FREULE LOUISA
In the gray loneliness of Ursula’s married life there was, however,
very little solitude. The house contained too many various elements
for that. And county society, which was plentiful, took a great
interest in her on account of the romance of her courtship. By the
coincidence of the old Baron’s immediately subsequent death, she
had come face to face with her whole circle of acquaintance, during
the days of her début at the Manor-house, through the medium of
that most trying of social functions, the visit of condolence. All
these people knew her from her birth; many of them called her by
her Christian name; it seemed to her, and to them, that she was
masquerading. She was nobody’s cousin.
And the Matres Familias who looked regretfully at Otto--there
were many such--could hardly be expected to look benignly on
Ursula. But they all patronized her most amiably, and patted her
on the back, and showed that they were trying to “make her feel
quite like one of us.” And Ursula, who could not be unnatural,
nevertheless strove hard to be natural--if any one fathoms what
is meant by that combination of miseries! The whole lot of them
studied her attitude, and compared her with what she was before
her marriage, and endeavored to accentuate a difference. One dear
old lady told her kindly “that she really did very well.” Another
took her aside: “Do not be self-conscious, dear Ursula,” she said.
“Just be yourself, my dear, just as you were formerly. We like you
best like that.” Surely, there was no cause for the historic Lady
Burleigh to “take on” so; before her marriage she had not resided
in Stamford-town.
The Dowager-Baroness was far too well-bred to mortify her young
rival intentionally; she was far too well-bred not to do so daily
without intention. The Dominé’s daughter must now take precedence?
Impossible. Mevrouw van Helmont retained her seat at the head of
her table. The servants came to Mevrouw for orders; not that Ursula
cared at all about this, or wished in any way to domineer, but her
clear nature shrank from the discomfort of hourly confusion. “Oh,
what does it matter!” thought Otto, harassed by the real troubles
of his own administration. His wife did not complain to him. She
retired to the big drawing-room, with empty hands, and found solace
for hours at her beloved piano. It was a superb Steinway grand of
the old Baron’s buying, very different from the little cottage
instrument at the Parsonage. For years it had been the object
of Ursula’s secret envy, and now it was the one acquisition she
heartily rejoiced in among all the grandeurs of the great house
which were not even hers.
“Does Ursula always play the piano?” asked the Dowager, wearily,
when her son came in to visit her. “Did she never do _anything_
else in her old home?”
“She is such a first-rate musician, mamma,” apologized Otto. “That
requires a great deal of constant practice.”
“I suppose so. In my day nobody was a first-rate musician, except
the professionals.”
“So much has changed,” said Otto, patiently.
“Perhaps.” The Dowager was making a spring-coat for Plush, what the
French call a _demi-saison_; she laid down the sky-blue scrap upon
her heavy crape. “Still, Otto, I wish things could be arranged a
little differently. Does it not strike you as rather incongruous,
with an eye to the servants and the tradespeople, that this house
of mourning should resound with dance-music from daybreak to dark?”
Otto went to his wife. “I like the playing very much indeed,” he
said. “But a little solemn music would make a delightful change. Do
you always prefer dances, Ursula?”
“This is a scherzo, Otto, out of one of Beethoven’s symphonies.”
“Is it? I wish it sounded a little less--gay.”
Ursula struck the piano a violent crash, and then ostentatiously
dragged, banging through the same composer’s “Marche Funèbre.”
Towards the end she looked up defiantly at her husband standing in
the embrasure of a window with folded arms. Suddenly she broke away
from the music, and threw herself on his breast.
“I am sorry,” she said.
* * * * *
The Freule van Borck was the member of the household--an
unimportant member--who took most interest in the new-comer. Otto’s
fondness seemed devoid of investigation, like his mother’s apathy,
but Aunt Louisa looked upon the fresh factor in her old maid’s
life of fuss-filled monotony as a worthy subject of scientific
experiment. Was Ursula--or was she not--_quelqu’un_? That, said the
Freule van Borck, is the question.
Louisa van Borck had created for herself a peculiar position in her
sister’s family. Some twenty years ago her tiresome existence with
her old father in the Hague had come suddenly to an end through the
conclusive collapse of Mynheer van Borck’s financial operations. He
was about seventy at the time, and she thirty-eight. She had never
wanted to marry, nor had she ever had an opportunity of wanting.
Her ambition had always been to live with herself, occupying,
enlarging, and fully inhabiting her own little entity, as few of us
find time to do. That nothing much came of it was hardly her fault.
She had a lot of little fads and fancies with which she dressed up
her soul for want of better furniture.
