“‘IT SEEMS TOO CRUEL TO DIE AND LEAVE IT ALL’”
“‘IT SEEMS TOO CRUEL TO DIE AND LEAVE IT ALL’”
BARON VAN HELMONT
So Otto and Ursula were married with all the customary paraphernalia of vulgar exposure—paraphernalia which cause a sensible man to resolve, as he runs the gantlet on his way back from the pillory, that the first time in his case shall certainly be the last. Theirs was as quiet a wedding as unselfish people can get—which means that it was not a quiet wedding.
Their honeymoon trip was but an introduction to the longer journey; at Genoa the big Java steamship would meet them; meanwhile, creeping down the Riviera, they lingered for a fortnight in that Paradise of Snobbery, Cannes. Cannes is a beautiful garden, planted with princes; what more can be desired by the millionaire, or by the numerous curs to whom the far scent of the millionaire is as sausage on the breeze? Other towns contain elements manifold, paltry and noble; exquisite, sun-wrapped Cannes has nothing but the worship of gold by glitter, and the worship of glitter by gold.
The young couple, therefore, passed through it unperceived. It was only natural that they should appear in the “Strangers’ List” as Monsieur et Madame de Holmani. They held out their hands to nobody, and nobody held out his hands to them, a kind of negative Ishmaelism, which has its advantages, even outside a honeymoon.
To Ursula, crossing simultaneously the frontiers of Holland, home, and maidenhood, this fortnight never assumed the cool colors of reality. Before it could do that it was over. She was back at Horstwyk again, like an awakened dreamer in the dusk of a troubled morning.
While the trip lasted—on the Paris Boulevards, among theorange-groves of La Croisette—the farewell peep of home hung heavy before her eyes. She seemed to see them all photographed on the steps of the Manor-house—the Baroness, firm set and still, the Baron coughing and sneezing, not from emotion, but from the sudden effects of a violent cold which should have kept him away from the ceremony. And her father, his one arm drawn tight across the “Legion” on his breast, his eyes fixed not on his daughter’s last appeal for a farewell benison, but on some far beyond of sunlight after storm.
The thought of Otto blended with the thought of her father, and over these, which were her thoughts of love, lay ever the thought of separation. Sadness is not a good beginning for a young wife who “respects and admires.” The Sabines, under similar circumstances, actually consented to live with their parents-in-law.
“Yes, it is very beautiful,” she said, looking across the bay to the blue-black of the sunset Esterel. They were on the terrace of their hotel at Californie. “Oh yes, it is very beautiful,” she said. She spoke with that admission which is a protest. There are times when we think that nature, like some women, would be all the better for a little less flamboyant beauty, and a little more homeliness.
“Java is far more beautiful still,” said Otto, encouragingly. “There is nothing in all Europe to compare with Batavia.”
And then, for the twentieth time, Ursula resolutely enjoyed these anticipated glories of the Indies, for the soreness and the separation were in her own soul, deep down.
Had Otto been more of a Mopius, he would never have guessed at their existence. Hearts like Ursula’s understand that a woman weds her husband’s life.
Nor can it be denied that the novelty of the prospect, by its very terror, attracted and pleasantly excited her. Still, unfortunately, by nature she was stay-at-home and cat-like. Besides, she had not left her father to himself, but to Aunt Josine.
So while she was telling herself how unearthly must be a scene that was even more beautiful than this stage effect of palm-trees and white buildings against the blue Mediterranean flare, even while she was schooling herself to this idea, herwhole life suddenly changed with the fall of a curtain. The play stopped at the very opening, and the audience went home again. All the worry and the expectation and the screwing-up had been superfluous. How many of us discover that, even when the lights go out at the conclusion of the fifth act, instead of in the middle of the first.
“Poor people are not poor in India; that is one great advantage,” Otto was saying. “There is always plenty of space about one, in house and garden, and even the mendicant, if a white, drives a trap. But I don’t suppose there really are any white beggars. You will see how comfortable we shall be in the great veranda of evenings, with all the pretty things around us, while I sit telling you how sugar prices are going up. Ursula, it will be delightful to think we are working for the dear old place at home, which is yours too now, and mustneverbelong to any one but a Helmont.” His face grew square as he sat staring at the black ridge of distant mountains, and then, suddenly, with a man’s embarrassment, “There’s the little steamer,” he said, lightly, “coming back from the Lérins.”
The hotel concierge was going his round on the terrace, leisurely seeking out an occasional lounger in the still, perfume-laden sunset, and distributing a bundle of letters. They watched him coming towards them, from their seat by the balustrade, between two bowls of geranium.
“C’est tout,” he said, holding out one letter.
“It’s too bad of them not to write!” exclaimed Ursula, as everybody always does on the useless, idle Riviera.
Otto was looking at the envelope, holding it across his outstretched palm, between middle finger and thumb. It was addressed in his Aunt Louisa’s handwriting to “Otto, Baron van Helmont.”
“Well?” said Ursula, with the impatience of the non-recipient.
