“HE STUDIED HIMSELF IN THE GLASS”

MY LADY NOBODY

A Novel

BY

MAARTEN MAARTENS

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

1895

Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Dedication

God’s Angel of Human Love sat alone in the garden of lilies. Her arms hung listless among the blooms she had gathered into her lap. For her eyes—sole mirrors of the Inapproachable Presence—were gazing steadfastly down upon the darkness, deep down where the black bar of sorrow strikes across the wide radiance of eternity, down on the sin-laden star that still hastens athwart the shadow. A single teardrop stole out upon her cheek, and, falling, crept away into a milk-white chalice. Suddenly, with a movement of ineffable pity, she flung forth all the flowers upon her lap, into the world below.

Into my bosom, O Beloved, is fallen the flower with the tear at its heart. Unto thee, O fair among God’s flowers, white among his angels, strong among his saints, unto thee, with the thorn in thy side, and the star on thy forehead, unto thee do I dedicate this ray from a life of which thou art the light.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

MY LADY NOBODY

Part 1.—CHAPTER I

URSULA

It was a white-hot July morning. Long ago the impatient earth had cast aside her thin veil of summer twilight; already she lay, a Danae, in exultant swoon beneath the golden sun. Yet the bridegroom had barely leaped forth to the conquest; his rath kisses were still drinking the pearly freshness from the dawn, while the loud birds filled the resonant heavens with the tumult of their bridal song.

It was still so early, and already so immovably warm; all wide earth and deep sky agasp in the naked blaze. Ursula drew forward her broad-brimmed straw hat, where she stood picking pease among the tall lines of pale-green, blossom-speckled tangle.

“Oof!” she said. Not as your burly farmer says it, but with the prettiest little high-pitched echo of the louder note. And she buried her soft brown cheeks in the cool moisture of her half-filled basket. Then she gravely resumed her work, and a great, big, booming bumblebee, which had thought to play hide and seek with Ursula’s nose, sailed away in disgust that on such a sun-soaked morning any of God’s creatures should bend to toil in his sight.

Ursula Rovers was not one of those who serve their Maker with dancing and a shout. Yet she sang to herself, very sedately, as she broke off each bursting pod, amid the fiercer jubilation of the passion-drunk blackbirds and finches,

“Stand then with girded loins, and see your lamps be burning;
What though the sun lie fair upon your paths to-day,
Who reads the evening sky? Who knows if winds be turning?
The night comes surely. Watch and pray!”

The prim vegetable garden, with its ranks of gay salads and pompous cabbages, lay serenely roasting, as vegetable gardens delight to do, in unabated verdure. About Ursula’s corner the lattice-work of creepers put forth some faint attempt at a stunted shadow. Dominé Rovers came down the walk, his coat-flaps brushing the currant-bushes.

“Who reads the evening sky? Who knows if winds be turning?”

“Ursula!”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Come in and shell your pease, while I recite you my sermon.”

“But I must pick them first, father!”

“True. What I love best in you, Ursula, is that you are as logical as if you were not a woman.”

The pastor drew nearer to the scaffolding of greenery, and strove vainly to shelter his tall figure in its shade. He was a spare, soldierly-looking man, with an honest complexion and silvery hair. You knew he had a very gentle countenance until you gave him cause to turn a wrathful look upon you.

“I might as well begin at once,” he said, and, proud though she was of her father’s preaching, the girl’s soul rose in momentary protest on behalf of the birds and flowers. “I have chosen a text for to-morrow, Ursula, which has troubled my thoughts all through the week. All through the week, I couldn’t understand it. And when I came to look it out, it wasn’t there at all.”

Ursula’s dutiful lips said, “I see.”

“I imagined the verse to be as follows: ‘Flee from youthful lusts that war against the soul.’ But I see the word used is ‘Abstain.’ I could not believe it of St. Peter that he would have instructed any man to run away in battle. You will find the ‘flee’ in Timothy, my dear, but the connection is not the same.”

Dominé Rovers paused and stood tenderly watching his natty daughter in her cool print dress. Suddenly he burst out quite impetuously, “Resist! Resist! That is the true Bible language. Resist the devil. Resist temptation. And so I shall tell them to-morrow morning. ‘Dearly beloved,’ I shall say, ‘life is a—’”

“War,” cried Ursula, facing round. A bold blackbird had alighted on one of the stakes, and sang loudly of peace and good-will.

“Don’t interrupt me, child”—the Dominé’s eyes grew vexed—“I know I have said it before; they cannot hear the truth too often. Life is a battle, dearly beloved. Against the city of Mansoul all the powers of evil band themselves together. But in the vanguard march ever the lusts of the flesh. You cannot escape the conflict. And therefore”—the speaker lifted an energetic arm—“remember what said the Corinthians—the grandsires of St. Paul’s Corinthians—to the Spartans, their allies, ‘He that, for love of pleasure, shrinks from battle, will most swiftly be deprived of those very delights which caused him to abstain.’ My subject divides itself—Ursula, you are not attending—into seven natural parts: the enemy, the weapons, the—”

Nobody listened. All God’s creation, busy with its individual loves and pleasures, luxuriously lapped in the sensuous sunlight and rejoicing in universal allurement, was twittering and fluttering and blushing and blooming in clouds of perfume and pollen. The great All-father smiled down upon his manifold children—and shrivelled them up.

Ursula was not listening. Her father was a dear, dear man, but she had heard it all so often before! And fortune had pity upon her and upon the sleepily staring marigolds, and created a diversion ere the sermon was ten sentences old.

Shrill shrieks of childish protest under punishment arose from beyond the garden-wall. The pastor of an unruly flock immediately ran to peer over the bushes. And Ursula followed more slowly, flitting into the full morning glow.

Out on the gleaming high-road a peasant-woman was belaboring an eight-year-old urchin in a whirlwind of dust. “I’ll teach you to use bad words,” she was screaming. “Damn me, I can’t make out, for the life o’ me, what taught the child to swear!”

Ursula, leaning one round arm on the top of the garden-wall, turned spontaneously to her father, all her serious young face a swift ripple of fun; but the Dominé counted not a pennyworth of humor among his many militant virtues. He pressed his thin lips tight, under his Wellington nose. He was not going to reprove a mother in the presence of her son.

“Discipline first,” said the Dominé. “One thing I note gratefully, Ursula, that the wretched habit of swearing is now confined to the lower classes in this country. In my time even gentlemen would swear—”

A dog-cart had turned the sharp angle at the back, where the road breaks off to the Manor-house. In the dust and the skirmish it pulled up with a jerk, and a clear voice was heard crying,

“Confound you! Get out of the way, can’t you? Scuffling in the middle of the road!”

The dog-cart was a very smart dog-cart, and the mare was a high-stepping mare. She fretted under the sudden restraint, amid an appetizing jingle and smell and glitter of harness. There was not so much promiscuous dust but that the speaker could instantaneously perceive the two heads over the low brown wall.

He lifted his cap. “Good-morning, Dominé! Good-morning, Ursula!” he said, with nonchalance. “Awfully hot already, isn’t it?”

The Dominé raised a flashing eye. The woman and boy had slipped away. “Gerard,” said the Dominé, “why do you swear at our people? How often must I remind you of our joint responsibility? We must lead them to what is right; I by my precept, you by your example.”

“Oh, Dominé, I’ll exchange, if you’re agreeable,” retorted the young man, with a quick smile. The Dominé looked away.

“You are going to the station to fetch your brother, Gerard?” interposed Ursula, carelessly cracking the pods in her basket.

“‘CONFOUND YOU! GET OUT OF THE WAY, CAN’T YOU?’”

“Yes, at your service,” replied the young man, as he loosened the reins.

“How strange it will be for you to meet Mynheer Otto again after all these years!”

Gerard turned quickly from his prancing steed. “Are you going to call Otto ‘Mynheer’?” he asked.

She blushed with annoyance, in an overflow of innocent confusion.

“Oh, very well,” he went on. “Only, of course, you will have to call me Mynheer Gerard.”

He raced off, laughing. “I know you,” she stammered; but the words were lost in the dog-cart’s departing rattle. She appealed to her father in dismay. “Why, father,” she cried, “I have known Gerard all my life!”

Together they stood watching the dust-enfolded vehicle disappear into the far blue sunshine. Its occupant was young, light-hearted, and handsome. Evidently a cavalry officer: you could see that by the way in which his tweeds and he conjoined without combining.

CHAPTER II

THE DOMINÉ

“Let us go in to breakfast,” said the Dominé. Father and daughter passed up between the stiff stalks of the gooseberry-bushes, among the sallow, swollen fruit. Both of them walked with a straight step, the figure erect, and a little self-reliant.

The pastor fell back a few paces with meditative gaze. He was wont to rejoice tremulously in Ursula’s physical health, in the easy carriage of the head, the light swing of the hips. He rejoiced in the clear brown of her complexion and the calm depth of her brave brown eyes. No weak woman in blood or brain, this stately, strong-limbed maiden. He thanked God mournfully, ever reminiscent of the pervading sorrow of his life, the loss of the frail young creature who had dropped by the road-side wellnigh twenty years ago.

It was that affliction which had made a cleric of Captain Roderick Rovers. By nature he was a soldier, recklessly brave and almost devil-may-care. A man who thought straight, if not far, and struck straight in the front. He had escaped from the inertia of the long Batavian peace to the red-hot tumult of Algerian desert war, and had come back, early bronzed and silvered, plus the Legion of Honor and minus an arm. He had married a pure white clinging thing, like a lily, that twined every tendril round his sturdy support, and then dropped from the stem. She was a good woman. To him she had come as a revelation. “I have fought the good fight,” she had whispered in dying. He, with the medals on his breast and the memory of not a few killed and wounded—could he have said as much face to face with death?

He began to comprehend something of that battle which is not to the strong. On their wedding-day the bride had given her soldier-husband Bunyan’s Holy War—a Dutch translation—substituting it on his table for the weather-beaten little Thucydides which had been his companion in all his campaigns. He had demanded back the Greek historian. He now took up the spiritual conflict, and fought the powers of darkness, as he had ever met an enemy, at arm’s-length.

His mutilation having incapacitated him from active service, he took orders, henceforth to do battle with his country’s inmost foes in the heart of every parishioner. The old militant spirit flamed in him still, and he led his slow flock like a regiment under the banner of the great Captain. On the high days of the Church he wore his Cross of the Legion in the pulpit. His clerical superiors had objected: he dared them to object. It was gained, he said, like their reverend titles, in honorable war.

He had cherished the solitary treasure of his heart, but his care had been free from coddling; he had even combated the enervating influence of his sister-in-law, who kept house for him. “Coolness and cold water” was one of his maxims in any sudden emergency; late into the autumn you could have seen the gaunt father and the little solemn-featured girl wending their way towards the river for a swim. The bathless villagers watched and wondered. They judged the good man to be a little daft, no doubt, but they loved his cheery helpfulness. Dozing on the battle-field, they caught, between two yawns, the stir of his réveillé, and its clarion note passed like a breeze through the foulness of their sleeping-ditch.

Then they turned in the trenches and fell asleep again.

Ursula learned early that life was no dream-garden. “Duty, like a stern preceptor,” often pushed himself unpleasantly to the fore in her young existence and extinguished the sunlight, provoking thunder-storms. Not that these were by any means the rule; her father loved her too tenderly for that; he kissed her leisurely upon the forehead. “Be sober,” he said, “be vigilant.” Her aunt gave her sweets.

Yet Ursula, from a two-year-old baby, loved her father best. Even when, once, he chastised her because she had told a lie.

“Gerard will be late for the train,” said the pastor. “Headlong, as usual. Either he will get there too late or he will drive too fast.”

“He will drive too fast,” replied Ursula, quietly. “Tell me, father, about this elder brother of his. How strange it will seem! A new son at the house whom nobody knows. I wish he were not coming.”

“I have told you before, Ursula, but women are so resolutely curious. A man’s curiosity is impulse, a woman’s is method. Besides, you remember him yourself; he was here twelve years ago.”

“I don’t remember much, only a quiet, kind-looking gentleman who seemed afraid of children. What had he been doing in Germany, Captain?”

“Earning his daily bread, no more and no less.”

“And what has he been doing these twelve years in Java?”

“Earning his daily bread, not less, but no more.”

“I know,” mused Ursula, with feminine inconsistency. “It seems so ridiculous, a Van Helmont earning his living.”

But this was a red rag to a bull. “It is never ridiculous!” cried the pastor. “Give us this day our daily bread; that means: we would accept it, Lord, from no other hands than Thine!”

“As manna?” queried Ursula.

“No, child, as the harvest of toil. By-the-bye”—the old man stood still on the veranda steps, his limp sleeve hanging against his long black coat—“it is a strange coincidence, my preaching to-morrow’s sermon, and Otto coming home to-day. The Sabbath before he first started for Germany I preached on resisting the devil.”

Ursula smiled, a harmless little smile, all to herself.

“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” continued the Dominé, thoughtfully watching a wheeling swallow. “Do you know, Ursula, why Otto van Helmont went away?”

“No,” she responded, quickly inquisitive. “Tell me why.”

“I suppose you think it was some love-story?”

“No,” she said again. “Why should I think? I don’t know.”

“You are not like other girls, Ursula. Most women think everything is a love-story. Come, let us go in.”

“But he is quite old now?” she persisted, with her hand on his arm.

“He is what children call old. I believe he is seventeen years older than Gerard. I have always liked Otto exceedingly, little as I know of him. He is a true, simple-hearted gentleman, is Otto.”

“I don’t doubt it,” replied the girl, with a shade of petulance; “but it will be so awkward, a stranger at the house!”

“I wish you would close the veranda door, Roderigue,” said a querulous voice from inside. “You are letting in all the heat.”

The occupant of the room came forward, a little yellow lady, with red ringlets, in a red wrapper. This was Miss Mopius, the Dominé’s sister-in-law, and an invalid.

“I had kept down the temperature so beautifully,” she complained, during the performance of the usual perfunctory pecks. “What’s the use of my scolding the servant if she sees that you don’t care? Look at the thermometer, Ursula; it was under 65°.”

Ursula obediently reported that it was now nearing 67°.

“You see,” said Miss Mopius. She said nothing else, but the words dragged down upon the little room a fearful weight of guilty silence, from which Ursula fled to wash her hands.

As the girl was coming down-stairs again, she heard the rumble of returning wheels. She could not resist a swift run to the veranda, where she had abandoned her basket. As she caught it up the dog-cart came flying past. The two brothers were in it now. The elder turned sideways, started, hesitated, took off his hat. Ursula remained watching them, a symphony in yellow and brown, with the marigolds at her feet in a lake of golden orange, and the pink-tipped honeysuckle all around her, against the staring sunflowers loud and bold.

CHAPTER III

HOME

“Who is that yellow-frock among the yellow flowers?” asked Otto van Helmont. “But, of course, I can guess,” he added, immediately. “That was the parsonage we just passed. The ‘nut-brown maid’ must be Ursula Rovers.”

“Ursula? Was she there still?” replied Gerard, flicking a fly from the horse’s flank. “She seems to live in the garden. Doesn’t care tuppence about her complexion.”

“She is very remarkably beautiful.”

“Do you think so? I never noticed. You see, I have known her all my life. She is just the parson’s daughter. I suppose she reminds you of your own Javanese.”

Otto flushed, and the two drove on, side by side, in silence. They were very unlike to look at; there must have been, as Dominé Rovers had said, from fifteen to twenty years’ interval between them. The young man was spruce and slender, carelessly elegant in appearance and attitude, the elder brother, the planter, sat square and stalwart, with ruddy skin and tawny beard. He was coming home for rest, weary of the jaded splendor of the tropics. As they drove on, he turned right and left, with eager, misty eyes. The salute of the passing peasants delighted him; he watched, in quiet ecstasy, their long-drawn glances of inquiry or semi-acknowledgment. This was better than the humbly crouching savages under the cocoa-trees. This was recognition; this was home.

The avenue was home, the white house behind the trees was home, and the clasp of his mother’s arms—no, that was home. Never mind, for one moment, the rest.

“You have gray hairs here and there, Otto,” said the Baroness van Helmont, fondly. “I never knew I was an old woman before.”

Otto’s father bent down quickly and kissed her slender hand.

“My dear, you will never grow old,” he said. “You belong to the things of beauty, and you remember what the English poet said of them.”

The little porcelain lady laughed among the laces of her morning-gown.

“Yes, but the French poet said just the reverse, and in matters of beauty the Frenchman is the better judge.”

“Well, let Otto be umpire. He is best able to decide. Otto, do you find that your mother has grown a day older since you left?”

The old Baron looked towards his big son with what, on his easy features, was almost an anxious expression.

“Yes, she is older,” said Otto.

The Baroness laughed again.

“My dear,” she said, “he is as impossible as ever. Leave him. He, at least, has not changed.”

Mynheer van Helmont dropped his eyelids with a quick movement of vexation, and walked from the room.

Mother and son were left together. They went into the Baroness’s little turret-chamber, a rounded bonbonnière, all pale flowered silk and Dresden china, with a long window overlooking the park.

“Sit down, child,” said the Baroness. “Are you glad to be home again?”

A lump in the strong man’s throat prevented immediate reply. Presently he took his mother’s jewelled fingers in his own. “And what have you been doing all this time?” he said.

“Doing? But, my dear, we have been living. What else should we do? It is you who have shot the tigers. Nothing has happened here.”

“Grandpa is dead,” said Otto, meditatively.

“Ah, yes, grandpapa is dead. That is very sad, but he had been childish for years. He lived up-stairs in the blue-room and never came out of it. He did not know us. He used to mistake me for some horrid recollection of his youth, and call me Niniche. It was very embarrassing.”

They were both silent.

“Your father said it was a great compliment,” added the Baroness, gravely.

“And his pension? What has become of that? How did you manage? I have often wanted to ask.”

“Well, of course, his pension went. Your father had always said it would make a tremendous difference. I cannot say I find it has.”

“But it must,” persisted Otto.

“Of course. My dear boy, have you still your old liking for business? I beg of you, do not begin talking of it just yet.”

Otto smiled.

“Come, lean your head on my lap as you used to do. Wait a minute; you will spoil my dress.”

She spread out a flimsy piece of cambric which could have protected nothing, and sat softly stroking the dark hair from his face, as he lay on the rug.

“You have come back heart-whole?” she said, presently, but there was not much interrogation in her voice.

“Yes, mother.” The tone excluded doubt; not that any one ever thought of doubting Otto.

“Gerard was always prophesying that you would bring back a ‘nut-brown’ wife.”

The words seemed to strike home strangely to Otto, like an echo. “Gerard appears very lively,” he said. “He always had exceedingly high spirits as a boy. But, of course, I hardly know him.”

