A FOOL AND HIS FOLLY
The dog gave a yelp.
“Do take care, Otto,” cried the Baroness, sharply. Her voice was
shrill with irritation. “I wish you would sit down. You have
trodden on poor Plush’s tail! And there really was no reason for
that. Not even if I take in earnest, as I have no intention of
doing, the exceedingly poor joke you have just concocted.”
“I assure you it is no joke, mother, but very sober earnest.”
“I am to believe that you have this morning asked Ursula Rovers to
be your wife, and that she has deigned to accept you?”
“She has deigned to accept me, mother.”
“Then there are other things you can tread on besides little
dogs.” She was too angry to continue. An embarrassing silence had
thickened between them before she added, looking straight in front
of her, “But I shall not afford you the satisfaction of a yelp.”
“Mother!” he cried, with a pathetic ring of pain in his virile
voice. He held out his arms. The movement was an appeal.
But she waved him back.
“Between mothers and sons,” she said, “there is a union of
sympathy, of interest, not only of intercourse. Dogs have mothers,
Otto, and love them and forget them. And when they meet again,
after twelve weeks--mother and son walk side by side, _but the pup
doesn’t know_.”
She held out her trembling fingers to the little animal beside her.
“The mother does,” she said, tremulously. “The mother does.”
Otto stood by the Dresden gimcracks of the mantel-piece. His head
was bent, but across the level eyebrows lay a bar of resolve.
“If you would only let me explain--” he began.
“Surely I can do that for myself. You are ‘in love’ with the girl,
to use the cant phrase. There is no more beautiful word in the
world, and none more insulted. With you it simply means that you
have been caught by the charms of a piquant brown face. _You_, who
are nearly forty, whose calf period might surely be past. Faugh!
you men are all the same, like dogs again! You talk of piety,
affection, ambition, but when the moment comes you run after the
nearest cur. Otto, I won’t say any more. I have said too much
already. In truth, there is nothing to say. There is only a curse
to bear. Nowadays, it seems, the children curse the parents. It may
be less melodramatic, but the results are far more visible to the
naked eye.”
Then he broke down before her hard, her hopeless misery, and knelt
by her side.
“Mother, I love her,” he said. “Never mind what the word means to
me, it need mean but little to you. I will take her away to some
place where you need but rarely see her.”
“And the Horst!” she cried, looking at him for the first time. The
despair in her eyes cut straight to his soul. “You have not even
thought of that! And you hardly know the girl. The old house--the
old home--you have not even thought of that!”
“I have thought of it,” he answered, sternly, returning to his
place on the hearth. “It is not gone yet. I will work and make
money. Father may still live twenty years.”
But she did not heed him. “Only a good-looking face!” she said.
“Only half a dozen glimpses of a good-looking face and--pfst!” She
snapped her fingers. “Does your father know?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he answered. “I came to you first. I had hoped that
you--”
“Would join with the happy pair in imploring his blessing.
Did I not say rightly, Otto, that a certain amount of mutual
understanding is essential to the preservation of natural ties!
That you should succeed in making a philosopher of such a
crack-brained creature as I am! I hear your father’s step in the
entrance-hall. The poor fellow is whistling! Never mind, it can’t
be helped. Call him in.” Otto obeyed.
“Well, what is it, my dear?” asked the Baron, entering. “Are you
still enjoying your new-found son?”
“Yes, that is it,” replied the old lady. “Exactly. My new-found son
still prepares me fresh surprises. Otto, tell your father to-day’s.”
“I have engaged myself,” said Otto, steadying his voice, “to
Juffrouw Ursula Rovers.”
The Baron’s thin cheek flushed. He resumed the tune he had been
whistling, and carefully finished it. Then he said, “I suppose that
is quite definite?”
“Oh, yes,” interposed the Baroness, “a fool’s decisions always are.”
“Hush, my dear. I mean, Otto, that you have fully considered and
weighed the matter, and have made up your mind to go through with
it at all costs?” The Baron spoke very quietly.
“Yes,” said Otto, and their eyes met.
“So I thought. Your decision will not be altered in any way by my
pointing out that, as long as I live (which I hope to do for a
quarter of a century longer), you will never receive a penny from
me towards supporting Ursula Rovers? You probably understood that
before?”