But Otto, Baron van Helmont, sat staring at the superscription. The first bell for thetable d’hôtebroke loose, with a sudden continuous clang. Ursula rose. “I’m going up-stairs for a minute,” she began.“If it isn’t from home, I suppose it’s of no importance.”
Otto shook himself.
“Wait,” he said, and broke the seal.
The note was brief enough. “Dear Otto,—Your father died this morning at half-past five, from pneumonia. You know he was ailing when you left, but the lungs were attacked only two days ago. We are expecting you back. Your mother is very unhappy. Aunt Louisa.—P. S. Your mother asked me to telegraph, but I consider it better to write.”
Even by the road-side of our selfish daily wanderings we cannot hear the voice of death calling a stranger from his field-work without mentally crossing ourselves, suddenly shocked and sobered. What, then, if he enter the court-yard of our hearts? Although, perhaps, he pause before the inner door, every chamber, in the horror of his presence, becomes to us as the innermost.
Ursula and Otto looked at each other with solemn eyes, speaking little. The Riviera evening fell suddenly, with its wiping-out of warmth, like the transition of a Turkish bath. The whole gray seaboard lay bleak and chill in a shudder of autumnal decay.
“Aunt Louisa,” said Otto, presently, “has a prejudice against telegrams, chiefly, I fancy, on account of the expense.”
Ursula was angry with the Freule van Borck. “She might have prepared you a little,” said Ursula.
“Oh, that is her way. ‘Simple and strong,’ you know. But you are mistaken. Shedidprepare me.” He held out the envelope to his wife.
Ursula blushed scarlet. There seemed to her in this brutal fact something strangely painful and insulting both to them and to the dead. She could not meet her husband’s gaze. She shivered. “Let us go in, Otto,” she said, softly.
As they walked across the terrace he murmured aloud, “‘Your mother is very unhappy.’ Ursula,” he added, “this alters everything. We must go back to-morrow as early as we can.”
“Yes,” she answered, unemotionally, “I understand.”
He did not say anything more till they had reached theirown room. Then, as he struck a light in the dark, he began, with averted face, looming large against the shadows:
“You will like that, at least, among all the sorrow—the going back!”
She tried to answer him, not knowing what, and unexpectedly burst into tears.
Well, it’s a good thing that women can weep. Their feelings are often too complicated for words. The woman who knows herself incapable of tears is surely one-third inarticulate. But, alas, that the act of weeping should be so positively ugly! From a purely æsthetic point of view there is nothing more regrettable in connection with the Fall of Man.
No further news from home reached the young Baron and Baroness during their hurried flight northward. They themselves were quite incapable of fathoming, even from the most materialistic point of view, the magnitude of the change which had come over their prospects. Otto trembled to think in what condition he might find his father’s affairs. Only, he felt certain that the Indian plan would have to be definitely abandoned on account of the estates at home.
The Dominé met the pair at the little Horstwyk station, and as Ursula put her arm round her father’s neck, she dimly realized that selfishness is man’s sole virtue, as, in fact, it is his only vice.
She could realize it all the more in the shuttered mansion, which seemed to lie as a waste round that one locked door of the widow’s boudoir. In the dining-hall, surrounded by candles, stood the coffin, awaiting the heir. All the house and the village and their surroundings seemed full of a subdued eagerness to bury the past and welcome the present. The library table was covered with carefully addressed letters and cards.
Gerard was absent. Only the Freule van Borck came forward, with hushed step, to greet them in the gray loneliness of the flowerless hall.
“My dears,” she said, sententiously, “you might have spared yourselves the shame of running away.”
GERARD’S SHARE
So the old Baron slept in the church-yard under the shadow of the “Devil’s Doll,” which he himself had erected on the grave of his children. Opposite, outside the chancel-wall, shone dully the great slab which marked the entrance to the family vault, heavy with the single name “De Horst.” The word suggested a “dépendance” of the Manor-house; hither came for more permanent residence the successive sojourners at the larger hostel. It was the widow who, waking from her lethargy, had demanded separate sepulture for her dear, dead lord, to Otto’s tacitly disapprobatory regret.
She had summoned her elder son into the dusk of her silenced chamber, and speaking softly from amid the solemn blankness of her loss, “I want your father to lie in the sunshine,” she said, “and I wish them to make the—the—in such a manner that every possible sunbeam shall fall straight across it.”
Then, before Otto’s unspoken demur: “He always had a horror of the vault; he never would enter it once during his whole lifetime. And, Otto, all his life long he detested cold. In the end it has killed him.” She began to cry. Her children had found her greatly changed, quite broken down and feeble.
“Cécile cannot even take comfort by contemplating the beauties of adversity,” said Freule van Borck, crossly. “Surely she might understand, in the midst of her legitimate tears, that sorrow is a great educator. She perversely persists in eluding the blessings.” The Freule did not understand that her sister’s soul was a plant of God’s conservatory, a blossom which could only drop off before the east wind.