“He is brightness itself,” said the Baroness. “He is like a constant sunbeam. Dear boy, I hope he will make an advantageous settlement. And you too, dear Otto, I wish you would marry and”—her voice grew tremulous—“stay at home.”

“But, mother, I must first find a wife.” He spread out his fingers contemplatively on the white plush beneath him, among the gold-embroidered lilies.

“That is a woman’s work, not a man’s. It is a mother’s, and I could easily manage it. A man should find all his loves for himself, except the one he marries in the end.”

“But would you look for a consort, mother, or merely for a mule with money-bags?”

“Otto, how rudely you put things! Contact with black people has not improved you. I should look for an angel, worthy of my boy—an angel with golden wings.” She paused, and played shyly with the velvet at her wrist. “Indeed, I hope you will marry a little money,” she added, looking away. “You father expects it. And, besides, you must.”

He did not answer. “Gerard is going to,” she added, blushing over the pink-and-white tints of her delicate cheek. “He quite understands it is necessary. He is doing his best.”

“How commendable!” cried Otto, sitting up. “He deserves, indeed, that his gilt-feathered seraph should bear him to a matrimonial heaven.”

The Baroness looked placidly alarmed. “My dear,” she said, “don’t, I beg of you, go spoiling your brother. He takes a much simpler view of duty than you. You have always complicated existence, poor child. You were a steel-clanging knight, Otto, in search of ogres; he is a troubadour under Fortune’s window. And he never plays out of tune.”

And then again there was silence between them, while she drew down his head once more. But their thoughts were conversing still.

“Marrying for money,” he continued at last, and his voice was black with scorn.

“Marrying money and marrying for money are two very different things,” rejoined the Baroness, patiently, “as you know. I should not like Gerard to marry for money, nor you. You never will. But you can do as your father did.”

The turret-chamber was cool, yet the glowing sun from outside seemed to penetrate to the cheeks of both mother and son.

“My father is a lucky man,” said Otto. “But supposing you had not turned out to be you?”

“Then there would not have been money enough. As it is, we had a little love and a little money; that is the best blend on the whole, to commence housekeeping with. Both, I suppose, should go on increasing; with us, only one has done that.”

“Nobody has ever missed the money,” interposed Otto, smiling pitifully down on the costly rug at his feet.

“Ah, you say that! But I have often regretted that mamma’s fortune was not larger. Papa, you remember, had squandered his share. Your poor father might have got many things he had set his heart upon, and which now he is compelled to go without.”

“Yes,” said Otto, “the house would have been twice as full again.”

“Exactly. For instance, he has always longed, passionately, to possess a ‘Corot.’ He has never been able to procure one. There is a very good ‘Daubigny’ in the small drawing-room. By-the-bye, it is new; you must go and have a look at it presently. But the poor man has never ventured to buy a ‘Corot.’ I cannot help feeling it is almost my fault. Certainly grandpapa’s. Yet he was always so considerate to grandpapa after we took him to live with us, never reproaching him with word.”

Otto did not ask, What is a ‘Corot’? He lay stroking his mother’s hand. Presently he started to his feet and walked towards the window.

“How beautiful it is!” he cried; “how lovely! Oh, mother, the sun-heat across the park!”

The little lady came dancing after him. “Yes, is it not exquisite?” she cried, standing close beside him. “Look at the patch of yellow color there, in the break between the beeches. Why, Otto, since when do you notice the merely beautiful? Do you see that far line of white roof with the sun full upon it? That is the gallery round the new Italian garden. Well, not exactly new, only you have been away such a very long time!”

She pressed his arm. “Now go down to your father,” she added, softly. “Ask him to show you the ‘Daubigny.’ And don’t talk to him of business. You know he doesn’t like it.”

“A fortune for a picture,” said Otto to himself as he closed his mother’s door, “while I was out in Java growing tea!”

He passed along a corridor which was hung with arms of all times and nations, into the large entrance-hall, a museum of old oak and heraldry among the masses of summer flowers.

There he found his father pacing impatiently to and fro. The old Baron, whose life motto had been “Tout s’arrange,” was only impatient about things of no importance. He was now eager to show his son the acquisitions of the last twelve years. He knew that the display would be productive of pleasure neither to himself nor to his heir, but he remained eager all the same.

The returned exile—his heart soft with the morning’s impressions—resolved at once to take an interest in everything. “Mother was speaking of a new picture,” he began, “a daub—daub-something. She said I must be sure and ask to see it.”

The Baron smiled. “The Daubigny,” he replied. “I suppose the name has not penetrated to India yet. With us, you know, he has made himself a little reputation.” He led the way into a small drawing-room, but stopped before pointing to his treasure. “Do you notice any change here?” he asked. “Anything new in the arrangement of the whole?”

Otto hesitated. He was horribly ill at ease, and afraid of making a fool of himself. It was the old sensation of twelve years ago. He felt like a shy man that doesn’t know a cob from a charger suddenly called upon to judge of a horse.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the Baron. “Only the ceiling’s been painted. It was done by Guicciardi, the same who decorated the last Loggia in the Prelli Palace just before the poor prince went smash. That was a magnificent finale, Otto. Poor old Prince Luigi knew that he couldn’t possibly hold out much longer—not a hundred thousand francs to the good, I am told. And he gave a commission to Guicciardi to paint the place with that last hundred thousand, just finished the thing and left an immortal whole to his country, and then—pwhit!” The Baron snapped his fingers lightly. “Pooh,” he said, “I know you don’t care for that kind of thing. I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to give you offence. That is the ‘Daubigny.’”

Otto stood staring at the little golden landscape. He was seeking hard for something sensible to say. He could not talk of art as his brother Gerard did, while knowing nothing about it, trustful to Fate to make his talk no greater nonsense than that of those who do know.

“It didn’t cost me very much,” said the Baron, a little shamefacedly. “It is not, of course, a first-rate specimen, though I flatter myself it is by no means bad.”

“It is very pretty,” said Otto. “The sky is something like a Javanese sunrise.”

“Really? That reminds me, I have some beautiful ivories in the west room, if you care to see them. Japanese, but they were bought at Batavia. What wonderful opportunities you must have had, had you only known!” He looked wistfully at his son. “Dirt cheap, I dare say.”

“I don’t think anything’s dirt cheap anywhere,” replied Otto. “And dirt seems the most expensive of all—in the end.”

He shrank back, with a sudden misgiving of his own meaning; but, if the speech were discourteous, the Baron quite misunderstood it. “I hope you have got into no entanglements,” said the Baron, sharply. “Although, true, it is not the expensive ones that are the most dangerous. We expect you to marry now, Otto, and settle down. Your mother is very anxious you should marry a little money. I sincerely hope you will.”

“There is time still, father,” said Otto; “I’m only just back.”

“Well, I don’t know. You are nearly forty. And you have wasted a great many years, after all. Here have you been toiling in Java, working hard the whole time, and with what result? The same as in Germany before. You might just as well have lived leisurely at home, and better. Your cheeks would have been less brown, and your manners no worse.”

He faced his son; he had been bracing himself for this, and he was astonished to find it came so easily. “After all, I think you must admit, Otto, that we easy-going people understand life better than you.”

“I have no wish to deny it, sir.”

“Well?”

“Well? I have tried to do my duty—the nearest duty.”

“Java! It seems to me your duty was a very far one. Well, well, we are heartily glad to have you back. Come into the smoking-room, and we will smoke a really good cigar.”

CHAPTER IV

THE VAN HELMONTS

Baron van Helmont could have dug out no better epithet to apply to himself and his race than the word which rose naturally to the top, “easy-going.” He knew he was “easy-going.” The Van Helmonts had always been that. “Stream with the stream.” “Tout s’arrange.” He could hear his grandfather saying these things in a far away mist of Louis XV. powder and ruffles; he remembered how he had brought home his Watteau-faced bride, and how the old gentleman, bent double over his gold-headed cane, had blessed the pair, with a sceptical grimace, at the top of the moss-grown steps.

“My children,” he had said, “you have launched your boat on the current. However you steer, the river flows to the sea. Take an old man’s advice. Let it flow. Laissez couler.”

Said the young wife to her husband, as soon as they were alone, “But ‘laissez couler’ means ‘let the boat sink,’” and she laughed the prettiest protest into his face. She had plenty of brains.

He stopped her mouth with a kiss. “You are too young a married woman,” he replied, “to study ‘équivoques.’” He, also, had plenty of brains, but neither had the art of using them.

The old gentleman, his grandfather, had made a tranquil ending; he had lain on his death-bed unruffled except at the wrists. His was surely a bright civilization with its “What does it signify?” Our self-clouded century repeats the words, but with passionate inquiry. And, after all, so many things that torment us signify so exceedingly little. Yet, perhaps, none the less, we are wiser than our grandfathers, for “it,” in their case, signified the French Revolution.

The present Baron van Helmont could not, of course, be “pure Louis XV.” None of us can, not even our clocks. You are unable—it is a stale truth—to push back the hand on the dial. The Baron, for instance, could not contemplate dissolution with the composure of his grandsire. He tried hard not to contemplate it at all. “Live and let live” was one of his favorite sayings. One day, long ago, he had used it to close the discussion with regard to a case which had recently occurred in his village of what he would have labelled “unavoidable distress.” His hobbledehoy of a son—the only one then—had suddenly joined in the conversation. “But that means,” the boy Otto had said, “live well yourself, and let the poor live badly.” It was the first symptom. The father shrugged his shoulders. Otto must have been, if we use the scientific jargon of our day, a reversion to an anterior type. To judge by the discrepancy of any half a dozen brothers, most families must possess a good many types to revert to.

The Baron van Helmont was a good man, lovable, and universally respected. In his youth he had enjoyed himself and spent freely as a young gentleman should do. He had been gay, but no irretrievable scandal had ever been mixed up with his name. He had married a charming wife, who had brought him a little more money. They had spent that together, and had quietly enjoyed the spending; but their friends and connections had been permitted to enjoy it too. The Baron had one of the finest collections of curios in the Netherlands, and also some very good pictures. He was a gentleman to his fingertips, and thoroughly cultivated. No one could possibly be a better judge of bric-à-brac.

“Bric-à-brac,” said the Baroness to the pastor, “is in itself a vocation; and the best judge of bric-à-brac in Holland is better than a taker of cities.” She spoke under strong provocation. At intervals the Dominé would make himself superfluous by speaking in the Manor-house drawing-room of “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.” “As if we got drunk,” said the Baroness.

Undeniably, the Baron was a gentleman, courteous and comely. There is a story about him which he loved to tell in the privacy of his after-dinner circle. It happened in Paris, at the court of the Citizen King. The Baron, passing through that promiscuous capital, had received a card for a monster reception. He went, and somehow got astray in the crush at the entrance, so that when he tried to pass in at a side door he found himself stopped by a gentleman-at-arms.

“Excuse me, monsieur; but this door is reserved for the members of reigning families.”

The Baron hesitated. To withdraw was absurd. He straightened himself in his small but serene hauteur.

“And who am I, then?” he said.

“Entrez, mon prince.”

But that was long ago, unfortunately. Even while the Baron said “Stream,” he regretted that his life could not lie stagnant in a bay, among water-lilies. And yet he hurried on each individual day to its close. He was always wanting to pick other flowers a little farther down the bank.

Two sons were left him at the close of his life, and one of these was already annoyingly old. Between the two lay a couple of hillocks in the village church-yard. The Baroness had begged to rescue the small relics therein contained from the musty family vault. “The vault is so cold,” she said. Her husband proved quite willing to adopt the suggestion; he availed himself of the opportunity it gave him to put up a charming Italian marble of a cherub gathering flowers. The “Devil’s Doll,” the Calvinist villagers called it. Occasionally, when her husband was not attending, the Baroness would go and weep a few quiet tears upon the hillocks. There was a chamber in her heart which she occasionally liked to enter, but she never had much objection to coming out again.

“I met Ursula this afternoon, Otto,” said Gerard at dinner. “I told her she had aroused your enthusiastic admiration. I fancy she was very much pleased.” He laughed; the others laughed.

Otto’s bent face sank lower beneath a sudden thunder-cloud. “That was an ungentlemanly thing to do,” he said.

“Ungentlemanly!” The younger brother’s voice had entirely changed its key. “What on earth do you mean? How dare you say such a thing as that?”

A man-servant was in the room. The remarks had been made in Dutch. The man would have understood them in French, but that would not have mattered.

“I mean,” responded Otto, rather awkwardly, floundering into the foreign language to which his plantation life had somewhat choked the inlets, “that it is a shabby thing to do, to go and tell a lady what a man has said of her in confidence.”

“My dear, not if it be a compliment,” interposed the Baroness, mildly ignoring, as her sex was bound to do, the all-important concluding words. “Every woman likes a harmless compliment.”

“Not sensible women. Sensible women despise them,” edged in the Freule[A] van Borck. Nobody heeded her.

“Confidence! Confidence!” echoed Gerard, hotly. “Who talked of confidence?” He lapsed, purposely, into Dutch. “I decline to be told,” he said, “whether at my father’s table or anywhere else, that I behave in an ‘ungentlemanly’ manner.”

The old Baron waved a conciliatory hand. “The word was unfortunate,” he admitted, “but, Gerard, you press too heavily upon it. Glissez, n’appuyez pas. Otto meant to say you had stolen an unfair advantage. He had doubtless been wanting to tell Ursula himself. Fie, what an ado about nothing. To me it is most remarkable that, after so long an absence, Otto should still speak Dutch so well.”

The obvious retort that Dutch is spoken in Java sprang straight to Gerard’s lips, but he bit it down again.

“I consider Ursula Rovers distinctly plain,” remarked the Freule van Borck. The Freule was the Baroness van Helmont’s only sister; she had lived at the Manor-house for years. She was what humdrum people call “a character,” as if all of us were not that when you shift the lights.

“She is common-looking,” said the Baroness, “but I think she is pretty.”

“All women are pretty,” smiled the Baron, “even those whom the pretty ones think plain.”

“My dear,” his wife nodded across at him, “it is a fallacy, old as Adam, that Eve, in her Paradise, is jealous of all the Liliths outside.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried the sharp-faced Freule van Borck, “there are women enough yet—thank Heaven—and to spare, that don’t care a cent about looks.”

Her sister puckered up a small mouth into a most innocent expression. “If it be so,” she said, suavely, “it is a merciful dispensation. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”

The two brothers sat in silence, not so much sullen as constrained. Presently the father proposed the health of the one who had that day returned to them. “We celebrate,” he said, with good-natured banter, “le retour du fils prodigue, trop prodigue—de lui-même.”

After the toast had been honored, he turned to his Benjamin. “You, sir,” he said, “prefer the fruits of other people’s labors. You take after your father. And, when the time comes, precious little you will find to take.” They both laughed heartily enough this time, and the whole family rose from table.

Otto came out to Gerard on the terrace. “I am sorry I offended you,” he said; “I meant to be angry, but not to be insulting.”

Gerard’s face cleared like a pool when the sun comes out. He gave his brother’s hand a hearty grasp. “Don’t speak of it again,” he said. “I dare say I was wrong, though Heaven knows I didn’t mean to annoy you. You will find me, sometimes, a little thoughtless, I fear. You mustn’t always take things quite as seriously as to-day, though. I wish you would come down to the stables with me, Otto; you haven’t even seen my saddle-horses yet.”

Mynheer van Helmont, standing cigar in mouth before the great bay window, turned and nodded to his wife.

“They are friends again,” he said. “Isn’t it dreadful? That is the worst thing that can happen to brothers.”

“What is?” queried the Freule van Borck.

“Why, to be friends again.”

“I like Otto very much,” said the Freule, irrelevantly, not comprehending.

Mevrouw van Helmont laid down her bit of fluffy fancy-work. “Of course you like Otto very much, Louisa,” she said. “I should be exceedingly vexed did you not.”

The Baron walked out into the after-glow. “It is most irritating,” he mused, “to have to say all one’s good things to an audience one-half of which is deaf to all meanings, and the other half of which is one’s wife.”

He stood looking at the white pile which lay softly imbosomed in its dark green half-circle, like a pearl set in emeralds, beneath the amber sky. He was deeply proud of its possession. “These Havanas,” he reflected, “are as excellent as if they were genuine,” and he wreathed a faint blue whorl on the tranquil air. Then another thought struck a sudden chill to his heart. “To die and leave it all!” He shivered, and returned to the window. “Louisa,” he said, “how about our piquet?”

A couple of hours later Otto stood on the same terrace, also cigar in mouth. He had come out for a last smoke before turning in. He was an inveterate and uninterrupted smoker. It was his one weakness, and he indulged it to the full.

The night was perfectly still, and translucent. A soft flutter, that was not wind, but the very restlessness of dreaming nature, weighted the balmy air with wandering gusts of incense. All creation seemed lapped in luxury, asleep on the breast of love.

Otto, alone in the dusk, looked up at the silent windows. The rest were gone to their rooms; a light glimmered here and there. The great stable-clock boomed heavily eleven long trembling strokes. “It is home,” said Otto, under his breath. But he said it aloud. He rejoiced with tumultuous delight for a moment in being able to speak to that home from a spot where the bricks and mortar could hear him. His memory strayed away to the low house with the long verandas among the spreading palms. How often had he lain back in there in his wicker lounge, his cigar a deep red spot of attraction among the insect whirl of the Indian night, while he said the word out vainly to the bats and moths and butterflies. Home. He stood and looked—looked at the mere walls till his eyes were burning with physical exhaustion. He was back again at last. He loved his mother very faithfully. He loved his father. He felt kindly towards his brother. Yet, somehow, he could not control an impression of loneliness as he turned to go up-stairs.

CHAPTER V

LE PREMIER PAS—QUI COÛTE

“Gird up your loins!” cried the Dominé, striking his only hand into the pulpit-cushion. The peasant congregation, with bodies huddled awry in wondrously diversified angles of drowsiness, nodded lower under the accustomed storm. One red-faced yawner, opening misty eyes, stared vaguely through the heat-cloud, and with some far perception of the preacher’s meaning, hitched up his trousers before sinking back into his seat.

“For the city of Mansoul is taken, is taken while the garrison slept!” In the Manor-house pew, under the glitter of armorial gaudery against sombre oak, sat their Baronial Highnesses, all except Gerard, who, coming down too late, had found himself compelled to elect between breakfast and church. Their Highnesses preserved an exemplary attitude of erect attention. It is even quite possible that the Freule Louisa was listening.

