CORONETS AND CROSSES
Meanwhile, untouched by the bustle and slush of the market-town, or
the still greater turmoil and filth of its more distant metropolis,
the little village and wide demesne of Horstwyk lay serene under
their mantle of unsullied snow. Surely each additional myriad of
inhabitants deepens the vulgarity of their place of abode, as when
ink-drops fall measured into a glass of pure water. The country
has its full share of vices--every anchorite’s cave has that. The
country has snobbishness, perhaps, more than the town. But it has
not vulgarity.
Snobbishness, be it observed, is by no means a marked
characteristic of the Dutch. There was little of that element
in the heart-felt and healthy veneration which the surrounding
countryside offered as natural tribute to the lord of the manor.
The lord was a legitimate and very actual centre of interest for
miles around, radiating wisely diversified influence to all parts
of the horizon. Can any thoughtful man dispute that God had willed
it so? The pursuit of rank is one thing. Of that the Horstwykers
knew very little. The perception of proportion is another; it is
still existent, though moribund, because the masses confuse it
with humility, or, still more blunderingly, with humiliation.
The Horstwykers were not humble--the Dutch peasant is not--but
they were self-respecting. It is the man who dearly loves a lord,
and can’t get near enough, that wants to see him hung up on a
lantern-post.
To many hundreds of simple souls the reigning Baron van Helmont was
the one visible manifestation of human greatness.
The Divine is intangible, and, at any rate, non-comparable. The
gleam of the Horst through its ancestral trees was a daily reminder
of Rule.
The change, therefore, in the King one feels--whom we all have,
even Emperors--convulsed the whole community, at first, with much
more than curiosity. The old Baron had lolled on the throne for so
many easy years. The old Baron had never lifted his sceptre. All
his influence--great as it was--had been automatic.
Everybody liked him, for he had never, by doing anything, given
cause for offence. And everybody liked Gerard, destined, by the
very _insouciance_ of his open-handed condescension, to conquer all
simple hearts. This new lord was an unknown quantity. Men lifted
their heads, expectant, not decided as yet in what direction to
shake them.
Ursula, of course, they all knew from her infancy, but as one
more or less of themselves. She had lived rather a sequestered
life, keeping much to herself and to her father; yet they had
always benignly approved of the parson’s daughter, chiefly on
account of her absolute freedom from all forms of assumption and
self-assertion, such as clerical womankind too often affects. But,
as Baroness van Helmont, her character seemed out of drawing. It
must readjust itself to their ideas, if such a thing were ever
possible. On the whole, the peasantry of the countryside did not
approve of Baron Otto’s choice; there was something incongruous in
this too human link between earth and heaven. Pharaoh should marry
his sister, not his kitchen-maid.
Even the Dominé had felt this, though he knew himself to be a
gentleman. Perhaps on that account.
Pharaoh, settling himself in his unaccustomed seat, might well have
wished for a Joseph. His predecessor’s years had been years of
fatness, agricultural prosperity, but there had been no storing in
granaries to stint the full-bellied kine. There had been plentitude
everywhere, and plenteous hunger. The hunger remained. Pharaoh
resolved to be his own Joseph, but, face to face with famine,
Joseph comes too late.
By the united assistance of the two old ladies Gerard’s claim had
been met. The Freule van Borck had been very particular about
the legal part and the mortgage, holding long consultations with
her notary. In all business matters women, starting from the
conviction that their defencelessness is sure to be imposed upon,
insist on driving bargains of granitic hardness. When four per
cent. represents a fair rate of interest, a woman demands six,
ultimately resigning herself to accepting five, because a woman,
you know, can’t hold out against men, as she querulously tells you
ever afterwards. The notary was compelled to restrain the Freule’s
fervor of self-sacrificial money-getting. As the weeks crept on she
became more and more resolved to assist her nephew advantageously.
And, when everything had at last been arranged, the estate was left
saddled with a heavy annual payment it could barely sustain.
“Never mind,” said Otto, looking round on the costly treasures he
mightn’t sell and didn’t want. That had become the brave refrain of
his resolve. “Never mind,” and then he set his teeth hard. It was
very different from the _tout s’arrange_ of his race.
He steeled himself, doggedly, and a little dogmatically, to
“putting things right.” That process, of course, annoys the
numerous persons who don’t care to be told that things were wrong
before. Besides, no adjustment is possible--especially not a
rectilinear one--without knocks and shoves in all directions.
First and foremost, Otto had to do battle with his mother. The
widow resented as an insult the suggestion that anything could need
alteration.