Work had to be done, however, and some one must do it. Otto soon recognized, with anticipated acquiescence, that his father’s affairs had been left in utter confusion. The confusion, however, was of the orderly kind. There had been a certain amount of method in the Baron’s madness; only, unfortunately, there had been a good deal more madness in his method. He had evidently entertained to the full an honest gentleman’s distrust of all commercial and industrial undertakings, and had added thereto a contempt for all usury and money-lending. To paper investments he would have nothing to say. Every penny he possessed he had sunk in land or curios.
Also he had made a will, an unwise thing for any man to do. In that entanglement of spoliation which we have glorified by the beautiful name of “jurisprudence,” any personal effort towards equity is only another welcome knot to the lawyer’s hand.
The Baron’s will disinherited his younger and favorite son so far as Dutch law permits parents to disinherit, which means that Gerard would be entitled to exactly one-third of the property as against two-thirds for Otto. Furthermore, the testator expressed a hope that his wife would allow all her claims on his estate to be met by an equivalent transfer of art treasures, and that she would preserve these unsold.
The dead man’s object was plain enough; while unable to stint himself, he yet desired to achieve the retention, after his decease, of thestatus quo. That is not an easy thing in Holland, where modern law, following the Napoleonic precedent, aims at the destruction of hereditary wealth. The Baron openly avowed his intentions in the last sentence of his brief testament; “I hope,” he wrote, “that my children will always retain the Horst intact as I leave it. Otto must do this; I believe he has it in him. I have ultimately succeeded, after infinite pains, in restoring the whole property as it was at its largest in 1672. I trust that neither Otto nor Gerard will ever consent to part with a rood of it. They will rather suffer privation, as I have done.”
The Baron’s way of “restoring” had been a simple one. Whenever opportunity offered, he had bought such alienatedlands as fell open, often paying a fancy price, the money for which he procured by mortgaging other property. Nominally, therefore, his landed estate was a very large one, much of it being encumbered, more depreciated. As for “suffering privation”—he had never bought a Corot.
Evidently he had distrusted Gerard, and felt confidence in intractable Otto. The strangest thing about it all was that he, with his fear of death, should ever have summoned up courage to make a will at all. To Otto this fact, more than anything else, revealed how intensely his seemingly shallow father must have loved the home of his race.
And the discovery brought them nearer now in their separation, the dead lord and the new one. Baron Theodore’s ambition was one such as this son could appreciate; the sudden self-reproach of undue contemptuousness caused Otto to veer round to the other extreme of veneration. He resolved, under this first impulse, that, come what may, his father’s decree should be to him a holy trust.
“Of course,” said the Dowager Baroness, relapsing immediately into her continuous mood of mournful indifference. But Gerard demurred.
“I must havemyshare in money,” said Gerard. “I can’t help myself. Besides, what did father mean? The property can’t be said to remain intact if one man owns two-thirds of it and another man the remaining third. Enough of the land must be sold to give me my share in cash.”
“None of the land can be sold,” replied Otto. He wore his dogged face. The two brothers were together by the library table. In the distant bay-window of the smoking-room Aunt Louisa had fallen asleep over a book.
“Keep the land, if you like, or know how. I don’t mind as long as I get my money. You are executor, Otto; pay me my share.”
“Do you wish,” asked the young Baron, just a trifle dramatically, “to ignore our dead father’s commands?”
“No, indeed. No more than you,” replied Gerard, with honest disdain. The tinge of melodrama irritated him. The unfairness of his treatment irritated him. But the inherentabsurdity of the testamentary instructions was what tormented him most.
“Father’s wish was to let me have as little as possible,” he continued. “So be it. But your wish is evidently to let me have nothing at all.” Both of them waited a moment, in bitterness.
“And”—Gerard ground his heel energetically. “I’m not going to stand that.” Then he said, in quite a different tone, “Simply, to begin with, because I can’t.”
“Of course you have debts,” said Otto, sitting down by the writing-table.
“Of course,” repeated Gerard, with a pardonable sneer at his immaculate brother. “But it’s not that, all the same—at least, not so much.”
He paced half-way down the room and back again. Suddenly both brothers heard the ticking of the clock.
“You wrong me, Otto, as usual,” said Gerard, in a broken voice. “I am as anxious as you are to do whatever’s right. But I can’t help myself. I may as well make a clean breast of it. I must have the money. You’ll think me an unmitigated fool, but, then, you think that already.”
He hesitated a moment; Otto did not move.
“Two years ago,” Gerard went on, huskily, “I became surety for a chum of mine—never mind his name; he’s dead, poor chap—and I’ve got to pay.”
“Surety! Surety!” stammered Otto. “How? What? What kind of surety?”
“It was a debt of honor, between gentlemen. And I’ve got to pay.”
“Of course—a card debt. I understood as much,” said Otto, self-righteously.
“It was notmycard debt,” retorted Gerard, feeling his wrongs more acutely than ever, for, as we are aware, he was not a gambler.“It happened playing with strangers, and quite unexpectedly it grew into an enormous sum. For him, next morning, it meant pay or shoot yourself. He wanted it to mean ‘Shoot yourself,’ but I stopped that just in time and made it mean ‘pay—some day or other.’ So pay we must. The responsibility is mine.”
