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.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Title of unmarried ladies of rank.