“Things have always been like that in your father’s time,” she
said over and over again. “And, Otto, I cannot understand all this
talk of yours about income and expenditure. Of course, people have
income and expenditure. Surely your father must have had them, too;
but he never worried about them as you do.”
Otto knew this. It had been a favorite maxim of his father’s--not,
perhaps, an altogether incorrect one--that only small incomes need
balance to a hair. “Rich men,” the Baron used to say, “have other
resources besides their revenues.”
“But your father always told me that you were a bad manager
because over-anxious to be a good one,” the Dowager would murmur,
querulously. “The excellence of management, he always said,
was moderation, and, dear me, Otto, you manage more in a month
than your father in all his lifetime. But you don’t sell the art
collections, mind. They belong to me. Your father always said you
would sell them.”
She even insisted on finishing the costly decoration of the west
room, to Otto’s bitter annoyance. “Would you leave it unfinished?”
she asked, with a flash of her old bright spirit. It was almost
fortunate for Otto that she had never completely recovered from the
shock of her husband’s death. For hours she would sit, silent and
motionless, in the boudoir she had filled with his portraits from
all parts of the house. And when the Baron entered, she would quote
his father at him.
“I _will_ spend less than my income,” repeated Otto, grinding
his heel into the carpet. It sounds easy in a big house, but, in
fact, it is easier in a small one. He retrenched, and made the
whole family most increasingly uncomfortable. When, at last, he
extinguished the great, wasteful fire in the hall, there was a
palace revolution. The butler gave notice. “For I’m too old,” he
informed Mynheer the Baron, letting him have a bit of his mind, “to
expose my life at my age in them draughty passages.”
“Very well, go,” said Otto, fiercely. But he didn’t like it. The
man had been with them for years. The Dowager-Baroness cried
at thought of his leaving. All the servants looked sullen and
demonstratively blue-nosed. For weeks the new master had been
causing them successive annoyance. Some kind of chivalry taught him
to screen his young wife.
“Let me do it, dear,” pleaded Ursula, when Otto complained that he
must speak to the cook. “Surely that is my department.”
“Oh yes, it is,” he said, looking out of the window. “Oh yes.”
“Well, then, what has she done? She seems to me a nice,
pleasant-spoken person.”
“Oh, they are all that,” cried Otto, facing round, with sudden
eloquence. “They are all nice, all pleasant-spoken! My father’s
people always were. Imagine, Ursula, that this woman, whom mamma
has had in her service for fifteen years, daily--mind you,
daily--writes down a pound of meat more than the butcher brings,
and divides the profits with him!”
“How can she?” objected Ursula, who had not yet got accustomed to a
household in which such things were possible, and even proper.
“How? Don’t ask me how. I suppose she calls it ‘perquisites.’ I met
an English marquess once, who told me that in his father’s time the
annual beer-bill had touched two thousand pounds. His was three
hundred. It’s all a question of authorizing theft by silence. Keep
your fingers off the tap. That’s all.” He laughed.
“I’ll weigh the meat to-morrow myself,” cried Ursula, rising
already to do it. “That will stop them at once. We weigh it at
home; that’s to say, Aunt Mopius often does. And I’ve had to scold
Oskamp’s boy before. I should never have thought it of Oskamp. I
suppose, Otto, your mother never weighs the meat?”
Otto smiled.
“So that will be all right. Don’t worry, dear, I’ll see to it
myself.”
“No, I think you had better not,” reasoned Otto, gravely. “I--I
think I had better do it. My mother, you see, Ursula, will take
anything of that kind more easily from me.”
He hurt her cruelly, for it was by no means the first time she
had thus been checked in the well-meant endeavor to assume her
legitimate duties. She turned away in silence, and took up some
needle-work.
Somehow he realized, helplessly, that things were again
uncomfortable. “My dear child,” he explained, “it is only because I
am anxious to shield you.”
But she stopped him.
“I don’t want to be shielded,” she said, quickly; “at least, not
_always_.”
And she beat back her emotion, looking away, with trembling lip.
He stood, uncertain, gazing at her, and his eyes grew
half-reproachful.
“Oh, of course, you don’t understand!” she exclaimed, unwillingly
reading his thoughts. “You have married a plaything, Otto. You
cannot comprehend my wanting to be a wife.”
[Illustration: “‘OH, THEY ARE ALL THAT,’ CRIED OTTO, FACING ROUND”]
“My dear child”--he began.
He too constantly called her that. She detested the name. She knew
well enough how much he was her elder.
“I am not a child,” she cried, passionately. “I am a woman, and
your wife.”