He stopped, staring with solemn eyes, back through the misty past, into what had been, till now, the most dramatic occurrence of his life. He remembered his awakening, the day after the gambling-bout, to the troubled consciousness that he must hurry at once to his friend. He remembered the room as he burst into it: the table with the despondent figure sitting there, the pistol waiting, ready loaded. These things were sacred; he was not going to speak of them to Otto.
“I cannot understand any human being accepting your security;” the elder brother’s tone was sceptical to a degree of provocation. “But, at any rate, the other man and his people must pay.”
“He is dead,” repeated Gerard, gently. “Had he lived, he would have been perfectly well able to do so; we both knew that, or I don’t think he would ever have allowed me to incur the risk. It wasn’t much of a risk, as I told him at the time. He was sole heir to a stingy old aunt; he died before her, and all her money’s gone to charities. So you see I’m fully liable. It’s exceedingly unfortunate, but it can’t be helped.”
“Even admitting all this,” began Otto, feeling his unwilling way, “you are not really liable. The law does not recognize gambling liabilities. They are not recoverable.” He stumbled over his sentences, thinking aloud.
“Law!” exclaimed Gerard. “Law! I was thinking of the other extreme—honor.”
“And you were a minor at the time, besides. Neither legally, nor should I say morally, responsible. It must been an act of madness.” He gazed in front of him, troubled, questioning, full of incertitude.
“I thought you understood,” said Gerard, haughtily, “that it was an affair between gentlemen. It has nothing to do with moral or legal responsibility.” He stood still. “I bound myself to meet this claim, if able, when called upon. The trust is a sacred one. By accepting it I saved my dead friend’s life.” Even amid the deep seriousness of his mood he smiled at the Irishism, just as his father would have done. “I am not going to desert him now.”
“Gerard, God knows I don’t want you to do anything ungentlemanly,” cried Otto, despairingly. “I am only thinking. Let me think. You say the sum is an enormous one. What do you call enormous?” His voice trembled with apprehension.
“It’s ninety thousand florins, if you want to know,” replied Gerard, in a moody murmur. The sombre room grew very silent. Outside the window nearest them a sparrow was pecking, pertly, at the sill.
“I thought so,” said Otto, scornfully, “I thought you had ruined yourself; it seemed so natural. I understood it at once, and that made me look round for the tiniest loophole of possible escape. Gerard, it seems to me you have but the choice of dishonors. Against the memory of your friend I pit that of your father. You cannot possibly do justice to both.” He was desperate, feeling the hopelessness of compromise.
“The will is absurd!” burst out Gerard—“absurd! He cannot have meant it absolutely, only as far as was practicable. Do you really want to make out that he intended both of us to starve, in the midst of our acres of corn-fields? I won’t believe it; and if he did, why, poor father must have been under some momentary delusion! Wills are always taken to be binding so far as circumstances will allow. Our father meant us not to sell more of the land than was absolutely necessary. He meant us—”
Otto faced round. “I understand perfectly what our father meant,” he said, and there was a roll of suppressed thunder through his patient words. “To me his aspirations do not seem unreasonable or absurd. They are my own.”
“I dare say,” cried Gerard. “You are the lord of the Horst, and the larger the property is, the pleasanter for you!”
“Gerard, you may accuse me of the most sordid—”
“I accuse you of nothing. Pray let us have no recriminations; we do not understand each other well enough for anything of that kind. All I say is this, and I shall stick to it—I must have my share in ready money. Can’t youseeI must? If I were to go to the other fellow—the fellow that won—and say, ‘My father won’t have any of the land sold,’ he’d think I was shirking, after all these years. Imagine that! He’d think I was shirking! The time would have come formeto decide between ‘paying or shooting.’ Otto, if father were alive, he’d understand that better than you do. Oh, I wish I could explain it to him; he’d want only half a word. He’d be the first to say, ‘Settle the matter at once.’” The young man was violently agitated. He tried vainly to steady his features. He had loved his father with ready, easy affection. It was a cruel wound to him to bear the appearance of showing less filial piety than Otto!
“Ninety thousand florins,” repeated the elder brother, as if not heeding the other’s passion. “You were mad. Younevercould have raised the money till father’s death. What a speculation!”
“Who knows,” replied Gerard, stung to the quick. “At this moment, but for you, the sum might have seemed to me a trifle. Do not you, of all persons, reproach me with my poverty. I should have been a rich man at this moment but for you.”
“But for me?” exclaimed Otto, in blank amazement.
“Yes, but for you,” Gerard continued, wildly. “It was you who told Ursula about Adeline, as if any man ever betrayed another, even his enemy, to a woman! But your ideas about honor and dishonor, which you bring forward so frequently, are certainly not mine.” Gerard stopped, eying his brother curiously. “Is it possible you don’t know,” he said, “that Ursula told Helena?”
“As you allude to the disgraceful story yourself,” replied Otto, in a dull voice, “I may as well assure you that I have never spoken of it to any one. Ursula knows nothing about it. Nor amIto blame if Helena does.”