To Otto the little barn-like building, in its white unchangedness, had brought that sudden quietude of soul which comes upon us when the rush of life has briefly cast us back into a long-remembered harbor. It was good to be here. It was good to find nothing altered, neither the gaunt externals of the service, nor the inharmonious music, nor even the long discourse. It was good to breathe the atmosphere of dutiful curiosity which played about the heir until at last it also sank, half-sated, beneath the all-oppressive heat. The crimson farm-wives sat perspiring under their great Sunday towers of gold-hung embroidery. There was not a cool spot in the building, except Ursula’s muslin frock.

As his eye rested there, Otto felt that one change at least made itself manifest. Where a little lonely child had formerly faced the Manor-house pew, a maiden now sat, calm and self-possessed, her gaze neither seeking nor avoiding his own. And suddenly he realized that he was growing old.

He realized it all the more when, presently, he found himself walking back by the side of the parson’s daughter, through wide stretches of sun-soaked corn. The older people had passed ahead, unconsciously hurried forward by the sweeping stride of the Dominé. In that opening search for words which always disturbs the meeting of long-acquainted strangers, Otto’s soul swelled anew with wrath against the brother whose indiscretion had doubly tied either tongue.

“Yes, everything is exactly as it used to be,” he replied to Ursula’s perfunctory question, when it ultimately blossomed forth from the marsh of their embarrassment. “That struck me more especially this morning in church. The people are pretty much the same, of course; at least, they look it. And so is the whole appearance of the place, and the odor of the fustian and the service.”

“And the sermon?” she laughed, lamely, thinking also of Gerard’s banter, and annoyed by her annoyance.

But his face clouded over. She noticed this, and it put her still less at her ease. She hurriedly added something about her father’s “coincidence,” thereby causing her companion to write her down insincere.

“Nevertheless,” she continued, desperately, feeling all the while that she might just as well, and far better, keep silence, “twelve years seems to me a most tremendous time.”

“That is because you are young.”

“Young or not, people change in twelve years.”

Gerard would have availed himself of this palpable opportunity to suggest something pretty; clumsy Otto merely made answer, “My grandfather is dead.” The most tragic words can somehow sound funny, and Ursula, in her nervousness, very nearly laughed.

“I miss him,” continued Otto, quite unconsciously. “He wasn’t—childish, you know, when I went away. How the poor old man would have enjoyed some talks about my tiger-hunts. He was such a splendid shot.”

“‘GIRD UP YOUR LOINS!’ CRIED THE DOMINÉ”

“Have you really shot tigers?”

“Yes.” A man always feels foolish under such a question as that.

“Many?”

“That depends on your ideas of proportion. Tigers must not be confounded with rabbits. I have shot enough to be able to beg your father’s acceptance of a skin when my boxes come.”

They walked on for some minutes in silence, awkward silence, she flicking at the corn ears with her white parasol. Then she said, “I feel sorry for the tiger.”

He answered, dryly, “The parents of his final supper did not take that view.”

“But,” he added, “I dare say you don’t quite understand about wild beasts, or heathen countries. I shouldn’t wonder, Juffrouw Rovers, if you had never even crossed the frontier.”

“No, I haven’t,” she answered, shortly, much put out by his innocent patronage, “and I am glad I haven’t. I should hate to come back as people do, finding all things small at home. And, above all, I should hate to go to India—a horrible place with spiders as big as my sunshade, and a python curled up, perhaps, under one’s pillow of nights. You needn’t laugh; I may have forgotten the dreadful creatures’ names, but I know they’re there, for my Uncle Mopius told me.”

“Ah, yes, your Uncle Mopius. He was out in Java, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was notary there, and he tells the most awful stories.”

“Then don’t believe them. So you would never go to India?”

“Never.”

“Well, it’s a good thing there’s no necessity. I had to, you see. People even face pythons, when they must. And there’s always the fun of killing them.”

She shuddered. “The fun of killing,” she repeated, “I cannot understand at all. We are speaking different languages, Mynheer van Helmont. I hate the idea of killing anything. And do you know what I hate still more? It is what you call ‘a splendid shot.’ Gerard is a splendid shot, like his grandfather; the finest, they say, in the province. Yes, I can’t help it; I’ve often told him.” She plunged headlong. “I dare say you’re a splendid shot. But it’s just my hobby. To go creep, creeping through God’s creation, a gun in one’s hand, seeking some innocent life you may slay for the pleasure of slaying! Or, still worse, to sit in a chair and have the poor fluttering wretches driven in quantities on to one’s barrels! It’s the one thing that spoils the country for me, and only in the autumn I long to get away from Horstwyk. There’s no shooting in towns.”

“I was thinking of real sport,” he answered, with provoking meekness, “but I dare say you are right.”

“Oh, I know what real sport means!” she cried, and her eyes flashed. “Hallooing after some little palpitating victim with beagles or harriers or hounds! You may think me very stupid—I dare say you do—but I wouldn’t shake hands, if I could help it, with a man whom I knew to have voluntarily ‘hunted’ anything. As for women, I can’t believe they do it.” She broke off, in that nervous “unstrungness” which only comes to the gentler sex, hardly knowing, after her sudden burst of eloquence, whether to laugh or to cry.

“You are quite right, quite right,” he said again; but in his grave regard she only read approval of her callow softness. They had reached a little well-known wicket, and he stopped. The path went twisting away at this spot from the yellow fields into the deep recesses of the park.

“I think we separate here?” he said, and to her amazement she caught a touch of regret in his tone.

“Yes, as a rule. But papa has gone on—in honor of you, I suppose.”

“Then you cannot do better than follow.” He held open the gate for her to pass. “I think you must forgive me,” he said, with downcast eyes. “It was only once. In Ireland. And we didn’t kill the fox.”

“Because you couldn’t,” she answered, fiercely. “Or do people keep foxes, like stags, to uncart?”

Her hand, in its long “Suède” glove, closed almost viciously on the filmy folds of her frock. Not another word was exchanged between them as they threaded the shady mazes of suddenly delicious green, but she felt that he was watching her all the time out of the corners of his eyes. A good man enjoys the arousing a womanly woman’s righteous indignation. Her heart beat till he saw it. He liked that.

“Ah, Dominé, there was sense in your sermon!” cried the Freule van Borck, haranguing everybody in a group on the lawn. “What I enjoy in your preaching is the protest against latter-day flabbiness”—the Freule van Borck had read and misunderstood Carlyle. “Where are the heroes of old?” she cried, pointing her “church-book” at the imperturbable Gerard, who had come strolling out, cool in the coolest of flannels, to greet the clergyman. “Where, as you asked them, are Gideon and Moses and Joshua the son of Nun, that was never afraid?”

“We give it up,” said Gerard, gravely. “Did the congregation know?”

“Be silent, Gerard. Your conduct is bad enough already. Instead of remaining to scoff, you should have gone to pray.” It was the Baron who spoke, looking up from his great St. Bernard.

“I bow to your command, sir, especially on a Sunday. But Aunt Louisa should not propound conundrums when the answers appear to have got beyond her control.”

“I was not speaking to you; I was speaking seriously,” replied the Freule, with lofty scorn. “And I thoroughly agree with the Dominé, that the age of troubadours is dead.”

The Dominé writhed. “Yes, yes,” he said—“undoubtedly. Though I should hardly, myself, have employed the names you mentioned as examples of fearlessness”—He stopped in despair. The Freule was grabbing, with her handkerchief in front of her, at a wasp which serenely buzzed behind. Mevrouw van Helmont, on a garden seat, against a great flare of MacMahons that looked, among their gold-rimmed leaves, like a mayonnaise of lobster—Mevrouw van Helmont seemed entirely engrossed by the interest of sticking her parasol into a fat bundle before her which wriggled and kicked. The Dominé sighed. This was “the Family.” These were the temporal lords of his spiritual domain. He turned, wistfully, to watch his daughter coming across the sward, by Otto’s side, between gay patches of color.

“You two have been renewing your acquaintance,” he said. “Or was there none left to renew?”

“Indeed, we are already old friends,” replied Otto, “for Juffrouw Rovers has been scolding me vigorously; and ladies, I believe, never scold mere acquaintances?” Ursula bit her under-lip. “I understand that Juffrouw Rovers objects to the killing of animals—all animals?” His heavy mustache hung unmoved as he looked across.

“Oh, that is a fad of Ursula’s,” broke in Gerard. “You should teach her her Bible better, Dominé. She admits that Nimrod may have been a mighty hunter, but never ‘before the Lord.’”

“Gerard,” said the Dominé, with a grave flash of his eyes on the prodigal, “the Bible is a holy book. Some day, perhaps, you will learn, with regard to holiness, that ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’” The rebuke was almost a fierce one, from gentle lips. In the painful silence Gerard, flushing, took it like a man.

The Baron’s mild voice intervened. “The daughter of a hero,” said the Baron, smiling and bowing, “can afford to appear soft-hearted. Ursula preaches peace, and her father preaches war. But I, were I Otto, should be most afraid of Ursula.”

“Mynheer van Helmont,” answered that young lady, goaded almost beyond endurance, “I am going next Wednesday to my Uncle Mopius, to stay with him for a week or two.”

“Coming to Drum!” cried Gerard, whose regiment was quartered in the small provincial town. He checked himself. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “You were about to speak?”

“Oh, it’s nothing!” cried the Baroness across from her seat. “Your father was only going to observe something about eclipses of the sun. You know you were, Theodore. It has done duty a dozen times before.”

“My dear, do I deny it?” replied the Baron, sadly. “We have lived too long together. You know all my little jokes, Cécile. You are tired of my compliments. And yet, after more than forty years of marriage, I still address ninety per cent. to yourself.”

“But none of the new ones,” replied the Baroness, pouting before the whole circle like a girl.

“The new ones are an old man’s compliments, and, therefore, insincere.” He went across to her, followed by the dog, and the gray couple sat laughing and flirting, like any pair of lovers.

“Ah, Dominé, you needn’t look sour,” said the Freule, her own angular face like skim-milk. “Surely, by this time, you no longer expect sobriety at the Manor-house of Horst.”

“I was only thinking,” replied the Dominé, softly, and his eyes seemed to pierce beyond the couple on the seat.

The Freule gave a smart snap—meant not unkindly—to her “church-book” clasp.

“But your wife is in heaven,” she rejoined, “and much better off, unless sermons mean nothing, than anybody here below.”

The Dominé started, and an old scar came out across his cheeks, as if a whip-lash had struck him. “Yes, yes,” he said, hurriedly. “Thank God. Ursula, I think it is time we were going.”

But the spinster laid a detaining hand upon her pastor’s arm. “Surely you must admit,” she persisted, “that you Christians are strangely illogical. What, to a Christian, is the King of Terrors? We should speak, not of Mors, but of Morphia!”

This sentence was taken from the Freule’s favorite periodical, the Victory, in which, however, the concluding word had been printed “Morpheus.”

“Yes, yes, exactly,” replied the Dominé, pulling away. “You remember what Thucydides said, Freule Louisa? I mean, Thucydides says it’s no use discussing a subject unless men are agreed on the meaning of the terms they employ. Ursula, we must really be going. Your aunt has such a dislike to irregular hours.”

“Juffrouw Mopius?” exclaimed Otto. “I didn’t see her in church. I hope she is well?”

Gerard burst out laughing. “Have you been away so long,” he said, “that you have forgotten Miss Mopius’s Sunday headache?”

The Dominé, who could fight men, looked as if he would have liked to answer something about Gerard’s Sunday ailments, but he refrained, evidently feeling that he had already said enough.

The two young men stood watching father and daughter as they swung away into the woodland shadows. “It will be rather a bore,” yawned Gerard. “Ursula’s coming to Drum. I shall have to show the poor creature all over the place. I don’t think she ever spent a night outside Horstwyk before.” He lounged away to the Baroness. “Mother, Otto is very much smitten with Ursula, in spite of her lamentable lack of style. I suppose he doesn’t notice that, after India. Has he been making any terrible confessions yet about other brown damsels out there?”

The Freule van Borck shot a keen glance at her elder nephew’s solemn face. “Yes, Otto,” she said, “it can’t be helped. Gerard’s humor is part of your home-coming.”

Meanwhile the Dominé went scudding through the corn as if the very wind of panic were after him. Presently his daughter ventured to hint that the day was rather warm.

“Ursula”—the Dominé’s cowardice had put him out of temper with all around him—“Ursula, I heard you remark to the Jonkers that you were exceedingly fond of your uncle Mopius. Now, Ursula, surely that was untrue.”

“It was irony, father,” the girl made answer rather testily, screening her tormented face.

“Irony? I do not understand irony. There is no room for irony in the Christian warfare. It is a sort of unchivalric guerilla. I’m afraid you are not always quite honest and straightforward. Always, in everything, be quite honest and straightforward, my dear.”

When Ursula was safe in her own room she sat down to cry. She had never, from her earliest recollections upward, enjoyed the luxury of rational grief; an altogether causeless outpouring, such as this, could, therefore, but increase her irritation against herself. What did it matter, after all, if she made a good impression on people? She was self-conscious. With angry energy she dabbed her blazing cheeks and went down to luncheon.

“Ursula, my dear child, your face is all blotchy,” said Miss Mopius. “I make no doubt you are going to have the measles; they are very prevalent in the village. Did you sneeze during service? Roderigue, did you notice if Ursula sneezed during service? No, you are no good in church; you only think of your sermon. Well, Ursula, I must give you some Sympathetico Lob. You may be thankful you have an aunt whose own health is so bad that she doesn’t care at all about infection.”

The Dominé looked up uneasily. His coffee tasted bitter, like remorse.

“Or is it hay-fever,” said Miss Mopius, “that begins with sneezing? I must get my little Manual and see.”

CHAPTER VI

UNCONSCIOUS RIVALS

Three days later Ursula started for Drum.

Looking down the straight vista of her shaded past, she could not have discovered, within measurable distance, an event to compare with this departure from home. Hitherto her world had been Horstwyk, and mundane greatness had been the Horst.

In those three days of delicious preparation she had nevertheless seen a good deal of the new arrival. His affection for the Dominé was palpable to all men, and he seemed to slip away, almost gladly, down the long road from the Manor to the Parsonage. All Monday evening they had sat over their teacups in the green veranda, and the Dominé, roused thereto by the guest’s brief descriptions of daring, had leisurely recalled his own stories of Algerine lion-hunts. Ursula, looking up from her work at Otto’s earnest attention, wondered if twelve years of absence could really suffice to efface the ofttold tale.

On Tuesday a great dinner at “The House” had fêted the return of the first-born. The Dominé had made a speech, and enjoyed himself notwithstanding. But Ursula considered the entertainment had been rather a failure, for amid the due honoring of dowagers and heiresses, nobody but the Baron had found time to say a civil word to herself. Helena van Trossart, the Helmonts’ wealthy cousin, had looked lovely, though bored, in the seat next to Otto, assigned her by the Baroness; she had brightened up visibly when the younger son joined her for an endless flirtation in the drawing room.

Ursula now stood waiting and mildly reviewing last night’s disappointments, on this, to her, eventful Wednesday morning. Gerard, who was returning to his regiment, had promised to call for her on his way to the station.

“Ten minutes too soon!” she said in surprise, running to the door as the sound of wheels became audible. But it was Otto who called to her from the box.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she cried, half-way down the garden path. “But Gerard—I thought you would know?”

“I know nothing of Gerard’s arrangements,” answered Otto with cold annoyance. “Never mind; I have brought your father’s tiger-skin. Is there any one here could hold the horse?”

“Why, of course,” she said, springing forward.

“You? I fancied you would be afraid of horses.” Otto began tugging at a brown-paper parcel wedged under the seat. As the carriage swayed forward the animal, grown restless, plunged.

“Naturally,” replied Ursula, one firm hand at its mouth. She flushed. “Hatred of cruelty stands, with an average man, for cowardice.”

“Don’t. You hurt one,” cried Otto, turning, with altered voice. She calmed down immediately.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “Hector knows me longer and better than you. Your father often lets me drive him.”

“This is it,” replied Otto, tearing back a strip of covering. A tawny mass of fur, broken suddenly loose, poured down into the dusty road.

“Oh, what a beauty!” exclaimed Josine, who had ventured out in a wrap beneath the laughing sky.

And, “Oh, what a beauty!” echoed Ursula.

“These are for you,” he continued, in the eager delight of giving, as he bundled out two gorgeous Indian shawls. “I thought you would like to wear them to church on Sundays”—he stopped, before the ripple on Ursula’s face. “You like them, don’t you?” he asked, dismayed. “You like them, don’t you, Miss Mopius?”

“They are exquisite,” replied the latter lady, affectedly, with a scowl at her niece. “My dear Mynheer van Helmont, you have inherited all your father’s charming taste.” Ursula murmured something about “a beautiful drapery.”

“All modern girls are alike,” thought Otto, “everything for ornament.” He was almost relieved to see Gerard’s trap come rattling up.

“You here!” cried the younger brother, looking down from his height. “Oh, I see! What a hurry you’re in to bestow your gifts!”

“I came here to conduct Juffrouw Rovers to the station,” answered Otto. “The message I sent appears not to have reached her.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Ursula stood distressful, by the little green gate, in her dust-ulster, the rainbow cloth over one arm. At her feet lay the white-fanged brute with gleaming eyes and distended maw. Otto climbed slowly back into his old-fashioned wagonette. By his side the smart dog-cart jingled and creaked. “Hurry, Ursula!” cried its driver. “We haven’t any time to spare!” Otto whipped up Hector almost savagely. “It’s of no account,” he said, “of no account at all.”

“Gerard, I’m afraid we shall miss the train,” said Ursula, as the trees went flying past them.

“Possibly,” answered Gerard. “You don’t mind my cigarette?”

“Gerard, my uncle will never forgive me.”

“Oh yes, he will. Dozens of damned people have said they would never forgive me, but they always did. You would have missed the train with Hector, anyway.”

“But if I had started with your brother, you would have taken me on.”

“No, indeed,” replied Gerard, with deep conviction. “Once with Otto, always with Otto.” He looked down into her face through half-closed eyelids. “Once with Otto, always with Otto,” he repeated, “and so you would have missed your train.”

She laughed. “Well, I’d much rather go with you,” she answered, gayly. He made her a mock little bow of acknowledgment.

“For, you see, you take me all the way to Drum.”

“Thank you. If. Gently, Beauty, gently; it’s only a bit of paper in the middle of the road. I like you for not being nervous, Ursula. My mother wouldn’t sit behind a horse that shied.”

“‘OH, I’M SO SORRY,’ SHE CRIED”

“I want to catch my train,” responded Ursula.

“Don’t be so peevish. Is this all the reward I get for allowing your box to scratch the paint off my dog-cart?”

“Oh, Gerard, will it do that?”

“Of course it will. But make yourself easy. I’m going to have the cart repainted, anyway. The green spikes were well enough two years ago, but I’ve seen another shade I like better.”