“Yes,” he replied, sternly, reading discontent in her pent-up
vehemence, and perhaps a little assumption; “you are now the
Baroness van Helmont.”
“I am not. I am not!” she cried, recklessly, and dropped her work
in her agitation. “I mean I am not that only. I am sick of merely
being that. I am your wife, Otto. I have a right to be recognized
as such.”
Otto paced down the large room and up again.
“I am sorry,” he said, stiffly, “that you consider yourself
slighted by any one, but I cannot ask my mother to leave the
house. There are difficulties, of course, in your position. I am
the first to admit them. We all have difficulties. Often they are
unavoidable. Yours seem so to me.”
She looked at him, her brown eyes dilated with horror; then
suddenly, very sweetly, her tenderness flowed across them.
“Oh, Otto,” she said, softly, “why do we so constantly
misunderstand each other? It is you by whom I want to be recognized
as your wife--nobody else!”
Then he caught her to his breast, and kissed her seriously, as they
kiss who love deeply, but apart.
“I want to take my share of your work,” she continued, caressingly,
“and, especially, my share of your worry. I am so tired, Otto, of
sitting in the big drawing-room. To you, at _least_, I want not to
be ‘My Lady Nobody.’ I didn’t marry you for that.”
“What did you marry me for,” he questioned, playfully.
“Certainly not for that,” she replied, gravely, and the answer fell
cold on his heart, for all that it left unsaid. A moment afterwards
she added, “Of course, because I love you.” She thoughtfully spoke
her conscientious verity; but love is quicker than thought.
He left her, with a kind little pat of encouragement, and she sank
down beside the dog, hiding her sunny brown head in the softly
responsive fur. She could feel Monk’s great heart beating gravely.
The room was very large and empty, the house was very large.
Yes, though he did not realize it, Otto van Helmont had married
his wife for her face--a sweet apparition, bright and fresh
among the home-flowers, a suggestion of the dear fatherland, a
dream of wholesome Dutch girlhood. He had married for that most
unsatisfactory of all reasons: “because he had fallen in love.” Not
even a fortnight--be it remembered--had elapsed between his first
sight of Ursula and their engagement. A man must either know his
wife before he learns to love her, or else he must never need to
love her, or else he will certainly never learn to know her. That
last eventuality, the rarest, is surely the most desirable, but
only if the love be mutual, and exceedingly great.
Otto, then, had never penetrated into a character whose reserve
was so like his own that he could not understand it. He loved his
young wife, and kissed her; and he fancied, like so many men,
that his consciousness of loving her was sufficient for all her
wants. As for her position in the house, in the family, if it was
uncomfortable, could he help that? Was not he himself weighed down
by his difficulties, his responsibilities, the worry of universal
deepening displeasure? What were the pinpricks she complained of
compared to his wounds? Her mamma-in-law was inconsiderate; his
mother was unkind. Her dependants were not always courteous, his
own people hardened their countenances against him. He could not
help thinking that much of her petulant soreness--well, she was
young--was provoked by mortification because of the scant dignity
or authority her sudden elevation had brought her. Had she not said
to him, “I will not be My Lady Nobody; at least, let me not be it
to you?”
She was annoyed, then, at being it to him, and to all. The
combination vexed her. She had hoped, as My Lady, to be Somebody
indeed.
He sighed from irritation. It was not his fault. Yet he was
a little disappointed in Ursula. He had thought hers was an
essentially gentle nature, unassuming, unaspiring. Even not
desiring to meddle and share in her husband’s affairs, because
that, for a young girl, is impossible. A thoroughly womanly
woman, who cried out in horror at thought of men’s work, such as
sheep-slaughtering, or of men’s play, such as a fox-hunt; a woman
who could be tacitly brave, on occasion, able to endure though
unable to act. Thus had she revealed herself to him in the week of
his swift immersion, his model woman, in a word. That is the worst
of tumbling into love. You marry your model woman and have to live
with your wife. Now, Ursula was far superior to Otto’s ideal. There
is nothing more hopeless in human relationships.
He turned impatiently from himself and went down to the room where
his bailiff was waiting. All that morning he had been weighed down
by the prospect of this interview. No, he was not the man, in his
gentleness of heart, to “set things right.”
“You can do as you like,” he cried, starting up from the other’s
excuses and tergiversations. “You can go or you can stay. But never
again, if I live”--his heart throbbed wildly as he bent that cruel,
hated look of his on the sullen retainer--“never again, by God,
shall you charge one and eight for a laborer’s wages while paying
him one and five!”