However Gerard might have misunderstood his brother, he implicitly believed him. All his anger turned against the woman who had ruined his matrimonial prospects, while herself grabbing, by any means, even including advertisement, at the first husband she could catch.
“Then it was Ursula, and Ursula alone,” he said, “who would not let me marry Helena.” He forcibly curbed himself on the brink of accusation, true to the chivalry he had just enunciated;but his brow grew dark with meaning. And, seeking sudden relief in permissible insult, “My Lady Nobody!” he cried, with an impudent laugh.
Otto rose. “Our discussion ends here,” he said. “Leave the room. I will get you the money somehow.”
He sank back a moment later, listening to Gerard’s retreating footsteps. Gerard, then, had been about to marry Helena, and Ursula had told Helena something which had prevented the match. It must have been something very serious indeed.
He shook off the thought. How should he meet his brother’s claim. It is easy enough to say, “I shall pay.”
Why not sell a large part of the land, which, after all, was Gerard’s and not his? Let Gerard do what he liked with his own. Theoretically, that was plain enough. But when it came to deciding what to abandon—and a good deal would have to go—common sense began to look strangely impossible in the new Baron’s eyes. Hecouldnot cut up the property. He wished his father had not made him executor.
He judged his young brother not only harshly, but unfairly. He could feel nothing for the generous impulse which had brought down upon itself such magnificent ruin. Most of us imagine we recognize virtue when we see it; in reality we only recognize our own peculiar form.
“Thereisno money,” said Otto, fiercely, and he groaned aloud.
Aunt Louisa came gliding in through the open smoking-room door. Her features were sharper than ever in her smooth black dress.
“That is a very bad story, indeed, about Adeline,” she said, speaking in a series of bites. Otto looked up interrogatively.
“Oh, of course I know all about it,” continued the Freule, who had known nothing up to this hour. “Adeline is an actress, or singer, or something low. Nevertheless, I think Helena van Trossart has behaved like a fool. A strong woman lives down all her husband’s love-stories.” She blinked her eyes. “Any woman can manage any man,” she said. “Inever considered the game worth playing”—which was true.
“But it’s best to know about these things beforehand,” she went on. “That’s why I told you about Ursula and Gerard. Afterwards they come as an unpleasant surprise, while, before marriage, one simply laughs at them. Helena ought to have thanked Ursula for frankly confessing to a passing flirtation with Gerard. Instead of that, she goes and breaks off her engagement. Inane! We can’t all marry first affections, as your poor mother thinks she did. But Helena van Trossart was always a poor, weak, fanciful creature.”
“It is not that,” thought Otto. “Women never object to apriorflirtation.” He looked up again, dumbly, to see whether his aunt would continue to use her gimlet.
“However, there’s no help for it now,” cried the Freule Louisa, changing her tone. “The marriage would have been the best thing for all parties, and that’s why it’s not to take place. So don’t let’s talk of it. But the money must be found at once. So let’s talk of that.”
“It can’t be found,” muttered Otto, wishing his aunt wouldn’t interfere, and very angry with her for eavesdropping.
“‘Can’t’ is a man’s word,” replied the Freule van Borck. “Your poor father used to say it whenever he didn’t want to do anything. You say it when you want to do anything very much. The symptoms are different, but the disease is the same—masculine incapacity. A woman says, ‘I will.’”
“Then I wish some woman would say it,” retorted Otto.
His aunt smiled. “You are so literal,” she said. “You never can enjoy the plastic beauty of a theory. And, Otto, in one thing I entirely disagree with you. Gerard’s action was a great one. However unfortunate for us, it deserves our abstract admiration. Yes, I know what you are going to say; but you are wrong. Few natures in our little world are capable of such splendid recklessness. I, for one, applaud it—from a distance. Imagine, in this nineteenth century, a man who will sacrifice his all for a friend!”
“He hasn’t ruined you, Aunt Louisa,” said Otto.
“I am not worth ruining,” she answered, quickly, meekly. “But, Otto, I was coming to that. I am poor, as you know—very poor.” She grew suddenly nervous and sat down, trembling,in a big leathern chair. “But I have this advantage over you rich people, that my money is where I can get at it, in the funds. I’m not going to give it to Gerard,” she said, racing off sharp and fast. Her cheeks grew pink. She was exceedingly frightened, as many women are whenever they allude to finance. “I couldn’t do that and starve, now could I? But I’ll lend it to you on the property, Otto, to pay him off. You’ll fasten it on the property and give me a pawn-ticket, won’t you? And I’ll let you have it on easy terms, because I admire Gerard’s action and—and yours also. I’m proud of my nephews.” She paused, out of breath, and aimlessly stroked her dress.
“Thank you,” said Otto, with his reflective reserve. But the fervor of his tone quite satisfied Aunt Louisa.
“Yes,” she went on, preparing to hurry away. “The estate must be kept together. I insist upon that. For I can’t have other people intruding upon my Bilberry Walk, and that would be the first to go. But, Otto, you must let me have some interest, or else I shouldn’t be able to pay you my ‘keep.’” Thereupon the Freule departed, fluttered with the consciousness of a heroic atmosphere all round and but little discomfort to herself. She had, indeed, behaved bravely, for scraping was the sole diversion of her life, and she imagined somehow that a mortgage at four per cent. was a very great sacrifice indeed. In common with many people who greatly admire great deeds, she liked to do her own great deeds small.