“Gerard, you are horribly extravagant.”

“So my father says each time he gets himself some new plaything. By George! I believe we really are too late.”

With a shout to the groom he leaped from his seat, and was lost in the interior of the station; as Ursula hurriedly followed, a whistle of departure pierced straight through her heart.

“Quick, you stupid,” she heard Gerard’s voice saying to somebody. The train had stopped again. She was bustled in. They were off!

“Now that never happened to me before,” said Gerard. “The man is an ass. But, in fact, it is all your fault.”

Ursula sat staring at her hero in unmixed awe. Her infrequent railway journeys had always been occasions of flurry and alarm. Never had she realized that any son of man could influence a station-master.

“Yes,” she answered, meekly.

“Of course it is. I should just have jumped in. But they had to stop the train for you. And now they will make us pay a monstrous fine for travelling without a ticket.”

“Is that also my fault?” asked Ursula, more meekly still.

“No, it was Beauty’s. I’ve a great mind to deduct the money from her oats. Only that would make her do it over again.” He laughed once more, a jolly, self-satisfied laugh.

“But, oh, what should we have done,” said Ursula, presently, “if the station-master hadn’t listened to you?”

“Stopped the train myself, of course; and Santa Claus would have forgotten to send that man cigars.”

“Gerard, you wouldn’t have dared!”

Her innocent amazement drove him on.

“You have a poor idea of my desire to oblige you,” he made answer. “It would have cost me a pair of gloves, I suppose, and a lot of depositions at the end, and a fine. It would have been a great bore; I do not pretend to deny that.”

She relapsed into silence, reflecting. She thought Gerard was youthfully overbearing. But she also saw he was in earnest. To her it had always seemed in the village of Horstwyk that the powers in authority—the Beadle, the Squire—were made to be implicitly obeyed. Submission, in the Dominé’s system, stood forth as an article of faith. In the great world outside she felt it must be the same, only still more resistlessly. Order and Law, however erroneous, were always ex officio infallible.

But for great people, evidently, the world was otherwise. The Irrevocable possessed no barriers which rank and insolence could not laughingly push aside. The railways in their courses obeyed these rulers of men. For the first time in her recollection she envied—perhaps with last night’s discomfiture rising uppermost—she envied “the Great.”

She sat furtively watching her companion behind his newspaper. He was handsome, with his light mustache and strong complexion, well-dressed, well-groomed, completely at his ease. She felt that the world belonged to him. She felt exceeding small.

At the little town of Drum she was able to continue her studies. Porters naturally selected Gerard to hover round; every one seemed anxious to please him. Whatever he desired was immediately “Yes, my lord” ed. He gave double the usual number and double the necessary quantity of tips. He insisted upon personally seeing Ursula to her uncle’s door and overpaying the cabman. “I have a reputation,” he said, merrily, “to keep up in Drum.” He turned back as she stood on the door-step.

“And your uncle has a reputation, too,” he called, waving his hat.

Ursula knew her uncle by more than reputation, and her courage began to ooze after Gerard’s retreating figure. Immediately she pressed a resolute finger on the leak; she was come to enjoy herself, and Gerard had promised to help her.

Villa Blanda, the residence of Mynheer Jacóbus Mopius, stood in a good-sized garden, some way back from the street. The garden was very brilliant, very brilliant indeed. The first impression it used to make was that of the hideous conglomeration of colors which children saw in former days through so-called kaleidoscopes; after a time you perceived that its complex disharmony was principally produced by a mal-assortment of flowers. These received some assistance, it must be confessed, from a glittering “Magenta” ball, two terra-cotta statuettes of fat children with baskets, and other pleasing trifles of similar origin.

The whole house had manifestly cost a great deal of money; it was its single duty to proclaim this fact, and it did its duty well. A hundred flourishes of superfluous ornament showed upon the face of it that the terra-cotta man and the gilder, and the encaustic-tile people, and the modeller of stucco monstrosities, had all sent in lengthy bills. The bills had been paid.

Yes, Mynheer Jacóbus Mopius owed no man anything—not even courtesy, not even disregard. He button-holed you to inform you how much more important a personage he was than yourself. If you tried to escape him you were lost.

Inside, the house was, as outside, a record of wealth misspent. Money, they say, buys everything; it is certainly wonderful to consider what hideous things money will buy.

Ursula was shown into the drawing-room, where her aunt came forward to greet her. “How are you, my dear?” said Mevrouw Mopius, in a tone whose indifference precluded reply. Mevrouw Mopius was a washed-out-looking lady in a too-stiff black silk. She immediately returned to her low chair and her Berlin woolwork frame. For Mevrouw Mopius still worked on canvas. She preferred figures—Biblical scenes. She was now busy on a meeting between Jacob and Laban, in which none of the gorgeously robed figures were like anything that has ever been seen on earth.

Ursula seated herself, unasked, on a purple plush settee. The room was large and copiously gilded. From the farther end of it a girl approached—a pale girl in a plain dark gown.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Mevrouw Mopius, pausing with uplifted needle. “My step-niece Harriet. Harriet, this is Ursula Rovers.”

“Will you come and take off your things?” said the dark girl. “Shall I show you your room?” Ursula rose, with a spring of relief, and began hastily to explain about the loss of her luggage as she moved towards the door. Just before she reached it her aunt spoke again.

“Harriet has come to live with us, you remember, since her father died.” Mevrouw Mopius always conversed in after-thoughts, when she troubled herself to converse at all.

“You won’t be able to change your clothes,” said the pale girl, as the two went up-stairs together.

“No. Does it matter?”

“Matter? No. What does matter? Certainly not Uncle Mopius.”

“What a fine house this is, is it not? I was never on the second floor before, though I’ve sometimes been to lunch.”

“Oh yes, it is charming, charming in every way,” said the pale girl, with a sneer. “This is your room, the second best guest-chamber. I’m afraid I can’t lend you much for the night. I’ve three night-gowns; one’s in the wash, and one’s torn. Uncle Mopius gave me them.”

She went and stood at the window while Ursula hurriedly washed her hands. “Are you ready?” she asked, presently. “Then come down-stairs again. Better tell Uncle Mopius you admired your room. The washing-things, for instance, they are English. Cost thirty-six florins. Come along.” Ursula shuddered under the continuous sneer of the girl’s impassive tones.

As soon as they opened the drawing-room door Mevrouw Mopius’s voice was heard exclaiming, “Harriet, get me my Bible immediately, Harriet.” She sat up quite awake and alert, her needle unused beside her. “I’ve been waiting,” she continued. “What a long time you’ve been. Ursula, I hope you’re not vain. It’s a bad thing in a pastor’s daughter to be vain of her appearance.” After a minute’s silence she became aware of the proximity of her other niece, who stood waiting beside her, Bible in hand. “And in all other girls,” she added, “for the matter of that;” but Harriet, having missed the discourse, lost the application as well.

“It was on the table in the next room,” said Harriet.

“I know. Did you expect me to get it?”

The lady took the sacred volume, which immediately fell open at the story of Jacob and Rebecca, much bethumbed. In the midst of her search she paused, to cast a sharp look at Ursula. “And not much to be vain of, anyway,” she said. She could not possibly have authenticated this remark, but she chose to consider it “judicious.”

“Here is the place,” she continued. “You see, it says Leah had ‘tender eyes.’ Now, what, I wonder, is the color of tender eyes?”

“I always thought it meant ‘watery,’” hazarded Ursula.

“Do you really think so?” Mevrouw Mopius reflected, sitting critically back from her screen, and surveying her cherry-colored Orientals. “Really, watery. Ursula, I wonder if that view is correct?”

“Like a perpetual cold in her head,” volunteered the dark girl, listlessly. “I know such people.”

Mevrouw Mopius sniffed unconsciously.

“In that case I should have to make them red,” she said. “I had just decided on dove color.”

“You couldn’t make red show against the cheeks,” said Harriet. “Hadn’t you better send round and ask Mevrouw Pock’s opinion?”

Mevrouw Mopius smiled immediate approval.

“A very sensible suggestion,” she said. Mevrouw Pock was the wife of her favorite parson. “You have plenty of sense if only you were always good-tempered. Get me my escritoire from the table over there. No; writing letters fatigues me”—she couldn’t spell—“you must run across after dinner, and get Mevrouw to consult her husband as to what it says in the Greek.”

“But I shall have to change my dress again,” protested Harriet.

“Well, and what of that? So much the better. There’s few things a girl likes more than changing dresses. I’m sure you ought to be thankful you’ve dresses to change.”

Without further reply the girl dropped away into her corner and resumed her interrupted reading. Ursula sat with her hands in her lap. Mevrouw began sorting wools, but presently remembered the guest.

“Harriet,” she called, “why don’t you come and amuse Ursula? You waste all your time over novels. I can’t imagine what you find in them. What’s this you’re reading now? A novel, of course?”

The girl came forward, lazily. “Yes, aunt,” she said.

“What is it? What’s it about?”

“It’s a historical romance called Numa Pompilius, translated from the German. Everybody’s reading it just now.”

“I can’t understand what you find in them. And they’re all alike. It always ends in Pompilius marrying Numa.”

Before Ursula had stopped laughing behind Mevrouw Mopius’s back her uncle came in. Harriet did not laugh.

Mynheer Mopius, though a very secondary personage in this story of the Van Helmonts, would be mortally offended did we not give him a chapter to himself.

CHAPTER VII

HARRIET’S ROMANCE

“Amusing yourselves?” said Mynheer Mopius. “That’s right. That’s what you’ve come for, Ursula. I’m glad your aunt’s been amusing you.”

Translated, this meant that Mynheer Mopius considered his wife had been taking a liberty. For, although Mynheer Mopius despised wit or humor of any kind, and but rarely condescended to utter what he considered a joke, yet he somehow believed his conversation to be a source of constant refreshment to his family. And he felt annoyed at their making merry without him.

“I’m sure, if Ursula’s laughing it’s no fault of mine,” said Mevrouw. “I was merely telling Harriet—where’s Harriet?”

“Gone up to dress. You had better follow her example, Ursula. Dinner at 6.30. We dress for it here, at least the women do. So do I when there’s company. It’s a custom I brought with me from Batavia. Must show the natives here what’s what.”

“I’ve nothing but this,” said Ursula, in some confusion. “My box hasn’t come, and I haven’t got much in the way of evening frocks anyhow.”

“I’ll give you one. I gave Harriet hers. That girl’s fallen nose foremost into fat[B] if ever girl did. Hasn’t she, wife?”

“She doesn’t know it,” replied Mevrouw Mopius, picking at Laban’s goggle eyes.

“Then she’s a greater fool than I take her for. She’d have been a nurse-maid, sure as fate. And now she’s as good as a rich man’s daughter.”

“And I’m a mother to her that was motherless,” grunted Mevrouw complacently, “and because she’s poor and no real relation I allow her to call me ‘aunt.’”

“Besides which, if she behaves herself, who knows what may happen to her!” Mynheer Mopius jingled the loose cash in his trousers-pockets and looked askance at Ursula.

Ursula looked back at him, peacefully unconscious.

“I might leave her my money,” said Mynheer Mopius.

“Oh, that would be splendid!” cried Ursula.

Her uncle looked at her again. “Sly little thing!” he thought, but he said nothing. Only Jacóbus Mopius could have called Ursula little. His greatness caused him to see all things small.

He was a stunted, pompous man, with a big head and yellow cheeks. He had made his money in the Dutch Indies, as a notary.

Harriet came back in a fawn-colored frock with a pink rosebud pattern, made of some kind of nun’s veiling, high in the throat. Mynheer Mopius gazed at it in admiration.

“Looks well, doesn’t she?” he said to Ursula in a loud sotto voce. “You shall have just such another; but Harriet’s a devilish good-looking girl.”

The subject of this comment did not appear to hear it, but Ursula fancied she? saw her aunt wince. Harriet was helping the faded woman to put things together. In the hall a gong was sounding a hideous bellow at the door.

“Late as usual,” remonstrated Mynheer Mopius. “Hurry up, my dear. Gracious goodness, how awkward you are getting!” The frail little creature in the stiff silk caught hold of Harriet’s arm with one skinny hand, and Ursula, as she watched her movements, understood something of her unwillingness to exert herself.

For his own use Mynheer Mopius never bought anything cheap, and all the appointments of the dinner-table were excellent. Of course he communicated prices to the new arrival, and Ursula, soon discovering that she was expected constantly to admire, entered into the spirit of the thing, and asked the cost of the silver candlesticks. Her uncle ascended into regions of unusual good humor, and ordered up a bottle of sweet Spanish wine for her, “such as you ignorant females enjoy,” he said. He grew very angry with his wife for refusing to have any. “But the doctor forbids it.” “Oh, damn your doctor. Never have a doctor till you’re dead; that’s my advice. Then he can’t do any harm.”

Mevrouw Mopius meekly swallowed a little of the liquid, her long nose drooping over the glass. Her husband sat tyrannically watching her. “Drink it all,” he said; “you want a tonic. You shall have some every day.” And she drank it, although she implicitly believed in the doctor, and the doctor, a teetotaler, had told her it meant death.

“Doctors are all scoundrels,” said Mynheer Mopius. “Hey, Harriet?”

The girl’s dead father had been a medical man.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Only lawyers are honest. That’s why doctors die poor.”

Mynheer Mopius laughed heartily. “I like your cheek,” he said. “Make hay while your sun shines, Harriet. A man can’t stand it from an old woman.”

Mevrouw Mopius sniffed.

“We must have some fun, hey, wife, while Ursula’s here? We might give a dinner-party, and show the grandees what’s what.”

“But the grandees don’t come to our dinner-parties,” objected Mevrouw Mopius.

“No, they don’t, hang ’em. But they’d hear from the people who do. Your Dominé Pock knows ’em all. We’ll have Pock to dinner. He’s always asking for money for something or other, but he’s a good judge of victuals. Trust a parson to be that, and a poor judge of wine. At least the Evangelicals. And he’ll tell every one I’ve the best venison in the city. I get my venison from Brussels, Ursula, and it’s better, they’ll all say, than the Baron van Trossart’s, who shoots his himself.”

“The Baron van Trossart!” said Ursula. “That is the guardian of the Van Helmonts’ cousin, Helen, the heiress. I am to go to a party there. Gerard promised me an invitation.”

Mynheer Mopius’s face grew very dark.

“Look here,” he said, “are you staying with me or in barracks? If with me, you must allow me to amuse you. I won’t hear anything about your Barons Gerard. And I won’t have nothing to say to them.”

“Gerard isn’t the Baron,” replied Ursula, hotly. “That’s his father. Not that it matters.”

“No, I shouldn’t think it did. I won’t hear anything about them. What did you say the father’s name was?”

“Theodore, Baron van Helmont van Horstwyk en de Horst,” rolled forth Ursula, proudly.

“Yes, poor Roderick likes that sort of thing. Is ‘the Horst’ the name of the house? Is it grander than this?”

Ursula laughed. “It’s quite different,” she said.

“Well, I dare say. But I won’t hear another word about them. That kind of people are all a mistake.”

Harriet lifted her indolent eyes, and fixed them on Ursula’s face.

“Do you like your wine?” she said. “Mind you deserve it.”

For the rest of the meal Mynheer Mopius talked of the entertainments he would organize for Ursula. He refused to let her accompany Harriet on the theological errand concerning Leah’s eyes.

“No, no,” he said, “come into the drawing-room and amuse us. Do you play? Do you sing? Harriet does neither. We do both.”

Ursula played well. She gave them a Concert of Liszt, and Mynheer did not talk till Mevrouw dropped her scissors and asked him, after a wait, to pick them up for her. As soon as he could, he got hold of the piano himself, and called out to his wife to join him. He had been possessed of a fine bass twenty years ago, and had enjoyed much admiration in Batavian society. It now stopped somewhere down in his stomach, and only a rumble came out. His wife rose wearily to play his accompaniments, and he kept her chained to the piano for the rest of the evening, though Ursula could not help seeing that the playing seemed to cause her physical pain.

He sang only love-songs of the ultra-sentimental kind, all about broken hearts and lovely death and willing sacrifice. Many of them were of a by-gone period when everybody pretended—at least in verse—to be absolutely ill with affection.

Harriet came back and poured out tea. When her uncle said it was bad she shrugged her shoulders.

“It always is,” she replied.

“Yes, Harriet, it is, though I get it direct from the East,” he rejoined. His whole attitude betokened reproof.

“The East,” interposed Mevrouw, from her tambour-frame. “Quite so. I wonder, when Laban welcomed Jacob, do you think he gave him tea?”

“Coffee, rather, I should fancy,” replied Mopius.

“Do you really believe they drank coffee, Jacóbus?[C] I wish I was sure”—for the fiftieth time that day (as every day) she fell to contemplating her work with arrested needle. “I could so well fill up this corner with a little table, and put on the rolls and cups and things.”

“And work an ‘L’ in the napkin corner,” suggested Harriet.

Mevrouw Mopius gazed suspiciously into her niece’s face, but Harriet’s expression was perfectly serious.

“And—work—an—‘L’—into—the—napkin—corner,” repeated Mevrouw Mopius, very slowly. “Well, I think that might be nice.”

Ursula had just extinguished her light, and was dozing off into a dream-land of Mopiuses and Jonkers, when the door opened and Harriet entered hurriedly, candle in hand, a white wrap flung loosely about her.

“I didn’t knock,” she said. “Knocks are heard all over a house at night.”

She threw herself into an easy chair by the bed. “Finished already!” she said. “You don’t make much work of your beauty.”

“It’s so little, I should be afraid of killing it with over-care,” replied Ursula, smiling.

But Harriet frowned. “Don’t tell lies,” she said. “You must know you’re lovely. You are. Am I lovely too?”

“I think you look very nice,” replied Ursula, hesitatingly.

“Thank you. I understand.” She tossed back her black locks from her sallow cheeks, and her sad eyes flashed. “But see here, I didn’t come to talk about looks.” She pushed forward the candle so that its light fell full on Ursula’s sleepy face. “Wake up for a minute, can’t you? You and I may as well understand each other at once.” She leaned back, and folded her bare white arms, from which the loose sleeves fell away.

“Uncle Mopius is always telling me that you are his natural heir,” she said. “He tells me whenever he wants to make himself disagreeable, which is not infrequently. I dare say you know.”

Ursula sat up. “No, indeed I don’t,” she said, “and I don’t want to. Once my Aunt Josine said something about it, a couple of years ago, and father called me into his study and said he didn’t think I should ever get a penny of Uncle Jacóbus’s money, and he earnestly hoped not. I’ve never thought of it since.”

Harriet jerked up her chin. “Your father must be a peculiar sort of man,” she said, “if sincere. Did he mean it?”