“I did,” replied Otto. “I don’t want any money. I’m going to work.”
“Quite so. More tea, I suppose? Java?”
Otto’s face fell.
“No,” he said, awkwardly. “Not Java. Ursula doesn’t want to go
there.”
The Baroness, who had been beating a silent tattoo with her foot,
broke into an impatient exclamation.
“Really, Otto,” said the Baron, with a thin little smile, “you
must admit that you are rather provoking. When everybody wants
you here, you insist upon living in the tropics, and when--well,
the whole thing, therefore, is settled, is it, and practically
beyond recall? Mistakes, as your mother just now remarked, usually
are. This, of course, is a huge mistake--a life mistake. However,
perhaps you are aware of that, too?”
“Perhaps it is,” replied Otto, “in some respects. But it seems to
me worth making.”
“Possibly. There are no bounds to human selfishness. Men have
thrown away an empire for a night of dalliance. And the heritage of
the Helmonts is not an empire by any means. I am sure I wish you
a more protracted period of enjoyment. Then, at least, one person
will get satisfaction out of this miserable business. Yes, as
there is no help for it, I may as well wish you joy. Wish him joy,
Cécile.”
“No,” said the Baroness.
“Anyhow, I suppose it won’t make much difference to you, Otto?
Nor, alas, to us. And now that all the preliminaries are settled,
and you know our mind exactly and we yours--excuse my putting you
last--we had better swallow down the rest of the unpleasantness as
soon as possible. Bring up Ursula at once, and we will give her
our blessing. Bring her before dinner if you can. I’m sure I wish
you had her waiting in the drawing-room. I will say this: she is a
good-looking girl, and, I honestly believe, a good one. But what a
reason for marrying her!”
He threw up his hands with his familiar gesture of comical dismay,
and turning his back on his son and heir, went and sat down by the
Baroness. Otto walked slowly from the room, leaving the old couple
together.
The little turret-chamber, all flowered silk and china shepherds,
looked strangely unreal, like a painting on porcelain. The light
crept in through its rounded window with a curve that lent to
everything a glamour as of glaze. The occupants themselves, bending
near to each other, the toy-dog between them, their delicate
features still touched, as it seemed, with eighteenth-century
powder, had the appearance of Dresden figures seen under a shiny
glass case. But their sorrow was very real, none the less so
because the Baron was endeavoring, as it buzzed around them, to
catch and kill it in the folds of a cambric handkerchief.
“Theodore,” began the Baroness, twisting her rings, “you are always
right. I do not mean to doubt your judgment. But it seems to me
that you almost encouraged him to do what you disapproved. You--you
told him how bad it was, how _wicked_, and then you wished him joy.”
“My dear,” replied the Baron, “you cannot push over the precipice
a man who has already leaped. His mind was made up, and nothing
would have changed it. I know Otto. This is just the kind of
idiotic thing he might be expected to do. Some men cannot keep away
from any folly which has an appearance of elevation. Their souls
positively itch to commit it, whether it be useful or pleasant
or not. Otto has always been like that. He is a Don Quixote of
foolishness. Had Ursula not existed, he would have been bound to
invent her.”
“Unfortunately she exists,” replied the Baroness. “But you might
have argued, protested--”
“My dear, he is thirty-nine. And to argue with Don Quixote is
to break a straw against armor. There is no strength like the
conviction, ‘the thing is so utterly asinine that I’m sure it must
be right’, especially when the thing is also pleasant. Modern
Quixotes are not above distinguishing that.”
“Oh, don’t reason it out in that quiet way,” cried the Baroness,
passionately. “It’s too horrible for that. I can’t bear it.”
Her husband took her hand. “Dearest,” he asked, “since when have we
left off grinning over the things we could not bear?”
The only answer was Plush’s grating bark, which she always started
as soon as the Baron grew affectionate to the Baroness.
“As for quarrels, they are always a discomfort, but useless
quarrels are a folly as well. And a dispute with Otto would soon
develop into a quarrel. He knows what we think without further
telling; be sure of that. For Heaven’s sake let there not be a row.
