to whom he called out, into the heavy twilight,
“All right, old chap! Wait a minute till I get my shirt on. There’s some sherry and bitters on the sideboard.”
Presently he went forward with his fingers at his collar-stud. In the shadow stood a shawl-enfolded figure whom he thought he recognized.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said; “I told the landlady to send you up. If you don’t do the things better I must get some other woman. I believe you purposely wear holes in my underclothing.”
“Indeed, Monsieur,” came the reply in French, “I am most anxious to wash your dirty linen, but, Monsieur Gerard, you give your family almost too much of it.”
“By Jove!” replied Gerard. “I say, Mademoiselle, wait a minute till I—” He disappeared.
Mademoiselle Papotier smiled a supercilious smile. “Ah, que les hommes sont plaisants,” she murmured. “Mauvais plaisants!” she added. But when Gerard returned a few moments later she was boldly agreeable to him, with a smirk round her slightly mustachioed lips.
“To what am I indebted?” began the young officer.
She waved a little deprecatory hand in the neatest of gray gloves.
“A moment!” she said. “Can you not spare me a moment? I am fatigued. May I not repose myself?”
Gerard, ashamed and awkward, hurriedly pushed forward an arm-chair.
“Ah, but sit you down also,” she expostulated. “Only the disagreeable says itself standing.” Then, as he obeyed, she looked at him with an ogle. “What a handsome man you are!” she said. The words frightened Gerard excessively but unnecessarily; it was only part of Mademoiselle Papotier’s philosophy that you could puteveryman on earth into a good-humor by broadly praising his looks. If Red Riding-hood had said to the wolf “What fine teeth you have!” instead of “What big ones!” he would probably have abandoned his intention of eating her.
“No wonder the poor thing loved you,” immediately added the little governess, casting down her eyes. She was hung round with black jet indiscriminately, and she picked at it—now here, now there.
Gerard, as we know, was not a diplomatist. “Didsheask you to come and tell me that?” he cried, with irritable irony.
“Ah, Monsieur van Helmont,” replied the Frenchwoman, softly, and her swarthy face seemed to lose its vigor, “it is always like that; you men, you knock at a woman’s heart until it opens, and then you cry out in scorn at the open door!” She hesitated for a moment, still plucking at the jet. “First the beautiful Ursula,” she said, “and then my own sweet Helena. Aye, Monsieur, it is not right!”
“Ursula?” cried Gerard, in amazement.
“Yes, do you think no one knows? Oh, that is like you men again. You can always trust the woman you have wronged to keep your secret. You are safe. Not a word has the noble Helena spoken; but trust Papotier to see for herself.”
“It is not true,” said Gerard, with real fervor. “I have never wronged a hair of Ursula’s head.”
Mademoiselle Papotier blushed, actually blushed. “The word ‘wrongs,’” she said, “is not easily defined; it has a masculine and a feminine gender. Ah, there you behold the former governess! One thing, however, I can tell you, Monsieur van Helmont, it is Mademoiselle Ursula and her wrongs that have lost you your bride. I repeat, Helena has told me nothing; but Mademoiselle Rovers, and she alone, has broken off your engagement.” Then she went on to tell her astounded listener about the interview on the garden seat which she had watched from her staircase window.
“And after that,” she concluded, “there was an end of it. My Helena would not have the parson’s daughter’s leavings. And quite right.” She shut up her mouth with a snap.
But she opened it again immediately.
“Nevertheless,” she went on,“I consider she exaggerates. Especially because she cared for you, and your previous belle evidently did not. It is for that I am come. The step is absurd, perhaps, but what is that to me? I am come to say the marriage with this little rabbit-eye is a farce. It must be prevented. Go tell my Helena that there is nothing between you and thefiancéeof your brother. Women are vain; who knows but what this Ursula has lied? You appear sincere. And I say one thing more, though I should not. Mark me. Helena will marry you if she can. She is proud, poor little thing, as she has a right to be, but—Ah, these men, these men! Then you will bid the little comrade go away home. I do not love you, Monsieur Gerard. I do not say these things for love of you. But they are true.”
“HE WENT FORWARD WITH HIS FINGERS AT HIS COLLAR-STUD”
“HE WENT FORWARD WITH HIS FINGERS AT HIS COLLAR-STUD”
She had spoken with suppressed vehemence, she now smiled a thin smile, and her lips trembled.