Ursula blew out the candle. “I’m going to sleep,” she said. “Good-night. I don’t want to be rude to you.”

But Harriet quietly drew a box of matches from her pocket. “I like that,” she said, leisurely. “I wish I had somebody to stick up for. But I came to say this—Uncle Mopius is sure to bring up the subject constantly in your presence. He’ll taunt me, as is his habit, especially now you’re here, with your good-luck in being his own sister’s child. Now, I want you fully to understand”—she leaned forward her big dark face till Ursula struggled not to shrink back—“that I—don’t—care. I don’t care a bit. I’m not like men. And if you think you’re enjoying a cheap triumph, you’re mistaken, that’s all. And if you imagine it’s bravado on my part, because I can’t help myself, you’re mistaken too. I don’t want his dirty money. I’m sick of it. I want something better. I’m not going to hate you for nothing. In fact, I rather like you. So he can go on as much as ever he chooses, and if you enjoy it you’re free to do so.”

“But I don’t,” cried Ursula, with hot cheeks. “I don’t a bit. You know I don’t. And, in fact, uncle talked quite differently this afternoon. I thought you—”

The other girl stopped her with a gesture.

“Don’t,” she said, “I won’t hear it. I’m sick of the whole business. Be sure that, whatever he said, it was a lie.” She got up and began pacing the room, her limbs quivering under the light folds of her gown. Suddenly she stood still, looking down at Ursula. “Shall I tell you what will really happen? Do you care to know? It’s easy enough.” Ursula did not answer, but Harriet went on, unheeding, “Aunt will die, and he will marry again as soon as he can. That’s all. There.” Ursula’s continuous silence seemed to goad her companion. “You think he may die before aunt? He may; but when a chimney falls down into the street, it usually manages to hit a better man. You watch aunt. Good-night.” She was departing, but again reflected, and came back to the bed. “You poor thing,” she said, “I believe you really would have liked me to get the money. Why?”

“Oh, I should indeed,” replied Ursula, earnestly, “though it looks a long way off. You seem so lonely and—will you mind my saying it?—so unhappy, Harriet.” To her amazement her visitor fell forward on the bed and hugged her. A moment afterwards, however, Harriet again sat in the big chair. “You are quite mistaken,” she said, arranging her draperies with downcast eyes, “I am not at all unhappy.” There followed a moment’s agitated silence, and then:

“Ursula, I like you. I want to tell you something. You’ll listen for a moment, won’t you? I’ve nobody else to tell it to.” Without further consideration the girl pushed one hand between the loose folds about her throat, and from the snowy recesses of her bosom drew forth a paper which she hurriedly thrust in front of Ursula. “There, read that,” she said, excitedly. “It never leaves me lest they should find out.” Still sitting up, with one elbow on the little table beside her, Ursula read a printed advertisement, a scrap from a newspaper:

“H. V. Meet me on Thursday next at eight o’clock in the Long Walk outside the West Gate. Wear a white feather and, if possible, a red shawl. Carry your parasol open, in any case. Dearest, I am dying to see you, but can’t come before then. Your own Romeo.”

“Well?” queried Ursula, but immediately her voice changed. “Harriet, you don’t mean to tell me that this is an entanglement of yours?”

“You choose a strange word,” replied Harriet, loftily. “There is no entanglement. But I hope there is going to be. As yet there is merely an answer to an advertisement. Yes, the advertisement was mine. Oh, Ursula, isn’t it delightful? He says he is dying to see me. Imagine that. And he doesn’t even know me yet.”

“That surely makes his eagerness less delightful,” replied Ursula, dryly.

“Oh, but I gave him a very accurate description, tall, luminous eyes, dark locks, ivory skin. I told him I was of distinctly prepossessing appearance. Yes, in spite of your opinion, I ventured to tell him that. Uncle informs me so frequently that I am very good-looking, and aunt repeats so consistently that I am exceedingly plain, I feel I have a double right to be satisfied with my beauty. Besides, every woman’s glass declares to her that her appearance is prepossessing; it is the one reason why I fancy, on the whole, women’s lives must be happier than men’s.”

“Did you put all that in the advertisement?” asked Ursula, still staring stupidly at the scrap of paper on the bed.

“I—I wrote him a letter, just one.”

“Addressed to ‘Romeo’?”

“To ‘Romeo de Lieven.’[D] Isn’t it a charming name?”

“It’s an assumed name. Imagine a Dutchman called Romeo!”

“Of course, it’s a pseudonym, like Carmen Sylva. I wasn’t clever enough to think of one; besides, I hate subterfuges. So I just put my own name, H. V.—Harriet Verveen.”

“Harriet, you don’t mean to say that you wrote a signed love-letter you don’t in the least know to whom?”

“Love-letter, no. I told him who I was and what I wanted. Besides, I shall know him to-morrow.”

“You’re not going.”

Once more Harriet assumed her almost defiant attitude.

“Yes, I’m going,” she said. “So there!”

“What do you think?” she suddenly burst out. “It’s all very well for you comfortable, sheltered girls, at home. What’s to become of the likes of me if we don’t look out for ourselves? Nobody’ll help to find me a husband or a hiding-place. Nobody’ll ever do anything for me except abuse me because I do things for myself.”

“But I haven’t had a lover found for me,” interposed Ursula. “It seems so unwomanly—”

“Womanly! There we have the word—womanly!”

Harriet’s words came stumbling and tossing; she thrust out her limbs and the muslin fell away from them. “It’s womanly to live on day by day in bitterness, with every womanly feeling hourly insulted and estranged; after a year more, perhaps, of this, to go to some fresh situation and look after other people’s children, and when you are worn out at last, to die, soured and in want. That’s honest independence, that’s womanly modesty. Well, then, I’m immodest. Do you understand me?” She threw herself wildly forward. “I’m immodest. I want love. I told you just now I didn’t want the old scoundrel’s money. I don’t. But I want love. I want love. And I mean to have it. A woman has a right to love and be loved. I won’t be some lazy rich woman’s substitute, with brats I don’t care for. I want to love children of my own. Children that love me when I kiss them. I love my own body.” She fell back again, and her eager voice died into a pensive murmur; while speaking, she softly stroked her rounded arm. “I love it, and I want others to love it also. I want it to belong to some one besides my lonely self. Great Heaven, don’t you understand?”—her tone grew shrill again—“one’s youth goes—goes. But you don’t understand.” She stopped abruptly, just in time, and hid her face in her hand.

Ursula knew not how to speak or act. There was only one thing she wanted to do; so she did it. She put an arm round Harriet’s neck and kissed her. But the girl shook herself free, and, without another word, hurried away.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRYST

The next day passed in an atmosphere of sombre expectation. Ursula and Harriet barely spoke to one another; the latter seemed to be holding aloof. Mynheer Mopius took his niece the round of the house amid a steady flow of self-laudation, and Ursula put in pleasing adjectives as full-stops. He showed her everything, even to the water-supply and the wine-cellar. There was but one exception, his wife’s store-cupboard; Mevrouw Mopius, to his annoyance, actually held out in refusing the key. But he found a compensation in unmitigated china and glass.

After a morning thus profitably spent, the afternoon brought a long drive and a visit to a flower show. The drive was merely an opportunity for parading Mynheer Mopius’s equipage among the beauties of nature, but that gentleman was made happy, after prolonged anxiety and craning, by meeting the very people he was desirous should see it. The visit to the exhibition, however, must be regarded as an act of kindness to his guest, for the committee had had the manifest stupidity to award Mynheer Mopius’s double dahlias a third prize.

In the gardens Ursula espied Gerard with his cousin Helena among a crowd of stylish-looking people, whom Jacóbus described as “swells.” She had received, that morning, the promised card for the Baroness van Trossart’s party, and she would gladly have sought an occasion of thanking the sender, but to this proposal her uncle, in a sudden fit of shyness, opposed resolute and almost rampant refusal.

“I don’t want to know the people,” he repeated, excitedly, his eyes fixed on the distinguished group by the central lake. “I don’t want to have anything to say to them. Ursula, you belong to my party. I desire you to stay where you are.”

“Oh, very well,” replied Ursula, offended; “though, of course, I should not have gone up to him as long as he was conversing with that violet-nosed old woman in blue.”

“That lady is the wife of the Governor, and I will thank you to speak of her with more respect.”

Ursula listened in amazement. She was not enough a student of human nature to explain her uncle’s change of front. She went and sat down on the bench beside her aunt, with a few kind words about the weather.

“Oh, beautiful!” gasped Mevrouw Mopius. “Jacóbus, don’t you think it is time we went home?”

Jacóbus assented, and in the midst of plans for to-morrow sought to impress upon Ursula the number and importance of his acquaintances as instanced by frequent salutes.

Ursula came upon her aunt alone in the drawing-room half an hour before dinner. The vast apartment was darkened to a mellow glow behind its yellow venetians. Mevrouw Mopius sat with closed eyes and cavernous cheeks before her unused frame. She stirred as the door opened, and beckoned her niece to her side.

“My dear,” she said in a faint voice, “come and sit by me for a minute. I have something to ask you.” Ursula obeyed. “Your uncle was speaking of the opera for to-morrow night. I want you to tell him you don’t care to go.”

“But I do care,” objected the girl. “I think it’s simply glorious. I’ve never been to the opera before.”

“My dear, I can assure you it’s not worth seeing. The singers make such a noise you can’t hear a word they say. Not that that matters, for they always say the same thing.”

“Oh, but I should like it,” repeated Ursula.

“Say, for my sake, that you don’t care to go.” Mevrouw Mopius’s manner became very nervous. “Ursula, I can’t go out at night. Have you set your heart on this performance?”

“Yes, aunt,” said the girl, frankly; “but, even if I hadn’t, I shouldn’t know of any valid excuse. However, I can very well go with Harriet and uncle. I’ll tell him you’d rather not.”

Mevrouw Mopius clutched her arm. “Hold your tongue,” she said, quite roughly. “I didn’t want to have you here. I tell you so honestly. I knew it would be like this. It was Jacóbus. Poor fellow, I suppose he felt how dull the house was getting.” She paused meditatively. “He’d never go without me; he wouldn’t enjoy himself.”

“I’m sure I didn’t ask to come,” protested Ursula, “but now I’m here, I can’t begin inventing a parcel of lies. You must tell uncle yourself, aunt, please.”

Mevrouw Mopius tightened her grip till the nails dug into the flesh. She turned her dull eyes full on Ursula. “Girl,” she gasped, “what are you, with your little pleasures or prejudices to come athwart such a sorrow as mine? I’ll tell you my secret, if it must be. Swear, first, that you’ll not breathe it to a living soul.”

Ursula was alarmed by her aunt’s earnest manner. “I can’t swear,” she said in a flurry, “but I’ll promise. I never swore in my life.”

“Swear,” repeated the other woman under her breath; unconsciously she tightened her grasp till Ursula shrieked aloud. “Hush! Are you mad? He’ll hear. Oh, is that it?” She relaxed her hold. “Fool, did you never feel pain?”

“I—I don’t know,” gasped Ursula, now thoroughly frightened, convinced that her aunt must have mad fits of which no one had spoken.

“Swear, I tell you. Say, so help me, God Almighty. Louder. Let me hear it. Now, listen. I’m ill, incurably ill. Never mind what the doctor calls the illness. Enough that he says I can’t live beyond two months. Perhaps he’s mistaken. They often are. Not that I want to live. Not in this agony, my God! Not except for him. Ursula, your uncle knows nothing. I don’t want him to know. I’d bear twice as much, if I could, so that he shouldn’t know. Poor fellow, he has his faults, perhaps, but he’s so soft-hearted, he can’t bear to see suffering, not even to hear of it. There, now, I have told you. I’ve never told a living soul, as I said. I can hide it from him, Ursula, if things go on as usual. But I can’t go taking long drives, or to flower-shows, and oh, Ursula, dear, I can’t go out at night.”

Ursula was dumb-struck with horror and pity. Still, she could not help feeling, even at that moment, that her visit to her uncle was becoming hopelessly perplexed. She had expected a round of gayeties, all the delights of a début.

“I’ll do whatever you wish me to,” she said, helplessly. “Oh, aunt, I’m so sorry, but I hope you’ll get better. Father says doctors never know.”

“Not about curing, they don’t,” replied her aunt, grimly. “Now, Ursula, remember, not a word. It’s a secret between you and me. I don’t think it’ll be for very long. Move away; I hear some one coming!”

Harriet entered the room with her novel under her arm. Presently she looked up at Mevrouw Mopius’s deathly countenance lying back as if asleep, and nodded meaningly to Ursula. Mynheer Mopius came in, and his wife sat up. “Jacóbus,” she said, “you were laughing at the blueness of my sky yesterday. I saw one in the exhibition aviary that was every bit as blue.”

“But did you look at the real article up above us?” questioned Jacóbus.

“No,” admitted Mevrouw Mopius, “I didn’t think of that.”

Harriet rose hurriedly from dessert. “Aunt is tired,” she said. “You must excuse us, uncle,” and she offered Mevrouw her arm. At the door she turned. “You don’t want me just now, I suppose?” she continued. “I am going out to get a breath of fresh air.”

“Yes,” added Ursula quickly, “Harriet and I are going for a walk.”

A moment later the two girls met on the bedroom-landing. Both were dressed to go out. Harriet had a white feather on her hat, and a red shawl over one arm. “Leave me alone, can’t you?” said Harriet. She spoke fiercely, and a gesture escaped her which was almost a menace.

“No, I’m going with you,” replied Ursula, quietly.

“Indeed you sha’n’t. What a fool I was to tell you. Women always are fools to ask sympathy from each other.”

“I shall not be in your way,” persisted Ursula, with coaxing decision. “Let me wait with you till he comes, if he comes, and then I can step aside.”

“Of course he will come,” said Harriet. Perhaps it was the thought of this certain triumph which induced her to forbear all further opposition to Ursula’s accompanying her.

“I bought this shawl,” began Harriet, as they walked through the shadowed streets. “I had to pawn my only brooch to get it.”

“Does uncle allow you no pocket-money?” asked Ursula.

“Ten florins a month,” replied Harriet, bitterly. “I spend most of it in scents and chocolate-creams. They are my one consolation. I adore chocolate-creams. Do you? We might get some now. I’ve got a florin left from the brooch-money.”

“Let me buy them this time,” suggested Ursula, sympathetically.

“Very well. I like the pink kind best.”

It was still light, but a veil had already fallen over the low-sinking sun. The hot, sleepy streets were waking up in the red glow of the fading day. People in the town, now that the glare had died from their eyes, were telling each other that the air was cool, and trying to believe it.

Outside, however, the assertion had more truth in it. A ripple of refreshment was slowly spreading up from the distant river. The shadows of the straight-lined trees lay across the brick road in great black stripes. The fields looked as if their dusty grass was turning green again beneath the darkening sky; in the dull ditches stood the cattle, dreamily content.

The girls walked on in silence till they reached a point where the road swerved off into a little thicket. This was the spot which Romeo must have had in his mind. It was very quiet and sequestered. They stood looking at each other, still in silence. Harriet’s pale cheeks were flushed.

Evening was now rapidly closing in; great folds of gray shadow seemed to come broadening over the landscape; not a sound was heard but the faint whiz of some tiny gnats.

Suddenly the clear chimes began to play from the slender ball-topped tower, which stood out black, like a monstrous ninepin, against the yellow western sky. The eyes of the watchers met. Eight slow strokes came trembling heavily across the hush of sunset. At the other end of the long, straight road a figure appeared, as yet quite indistinct. They watched. They could hear each other’s hearts beat.

When it drew nearer they saw that it was a woman. Harriet gave a great gasp of relief. A moment later it had come quite close to them. And both saw simultaneously that the woman wore a white feather and a scarlet shawl.

She passed them suspiciously; she was an independent-looking, weather-beaten female of some forty wintry winters—all angles and frost. After a moment she halted, and hesitatingly retraced her steps.

The last glow paled away from the horizon. In the ashen grayness it even seemed to Ursula that the little breeze from the marshes blew cold. The long road lay motionless, gradually shortening into night.

“A fine evening, young ladies,” said the red-shawled female, stopping abruptly near them, and suddenly opening an enormous parasol; “but it’s getting late.”

“It’s not much beyond eight,” replied Ursula, for want of an answer.

“Nine minutes,” said the female, with precision. “Nine full minutes past 8 P.M. Perhaps I may remark to you, ladies, that this spot is unhealthy after sunset—very particularly unhealthy. The back-sillies, as modern science calls them, come up from the water and produce injurious smells. If I were you I should be careful—very particularly careful.” She turned on one heel, but suddenly bethought herself.

“I,” she said, nodding her head—the white feather waved—“am compelled by the call of duty to remain. I am waiting for some one—an engagement.” She spoke the last word with triumphant pomposity. Its double meaning evidently furnished her extreme satisfaction. She repeated it twice, and jingled a small reticule depending from a cotton-gloved wrist.

“I know of a case,” she went on immediately, seeing that neither girl moved or spake, “when a young person (much of your age) spent an evening out here in this wood. Her reasons for doing so I distinctly decline to enter into. They were not laudable, you may be sure; no young girl’s would be. Well, she caught the myasthma and died. She died.”

“THE GIRLS WALKED ON IN SILENCE”

All the time she was holding forth the speaker peered anxiously to right and left in the darkness.

“Duty,” she added, “as I told you, compels me to remain. But I do so at the risk of my health.”

“You lying old humbug!” said a deep voice behind her in the darkness. “Then what have you got that red shawl on for, eh?”

The victim to duty spun round as if shot.

“Oh, it’s you, is it, Maria?” she said. “I know what you’re here for. Spying, spying; that’s your errand, you nasty, envious thing.”

“Then you’re wrong, that’s all. I’m here on a fool’s errand of my own, like yourself.”

A short, fat woman stepped into the faint reflection of a distant lantern, and they saw that she also wore a red shawl! Not even courtesy could describe this lady as of “uncertain age.”

“Seems to me,” she continued, “you and I needn’t have been so mighty close with each other. Nor you needn’t have crowed over me as you did, Isabella. I don’t see that your lover was so much smarter than mine.”

“Oh, Harriet, come away,” whispered Ursula, breaking a long silence.

Harriet laughed hoarsely. “No,” she said, “I’m going to see this comedy out.”

“And as for those young ladies there,” Maria went on, “they’ve as much right to be here as we have—at least, the one with the red shawl over her arm has. Yes, my dear, you needn’t try to smuggle it away behind your neighbor. You’re here from a sense of duty, as much as ever my friend Isabella is. I wonder how many more of us have answered this advertisement?”

“One more has,” said a young voice, and a pretty, fair little creature, looking like a dress-maker’s assistant, stole from behind a tree into the ring.