I have not been present at a row since I was twenty. Gerard ran
the thing close the other day. We may just as well treat Ursula
civilly. I only hope he will bring her at once. The prospect makes
me nervous, and I don’t see why my dinner should be spoiled because
my eldest son is a fool.”
“But Ursula should be made to feel--”
He interrupted her, a thing he was not in the habit of doing.
“Be sure that Ursula will be made to feel,” he said, “whatever we
do. Trust human nature for that.”
“Had it only been Gerard,” she moaned. “And just as I had arranged
about Helena!”
“Ah, had it been Gerard, I should have reasoned with him. Gerard
can be made to laugh at follies, and the man who laughs can be
made to abandon. Fool! Folly! You see, those are the only words I
am able to think of. Answer a fool according to his folly. That is
excellent advice. Molière’s, is it not? I tried to bring it into
practice to-day.”
“Deeds like his,” she said, “should still be preventable by lettres
de cachet. They are worse than crimes. A name such as ours may be
scotched by the reprobates who bear it, but it takes a fool, such
as you laugh at, to kill it outright.”
“Whom would you lock up? Ursula? Do you know, I fancy Ursula is in
no way to blame. She is really a good little girl.”
But the Baroness shook her head. The Baron rose.
“Well, it can’t be helped,” he said, yawning. “That is the
beginning and the end. I wonder what Louisa will say. At any rate,
the house is still ours; après nous le déluge. Otto is such an
exemplary Noah; he is sure to be saved when it comes. By-the-bye,
I had written to Labary about rehanging the west bedroom, but such
experiences as this take away all one’s pleasure in things of that
kind. What’s the use of working for such a son as Otto?”
With which momentous but unanswerable question he strolled out into
the grounds.
* * * * *
Louisa, when informed shortly after by her sister of what had
happened, took off her spectacles, laid down the book she was
reading, and said,
“Otto is, at least, the only member of this family possessed of
marked originality.”
The Freule van Borck’s view of the question was not without
importance, for she had some money to leave where she liked. She
was exceedingly stingy, and her savings were presumed to be large.
“Yes,” replied the Baroness, tartly, “but all his originality
is original sin. However, I am glad, Louisa, if you can find
extenuations, which I openly confess myself as yet unable to see.”
The thin Freule rested an angular elbow on her knees.
“Ah, but that is because you are so entirely conventional,” she
said, gravely. “You are altogether hereditary, my dear; you cannot
step out of your groove.”
“Je ne déraille pas,” replied the Baroness. “No. Dieu merci. Must
Otto, to be happy?”
The Freule van Borck sighed.
“My dear, it is no use,” she said. “We shall never understand each
other. It is of the very essence of man’s making that he should
_not_ run on rails. Machines run on rails. All the misery of the
world has been caused by our doing so, and generally in batches,
after one locomotive. When two of our locomotives met, there was a
smash and bloodshed.”
“But that,” said the Baroness, evidently bored, “is exactly opposed
to your favorite theory of hero-worship.”
“So it is,” replied her sister, cheerfully. “We must all be
inconsistent at times, except you people on the rails. I was
thinking of the hereditary leaders, not the hero-leaders of men. No
hero ever--”
“But, Louisa, don’t you understand? I have just told you that
Otto--our Otto--is going to marry Ursula Rovers.”
“Yes, my dear, and I reply that he makes a distinctly new
departure. To judge of its expediency, we must know the result.”
“The result can only be misery to all concerned.”
“You think that because your heredity tells you so. Now, I shall be
an interested and unprejudiced spectator. Everything depends upon
Ursula. Is she an entity or a nonentity? _That_ is the question. I
agree with Carlyle--”
“Carlyle was a ploughboy!” cried the Baroness, still too impatient
to be polite. “Of course, he would rejoice to hear of milkmaids
marrying marquises! Nothing is more lamentable in these levelling
days than that all the geniuses are born without grandfathers. The
odds in the fight are unfair.”
“Just so,” replied the Freule, grimly. “Now, who knows what a
genius the son of Otto and Ursula may be! My dear, I have been
reading a most interesting volume, entitled _Le Croisement des
Races_. I could give you some exceedingly curious details--”
“Spare me even the mention of your horrible reading, Louisa!”
exclaimed the Baroness. “It is like passing down the streets where
they hang out the _Police News_. Dear me, that is Gerard’s voice
speaking to his father. How excited he seems! I suppose Theodore
has already told him. He must calm down a little, for the happy
pair will be here in a minute. I saw the carriage turn into the
avenue from the road.”