At any rate, Otto felt immensely relieved for the moment by the certainty that the money would be forthcoming. He went in search of Ursula, whom he found playing on a sofa with his father’s great smooth St. Bernard. Ursula’s opening days were long in this new home of which she had become the mistress. Everything was as yet in the listless uncertainty of a not-disorganized transition. The Dowager Baroness had nowise resigned the keys, while occupying herself with nothing in the privacy of her own bereavement.
“Dearest,” said Otto, “why did you not tell me about Helena and Gerard?”
Ursula blushed.
“Because it was a secret,” she replied, hotly. “I told nobody, Otto.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody but my father. Has Gerard spoken of it? How much has he told you?”
She looked at him anxiously, scarlet with the soilure of Gerard’s sin.
He misread her distress.
“Oh, very little,” he said. “Make yourself easy. I don’t want to know any more.”
She sprang forward to him, the great dog entangled in her skirts.
“Otto,” she said, pleadingly, “you’ll let by-gones be by-gones, won’t you—now?”
She was thinking of the reconciliation between the brothers for which her whole heart yearned.
She frightened him.
“Yes,” he cried. “Yes, if Gerard goes away. That is all I demand.Youmust ask Gerard to go away.”
“I?” She drew herself up. “No, indeed,” she said. “You are lord of the Horst. It is you who must forbid your brother the house, if you wish him to leave it.”
As he turned to go she ran after him, and laid her hand on his arm.
“Only don’t let it be for my sake, dear,” she pleaded, recalling Gerard’s initial insult, and continuous cold hostility, to herself. “Do not, I entreat you, let me be the cause of further discord between you. Gerard will forget the past, and I will ignore it. And even if do not, I am strong now, in your love, to face the future with confidence. Otto, I implore you, do not send him away for my sake.”
“Oh no, for my own,” exclaimed Otto, and broke away from her.
She came back to the dog, completely unconscious of all complications except the old quarrel between her husband and his brother.
It weighed upon her; she regretfully felt that she, in her innocence, was chiefly to blame for it. Gerard had deeply resented,and still continued to resent, the marriage of the head of the house to the parson’s daughter. Compared to this, the quarrel about the horse was only a passing cloud, and even that would not have arisen but for her. Men of the world, she felt bitterly, could desert Adelines, but they could not marry Ursulas. It is true; more than that—only she did not know it—men of the world can offer to marry Adeline, and never forgive their brother for marrying Ursula. We can do all that, we men. It is our privilege, because we are thinking creatures.
Just now, Ursula felt that her only duty in the great house was to comfort the dog. Monk was an institution at the Manor; he had been that ever since the old Baron had brought him back from the desolate monastery which is all sunshine within, and all snow without. By this time surely he had forgotten his native Alpine frosts—if dogs ever forget—among the mists of Holland. He had basked for years in the master’s smile, unassuming, as no man would ever have remained, under the dignified repose of his assured position. All the household had honored Monk; many with time-service only. This he had understood; he had loved his master alone. He knew that the Baroness endured him; perhaps there was a little jealousy between the two. And on the day of the old man’s death he had wandered about, disconsolate, gradually beginning to realize a change. Ursula found him a forsaken favorite, not mourning his fall—again, how unhuman!—but his friend. She looked into his big soft eyes, and the hunger died out of them. Immediately the two understood each other, forever. “I accept of you in my empty heart,” said Monk.
In the old Baroness’s boudoir the fat ball of white silk on its crimson cushion opened one eye with lazy discontent and scowled across at its mistress. It was disgusted with the selfish irregularity of its meals. The little old woman in the easy-chair near the autumn fire did not even notice it, in spite of the oft-repeated sighs by which it strove to attract attention. Occasionally slow tears would now roll down the widow’s sunken pink-and-white cheeks, and glitter amid the jewels of her folded hands. She had reached that milder stage whenwe begin to feel our sorrow. Oh, God, that in this world of agony, men should find cause to be thankful for consciousness of pain!
“Plush” considered the state of affairs most disgracefully disagreeable.
TOPSY REXELAER
Gerard went back to Drum before his leave had expired.
“Your share shall be paid to you,” Otto had said, perusing the carpet-pattern. “Mother and Aunt Louisa will combine to make that possible. I think that is all, Gerard. Good-bye.”
So, dismissed like a footman, the young fellow turned his back on the home of his youth. He little guessed that the stern, middle-aged man, seated at his father’s desk, in possession, was, even at that very moment, inwardly tossed by a passion of prayer to keep back the furious inculpations that were beating at his lips.
So Gerard went back to Drum. He realized, as he drove away, taking Beauty’s successor with him, that even though he might visit the Manor-house again, henceforth it would be as a stranger. During all the years of his growth into manhood, ever since he could remember, he had been practically the only son, the “young squire” in the eyes of the peasantry. He felt cheated of his birthright.