“That makes five of us,” announced the fat woman, with a nod to Ursula. “It was mean of you yonder to be ashamed of your colors. Well, men were deceivers ever, and, girls, we’ve been once more deceived.”

“It was I advertised first, not he,” said the pretty girl, defiantly.

“So did I,” Harriet admitted. “We may as well be fair.”

“Well, so did I, if it comes to that,” declared the fat woman. “And so did you, Isabella; we needn’t ask you. And so did that featherless girl, I dare say. I don’t see that it makes much difference. And it was Romeo de Lieven, was it, as told you all to come here?”

“All,” said the whole chorus. They had gradually drawn nearer to one of the rare street lamps which make a dismal haze at far intervals along the dark road. They stood in a circle, with unconsciously uplifted parasols, and all around them was the soft night, and the little wind, and the damp smell of the water.

“Then the best thing you can do is to go home again. Come along, Isabella, you can sing me the praises of your lover as we go.”

“I solemnly swear,” said the sour spinster, in sepulchral tones, “never to trust a man again. Ah, I could tell you a story—”

“There’s no time for that now,” interrupted her friend, briskly. “As for solemnly swearing, I don’t object. Ladies, you see what they are, these men. Imagine what would have happened to you if this Romeo had come, and any of you’d married him. No, Romeo, we will not marry. Let us promise, each one of us, after to-night’s experience, to turn our backs on them forever.”

All of them, except Ursula, lifted their arms on high. In chorus they sang out, “We promise,” and even as they did so a vehicle suddenly loomed through the darkness, a high trap, devoid of carriage lights, occupied by three or four officers in uniform.

“Way there, please,” said a voice which Ursula recognized. The women scattered on one side, all looking up involuntarily. The dim light of the lantern fell full on their faces, and, for one instant, Gerard saw Ursula’s features quite plainly. She shrank back; how she hoped that he had not recognized her! She thought not.

The dog-cart passed down the road, and presently the young men were heard laughing heartily. This masculine hilarity seemed to exasperate the buxom Maria.

“Let us bind ourselves,” she said, “to meet together next year, at this spot and this hour, and to prove to each other that each has kept her word.”

“We promise,” said the others, in taking leave.

But, when the anniversary came round, be it noted here, Maria marched to her solitary vigil. The two younger women had broken their vow, and the weather-beaten spinster much wanted them to believe that she had broken hers.

Not a word was exchanged between the two girls on their homeward way. Ursula felt heartily relieved when she found herself once more safe in the drawing-room. Harriet had a headache, and Ursula poured out tea. Mynheer Mopius took an opportunity of praising her concoction as a set-off against Harriet’s.

“Of course it’s her fault,” he argued, “not that of the tea. How could it be?—best Java imported.”

“Uncle Jacóbus,” began Ursula, emboldened by this approval, “I don’t care about the opera to-morrow. I’d as lief stay at home.” Her hand trembled, and she blushed crimson.

Mynheer Mopius set down his teacup cautiously, for it was best Japan. “Well, of all the deceiving minxes!” he said. “And to hear her go on this afternoon in the carriage! Ursula, you are insincere.”

Mevrouw Mopius sat quite motionless. Her niece did not venture to glance her way.

“Well, of course,” said Mynheer, in the silence, “you must know. I’m not such a fool as to waste my money, and no thanks for my pains. After I’d sent round to the stationer’s, too, for the book of words you said you would like to have. I’m very much disappointed in you, Ursula. I can’t make it out.”

“Operas aren’t really good,” piped Mevrouw Mopius’s tremulous voice. “They’re not a bit like real life. I never had anything happen to me like an opera.”

Mynheer Mopius slapped his knee. “I have it,” he cried; “it’s some religious nonsense of your father’s. Well, if it don’t rise to the surface quicker, there can’t be much of it. Come along, wife, I can’t bear to think of her. Come along; let’s play and sing.”

Mevrouw Mopius staggered to her feet. Ursula remained in the half-light of the front room. Husband and wife spent the rest of the evening at the piano.

“Dear love, for thee I would lay down my li-i-ife,
For without thee what would that life avail?
If thy hand but lift the fatal kni-i-ife,
I smile, I faint, and bid sweet death all hail,”

sang Mynheer Mopius. And Ursula listened. And Mevrouw Mopius played.

CHAPTER IX

OTTO’S WOOING

“Plush,” said the Baroness van Helmont, addressing her silken favorite, “it is a terrible thing to have an incompatible child.”

Plush made no answer, but from the other end of the room came Otto’s reply: “I can’t help it, mother. I suppose you made me what I am.”

“I? Never in my life. I could not have produced anything so strong. Plush and I, we are in harmony; we take the same view of existence.”

She languidly entangled her fingers in the meshes of her darling’s soft white hair. The lapdog, on her crimson cushion, laid two delicate little slender-wristed paws, that looked as if encased in a perfect fit of peau de Suède, over a bright black button of a nose. The pair of them, lady and lapdog, looked born to undulate.

“You are resolved, then,” continued the Baroness, “to return to Java as soon as you again get tired of us.”

“Tired of you! Mother!” His emotion made him both unable and unwilling to say more.

“Tired or not, in a few months you will once more leave us. Otto, it will break your father’s heart.”

This prophecy Otto considered a decidedly doubtful one.

“I never understood why you first went,” continued the Baroness. “Gerard stays. Everybody I know stays. Fifteen years ago you must suddenly resolve to learn gentleman-farming in Germany. It sounds so silly, ‘gentleman-farming.’ They call it ‘economy’ over there—I suppose the name pleased you—and after a year or two you came back and said it couldn’t be done without plenty of money. A charming economy. It is as good as a farce!”

“That is true, Otto, is it not?” she added, petulantly, after a pause.

“Quite true,” he replied, helplessly, sitting forward on a little boudoir chair, his brown hands hanging joined between his heavy legs.

“Well, then, after that you must hurry away to plant tea in the Indies, as if there were not enough common people to do that! And doing it, too. I never heard of a break-down in the tea-supply. And now you have been busied there for a dozen years, and what’s the profit to you or to any one? You’re no richer, and tea’s not even cheaper. So you’ve benefited neither your neighbor nor yourself.” The Baroness sighed. Plush sighed also, her whole little pink-tinted body a sob of lethargic content.

“But I’ve been earning an honest living,” burst out Otto, desperately. It was all so useless; he had said it so often before! “At least I’ve not been droning through my whole life, spending father’s money, and knowing all the time that in fact there was no money to spend. Of course, I’d hoped to come back richer from India, but you can’t understand about the crisis in the tea-trade, mother.”

“No, indeed,” said the Baroness.

“At any rate, however, I’ve paid my way. I’ve not lived, as Gerard does, in a constant entanglement of bills and loans. I don’t depend for my daily bread on the mercy of the Jews.”

“Nor does Gerard, thank Heaven! though he may for his daily champagne!” cried the Baroness, her irrepressible sprightliness bubbling uppermost. “And the Jews, as your father always says, are a dispensation of Providence for the survival of the fittest. He doesn’t mean themselves. They keep the old families above water till smoother times work round again. Look at the Van Utrechts, for instance; the only son tried to commit suicide for want of a friendly Jew! And four months later he married a Rotterdam oil-merchant’s daughter. That’s what Gerard will do; only, in his case, I do hope and pray that the man who made the money will be a generation farther off. And on the mother’s side.” The Baroness sank back reflectively, and, for the hundredth time, a procession of ticketed young ladies passed before her pale blue eyes.

“Otto,” she said, “you know the desire of our hearts. It is that you marry Helena van Trossart. Then we should say, ‘Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.’”

“Catch my father saying that,” cried Otto, roughly, with holy horror in his honest eyes.

The Baroness stopped him by an imperious gesture.

“I don’t know what you mean, Otto,” she said. “Please don’t be profane. Yes, I desire above all things to see this marriage consummated. Gerard will do well in any case. And, after all, it is you who will one day be Baron Helmont of the Horst. You, our first, our eldest.” She checked herself, holding out her thin white hand, and her eyes were full of love.

Otto took the hand in his own and kissed it.

“You might try, Otto,” continued the Baroness. “You don’t know her; she was a child when you went away. There is no sense in your refusing to find out whether you could like her or not. The marriage would end all difficulties for good, and you could remain with us.”

“What do you want me to do?” asked Otto, heavily.

“Supposing you were to go to Drum to-day, and see them. You might stay over their dance, which is to-morrow night. It would be a pretty attention. I feel sure the coast is clear, and she thinks you interesting. She told me so herself, when they dined here; she considers your life one long romance.”

“Romance is the word,” said Otto. “Well, mother, I’m willing to go.” He took up the Graphic from a side-table, and silence brooded over the trio till the Baron came in.

“My dear,” said the Baron, eagerly, his eyes alight, “I must just show you this; the carrier brought it. It’s Feuillet’s Jeune Homme Pauvre, with the original drawings by Mouchot. Isn’t it charming? I had it over from Fontaine.”

The Baroness took the volume, disturbing Plush.

“Yes,” she replied, as she turned over the pages. “It’s very nice. But I can’t help preferring my old friend, Johannot.”

“How unkind!” said the Baron, plaintively, “Johannot couldn’t be expected to illustrate everything, especially not the books that were written after he died.”

He turned to his son.

“I sha’n’t show it to you, Otto, for you’d only ask how much it cost.”

“Oh, don’t,” interposed the Baroness.

“And yet this is quite a bargain. Only 625 francs, and the binding by David.”

“My dear, I don’t care. Besides, I have forgotten already.”

“Lucky woman,” the Baron laughed. “I, at least, must remember till it’s paid. What’s the matter, Jan?”—this to a servant who appeared in the open door. “You can clear away the papers on the library floor.”

“There’s a poor woman at the kitchen entrance asking to see you, sir,” said the man. “She says you know all about her. Her name is Vrouw Klop, from the cottages by Horstwyk Mill.”

“I never heard of the creature in my life!” cried the Baron.

“I know her,” remarked Mevrouw, quietly. “Her husband drinks.”

“Saving your presence, Mevrouw,” said Jan, without moving a muscle, “she says her husband’s been dead these seven years.”

“Well, if he had lived, he’d have drunk,” replied the Baroness, indifferently. “And, besides, if she’s been a widow so long she must have children earning something.”

Otto got up and walked towards the window.

“Send her away,” exclaimed the Baron. “It’s like her insolence, asking for me!”

“She says she has a letter from the Burgomaster, mynheer,” gently persisted the servant. Menials are always pamperedly insolent to mendicants or aggressively sympathetic regarding them. They are never indifferent.

“Then why didn’t you bring it up? Why doesn’t she go to the relieving officer? I can’t be bothered. There, give her a twopenny bit, and let her go.”

Otto stood at the window, looking out.

“The people are unendurable,” said the Baron, as the servant departed. “Always wanting something, and always asking for it. As if it were our duty to supply unlimited gin!”

“Yes,” replied the Baroness, “and the respectable poor never beg. This illustration is charming, Theodore; I think it is the best of all. What a sweet face the girl has!”

She held up the beautiful blue morocco volume to the light.

Otto stood at the window, looking out.

Helena van Trossart belonged to one of the most influential families in Holland. Her mother had been a sister of the Baron van Helmont; both mother and father were long since dead. She lived with an uncle and aunt on the other side, Trossarts, like herself, and rich, like herself, with Trossart money. The uncle and aunt were childless, and affectionately interested in their beautiful heiress, of whom they felt proud to think as the greatest parti in the province. The Baroness was portly and comfortable; she had never known any but comfortable people all her life. The Baron, a fine old gentleman with silver-striped hair, was concerned in the government of the country, which means that he occupied his time in procuring lucrative posts for his wife’s poor relations, of whose poverty he lived in monotonous dread.

The fine old double mansion which the Van Trossarts inhabited stood on a green canal behind a sombre row of chestnuts. Grass grew between the paving-stones, and iron chains swung heavily from post to post. Not a street boy passed but pulled those chains. The street boy of Holland is unparalleled in Europe, a pestilence that walketh in darkness, and a destruction that wasteth at noonday, but here you could hardly take offence at him, for he imparted an element of liveliness to as dead a corner as dull respectability could desire to dwell in. The outside of the house wore that aspect of dignified dilapidation which is characteristic of hereditary wealth. Inside nothing was new, except in Helena’s apartments, nor was anything worn out.

“Mamma,” said the Freule Helena—she called her foster-mother “mamma”—“I have a note from Gerard. He asks whether he may bring Otto round to lunch in half an hour’s time. Otto, it appears, has turned up for the day. The orderly is waiting. I suppose I had better say yes.”

“Stop a moment while I ring and ask how many pigeons there are,” replied the Baroness, who was eminently practical.

“You wouldn’t keep them away because of that!” cried Helena, laughing.

“Indeed I should. Gerard detests cold meat. And there’s nothing a man resents like getting what he doesn’t eat in a house where his tastes are known. You’ve asked people enough unexpectedly already.”

“Only Georgetta van Troyen and her brother. That was to escape a tête-à-tête with Mechteld van Weylert. We shall be quite a small party.”

“I don’t mind large parties, like to-morrow’s,” replied Mevrouw van Trossart, turning from a confabulation with her confidential maid. “Well, tell them to come. Ann, just say to the man, ‘My compliments, and the Jonkers[E] are welcome.’ You are terribly gay, child; you can’t bear a moment of quiet.”

“Dear mamma, did you want me to sit all the afternoon opposite Maggie van Weylert? Confess though she is your niece, you would not do it yourself. With some women conversation is just contradiction. And there are few people outside this house, except Gerard, I care to be alone with. No guest, or a number, that is my view.”

“Gerard would feel flattered,” replied the Baroness, smiling over her plump hands. “You had better not tell him, or he will ask you to afford him the opportunity of being alone together for life.”

“How terrible! Mamma, you are perfectly ruthless. There is not a creature in the world, not even myself, I am fond enough of for that. Besides, surely one should never marry a man one likes to be alone with; it is the most fatal way of dying to society at once.” She laughed, and threw back the yellow curls from her blue-veined forehead; she was all pink and gold, like a bunch of wild rose and laburnum. “What I should like to do,” she went on, “would be to marry Otto, and flirt with Gerard and other people. But, of course, it would be horribly improper, and it couldn’t be done.”

“Don’t be silly,” remonstrated the Baroness van Trossart, trying to frown. “You are getting too old, Nellie, for saying things you ought to be ashamed of. Now go and get ready.”

“I am half Otto’s age,” replied the girl, rising.

“That may be. But an ingénue should die at nineteen. We women, my dear, are inverted butterflies, and marriage is our chrysalis, as your future mother-in-law said the other night. I can’t imagine where she gets her sayings from, I suppose she reads them somewhere. But neither she nor I would like to see a Baroness van Helmont who was ingénue.”

Helena paused in the doorway. “Would you like me,” she asked, “some day, to be Baroness van Helmont?”

“My dear, you might be a worse thing. Personally, if you ask me, I should certainly prefer Otto, little as I know of him, to Gerard. Of Gerard I should say, ‘Pour le badinage, bon. Pour le mariage, non.’ And then, Otto is the better match, the future Baron. You two could restore, together, the glories of the Horst.”

Helena had stood listening, thoughtfully. Thought did not suit her soft-featured, facile face.

“But you must do what you like, and decide for yourself,” added her aunt, “as, with your character, you certainly will.”

“I thought I was so yielding,” protested Helena.

“You are, my dear, except when you care.”

“Then it’s you that have spoiled me,” answered Helena, tripping off.

The Baroness looked after her. “Dear girl,” she said to herself. “It will end in her marrying Gerard, I fancy. The book-writers may say what they like, but the woman who can, always marries for love.”

A few minutes later her husband came in. “My dear,” he said, “some of my papers are missing. I wish you would tell Mary to mind what she’s about.”

“Yes, my dear,” she replied, without looking up. Some of his papers were always missing. He always grumbled. It had come with his appointment to the high government post. For the first month or two she had fretted; then she had understood that it was part of his new importance, and she had returned to her old comfortable life. “Both the Helmonts are coming to lunch,” she said, “and one or two other people.”

“I don’t care who’s coming to lunch. I wish you minded more about my papers. They’re of very particular moment.”

“I do mind. I shall tell some one to find them at once on your table, for I’ve no doubt that they’re there. Mademoiselle”—this in French to a swarthy little lady who came gliding in—“would you mind looking for some papers Monsieur has left on his table—official papers—a dirty yellow, you know.”

“But how on earth”—began the state functionary.

“Oh, she’ll find them. She knows what your papers are like. How do you do, Georgette? Where is Willie?”

“On the stairs, I believe,” replied the young lady thus addressed, “flirting with the Freule van Weylert.”

“We should all have said ‘of course,’ Freule,” declared Gerard’s voice behind her, “had you omitted the name of the lady. Even Willie could not teach the Freule van Weylert to flirt.”

Otto was bowing silently beside his brother, with a specially deep bow for Mademoiselle Papotier, Helena’s quondam governess, who had returned, bearing the lost papers, to be welcomed by their owner with a grunt. As a rule, nobody but Helena took any notice of Mademoiselle Papotier.

They all went in to luncheon, a medley of exceptionally noisy and exceptionally silent elements. The old Baron took his seat at the head of the table, and immediately fixed his keen eyes on his food. Opposite him sat the French lady, coquettish in movements and apparel, pouring out coffee, of which no one partook. The mistress of the house strove vainly to converse with her niece Van Weylert, an angular and awkward young girl, or to draw out her other neighbor, Otto, who sat with his attention glumly concentrated on the fair object of his visit. The rest of the company were uproariously merry, led on by Gerard and his pink brother-officer, young Willie van Troyen.

Otto was wondering whatever had induced him to come. Yet, at the bottom of his heart, he knew very well. It was not so much his mother’s affectionate expostulation as the thought, ever present within him, never expressed: What will become of the Horst when my father dies? What, indeed? He had never loved the old home as he loved it since his return.

“You are coming to my dance to-morrow, I hope, Mynheer van Helmont?” said his hostess. He awoke as from a reverie. “Oh yes,” he said, “I hope so. I intend to stay at Drum for a day or two.” He was still watching his cousin; the Baroness followed his gaze, and then their eyes met.

A shout of laughter went up from the opposite side of the table. The old Baron lifted his brows.

“In my time,” he said to the shaking mass of pink muslin beside him, “we weren’t half as funny as you young people seem to be.”

“Weren’t you?” retorted Georgette van Troyen. “How slow you must have been! Too bad, not even to have had a good time in your youth! But isn’t this too amusing, this story that Willie is telling?”

The Baron returned hastily to his omelet.

“Isn’t it too amusing?” cried the young girl, appealing to Otto.