“I do not know what to say or think,” replied Gerard, greatly agitated. “Towards Ursula, at least, I am innocent. What interest can she have had in ruining my chance with Helena? Mademoiselle, you—you must really excuse me. I am going out to dinner. I shall be late as it is!” He started gladly to his feet.
She also rose, with a great rustle of scorn.
“Good-night, Monsieur,” she said. “A benevolent fairy—remember there are old fairies—has shown you the hole in the hedge; will you have the sense to creep through unscratched? Ah, be sure that I should rather have barred your path with my body, but that love cannot bear to see the whole life of the beauty benumbed in the wrong prince’s arms. Princes, forsooth!” She dropped him a courtesy and hurried away.
He had not even time to sit down and think it out. His excuse had been as imperative as it was inane. He flew off to his dinner-party and laughed and flirted, wondering all the time whether Ursula could possibly have had “a weakness” for him. That seemed to be the only possible explanation. Evidently it was Mademoiselle Papotier’s. Romance, exaggeration, these were probable; but he could hardly believe in intentional spite or untruth.
And yet—he was very much out of temper with Ursula for her capture of “that fool, Otto.” His rage against his brother, softened by time and a capital new horse, melted still more at the thought that he had wronged Otto regarding Helena. Ursula, then, was at the bottom of the mischief. Ursula, the designing intruder; the nobody who, one day, would rule at the Horst. She had always been a subject to him of kindly indifference. He was angry with himself for the violence of his new passion against her.
On returning home he found a note awaiting him. It contained only these two quotations, evidently from Papotier’s favorite seventeenth-century romances:
“Said Marcellino: ‘Damaris, my brother is faithless. I can prove it to you. Why, then, should your heart, blinded by useless smoke, still refuse to perceive the flame that is burning in mine—i.e., heart.’”“Rodelinda replied: ‘Adelgunda, I thank you for warning me. The lover that deserted you shall never have an opportunity of trampling upon Rodelinda’s affections.’”
“Said Marcellino: ‘Damaris, my brother is faithless. I can prove it to you. Why, then, should your heart, blinded by useless smoke, still refuse to perceive the flame that is burning in mine—i.e., heart.’”
“Rodelinda replied: ‘Adelgunda, I thank you for warning me. The lover that deserted you shall never have an opportunity of trampling upon Rodelinda’s affections.’”
“Exactly,” said Gerard, sighing heavily. He was very miserable. And then he went to sleep.
Meanwhile Otto plodded on, unconscious of the sins laid to his charge and to Ursula’s. The story which Adeline had forced upon him in the public gardens at Drum he had folded away on a shelf in his memory. What else could he do? He was not the man to influence Gerard. We know it was not through him that the tale reached Ursula—or Helena.
His occupations called him away from Boxlo to Bois-le-Duc, the capital of Brabant. There he came into frequent contact with a cousin, of whom he had previously known very little—nothing personally—and regarding whom his parents would hardly have cared to enlighten any one. This was a young Van Helmont, who lived with a widowed mother, and supported himself as a post-office clerk. The Helmonts of the Horst did not object to his poverty, but to his mother. To Otto’s enthusiastic eulogies the Baroness listened bored. She was too polite to ask him to change the subject; besides, perhaps she felt that such a measure would have proved quite useless, for, whatever Otto might select to say, he bored her by his way of saying it. She could only love this son, not live with him. She rejoiced with exceeding joy when Gerard, whose character was incapable of vindictiveness, consented once more to sit opposite to Otto at table. Still, the brothers held aloof.
And the wedding-day drew near, overshadowingly near. One person delighted in that thought. Otto.
MYNHEER MOPIUS’S PARTY
Mynheer Jacóbus Mopius stood on the hearth-rug in his wife’s bedroom.
“My dear,” he said, “I must admit this—since you have taken to spending the greater part of your day up-stairs, the house has become most insufferably dull.”
For Mevrouw Mopius this remark had long ago lost all its novelty; still, she never grew to like it, even while she meekly answered,
“Yes, my dear, yes. I know. I shall be better soon.” And she added, as one of her familiar after-thoughts, “Harriet ought to amuse you.”