The packing-up had been a terrible business. Nothing had been said about retaining his rooms, and his nature was one that shrank back before the shadow of a coming hint. Quietly he had put all his things together, turning from Ursula’s silent, terrified gaze. Silence seemed to have fallen upon them all like a paralysis. The servants looked at each other.
All his life had been sheltered too warmly in his father’s fostering affection. The luxury of his youth hung about him—the easy generosity which had accounted money only a thing to spend on himself or on others, according to requirement. It is a cruel thing, that flow of parental good-nature, while the fingers of Death are playing with the tap.
And at this supreme moment even his mother’s sure preference deserted him. The Baroness, whose faculties seemed to lie dulled beneath the veil of her widowhood, had understood, clearly enough, without need of any malice on Otto’s part, that Gerard objected to the terms of the will. The discovery had galvanized her into feverish activity. She had insisted upon sacrificing whatever her husband’s improvidence had left her still unsacrificed. Half a dozen times in the course of one day she rang for Otto, to ascertain whether everything was settled. For the moment, Gerard had become the enemy against whom the forces of the family must unite. She was very angry with him for wishing to destroy his father’s life-work. “You won’t allow it, Otto,” she repeated, excitedly. “You will never allow it.” She clung to her strong eldest, in the weakness of abandonment. Her farewell to the traitor was full of reproach. Gerard went back into life from his father’s funeral, alone.
As soon as the money was in his possession he sought an interview with the creditor at the Hague and discharged his debt, or rather his departed friend’s. But he had plenty of liabilities of his own incurring, and these now came tumbling about his ears in the crash of his father’s removal. By the time he had effected a settlement there was very little left of his original curtailed inheritance. This would hardly have disturbed his calm fruition of all things needful but for the brusque discovery that his credit was gone. One afternoon he stepped into a familiar shop to order a new saddle, and the obsequious tradesman asked prepayment of his standing account. Gerard came away bewildered. It was the turning-point of his life. He was poor.
Before all this, before the Baron’s death, he had made one attempt to act on Mademoiselle Papotier’s suggestion. He had written a long letter to Helena. It had been returned to him unopened, and from that moment he felt his case was utterly hopeless. For a woman hardly ever returns a letter unopened. She is quite willing to do so, only she must read it first. Some of them manage to.
Gerard was in the position of many a modern spendthrift. Steal he could not, to work he was ashamed. Besides, what was he fit for, excepting parade? It is one of the saddest confusionsof this muddled society of ours that only the poor can beg and only the rich can steal. Nothing was left, therefore, to our young soldier but to return to his simplified avocations in the endeavor to make both ends meet on starvation pay. All the color and cake went out of his existence, which became drab, like rye-bread.
Adeline was married to her lawyer’s clerk; Helena’s wedding-dress had been ordered. Under these circumstances, in his handsome forlornness, dawdling about dull Drum, Gerard found one motherly bosom on which to rest his curly head. The plump Baroness van Trossart, disgusted by her niece’s perversity, but resolved not to fret over anything, immediately set herself to pay the poor boy what she considered a family debt, and, after a little preliminary reconnoitring, backed by an artillery fire of praises and pushes, she successfully manœuvred the rejected suitor into a fresh flirtation with one of the most charming girls in Holland, Antoinette van Rexelaer. The Freule Antoinette was not an heiress, like Helena, but she had lately, and quite unexpectedly, come into a snug little fortune through her godfather, a relation of her mother’s, and former Minister of State—a windfall, indeed, to the youngest of five children! “A dispensation!” mysteriously ejaculated the young lady’s mother, Mevrouw Elizabeth van Rexelaer,néeBorck.
Topsy, as her own circle called her, was a distant connection of Gerard’s; but then in Holland we are all that, and it no longer counts. The two mothers were some sort of cousins.
From the Hague, where the Rexelaers lived,Antoinette came to stay with the Baroness van Trossart, and, under that match-maker’s auspices, she saw a good deal of Gerard. Now, for Gerard to see a nice girl was to be charming to her; he was charming in the most natural, innocent, and infectious way. The Freule Antoinette understood this perfectly, and they lived together in that happy mutual desire to please which may mean everything or nothing, according to Cupid’s caprice. When the guest returned home, Mevrouw van Trossart felt convinced it meant everything, and she had easily persuaded Gerard to think so too, for Gerard had taken a real liking to the frank-faced, bright-witted girl.
“My dear boy,” said the good-natured Baroness, intent on further arrangement, “you are positively too dangerous; I cannot introduce you to any more young ladies. You are irresistible; you have now carried off the heart of my poor little Antoinette!”
“One young lady did not find me irresistible, Mevrouw,” replied Gerard, bitterly. He was angry with Helena, but he had never really cared for her. It was she who now avoided him.