Gerard came rushing in, followed more leisurely by his father.
“Mamma!” he gasped. “Mamma, Otto has shot Beauty! It isn’t
possible; I can’t believe it. Shot Beauty! Shot Beauty! Great God,
what have I done to him that he should treat me like this!” He
clinched his fist to his forehead. “Shot Beauty!” he cried again,
in a choking voice. “Oh, I hope I sha’n’t see him! I won’t see him!
I’ll go back to Drum. If I see him I shall kill him!”
“Gerard!”
“Don’t speak to me, any of you. I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!”
“My dear boy, don’t be so absurd,” began the Baron. “It really
couldn’t be helped. Your aunt has most kindly offered to get you
another horse.”
“In recognition of Otto’s prompt and spirited action,” said the
Freule; “it was very dreadful, Gerard, but unavoidable, and he rose
to the occasion. That is what I admire. And though I am not in the
habit of giving expensive presents, and haven’t the means to do
so--”
“I won’t have another horse,” burst out Gerard. “I mean to say,
that’s not what I care about. He--he--oh, you don’t know what he’s
done to me. And now he’s killed Beauty as well! I hate him! I
won’t, I daren’t meet him at dinner!”
“There’s the hall-bell,” cried the Baroness. “Shut the door,
Theodore. Gerard, you had better go out by the anteroom. Otto is
bringing home his betrothed for us to welcome as such!”
“His betrothed!” stammered Gerard, looking from one to the other.
“What? Helena? Already?”
“Helena? No, indeed. The young lady is Ursula Rovers.”
Otto and Ursula, pausing outside the door, heard Gerard’s laugh of
malevolent contempt, as well as the words that immediately followed
it.
“Ursula Rovers!” he cried. “The future Baroness van Helmont! My
Lady Nobody!”
PART II.--CHAPTER XVII
BROTHERLY HATE
The two brothers stood face to face by the stables. Otto, running
round for Ursula’s carriage, after the brief interview with his
parents, had almost knocked up against Gerard. He started back.
“Damn you!” said Gerard. He said the hideous words with deep
conviction--almost conscientiously, as if acquitting himself of a
painful duty. For the last quarter of an hour, ever since he had
fled from the boudoir before the approach of the betrothed pair,
Gerard had been striding hither and thither, like one possessed,
in the close vicinity of the stables. He was hardly aware what he
said or thought. Otto had shot Beauty; Otto had estranged Helena,
actuated not even by sneaking jealousy (as had first seemed
probable), but by wanton ill-nature. He hated Otto. He would never
look upon his hateful face again. He would hurry back to Drum.
Suddenly his elder brother stood before him, almost jostling him in
a hasty recoil. All Gerard’s confusion of anger and sorrow cooled
into one clear thunder-bolt.
“Damn you!” he said. There could be no doubt in his own heart or
any other of his concentrated hate of the intruder. What says
Tacitus? “With more than brotherly hate.” Tacitus read the inner
souls of men.
From the moment when he fired the fatal shot, Otto had felt that he
owed Gerard most humble and affectionate apology. Concerning the
episode with Helena he was, of course, serenely ignorant. But his
attitude had stiffened just now under the cruelly careless words
which had fallen like a shadow across the home-bringing of the
betrothed.
“Silence, Gerard,” he replied, haughtily. “No one can be more sorry
than myself. If you will listen reasonably, I will try to explain--”
“No one more sorry than yourself!” burst in Gerard, his whole
frame trembling with passion. “No one more sorry! You loved
Beauty, I suppose? You loved Beauty better than anything else
except--except--” He bit back the word “mother.” “You loved Beauty,
and first drove her mad by your insane bungling, and then shot
her!--shot her! Oh, my God!” The words choked him. Suddenly he grew
white and calm. He advanced upon Otto.
“If only you were not my brother!” he said, in a whisper.
Otto met his anger-troubled gaze, unflinching.
“You are a first-rate shot,” continued Gerard, with bitter meaning.
“Oh, a first-rate shot! Ursula was right. But I, too, can shoot
straight.”