“Oh, Harriet amuses me fast enough,” retorted Mynheer Mopius, with unpleasing alacrity. “But you’d soon be all right if you left off remembering you were ill.”
“Yes, my dear, yes,” repeated Mevrouw Mopius, closing her faded eyes. Her cheeks were faded, her hair was faded, her flannel dressing-gown was faded. In the fading light, complacent Mynheer Mopius, looking down upon her, thought how excessively faded she was.
“Only yesterday,” Mynheer continued, triumphantly, “I purposely asked your doctor what was wrong with you. And what do you think his answer was? He said he really couldn’t tell. There!” Mynheer Mopius stood out, defiant, protruding his portly prosperity. “He—said—he—really—couldn’t—tell.”
It gave Mevrouw Mopius some comfort to learn how literally the physician fulfilled the promise she had extracted from him.
“And it’s absurd to have the whole house made wretched by an illness the doctor don’t even put a name to. If you’re not down to breakfast to-morrow I shall send for a professor from Amsterdam.”
“Don’t, Jacóbus,” gasped the lady. “I’m feeling better to-day. I really am. I don’t want no professors from anywhere.”
“But I do. Sarah, I believe you enjoy being ill. Thank goodness I can afford to cure my wife.”
“There’s another reason, besides,” he added, after a moment, “why I want you to hurry up. There’s this wedding of Ursula’s coming on. They’ve behaved very badly, I know; but Roderick was never a man to know about manners—never in society, poor fellow. However, I’m not one to take offence. I intend to give a big party here in the ‘bride-days.’”[I]
“Jacóbus!” exclaimed his wife. “Why, we don’t even know the Van Helmonts. She hasn’t even presented him here!”
“My dear, did I not say that Roderick is a boor? Josine tells me they have paid none of the customary visits on either side. In one word, they behaved as people who don’t know how to behave, and I am going to behave as a person who does know.”
“But, Jacóbus—”
“Ursula is my own sister Mary’s child. My own sainted sister Mary’s. And I shouldn’t even give a wedding-party to my own sister Mary’s only child? Sarah, it is all your increasing indolence. You are prematurely making an old woman of yourself. Look at me. I am two years your junior, but it might be twenty. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” As he said this he arranged the rose in his button-hole, with a great crackle of his blue-spotted white waistcoat. An oily satisfaction played over the yellow smoothness of his cheeks.
The truth of it was, of course, that the whole man burned with eagerness to leap, at one rush, into the glories of the great world. The opportunity was unique; it offered more than the boldest could have hoped for; we may well forgive his anxiety.
Mevrouw Mopius lay in utter collapse, a crumpled rag, against one corner of her great chintz chair.
“I want Harriet!” she said, faintly. Her husband gave a great snort of contempt as he stalked from the room.
A few minutes later Harriet entered, a novel, as usual, in her dangling hand.
“Harriet, I must have my drops,” exclaimed the invalid, sharply. “The doctor said I was to have them every two hours. And in freshly drawn water each time. I told him it couldn’t be done. Doctor, I said, I’ve nobody to fetch me the water.”
Harriet busied herself about the side-table, mechanically, and in silence.
“‘And your niece?’ said the doctor,” Mevrouw Mopius continued. “So I had to tell him you were no good.”
“Oh, he knows that,” replied Harriet. “I’m no nurse. I can’t look after sick people.”
“There’s one person you’ll nurse, if ever she’s sick,” replied Mevrouw, with a grunt, swallowing down her medicine. “Harriet, do you know the date for which Ursula’s wedding is fixed?”
“Thursday month,” curtly answered Harriet, who just now hated the fortunate bride with unreasoning envy—an envy that wrung tears from the lonely girl at night.
“What day of the month?” persisted Mevrouw, wearily.
“It’s the twenty-third.”
“Harriet, you must go across to the doctor’s for me. I can’t have him here again just yet; his coming vexes your uncle so. You must say to him—listen—word for word; you must say, ‘Aunt bids me ask: Will uncle be able to go to the wedding-feast on the sixteenth of next month?’ Just that. And you must bring back an answer—yes or no. Go along.”
“But the wedding is on the twenty-third,” protested Harriet, sulkily. “And besides, Uncle Mopius isn’t ill.”