“Ah, dear boy, do not let us speak of that; it is too dreadful. Be thankful that you, at least, did not love your cousin. No, no.” She held up a fat forefinger. “Of course you protest; but an old woman like me sees what she sees. We all make mistakes. As for poor Helena, hers”—She stopped. “This time, at any rate,” she cried, gayly, “there must be no blundering. Go at once and propose to Mevrouw Elizabeth. To know you prosperously settled will be a load off my heart.”
“Propose to Mevrouw Elizabeth!” said Gerard, with a grimace.
“Don’t be stupid, Gerard. Yes, considering the undoubted fact that Antoinette Rexelaer is so much richer than you—there’s no use in ignoring what every one knows—I think it would be in better taste for you to speak first to the father—which means the mother; especially as in this case I feel sure you can safely do so.”
Accordingly Gerard, by no means indifferent as to the issue, waited upon Mynheer Frederick van Rexelaer, Topsy’s papa, a Judge, and also a Fool. That gentleman received him very affably, and immediately invented an excuse for withdrawing to consult with the head of the household.
“No money and a very desirable connection,” said Mevrouw Rexelaer, sitting up. “I wish it were Van Helmont of Horstwyk and the Horst. Buthehas behaved like an idiot. This seems a very agreeable young man, and Topsy might do worse. Since her miserable failure with poor deluded René I am often quite anxious about what is to become of her.”
“Oh, she’ll marry,” said the Judge.
“I’m not so sure, Frederick,” replied Mevrouw, who was very impatient, for various reasons, to get this last daughter off her hands.
“Antoinette is so strange, so ungirlish; no man, as yet, has ever proposed to her. My cousin Herman’s legacy was a merciful dispensation; but, all the same, I should consider it very unwise to let this chance escape.”
So Gerard was instructed to make his proposal that night at the Soirée of the Society of Arts, and Topsy was instructed to accept him.
“You may thank your stars,” said Mevrouw Elizabeth, frankly, to her daughter. “Judging by the past, I should think it’s your only opportunity. Money doesn’t go for everything, especially if a girl has no ‘charm.’ I thank Heaven on my bended knees when I remember what might have been!”
“Yes, mamma,” replied Antoinette, meekly, with flushed cheeks and downcast eyes. In her own family Mevrouw Elizabeth’s will was law, the immovable incubus of many oppressive years.
“What might have been”—what Mevrouw had once yearned and worked for, in spite of present thanksgiving—was Topsy’s marriage with a cousin, who had never understood Mevrouw Elizabeth’s plans. This cousin was now dead and mad and altogether forgotten and unmentionable. Hush!
The evening exhibitions of the Arts Society are very brilliant social events. Some first-rate private collection or portfolio forms the welcome excuse for coming together, and the people who go everywhere and see nothing insure, by their presence, artistic success. There was such a crowd in the central room—a chattering crowd, unconcernedly self-obstructive with regard to the pictures—that it took Gerard some time to worm his way to Antoinette. His heart fluttered. How sweet she looked with her provokingly clever little face in the turquoise cloud of her evening-dress!
“Let’s go into that little side-room, Freule,” he stammered. “I should like to show you a picture there.”
“Oh, but I don’t want to go into the little side-room, Mynheer van Helmont.” Her voice was uncertain, like his. “Please don’t,” she said, “I’m much happier as I am.”
He looked at her without immediate answer, offering his arm. Suddenly she seemed to grasp at some mighty resolve,and, checking further protest, she allowed him to lead her away.
The little alcove was empty but for a couple of expectantly staring portraits, forlorn in the gaslight.
“How stupid they look!” exclaimed Gerard, impatiently; then, rebelling against the still atmosphere of imminence which seemed to thicken upon this sudden solitude, “Freule, I want to say something to you,” he murmured, hastily. “I don’t quite know how to begin, but, perhaps—”
“Oh, don’t,” she interrupted him, releasing her arm. “Don’t, please, Mynheer van Helmont, I know what you are going to say, and I want you to leave it unsaid. I am so sorry, for I know it must be all my fault. I never thought of anything of the kind. I had understood you—I believed your affections were placed elsewhere. I—I am so sorry.” She faltered. “I shall never marry,” she said, and plucked at her fan.
He did not answer, in the silence, with the senseless hum beyond. Opposite him, in a big gilt frame, a woman sat eternally simpering, a lay figure with black laces and Raglan roses. He hated that woman.
“Shall I take you back to Mevrouw van Rexelaer?” he said.
The name seemed to arouse her from her dream of unmerited self-reproach.
“Just one moment,” she began, hurriedly. “There is—I should like—Mynheer van Helmont, I am going to ask you an immense favor! I know I have no right, but I want you to tell my parents that it is you who have changed your mind. You haven’t really asked me anything, you know. Well, say you haven’t.”
“I don’t quite understand.” Gerard spoke a little haughtily.
“Perhaps it isn’t so much of a favor,” the poor girl went on. “It’ll save you the appearance of having been refused. Forgive me, Mynheer van Helmont; I don’t quite know what I’m saying. But my life will be even more miserable than it is; it will be unbearable, if my mother knows you asked me to be your wife.”
She looked up at him pleadingly. He was amazed. What had become of the bright creature he knew, with her sparkle of innocent repartee?