“I haven’t heard it,” said the latter; at which they all roared again. Willie was in high spirits, though Gerard was endeavoring to arrest his narration.

“Do shut up, Troy; we’ve had quite enough of it,” growled Gerard.

“No, indeed, I am mistress here!” cried Helena, her eyes sparkling with merriment. “Go on, Mynheer van Troyen; you and the Captain had agreed on the wager. And you answered the advertisements; and what happened then? The advertisements,” she called across to Otto in explanation, “were from young ladies in search of a husband.”

“From ladies,” corrected the little officer, who looked like a bibulous cherub. “Well, we got replies to our letters, and we wrote again, arranging a meeting. We convened all the aspirants—there were four of them—at the same spot, and, of course, the same hour, and we bade them dress up in red shawls and white feathers. And when we drove past, taking Gerard and another man as umpires, there they were, the whole four of them; I think there were even more!”

Renewed shrieks of laughter greeted the final sally.

“It’s too killing!” cried Helena, the tears on her cheeks. “And what were they doing? Tearing each other’s eyes out?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t wait to see. They were making a great noise, screaming at each other. I had won my champagne, and I went and drank it. I always knew these advertisements were perfectly genuine.”

“But the letters,” interposed Georgette. “You must show Helena the letters, Willie.”

“No, no, he mustn’t,” cried Gerard, energetically. “I’m sick of the whole business. Do let’s talk of something else.”

“But I’m not,” protested Helena. “It’s new to me. How selfish you are, Gerard. Don’t you think it’s awfully amusing, Otto? I’m sure you want to hear more.”

“I only want to hear one thing,” said Otto, gravely, bending forward, “and that is what Mynheer van Troyen is going to do with those letters?”

“Why, keep them, of course,” replied Willie.

“It is no business of mine, Mynheer; I have not the honor, like my brother, of being your friend. But if I were umpire, I should insist on those letters being given up and burned.”

“I suppose you don’t approve of the whole joke?” cried Gerard, hotly, forcing back his own better misgivings, swift in defence of his chum.

“It is not my province to express an opinion. Certainly not here. It is not a thing I should have done myself.”

“And the girls who advertised?” continued Gerard. “We only answered advertisements. What of them?”

“Poor things!” said Otto, softly.

“What nonsense!” exclaimed Helena. “I think it’s great fun; and for the girls, too. I should like to try the plan. Some day we must do it, Georgette. It’s a capital way of getting a husband. What freedom it leaves in the choice!”

“Surely you are not restricted, Freule,” said Willie. “You have but to fling your handkerchief wheresoever you will.”

“Oh, but I am restricted,” she replied; “for instance, I could never marry you.”

“Alas, I am sure of it,” he answered; “but why not?”

“Imagine what a combination! Helen of Troy![F] Who could live up to such an appellation?”

“You could,” he replied, fatuously. But she was not listening to him; she was looking across the table at Otto. “What a reputation!” she said. “Who could live up to it? But why was she called Hélène de Trois? There was Menelaus”—she counted on her fingers—“and Paris. But I forget who the third lover was.”

That evening Otto appeared again in the drawing-room at the Manor-house. His mother gave a cry of surprise. For a moment her heart stood still.

“I don’t care for Helena Trossart,” said Otto. “Her conversation is a perpetual dance on the tight-rope of propriety.”

“My dear boy,” replied his father, “how natural! Consider the continuous pleasure of keeping your balance.”

“Well,” said Otto, “it seems to me she came some very positive croppers. However, I’m no judge.”

He left the room; his mother ran after him.

“You haven’t asked her, Otto?” she gasped. “She hasn’t rejected you?”

“Oh no,” he said, and shut the door.

CHAPTER X

AN INDELIBLE STAIN

The next day dawned for Ursula in unclouded brightness. Those few of us who remember a youth no longer ours will forgive her the excess of an expectancy she was unable to curb by experience. She was going to an entertainment at one of the great houses of Drum. She had never been to anything so magnificent before. And Gerard, whom she had known all her life, was to be there to make things smooth for her. A slight difficulty about a chaperon had been most pleasantly removed. The Freule van Trossart had on the preceding afternoon left a card for Juffrouw Rovers, with a note saying that if she cared to come and dine before the party, she could be present at it afterwards as a house guest, under the Baroness’s wing. Ursula had accepted gladly, by no means impervious to so much condescension, and, altogether, she felt very well satisfied indeed. The night before she had written a glorious letter to her father; she had said nothing of her aunt’s ill health.

At 9 A.M. there was tranquil jubilation, at 10 A.M. there was sudden dismay. “I can’t wear it like this,” Ursula was saying to Harriet, with whom she had come to terms on a basis of mutual oblivion. She sat on the floor, a brown heap of perplexity. Her simple evening dress lay on the bed, with a round stain, as of grease, distressingly displayed upon its breast. It was a frock of crushed-strawberry crepon, with ripe-strawberry silk ribbons.

“No, you can’t,” asserted Harriet, full of interest and sympathy. Harriet was in her element. “You must manage to get some more of that crimson lace for the front. How can it have happened, Ursula? Something must have oozed out in your trunk.”

“But colored lace is so difficult to match,” wailed Ursula.

“So it is. Never mind. We must try.” And the two girls sallied forth on that most hopeless of errands, the only form of shopping no woman enjoys, “the matching” of colors. In every shop they entered their little scrap was held up against an incongruous variety of tints, and they were informed by the assistant that it was “exactly the shade.” One especially truthful person qualified her recommendation of a moderate scarlet by the statement that “really it was as near as you could get.” But all, without exception, were pertly offended when the girls crept hopelessly, though resolutely, away.

“It’s no use,” said Harriet at last, as they retraced their steps. But even while she spoke a sudden inspiration struck her. “Do you know what you’ll have to do, Ursula? It’s V-shaped now; well, you’ll have to make it into a low-neck.”

“Oh, I don’t like that,” cried the pastor’s daughter, reddening.

“There’s no choice left to you. How stupid of me not to think of it before. It’ll look much nicer, too.”

“But supposing we matched the ribbons?” suggested Ursula, holding out.

“You never could in this primitive place. They’re a very peculiar color. Besides, if you covered up all that space with ribbon, you’d look like a prize cow. No, the top’ll have to come off, and we must see about a dress-maker at once. There’s no time to lose.”

They turned down a by-street.

“Let us cross to the square,” said Harriet. “It’s no use taking the little woman that works for me; we must get the best help we can.”

A few moments later they entered—not without a feeling of awe, especially on Harriet’s part—the largest establishment of its kind in Drum.

“Call Miss Adeline,” said the smart personage who had listened to their piteous tale. “We don’t usually alter garments not made by ourselves. Still—”

Both of the girls gave a sudden gasp, for in the person of Miss Adeline, who came forward at this moment from far-back recesses, both simultaneously recognized the fair little maiden of the tryst.

“Mynheer Mopius, Villa Blanda,” said the black-silk manager. “Very well. Perhaps Miss Adeline had better accompany you at once. There certainly is no time to be lost.”

With feelings utterly indescribable the three walked off together.

A few moments later, Harriet having fled, Ursula sat helping the dress-maker in the oppressive silence of the “second best spare room.” The click of the scissors was becoming insupportable. Even the occasional rustle of the pendent frock seemed a relief.

“I think we have met before,” said Ursula, at last, very gently.

“Really, Juffrouw? A great many ladies come to our place,” replied the girl, bending over her work.

For a moment Ursula felt nonplussed, but her pity rose paramount.

“You know what I mean,” she said, rather sternly. And then she went on to talk about the folly and wickedness of female initiative in matters matrimonial, and her little lecture broadened into its third well-rounded sentence—

“And you,” burst in the girl, fiercely, “a rich young lady in a fine house, well looked after. You!”

So Ursula had to incriminate her absent friend, lest her moral go awry. She found a politely incredulous listener, and began to realize that, with her, it was a case of “caught together, hung together,” as the Germans say. If only Gerard had not observed her!

“I can assure you,” she said, continuing her homily, though rather disconcerted by the sudden change of front, “that I should never lift a finger to get married for the sake of being married. Every woman may rejoice if God sends her an honest lover and enables her to love that lover. But merely to be able to say ‘I am somebody’s wife!’ I cannot understand any woman wanting that”—this under the stress of her own inculpation—“I cannot understand what for.”

She opened her big dark eyes, and looked innocently interrogative.

“Can’t you, Juffrouw?” said the kneeling dress-maker, taking the pins from between her lips. “Well, I can. There’s reasons would make a girl willing to be any man’s wife as long as she was only married. And one of them’s mine.” She spoke bitterly, and shut her lips with a snap, as she rose from fitting on the frock.

Suddenly Ursula understood.

She was not given to emotion, still less to showing it; perhaps her nerves had been wrought on by the previous strain; now, quite unexpectedly to herself, she burst into tears.

The girl quivered, stared, and, sinking on to a cane-bottomed chair, began crying too, but in a soft, self-pitying way, while speaking all the time.

“You think me a bad, wicked creature,” she sobbed, “but I’m not, I’m not. I didn’t know, and he promised to marry me. There was never any doubt of his marrying me. I’m not as bad as you think, and I was certain he loved me. And I was desperate, and I put in the advertisement. I wish I were married or dead.” She stopped crying for a moment. “When the time comes,” she said, earnestly, “I shall be one or the other.” And then she fell to sobbing afresh.

Ursula had dried her eyes.

“My dear,” she said, “if he promised to marry you, perhaps he will.”

“Oh no, he won’t. I know now, and understand things different. He’s a gentleman. He’d marry me if he was not.”

“For I’m sure he loved me,” she added, softly.

Ursula was trembling from head to foot. Shielded and sheltered through all her simple girlhood, she had never come into contact, whether by actual experience or in literature, with any such vision of shame as this. She compared her own happy, unshadowed life with the struggle of the girl before her. And, full of compassion, she thanked God for the difference. For, to the very backbone which held her erect, she was womanly and pure.

She had forgotten all about the pressing needs of her toilet, but the dress-maker had not. Adeline caught up the frock, and began silently, sullenly sewing.

“If I could but do anything for you,” said Ursula, meditatively.

“You can’t. Only don’t gibe at me. Gibe at the men of your own class. This one, they tell me, is going to be married. I dare say you’d marry him if you could.”

“Never! never!” said Ursula, with quiet passion.

“Well, I don’t care whom he marries. It won’t be me. I’ll tell you how I know for certain. You seem to be good, you do, and you mean well. It’s not me alone he’s ruined. Do you know”—she laid down her work on her lap—“I believe it was he who brought us all together the other night. I believe he is Romeo de Lieven.”

“But why?” asked Ursula, incredulously. “Certainly, the young lady down-stairs—”

“Oh, don’t tell me, Juffrouw. We all deny. Women always do. But you remember a carriage passing along the road? There were officers in it. It flashed across me at once that they had come to see their handiwork. And he was driving.”

The room swam round before Ursula’s eyes. She closed them hastily, and leaned back in her easy-chair. She could think of nothing distinctly; but she could hear the clock ticking solemnly on. She longed for some one to stop it. As for herself, she knew that she was incapable of moving, body or soul. In a lightning flash she had realized two facts undreamed before—the first, that she was very fond of Gerard van Helmont; the second, that she scorned him forth from her heart forever.

When at last she opened her eyes she saw the other girl intently watching her. There was a quiet sneer in the dress-maker’s gaze before which Ursula shrank affrighted. She understood immediately how her elaborate self-exoneration had crumbled away. This creature had perceived that Gerard was personally known to her. In the wretched girl’s estimation she was doubtless one rival out of many. She shuddered.

“Yes,” said Mademoiselle Adeline, “we all deny. I think, Miss, if you left me to myself, I could finish this dress a great deal better.”

Ursula dragged herself together and crept from the room.

While this uncomfortable interview was in progress, the chief subject of its interest was complacently installed among the thousand elegances of his cousin’s sitting-room, on a low stool almost at her feet. He looked a little more extensively red than usual, and his blue eyes were restless; but otherwise he showed no signs of trepidation. Yet he had resolved that this day should decide his fate. His mother’s by-play about Otto was becoming a nuisance.

That morning he had risen, after tranquil sleep, and carelessly studied himself in the glass. Of course, he was good-looking—very good-looking. Experience had taught him that quite as much as ocular demonstration. It was the perfect grace of his gracelessness which made women adore him.

He had eaten a hearty breakfast as usual, but he had drunk two more cups of tea and a glass of brandy. That is a man’s way of realizing that the crisis has come.

“My dear Gerard,” said Helena, “you are dull, while the rest of the family are flurried. People talk about the day after the festival; my ‘Katzenjammers’ come ten hours before. I shall ring for Mademoiselle Papotier; she always amuses me.”

“Do,” said Gerard, surlily, glad of any postponement.

“That is charming. You could not have said that ‘do’ more naturally had we been husband and wife. Do I bore you? Then amuse yourself elsewhere. But don’t even expect me to ring the bell.” She jumped up lightly as she spoke and ran past him to the bell-pull.

“I don’t like Mademoiselle Papotier,” said Gerard. “She has taught you a number of things you needn’t have known. If you read books like that”—he pointed to Une Vie upon the table—“it’s her doing. I wish you wouldn’t, Helena. Men don’t like it.”

She came back to her seat: “Oh, but that is still more charming,” she said, “especially from your lips. You would have me restrict my reading so that I might the better enjoy your conversation. I won’t hear a word against my dear Papotier. She brightened my youth with eighteenth-century romances, and she cheers my old age by nineteenth-century novels. She is a dear.”

Undeniably, the heiress’s education had been a peculiar one. Her governess’s tissue-paper rosette of a soul had never given forth more natural odors than patchouly. The Baroness van Trossart could have told you how, when Helena was an eight-year-old little girl, she had come upon the child slapping her ball up and down in the court-yard, and occasionally muttering the same words over and over again.

“What on earth are you saying, my dear?” the Baroness had inquired.

And Helena had looked up with sparkling eyes: “And his beautiful head,” she had spouted, without stopping her ball-bumping, “went bounding three times across the marble, while repeating three times the sweet name of ‘Zaïre’! Isn’t it lovely? He was dead, you know; they had just cut it off.” And she had run away.

The Baroness had shaken her head. “It sounds like Scudéry,” she had said. But she was comfortable. She was not going to object to Mademoiselle Papotier.

“I shall read what I like,” repeated the heiress, provokingly. “And when I am married, I shall go to what plays I choose. I like impropriety on paper. Paper or boards. And so do you, Gerard, et plus que çà. You, of all people! I believe you are laughing at me.”

“No, by thunder, I’m not,” he cried, violently. “I don’t pretend to be a saint—far from it; but there’s not a lover in the world would like to remember that the girl he’s engaged to has read Maupassant.”

She looked at him for a moment with that sweet mixture of mocking tenderness which a man’s eyes can never assume; then she said to her maid, who had answered the bell,

“No, thank you; I want nothing. I rang by mistake.”

“But you are not”—she began, and checked herself. “So Otto is coming to my party to-night,” she said.

She enjoyed his responsive scowl.

“No, Otto is not coming,” he answered. “His Highness has gone off in a huff. About that hoax of Willie’s, I imagine, but his huffs are not easy to classify. Mind you, I don’t defend the trick. I think it was rather a low thing to do.”

“To Van Troyen it merely represented so much champagne,” she replied. “I like Otto; he is eminently estimable and—and worthy. He, at least, would never have told me not to read Maupassant.”

“No,” sneered Gerard, “he would never have heard of him.”

“Just so. There is nothing more delightful than a husband who is absolutely ignorant of everything. With him, at least, one runs a chance, even in this age, of unreasoning jealousy. And unreasoning jealousy must be delightful. Like mustard. What is the use of a man who keeps saying, ‘The vices are my share; the virtues are yours. And each of us has got what he ought to have’? Gerard, rather than a husband who said to me, ‘Of course, I am faithless; let us talk of something else,’ I would have a husband who said, ‘You are faithless. I am going to kill you,’ and did it.”

“It could only be done once,” replied Gerard, languidly. “My dear child, you have been to Verdi’s ‘Othello.’ Evidently you want to be worshipped not wisely but too well. I don’t think Otto would tell you that you are faithless. I fancy you’d have to jog him a bit.”

“Otto! I wasn’t thinking of Otto. I believe you are jealous of Otto.”

“Yes, I am. I’ll tell you why, if you like, immediately. I have a note here from my mother, received this morning; shall I read it to you?”

“If it concerns me,” she said, negligently.

“It concerns you very nearly. My mother tells me to ask whether you would care to come down to the house with me to-morrow, and stay for a few days. You understand what that means, Helen, as well as I do!”

“Yes, I understand,” she answered, and with a sudden impulse she caught up the “Maupassant” at her elbow and flung it into a corner of the room.

“So that, knowing the comedy you are expected to take part in, you can foresee and forego the conclusion. I should say, if it is to be only farce, why act it at all?”

She popped out the tips of her little feet and looked down at them.

“The best way to avoid all complications,” he went on, “would be to arrive at the Manor-house—engaged.”

She lifted her eyes from the ground and fixed them steadily on his face.

“Let me telegraph to my mother that you are coming engaged.” His voice broke down.

“But how will you know?” she asked, laughing.

“Let me know first.” He bent forward. “Oh, my darling, my beauty.” He caught her two hands, and, like the passionate young fool he was, covered them with kisses. “My darling, how happy they will all be at home.”

Even at that moment the naïve selfishness of this last exclamation amused her. She said nothing, however, prolonging the sweetest silence a woman ever knows.

“Gerard,” she said, some minutes later, looking up at him as he bent over her. “You have forgotten that the girl you are engaged to has read Maupassant.”

“Yes,” he answered, “I have forgotten. I shall never remember.”

He went back to his rooms to dress for dinner, highly delighted. He was very much attached to his cousin. And she was the greatest heiress in the province.

CHAPTER XI

ONE HOUR OF HAPPINESS

Ursula descended from a cab in the full light of the early summer evening, and hurried away into the Van Trossarts’ gloomy hall. Her shoulders blushed as the footman took her wrap. It felt like undressing.

“Juffrouw Rovers,” said the Baroness, beaming like a crimson sun, “I am glad you have come. My niece is—is occupied. Take off your gloves, my dear, and help me to arrange these flowers.”

Ursula had looked round in terror for Gerard. She must dine with him en famille, perhaps sit next to him. There was no help for it. Yet she trembled to think of him. To her simple maidenhood, familiar with sermons on sin in the abstract, he was a sudden incarnation of infamy.