“Yes he is,” replied the invalid, with guilty incisiveness. “You just go and do as you’re told, and come back with the answer immediate. Harriet, if you don’t say a word about it down-stairs—you’d only make your uncle nervous—I’ll give you my Florentine brooch, the mosaic of the two doves drinking. Now hurry away.”
Thus incited, Harriet sulked off through the stolid streets. If Mevrouw Mopius did not send a note to the physician, it was not only that she felt physically and autographically inadequate,but also because she confidently believed that Harriet would in any case have broken the seal.
The messenger soon reached her destination. A maid-servant admitted her into the young doctor’s private room. He was at luncheon.
“My aunt sends me to you on a fool’s errand,” she began, abruptly. “This is her literal message: ‘There’s a wedding-feast on the sixteenth’—which there isn’t—‘will Uncle Mopius be able to go?’” She hung her head with affected accentuation of the indifference she was really feeling.
The doctor hesitated and looked curiously at her.
“I’m to bring back an answer—yes or no,” she added.
“Yes or no?” repeated the doctor. “Would you mind saying it again, Miss Verveen?”
“There’s a wedding entertainment on the sixteenth,” answered Harriet, with almost ill-mannered impatience. “Will Uncle Mopius be able togo?”
The young doctor studied his boots for a minute.Then he said, slowly: “No; I believe, considering the circumstances, I may safely commit myself to a ‘No.’ As your aunt so expressly wishes it, you must tell her my opinion is ‘No.’” He was much annoyed, but he could not help himself. By this time he had got somewhat accustomed to Mevrouw Mopius, the strangest of patients, who treated him like a younger colleague called in for a consultation.
“Very good,” said Harriet. “I’ll tell her. And now, please, a little questioning on my own account. What’s the matter with Uncle Mopius?”
“Nothing, Juffrouw Harriet,” replied the young man, heartily, with sudden relief. “I am glad to be able to assure you that your excellent uncle enjoys very fair health.”
“Don’t tell me untruths, if you please,” persisted the girl, greatly in earnest. “I have very particular reasons of my own for desiring to know. What’s wrong with him? Why shouldn’t he go to a party—if there were a party—on the sixteenth?”
“Oh, he might be a little out of sorts, you know. You had better give your aunt her message. It must be rather dull for you sometimes, Juffrouw Harriet, eh?” He cast an admiringglance at her; he had quick, sympathetic eyes, good doctor’s eyes.
“By no means,” replied Harriet; but her attitude, grown suddenly listless again, belied her words. “So you see what a fool’s errand mine was! As for Aunt Sarah, of course I know she’s very ill.I wish she wasn’t. It’s very hard on me. I can’t nurse invalids, and I hate to seem unkind.”
“Oh, I’m sure you couldn’t be unkind to any one,” said the young man, sweetly. It struck him that his lunch-table looked very forlorn. “You couldn’t be, Miss Harriet.”
“Oh yes, I could,” replied Harriet, quickly. “I am always unkind, for instance, to people who call me Miss Harriet, and forget that my name is Miss Verveen.”
The doctor laughed rather awkwardly as she turned to go.
“You are quite right,” he answered; “quite right. Either Juffrouw Verveen or—not Juffrouw at all; I envy the privileged few.”
“So it’s ‘No’?” she said, with her hand on the door-knob.
“So it’s ‘No’?” he repeated, boldly, looking her straight in the face. But he read his answer there, and sobered suddenly, as the physician crushed down the lover in presence of the great tragedy so quietly enacting. “Yes, I’m afraid it must be ‘No,’” he said. “The sixteenth, you said? Tell your aunt I am awfully sorry, but as far as I am able to judge, she had better think ‘No.’”
Harriet hurried home through the autumn grayness of the sleepy little town. A peculiar smile hung fixed upon her forbidding features, a mixture of anxiety and content. She went straight up to her aunt’s bedroom.
“The answer is ‘No,’” she said.
Mevrouw Mopius made no reply. She lay back, with closed eyes and sunken jaws, almost as her niece had left her when sent forth upon this hideous errand. Harriet flung herself down on a chair, and resumed her novel. Presently she rose to slip away.
Mevrouw Mopius opened her eyes.
“Harriet, give me my tambour-frame,” she said. Harriet obediently drew forth Laban from his cupboard, and removedthe sheltering tissue-paper. “I wonder could I do a stitch or two,” said Mevrouw Mopius, dolefully. She sat trying to thread a big needle with shaky fingers. Harriet waited a moment, watching her.