Then he broke off short, and struck his forehead, bewildered among
the madness of his own conceptions.
“Leave me to myself,” he gasped. “Only leave me. Go back to
Helena--or Ursula--which is it? Tell Ursula also. Be sure and
tell Ursula everything about me. Go and be happy, you and your
charming--”
“Not a word more,” interrupted Otto, forewarned by the other’s
tone. “I am very sorry, Gerard, and willing to make every
allowance. But I will not hear a word against my future wife.”
Gerard rushed away.
“Why not, after all?” he asked himself. Brothers had met before in
honorable combat alone beneath the moonlight shadows of Rhenish
castle walls. He laughed aloud, and when the coachman’s dog ran
out, barking, to greet him, he kicked the brute away.
Ursula could not but notice Otto’s silence--nay, more, his
depression--as they drove back again to the Parsonage. She
explained it by the Baroness’s reception of the engagement. For
not even the most laborious amiability could make the two women
misunderstand each other.
“Otto, I hope,” stammered the girl, with sudden heart-sinking, as
they paused under the little veranda, “oh, I hope you will never
repent.”
He hesitated, and, with human inconsistency, she resented the
momentary delay in his denial.
“No, I shall never repent,” he replied, “unless--”
He checked himself; he was going to say she must make up her
mind to leave Horstwyk, but he realized the unfairness of too
precipitate appeal.
“Unless?” she repeated, looking into his eyes.
“We will talk about it some other day,” he answered, hastily. “For
the moment you and I are simply happy; let that suffice us. I am
proud of you, my darling, and it seems too good, you caring for an
old fellow like me.”
He kissed her, and she blushed, half unwilling, under the unwonted
familiarity from a man she barely knew. Love and marriage seemed so
strange to her--not unpleasant, but so strange.
She watched him down the road, and her eyes grew misty. “Unless?”
she softly repeated to herself. Then she went and found her father
in his study.
“Papa,” she said, “you are sure that Otto loves me?”
“Why else should he ask you to marry him?” retorted the Dominé,
turning abruptly in his round desk-chair.
“Yes, that is true,” replied Ursula, humbly. “But they cannot say
the same of me.”
“How? What?” queried the Dominé, with troubled eyebrows.
She turned full to the light.
“Papa,” she said, impetuously, “it’s not that I want to be Baroness
van Helmont. I’m sure, I’m sure it’s not.”
The Dominé struck his hand on the table before him.
“No, indeed,” he cried, in a loud voice. “Who says that? Who dares
to say that?”
Ursula sighed wearily.
“Oh, no one does,” she answered. “Never mind. Life is very
complicated. I wish one always knew exactly what was right.”
“One always does,” said the simple-thoughted Dominé.
[Illustration: “‘NO ONE MORE SORRY THAN YOURSELF!’ BURST IN
GERARD”]
“Obey marching orders. Forward. Do the nearest duty at once, and
with all your might.”
Ursula sighed again, still more wearily, and, going out into the
passage, happed upon her aunt. Miss Mopius passed on her way to the
store-cupboard, her joined hands overweighted with eggs. At sight
of her successful rival she started, and one of the eggs flopped
down on the stones in slimy collapse.
“I can understand your exultation, Ursula,” said Miss Mopius, all
a-quiver, “but don’t sneer at me like that. I won’t stand it. Some
day, perhaps, you also will know the curse of Eve.”
Ursula, in the cruelty of her youth and beauty, barely pitied her
aunt.
“What was the curse of Eve?” she inquired.
“Adam,” retorted Miss Mopius, and dropped another egg.
“I’ll wipe up the mess,” said Ursula, sweetly.
Miss Mopius beat a hasty retreat. She spent the rest of the
afternoon diluting one solitary globule of a patent medicine
through a series of thirteen brimming decanters of water. A tumbler
from the first decanter was poured into the second, and so on
through the lot. The thirteenth solution, said the advertisement,
was the most “potent.” Miss Mopius believed the advertisement. The
magnificent name of the small globule had an ever-recurring charm
for her. It was called “Sympathetico Lob.” “Lob,” especially,
struck her as so delightfully mysterious. And it cured dizziness,
palpitation, bad taste in the mouth, liver complaint, rheumatism,
St. Vitus’ dance, stitch in the side, and heartburn, besides being
highly recommended for cases of agitation, nervous depression,
sudden bereavement, and disappointed love. Miss Mopius found it
very helpful. She sat in her darkened room, amid the falling
twilight, sipping.