The Baroness buzzed and bubbled over her flower-trays, her fat arms all dimples, her fat cheeks all smiles. She chattered about this evening’s party, which was Helena’s party—“as if anybody in Drum would give a dance in July!”—but Helena was so gay she could never sit still for an hour: a nice dance she would lead her husband if only the husband himself was addicted to pleasure. Well, old people were apt to get dull. No wonder Helena fared farther in search of diversion. And she laughed to herself, and winked to herself (a difficult, but by no means impossible, proceeding) while talking to Ursula in the pragmatical cackle with which hens of all ages surround a new-laid matrimonial egg.

Ursula, who was barely acquainted with the Freule van Trossart, could only display a perfunctory interest in that young lady’s possible prospects. Harriet had told her that, according to rumor, the Freule was “as good as engaged” to a young politician.

“It is a living romance,” the Freule’s clear voice was heard saying on the landing, “and a thousand times more amusing, ma vieille, than all your dressed-up dead ones together.”

She came into the room with her arm through that of her shrivelled governess, Gerard bringing up the rear. The little Frenchwoman looked depressed as she slid away into a corner. The fat Baroness rustled across to her in a perfect crackle of crimson. “My dear Papotier, is it not delightful?” she said, with tears in her eyes.

“Mon Dieu, madame, yes,” replied the governess, “it is the first chapter.” And, to herself, she added, “For me it is the last.”

Ursula shook hands with Gerard, but a thick curtain had fallen between them; she was surprised by the aloofness of his manner, even while she herself stiffened to a cold “good-day.”

How contented and complacent he looked! She watched him as he sat opposite her at table, between the Baroness and the Freule. How prosperous and pleasing! Yes, truly, there was a law for the humble and a license for the high! It was a gloriously simple thing to be born to impurity, like the old Greek gods. What nonsense her good father went preaching about “sin”! The world knew no such thing. It knew only a small hub of pleasure reserved for the rich, and a wide zone all round it of hunger and crime. She felt very bitter; she glanced down with a sensation of physical disgust on the fingers which had touched his, unwilling to break her bread with them.

Her French was rusty, and out of repair; she did not feel up to much conversation with the prim little portrait of the past on her right; the master of the house, on her other side, was sufficiently, but not amply, polite. There is no human insolence such as that indifferent politeness which barely fits—like a glove one size too small.

There were only the six of them; but the fascinating little heiress was a host in herself. Ursula had heard much of her vivacity; she concluded, notwithstanding, that the prospect of the evening’s pleasure must be abnormally augmenting it. Lovely the girl undeniably was, frail, and golden-haired, in a cloud of white over blue, like the sky, and a treble row of pearls. Ursula’s grave brown face looked very quiet compared with the other’s delicate, clear-veined features; you might have said a Madonna of the Annunciation, and an immature Venus Anadyomene.

“Ursula,” thought Gerard, “is just a nice-looking rustic.” As for him, she wondered how he dared to sit beside, and speak to, this white-robed virgin. It seemed as if toads must drop from his full red lips. Well, it was no business of hers. And perhaps—perhaps she was wronging him all the time, this good-natured friend of her childhood! Perhaps he intended to marry Mademoiselle Adeline, if only his parents would let him. He was waiting, perhaps, for an opportunity—who knows?—perhaps—

The thought gave her great comfort. Of the truth of the story she could not harbor a doubt, for the girl before leaving had shown her a photograph, worn by a ribbon round the neck.

She noticed that the atmosphere seemed full of a ripple of merriment: asides, which courtesy only kept just above whispers, innuendos, sudden glances, mots à double entente. She felt even more awkward than she would have done under ordinary circumstances. And soon she felt exceedingly miserable. Perhaps her kind-hearted hostess noticed it.

“Helena, we must drink to your health,” cried the Baroness, her ample bosom swelling under its laces, like a crested wave. “Yes, my dear Gerard, you needn’t look at me like that; see how your neighbor is laughing. As Juffrouw Rovers does us the favor of dining here to-day, she will increase that favor, I feel certain, by keeping a secret—an absolute secret—for forty-eight hours. I cannot let this meal pass as if nothing had happened. You must know, Juffrouw Rovers, that it is my dear niece’s birthday—her first birthday into a new life. In other words, she is engaged to her cousin Gerard, who is an old friend of yours, so I need not praise him. And we are going to drink their healths, and wish them long life and prosperity.”

Afterwards Ursula had a faint recollection of having spilled some champagne on the table-cloth. For the moment her whole strength was concentrated in a wild prayer for outward calm. These people would imagine she cared for Gerard. It was not that—my God, not that!

Fortunately the others were busy lifting their glasses; all during dinner Gerard had scarcely looked her way. She stared round the table in a dazed manner. She felt sick.

“The strawberries are not good this year,” she heard Baron Trossart’s grumpy voice saying. “I am not surprised Miss Rovers doesn’t care to eat them.” She hastily returned to her dessert. “No, I must beg of you. Joris, bring this lady a clean plate.”

It was the strawberries, then, that interested her? So much the better.

“How I envy your father, Gerard,” continued the Baron. “It is two years now since we have been at Trossartshage. The fruit cannot bear the transport; we have tried both water and rail. But the cares of state, you know, the cares of state! A man sacrifices himself for his country, and his country repays him with ingratitude.”

This last sentence was an allusion to a recent article in a small paper which reproached the authorities—in this case Baron Trossart—with not having cleared out a canal before the warm weather came. Nobody ever complained of the ceaseless flow of nephews and brothers-in-law. That, as we all know, is a part of the constitution. Were it not so, the “eminent politician” would be a thing of the past.

“Papa,” interrupted Helena, wilfully, “please don’t be gloomy. I’m engaged.”

“Well, there’s cause enough for gloom in that,” he replied. “I’m as jealous of Gerard as”—he looked round—“as Mademoiselle Papotier.”

“Ah! do not speak of it to me!” cried the Frenchwoman. “I could slaughter Monsieur Gerard if I met him in war.”

“That’s the last place where you’ll meet me,” exclaimed Gerard, laughing. Helena had suddenly blanched.

“War!” she said. “How horrible! No, we will have no fighting. Juffrouw Rovers, would you have the courage to marry a soldier?”

Across Ursula’s brain flashed a vision of a dog-cart filled with uproarious malevolence.

“No, I should not like to marry an officer,” she replied.

Her words—perhaps, still more, her unconscious manner—seemed to sting Gerard. He flushed.

“Juffrouw Rovers is never particularly brave,” he said. “She is too soft-hearted. The last time I saw her, she was showing the white feather, as now.”

The words were a challenge. And, unconsciously, his manner betrayed as much; it was too significant.

Helena looked from one to the other: “What is it?” she asked. “What does it mean, Juffrouw Rovers? Gerard, what is the joke?”

“Joke? None. Ask Juffrouw Rovers.”

“So I have, but she doesn’t tell me.”

“Then you may be sure it is a little secret between Ursula and me, which I shall keep. I am not responsible for what she may do.”

She had the good taste not to press the subject, but she reverted to it as soon as she found herself alone with her lover.

“Gerard, what is this silly secret between you and Miss Rovers?”

“My dear child, how inquisitive you are! I thought you liked secrets.”

“Yes, when one is in them. I told you I should be jealous.”

“Of Ursula! How ridiculous! Utterly absurd! Ursula!”

“Well, I dare say I shall often be absurd. At any rate, Gerard, you would please me by not calling her ‘Ursula.’ She is not a relation of yours.”

“But I have known her all my life. I used to drag her in a go-cart.”

“I know. And it seems to me you behave very strangely for people who have always been intimate. You seem suddenly afraid of each other since this afternoon.”

“I am afraid of—that is, bored by—every girl but one since this afternoon. I am exceedingly bored by the prospect before me to-night. Don’t let’s spoil the one hour of happiness left us.”

“The one hour! How tragic that sounds!” she laughed.

“To-morrow we will go down to the Manor-house; there will be more hours there in the moonlight on the terrace. Say again that you love me, Nellie.”

“Yes, I love you,” she replied; and her voice was some soul-voice, quite different from her usual high-pitched tones. “I have loved you for a long time,” she added; and then, suddenly, with the old every-day ring: “There, I had made up my mind not to tell you that before our golden wedding. Papotier says a girl should never tell it at all, because the confession is ill-advised; and mamma says she certainly shouldn’t, because the feeling, if there, was a thing to be ashamed of.”

“Ashamed of love? But, my dearest?”

“No, I should never be ashamed of loving any one. Not even a footman.”

“Thank you,” sotto voce, from Gerard.

“We must bear the consequences of our virtues. I can’t understand any one’s being ashamed of ‘love.’ Can you?”

“I can’t understand any man’s keeping quiet his love for you. I want to shout out mine on the house-tops! Now that Ursula knows—I mean Juffrouw Rovers—why not proclaim the engagement to-night?”

“And your mother?”

So they whiled away the time on the veranda, looking down into the garden, where a large marquee had been put up for the dancers, with a music-tent and strings of Chinese lanterns. Meanwhile the Baroness lay back dozing in little audible gasps, and Ursula sat looking at photographs of Italy with Mademoiselle Papotier, who had forgotten all the names.

“Yes, that is Pavia,” said Mademoiselle Papotier. “Or perhaps it’s Pisa. I think it must be Pisa, because of the crooked tower.”

“Oh, that’s only the photograph,” replied Ursula, listlessly; “the angle’s wrong.”

“Do you think so? Look at the turtle-doves billing and cooing. Isn’t it sweet?”

Mademoiselle nodded towards the veranda, with keen scrutiny of her companion’s face. Ursula blushed again, that terrible tell-tale blush.

“And this place with all the boats,” she said, “I suppose is Venice?”

The guests began to arrive, and Mevrouw van Trossart pushed her cap across from the right to the left. It was quite a young people’s entertainment, more or less impromptu, and Ursula, already so greatly distressed by her toilet, noticed that many of the girls were more simply dressed than she. The acuteness of annoyance about this deadened, for a time, the sick anxiety at her heart.

She went out into the garden; she had fancied the fête would mean music and refreshments and fireworks; she now suddenly saw that the marquee was prepared for dancing. There had been no intimation, that she knew, on her card. She had never learned the art.

“May I have the first valse?” asked Willie van Troyen, who had just been introduced, for that purpose, by the Baroness.

“I don’t dance,” she said, pulling at her gloves. “I didn’t know people were going to.”

“They often do,” said Willie, “don’t they, at a dance?” He laughed heartily; he thought that was rather witty. And he betook himself to some one else.

So Ursula sat in a corner of the tent, or out on a bench, and was a bore.

The Baroness “made” talk with her from time to time in laborious sentences, and one or two other elderly people tried the same experiment. All the time, as she sat there disconsolate, one question was burning at her brain: How must I act regarding Gerard? Must I save this innocent girl or must I not? Sometimes the girl was Adeline, more often Helena, but the question remained the same.

“And this is your first party?” said a good-natured man. “I don’t think you seem to be enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, don’t let Mevrouw hear you say that!” she cried, in alarm. The Baroness happened to be passing. Yes, undoubtedly, Ursula was a drag.

“Come out into the garden,” said Gerard, stopping before her, “it’s tremendously hot here. I’ve kept this dance free for you; we’ll sit it out.” She rose and obeyed him.

Helena came out of the room where her uncle and his cronies were playing whist, with closed windows, her whole figure was a-sparkle with happiness. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked of her own Papotier. “The weather is perfect, the garden is perfect, the music is perfect. I don’t think we ever had such a pleasant party before.”

“It is your own joy, ma chérie,” said the governess, drawing her pupil to the dark staircase window, where she, Mademoiselle, stood watching the dancers. She pointed to a corner, half-hidden by a willow, in which Gerard and Ursula could be dimly descried. “That is the prologue, my child, to your romance,” she said. “Make haste to get on to the story.”

“Mademoiselle!”

“Hush! I watched her at dinner, when Madame the Baroness spoke. I have watched them since. It is nothing, my dear; it is even delightful—a compliment. But your lover must put a full-stop to the prologue. Perhaps he is doing it now. Creep behind, if you will, and hear what they say.”

“No, indeed!” cried the young Freule, with warmth.

A little later Ursula was again alone on the garden seat. She had exchanged but a few distressful sentences with Gerard. He had reproached her with behavior he hardly cared or dared to analyze, and she had answered hastily, eager to vindicate herself, but still more firmly resolved to screen Harriet’s reputation. Even while she was explaining, lamely, she had understood the incredulous smile on his face. He had come out of the brief conflict as a champion of female modesty, leaving her helplessly, guiltily crushed.

A white figure glided through the dusk and sank down by her side. The evening was gentle as velvet, caressingly warm and soft. Over yonder shone the great yellow glare of the music and the moving shadows; on all sides gay, ghastly paper lanterns went breaking the solemn silence of the trees. This spot of Ursula’s choosing was dark and willow-sheltered, alone beneath the calm blue height of heaven.

“Juffrouw Rovers,” said the Freule, “what is this joke between you and Gerard? You see, I am curious. You must forgive a spoiled child. What did he mean about your showing the white feather?”

“Don’t ask me, Freule, please,” replied Ursula, shortly. “For I can’t tell you.”

“So Gerard says. It must be a very dreadful secret!” This was said laughingly.

Silence. From the tent came the strains of the “Liebchen Adé” gallop.

“Great Heaven, it must be a very dreadful secret!” The Freule half rose from her seat; her voice trembled. She caught Ursula’s arm.

“It can only be,” she said, steadying herself, “that Gerard made love to you formerly. That is rather like him. I am sorry. It was wrong. But you have made up your mind to forget him, have you not? He is so charming; no wonder women love him. Poor child, it was cruel of us, in our ignorance, to invite you to behold our happiness.” In a sudden impulse of womanly pity she put an arm round Ursula’s bare neck.

“It isn’t that,” gasped Ursula. “Don’t, please, say I love Gerard. Oh, Freule, it’s a great deal worse.”

She hardly knew what she was saying. She covered her face with her hands.

“A great deal worse!” repeated Helena, drawing away. Ursula started at the hardness which had come into the Freule’s voice. “That can only mean”—Helena got up and stood at the farther end of the seat. “I refuse to say it,” she continued. “I refuse to believe it. You two are mad.”

The dance-music came faster from the lawn. Ursula, her head bowed low upon her lap, felt that in her cup of unmerited bitterness not a drop was left undrunk.

“I want to know the truth,” Helena went on after a moment. “I have a right to know it to-night. If you still feel any love for Gerard, do him a good turn now. We are girls together. No one will hear you but I. Tell me exactly what there is to tell, and I will forgive him.”

“I have nothing to tell,” murmured Ursula.

The Freule stamped her foot.

“You are ruining his life,” she said. “I will never marry him till I know how much you have been to each other. What happens after marriage must be settled after marriage; but what happened before I will know now.”

“We have never been anything to each other,” whispered Ursula. “Oh, Freule, have pity, and let me alone!” But even as she spoke her mood changed. Why should she agonize to save this girl’s selfish happiness at the cost of her own honor, of an innocent victim’s peace? She lifted herself up. “Ask no confessions of me,” she said. “Ask them of your future husband. He is nothing to me. You have no right to assume that he ever was.”

Even in the shade she saw Helena change color. A long silence deepened between them. Somebody in another nook not far distant laughed shrilly. There was a clatter of glasses.

“What happened before I must know,” said Helena, at last. “I will never marry him until I do.”

“You do not mean that,” said Ursula, but the other took no notice.

“I understand,” she continued, “it is some other woman.” She tossed up her head. “I knew I wasn’t marrying a saint,” she said. “He warned me about that himself. But, of course, all you speak of is past.” Then she broke into sudden passion. “How dare you come and talk of such things to me?” she cried, advancing on Ursula. “How dare you do it?”

“But I have talked of nothing!” exclaimed the pastor’s daughter. “It is you who torment me—”

“I know. Never mind,” said the Freule, interrupting; “tell me one thing. This girl that you and Gerard are thinking of was—was—infamous?”

Again the silence which is dissent. The Freule broke into a cry. Fortunately the music drowned it. The “Liebchen Adé” gallop was finishing up fast and furious.

“Don’t tell me she was good like—like you and me! Don’t tell me; I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care. I know how the whole story runs; it’s in so many novels. All men do such things. And the girl goes on the stage!”

The music had stopped. The bright dancers were flowing out into the cooler grounds.

“You needn’t tell me anything,” said the Freule, hurriedly but quietly. “I have guessed it all. This girl is good and honest, and she hoped that Gerard would marry her. She hopes so still. You hope it. Of course there is a child—there always is. It is the stalest form of pathetic feuilleton, and, therefore, it comes true in my life. Good-bye, Juffrouw Rovers.”

She sank down on the seat again and waved away her companion, hiding her golden head on her arms against the back. It was very still now in this forgotten corner. Ursula stole off to the house without taking leave of any one, and, having recovered her cloak, went out into the desolate street, alone and on foot, amid the stupefied stares of the domestics.

Several minutes elapsed before Helena lifted her head. She stared from her bench into the night.

“Why not?” she said, half aloud; “I love him. All women do it. There was that creature at the church gate, with her brats, when Henri van Troyen was married.”

She gathered her white laces about her and shivered, as she rose to walk towards the house. On the stairs, at the same post by her dark window, like a spy, still stood the French governess.

“Ma vieille,” began Helena, “will you please tell mamma I have gone to my room with a very bad headache, and want nobody to disturb me—not even her or yourself.”

“But, my dear—”

“The romance is changing to a tragedy,” said Helena. “Good-night.”

CHAPTER XII

“AN OLD MAID’S LOVE”

“Yes, uncle, I should like to go back to Horstwyk to-day,” Ursula was saying at breakfast. “I have had a letter from father, and Aunt Josine seems far from well.”

She had found the letter on her return from last night’s dissipation. It was a long and affectionate letter, full of praises of Otto, who came frequently to the Parsonage, enjoying the quiet strength of the minister’s talk. The letter certainly stated that Miss Mopius had been laid up with a feverish cold.

“Nonsense, Ursula,” cried Mynheer Mopius loudly. “Of course, Josine has been ill; it’s her solitary pastime. Why, your visit has hardly begun.”

“We want to hear all about last night,” interposed Harriet, in her sleepy tones. “You look quite worn out this morning; you must have enjoyed yourself immensely.”

“Oh, bother last night,” said Mopius. “We don’t care to know about the grandees. Were there many of them there?”

“Yes, there were a good many people,” replied Ursula, wearily, “most of them young. I didn’t enjoy myself so very much, because, you see, I don’t dance.”

“Was the Governor there, or his wife,” asked Mopius, “or the Burgomaster? I suppose you saw the Van Troyens?”

“And the Governor’s daughter?” added Harriet. “The pretty girl with the hazel eyes?”

“I remember a Mr. Van Troyen, an officer,” said Ursula, vaguely. “Uncle, may I send a telegram for this afternoon. I could always come back on Monday, you know.”