“Let me do it,” suggested Harriet at last.
But Aunt Sarah resented this interference.
“I wasn’t attending,” she said, angrily; “I was thinking of something else. Surely you don’t imagine I couldn’t thread a needle?”
And as she still continued trying, pitifully, tremblingly, her niece turned impatiently away.
“Do you know,” continued Mevrouw Mopius, contemplating the gaudy flare of patriarchs and camels, “I have been thinking that I should like to give it, if I can finish it, to Ursula Rovers for a wedding-present. She admired it very much when she was here. She was the only person that ever admired it.” Her voice became quite sorrowful.
“Dominé Pock admired it,” said Harriet, soothingly.
“Yes, after dining here!” exclaimed the invalid, with a flash of grim humor. “He said Jacob must have had just such a face as that. Now, Harriet, that was flattery. For Jacob couldn’t have hadexactlythat sort of face.” Indeed, had the countenance of the patriarch blazed in such continuous scarlet, his uncle could never have engaged him to look after cows.
“Besides, Pock doesn’t really know about Jacob’s face,” continued Mevrouw Mopius, with a sick person’s insistence, “for I asked him myself if we had an authentic photograph”—she meant “portrait”—“and he said we hadn’t. Though we have of Joseph, he said. It seems a very great pity. I should have liked to do it from the life.”
Mevrouw Mopius sank into aggrieved consideration of the father’s remissness about sitting for his likeness as compared with the foresight shown by the son.
“Yes, I should give it to Ursula for her wedding,” she resumed, after another long pause, “unless—”
She broke off.
“Unless what?” prompted Harriet.
“Unless I should like it for a cushion in my coffin. I think that might be rather nice.”
“Aunt!” exclaimed Harriet, in real horror, and a sudden film of feeling clouded her passionate eyes.
“Why, my dear, whatever is the matter?” queried the elder lady, calmly. “All of us die some day, do we not? And when my time has come, I should like to carry away with me my last bit of work.”
“Ah, but this is not going to be your last, you know,” comforted Harriet, with the easy infatuation of the survivor.
“Well, if not, then Ursula shall certainly have it,” Mevrouw said, cheerfully. “I wish I were quite sure she would put it, as a fire-screen, in her drawing-room. Imaginemywork in the drawing-room at the Horst. I should like that.” She resumed her tender contemplation of the immovably staring figures. “I am very tired,” she whispered; “go down now to your uncle, and tell him the doctor says he can have his party on the sixteenth or after. Don’t say anything about my message; your uncle’s got a cold, but he doesn’t want people to know it. There can be no objection, however, to his asking people here.”
Poor woman, she prided herself on her clumsy diplomacy.
“Let him get ready for his party,” she reflected. “It will keep him busy—meanwhile.”
In the face of Mynheer Mopius’s blindly staring selfishness, the stratagem was completely successful. Plunged up to the eyebrows in preparations for a gorgeous entertainment, which was, of course, to excel all similar ones, that gentleman forgot to notice his wife’s condition. He would run up to her with long descriptions of his arrangements, to which she listened reposefully for hours. When he went down-stairs again she smiled. He was happy, and he was letting her die in peace.
Soon Mynheer Mopius was obliged to slip over to Horstwyk to consult with the relations who had so suddenly increased in importance. He found the trio gathered in the Parsonage drawing-room to receive him, and he patted their heads all round. He even condescended to chaff Josine about “one wedding begetting another,” as they say in Dutch, and proposedthat she should be bridesmaid and make up to the best man.
“I should never marry my junior. I disapprove of such matches,” replied Josine, hitting out, however unreasonably, at both Ursula and Mopius.
“Well, we can’t all marry our twin-sisters, like Abraham,” said Mopius, reddening. “Can we, Roderick?”
“Sarah was Abraham’s half-sister,” answered the Dominé, wistfully gazing out at the placid sky.
“Well, at any rate,mySarah’s only six years my senior, and I made it two the day we married. I’ve done my duty to the old girl. Ursula, I hope that thirty years hence you’ll be able to say as much.”
“You married for money,” retorted Josine. As her niece’s wedding-day approached, Miss Mopius’s growing disagreeableness became a source of great agitation to herself. She smelled at her vinaigrette.