* * * * *
That evening there was consternation in the big drawing-room at the
Horst. It spread itself like a great mist between the occupants
of the apartment, and prevented their looking into each other’s
eyes. The oppression had begun round Gerard’s vacant chair at
the dinner-table; it now deepened about the Baroness, where she
sat apart from the rest, straightened among the soft silks of
her _causeuse_. In the lap of her pearl gray evening-dress lay a
crumpled white scrap from Gerard:
“I’m off to Drum. I sha’n’t come back as long as you’ve got Otto.
The house can’t hold us both.--G.”
Father and elder son stood with downcast lids, watching each other
through inner eyes. The Freule laid down her newspaper.
“He will think twice,” she said, sharply. “Gerard is not the kind
of man to desert the fleshpots of Egypt because Moses has come with
a plague or two.”
The Baron’s gloomy face rippled over with sudden sunshine.
“That’s just like you, Louisa,” he cried, “to select the most
unfortunate simile in a hundred thousand. The worst of all Moses’s
plagues was the removal of the eldest son!” He laughed, looking
for the first time at his heir. “I am speaking from Gerard’s point
of view,” he added. “Of course, of course, from Gerard’s point of
view.” And he laughed again, but half-way the laugh died down into
a pathetic little murmur. “It is exceedingly annoying,” he said,
plaintively. “And I who detest unpleasantness! We have never had
any unpleasantness before.”
“He means it,” interposed the Baroness, in a dull tone. “I know he
means it, because of the little hook to the ‘G.’ When Gerard makes
that, he is in earnest. It corresponds to a jerk in his voice. None
of you understand Gerard. He is so good-natured; you fancy he is
all sunshine and no fire.”
“Deplorable!” exclaimed the Baron, stopping, helpless, in the
middle of the room. “And incomprehensible. All about a horse. We
will buy Louisa’s present, the sooner the better, and send it to
bring him back.”
“Ah! but is it all about a horse?” asked the Freule’s high-pitched
voice. Once more she emerged from behind her newspaper, her own
particular newspapers, the _Victory_! It would be difficult to say
what the _Victory_ wanted to conquer; but you received a general
impression from its pages that in this world the battle was always
to the strong.
“Ah! but is it all about a horse?” asked the Freule, amid a
darkening silence. “Or could Otto tell more if he would? You
consider me none too sharp-sighted, my dear brother and sister; but
it strikes me you are blind not to perceive that you would have had
a daughter-in-law Ursula anyway, whether your eldest had come back
or not, eh?” She shot out this last interjection at her nephew,
rising, meanwhile, all in one piece, with an abrupt sweep back of
her stand-up silk.
Otto was horrified by the sudden condensation of the amorphous
suspicions afloat in his brain. Could it be possible that he had
ousted a rival? Certainly, Gerard’s fury seemed in excess of
the injury to which he owned. For the first time, in the elder
brother’s heart also, dislike and distrust joined hands.
“Just so,” said the Freule van Borck, across his irritable
uncertainty. She nodded to the others provokingly, and walked out
upon the terrace. Otto followed her.
“Aunt Louisa,” he began, “I think you are mistaken.”
“Yes, Otto,” she answered. “Of course you do now. But you didn’t
when I first spoke, you see. Let me give you a bit of advice. Eh?”
“Well?” The young man’s voice was not inviting.
“Don’t go back to Java with your wife, as I dare say you want to
do. Stop here and fight it out. Ursula’ll fight it out. I don’t
give twopence for a married woman who can’t live in the same house
with her former lover. Of course they were lovers. I’ve seen it
these half a dozen years. Never mind. She was too good for Gerard.
There!” She smiled a complimentary smile to her brawny nephew; she
liked his brownness and bigness, and straight, square strength.
Otto crept away.
“To-morrow I shall speak about going away,” he said to himself.
“To-morrow, not to-night. The Dominé must listen to reason. The
shadow of Cain lies between Gerard and me.”