“We must go and live with the Van Helmonts,” Louisa had said to her
protesting parent. “It is unavoidable.”
“But, Louisa, your money, your share of your mother’s money--”
“Cannot support us both. Besides, I don’t intend to die in a
workhouse.”
So the old gentleman had to turn his back upon the sweets of the
“Residency,” and die away into the wilderness. Of course, the Van
Helmont’s made room for their relatives. “So that’s settled,” said
the lord of the Horst. _Tout s’arrange._ But grandpapa’s brain soon
got clogged, in the still country atmosphere, from inertia and
want of winding up. For many years his body vegetated in an upper
room, with an attendant and a box full of toys. Nobody objected to
him, nor was any one ever unkind. Besides, he had still his pension
of four hundred a year, which made a welcome addition to the family
revenues. Yet it was he they regretted mildly when he died.
Freule Louisa could not honestly be accused of unthriftiness. “I
know nothing about money matters,” she was wont to exclaim, with
pink-spotted agitation. “You mustn’t talk to me about money. I
haven’t got any to spend.” Nobody knew how much of her private
fortune was still in her possession, or how much she had possibly
lost by investments. “You will see,” Baron Theodore had always
prophesied, “Louisa will die a pauper.” His wife doubted it.
She had insisted upon making an arrangement with her relations
which was especially antipathetic to their temperament. She paid
a “pension” price for herself and maid of so much per diem, with
deduction of one-half for board during absences of at least a
week. In addition to this, she paid for the use of the carriage
each time she drove out, according to a scale of her own careful
concocting. So much per hour, so much per horse, so much if nobody
else went with her. The whole thing was just like a hotel bill,
and she enjoyed it immensely. “I am not going to sacrifice my
independence,” she said. The Baron, of course, considered the
business “disgusting”; but he never pushed his objections beyond
a certain limit of opposing vehemence. He simply refused to have
anything to do with the Freule’s laborious computations, and the
Baroness was obliged to receive and receipt the monthly payments,
which would sometimes remain on a side-table for days. Once or
twice a dishonest servant took a gold piece without any one being
the wiser.
The Freule did not approve of her sister’s domestics. Her own maid
was perfection: angular (like herself), middle-aged, cross-eyed,
cross-grained, and crossed in love (so she sometimes told Louisa),
one of those bony asperities whose every word, like their every
contact, cuts. The name this person gloried in was Hephzibah, and
she belonged to a religious sect which was supposed to embrace
exclusively the elect, although these, in the opinion of each
individual member, were represented by a minority numbering one.
Nobody in the house knew half as much about himself or about any
other member of the family as Hephzibah. Her mind was a daily
chronicle up to date, with all the back numbers neatly filed.
Fortunately, her exceeding taciturnity limited the circulation.
“Hephzibah, I am watching my niece,” the Freule remarked from time
to time. “She has an interesting part to play in the comedy of
life.”
“Yes, Freule,” replied Hephzibah, who thought life was a tragedy.
“Will she rise to the height of her position? I love my sister and
I love Gerard, but I should like to see Otto conquer them both, and
Ursula conquer all three.”
“Yes, Freule,” said Hephzibah. She hated the young Baroness, for
Ursula had attempted to show kindness to Louisa, whose forlorn
inanity called for pity. The Freule’s sharp eyes were far-sighted
and weak; she liked being read to for hours together, and she
frequently complained of her maid’s incapacity for pronouncing or
punctuating anything, even Dutch.
“_I_ will read French to you with pleasure, Aunt Louisa,” said
Ursula.
“Oh no, my dear, no.” The Freule took her aside in great agitation.
“I could not be so inconsiderate to Hephzibah, I could not. Oh no.”
Still, in a hundred small ways, too wearisome to relate, Ursula
filled up her time with attentions to the little old maid. It was
a relief to find some one she could do something for. She learned
a lot of Rossini’s opera airs on purpose, because the Freule had
stated that she “adored Rossini.”
“Otto,” said the Freule one morning, “I should like to speak to
you.”
He stopped, with his hand on the door-knob.
“Yes?” he answered, his thoughts intent on the morning’s
disagreeable work.
“Otto, I have considered, and”--the Freule fidgeted--“under
present circumstances I should wish to--pay seven florins more per
week for my board.” The Freule gasped.
“Why?” asked the Dowager, sharply, from the top of the
breakfast-table.
“Don’t interfere, Cécile. I see in the paper that prices everywhere
are being raised.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said Otto, turning away.