“Pooh!” replied Mopius. “If so, I quadrupled the sum. Don’t be more of a nuisance than you can help, Josine, or I sha’n’t invite you to my party.”
“There are the Baron and the Baroness coming down the road,” interposed Ursula, watching her father’s flushed face.
“Where? Show me, Ursula,” cried Mopius, bounding to the window.
She laughed. “I do believe they are coming here!” she cried. “You will have to meet them now, Uncle Jacóbus.”
“I have no objection to meeting them,” replied Jacóbus, red and important. “I was going to ask them, of course, to my party. I have no objection to the aristocracy as such.”
A moment later he was bowing and smiling—bowing what he considered an eighteenth-century bow. And the Baron was expressing his delight at making the acquaintance of Ursula’s uncle, “of whom he had heard so much.” Furthermore, Mynheer van Helmont spoke with admiration of Mynheer Mopius’s villa, upon which Mynheer Mopius replied, in the kindest manner possible, that it was very nice, but not as fine as the Horst. He also proffered his invitation on the spot, and the Baroness, smiling elaborately, accepted it, as in duty bound. It was sometime before her courteous husband consented to catch her eye, and then she immediately arose. In those few minutes the retired attorney had twice called Mynheer van Helmont “Baron,” and several other atrocious things had occurred. “How small she is! She needn’t look so bumptious!” thought Mopius, as the little lady shook hands. He was telling her how there would be dancing at his party, and he poked Josine in the ribs. “In my young days out at Batavia,” he said, “I used frequently to dance with the Governor-General’s lady. I dare say, Baron, you remember Steelenaar, a good Viceroy in his day?” He hoped for the honor of the opening polonaise with her ladyship.
“My dancing days are over, Mynheer,” said the Baroness, stiffly. “I doubt whether I should be able to acquit myself properly. Things have changedsomuch in society since my youth.”
“Ah, there you are right, Mevrouw,” replied Jacóbus Mopius with fervor. “Now, at the Drum Casino, nowadays—I am an old member—you meet people who, in your time, would not have dared to appear at a public performance.”
“I do not doubt it,” replied the Baroness, taking leave.
Husband and wife proceeded leisurely homeward. Presently the Baron said,
“My dear, I cannot understand your caring so much. Surely Mynheer Mopius is only a continuation of Juffrouw Josine.”
“I had said nothing,” replied the Baroness, quickly. “But, as you broach the subject, I must confess that I think you might have stayed half the time, and showed a quarter the courtesy.”
The Baron laughed. “He is Ursula’s single rich relation,” said the Baron. “I never forget that. And, besides, I am naturally amiable, Cécile. It is a masculine weakness.”
“I hate money,” cried the Baroness. “If there were no money in the world there would be no vulgarity.”
“How sad that would be for the non-vulgar,” replied her consort.“Yes, he is Ursula’s single ‘prospect.’ I was aware of the fact, but, of course, he stated it. I had very good reason to be amiable.”
“He may live to be a hundred,” said the Baroness, petulantly.
“Not he. His widow might, if she were healthy, but she happens to be very ill. My dear, you put things so roughly; you love money more than I do. But I hope hewilllive to be a hundred. If only pour nous encourager, nous autres. We all ought to live to be a hundred; a hundred years isn’t much. As a rule it’s the widows who live on forever. We men die fast enough.”
“No, no!” cried the Baroness, drawing her arm through his. “Don’t talk like that, Theodore; I should never survive you.”
“My dear, if I can, I will give you but little opportunity. Do not forget that, when I depart, I must leave my art treasures to Otto, not to mention the Horst.”
They walked on, arm in arm, each silently busy with his own grave thoughts.
“Somehow, I have occasionally imagined of late that it wouldn’t be for long.” The Baron’s voice suddenly changed. “But that’s all nonsense,” he said, briskly. “It seems too cruel to die and leave it all.”
He swept his eyes across his fields and forests. His wife pressed his hand.
“My dear,” he said, “do you object to my lighting a cigar?”
When the sixteenth came round there was no dancing. Mynheer Mopius sat in a darkened room.
Yes, Mevrouw Mopius had provokingly died. At the last moment she resolved to take her unfinished patriarchs down into the grave with her, but she left her collection of samples to Ursula, because Ursula had shown some appreciation of her work.