“Well, I intend to do it, so now you know. And, Cécile, you need
not make any difference.”
“Difference?”
“Yes, in the menus.”
“I should think not, indeed,” exclaimed the Dowager.
How difficult is the path of virtue made for most of us by our
relations. During the whole of the Freule van Borck’s terrestrial
pilgrimage she never committed another action worthy to rank
with this voluntary conquest of her ruling passion. Yet nobody
understood it.
“Van Helmont of the Horst,” she said to herself, “shall remain Van
Helmont of the Horst.” And she deducted the thirty pounds from her
already meagre charities.
No one at the Manor-house had ever been prodigal in almsgiving. The
old Baron had reckoned the poor a public nuisance; the Baroness
provided them with systematically indiscriminate pennies; Gerard
flung away an occasional hap-hazard shilling. And the new lord was
by no means generally generous. He had very definite ideas on the
subject. Charitable help must be strictly limited to the “deserving
poor,” whatever that may mean--_only_ the deserving, and _all_
the deserving. The word was his shibboleth. On paper it looks
exceedingly well.
Also, he never gave money where he could give work, and he never
gave work where he could give advice as to work elsewhere. He
was forty when enabled and called upon to put into practice his
carefully elaborated theories regarding pauperism. All the paupers
of the neighborhood, to a man, resented a charity which had lost
the charm of the happy-go-lucky. But to no one came more bitter
disappointment than to Ursula, o’er the sun of whose crescent
benevolence her husband’s theories spread in tranquil clouds.
How often had she not pictured to her father the wide use she would
make of an expanded scope and increasing opportunities! Shall we
venture to say that the constant thought had been a comfort, or
at least an encouragement, through the months of her love-making?
She had always worked fairly hard, with her limited means, in her
father’s parish, nothing exaggerating, and setting nobody down in
malice.
“And you will find sympathetic support in your husband,” declared
the Dominé. “I know that he suffers greatly under his father’s
bright indifference”--the Dominé sighed--“for instance as regards
the Hemel.”
The Hemel--so it is still inappropriately called; the word means
“Heaven”--was at that time a small hamlet outside the Dominé’s
jurisdiction which had long been notorious in the whole province
for the wild and profligate character of its consanguineous
population. The people were mostly Roman Catholics, but, even
had this not been the case, their pastor would hardly have paid
them much attention. He was a very different man from Roderick
Rovers. “The poor ye have always with you,” he repeated. And to
his colleague he would have said, “Hands off!” Ursula rejoiced to
realize her new position as lady of the Hemel as well as of the
Horst. Oh, the cruel disappointment of discovering that the poor of
the Hemel were not deserving. They were everything and anything but
that.
“Be just before you are generous,” said Otto. “First, we must pay
our way, dear Ursula, and that, in a landed proprietor’s life,
includes an immense amount of unconscious, and even unintentional,
philanthropy. What we have left we will gladly give away, but let
us be careful to confine ourselves to worthy recipients of our
bounty.”
Never mind, there is plenty of good to be done, as Ursula knew,
without almsgiving.
“I wish you would not go to the Hemel,” pleaded Otto in the face of
her efforts; “you would do me a great favor, Ursula. Mother has so
many causes of complaint against me already, and she is dreadfully
afraid of infection. Besides, it is altogether useless. They only
make a fool of you. Nothing good ever came, or can come, from that
horrible place.”
[Illustration: “‘I SHOULD WISH TO--PAY SEVEN FLORINS MORE PER
WEEK’”]
So life flowed on at the Horst, for its chatelaine, in a narrow
little stream, over rocks, amid a vast splendor of scenery. The
Baron, her husband, working day and night in the almost hopeless
effort to make both ends meet, waxed sombre and careworn beneath
the ever-increasing dislike of his numerous dependants. Towards
his wife he was always affectionate, closing the door to his
heart-chamber of torture and seeking relaxation as from a beautiful
plaything. And Gerard, except for the briefest of visits, remained
at Drum.
When the Stork, some twelve months after the old Baron’s death,
tapped at Ursula’s window, her life was no longer empty. Suddenly
the Baby filled it to overflowing. Every one manifested an
absorbing interest in the Baby, as was his due, even the Freule
Louisa, for babies, surely, are vast potentialities. Miss Mopius
forgot her slumbering grievances and rubbed the Baby’s back with
fluid electricity. The Dominé christened his grandchild, wearing
his Legion of Honor, as he had done at Ursula’s wedding. But the
Dowager Baroness very nearly refused to be present at the ceremony,
for the heir of the house received the single name of Otto.