THE COUNSELLOR
As she emerged into the avenue Ursula noticed a figure in front
of her which she immediately recognized. It was walking at a
deliberate pace, a valise and an overcoat thrown over one arm. The
dog gave the alarm, and the figure looked round.
“Why did you not telegraph for the carriage?” thought Ursula.
The young man waited; his fresh-colored face shone out in the
all-pervading gloom.
Ursula wondered, as she drew nearer, what deliverance she expected
from this pink-eyed little innocent. He looked like a solemn
peach. How could she broach her unusual subject? Visible shyness
was not one of her qualities; but she smiled rather foolishly as
she walked, thought Theodore Helmont, and, for so recent a widow,
improperly.
“You have come up on foot from the station?” she cried. “I wish we
had known. Why didn’t you telegraph?”
“Telegrams are expensive,” replied the young man.
This sounded promising.
“I only got my leave this morning,” he continued. “I couldn’t let
you know, so I simply came.”
“Ah, you had to get leave?” said Ursula, her conscience smiting her.
“Yes; government officials always must. Most people must who work
for their bread. I am a post-office clerk.”
“I know, I know,” answered Ursula, hastily. “Of course I know,
_Cousin_ Helmont. Please put down your bag; it will be quite safe.
I will send one of the laborers to fetch it.”
“I can easily carry it myself,” he said, more courteously;
“I always do.” And, although this time he said nothing about
expenditure, she felt that he considered the tip.
After that the conversation lagged. Presently the young man said,
with much timidity:
“There is one thing I should greatly like, if you would be so very
kind. My mother is exceedingly anxious about railway travelling of
any sort, and she made me promise to let her know at once of my
safe arrival. They couldn’t telegraph at the station. Would there
be a possibility, perhaps, of forwarding a message?”
“Oh, certainly,” replied Ursula, demurely. “But--you
know--telegrams are expensive.”
Theodore’s pure eyes grew troubled.
“The matter is altogether different,” he said. “Perhaps, if you
will allow me to explain--”
Ursula burst out laughing.
“Certainly not,” she exclaimed. “What do you take me for? Of
course, I perfectly understand. The boy shall get ready at once.”
Theodore looked straight in front of him.
“I only wanted to say,” he went on, doggedly, “that my mother’s
anxiety is not irrational. She is quite unaccustomed to travelling
herself, and we have never been parted before.”
Ursula stood still on the Manor-house steps. “Never been parted
before!” she exclaimed. “Woe is me, what have I done?”
Theodore blushed in fresh waves of crimson. “Now you are laughing
at me,” he said, and his tone was distinctly annoyed. “You mustn’t
laugh at me. I am not at all accustomed to the society of ladies,
and if you laugh at me we shall not be able to get on.”
“No--no, I really meant it,” Ursula hastened to say. “I honestly
fear I have been exceedingly inconsiderate. I wish that your
mother had accompanied you.” (“Oh dear, no,” she reflected; “there
the expense comes in again!”) “But _you_ must not say you are
unaccustomed to the society of ladies--”
“My mother is not a lady like you,” he remarked, quickly.
“I am Ursula Rovers,” she replied--“the pastor’s daughter. I
remember Mevrouw van Helmont very well.”
* * * * *
In the solitude of her dressing-room she wondered what would be
the next development of her devotion to Otto’s memory, and chid
herself for the ungracious thought. Then she went down to luncheon,
expecting to find her guest in a corner of the library turning over
picture-books. That was the only pose in which his former visit had
left him photographed on her brain.
To her astonishment, she heard him in earnest discussion with Aunt
Louisa. “My dear Ursula,” cried the latter lady, running forward,
“your cousin Van Helmont is a most interesting young man. I have
been telling him about European manners, and he most sagaciously
remarks that the best of manners is to have none. How delightfully
true!”
The subject of this outspoken eulogy did not seem at all abashed by
it; probably he was accustomed to his mother’s estimation of her
only son.
“Pardon me,” he calmly protested; “I was saying that I had read
that observation somewhere. I am not prepared to maintain that it
is absolutely correct.”
“Oh, what does it matter whose it is,” cried the Freule.
“Everything we say must have had its origin with some one, so
everything is really original. Now that never struck me before. How
new!”
“Yes,” replied Ursula. “Will you have a rissole?”
“Thank you, my dear. One more, please. Thank you. Personally, what
I most reprobate is the walking in line, like ducks. ‘Do as others
do.’ The Bible says, ‘Do as you would be done by’--a very different
thing. I hope, Mynheer Helmont, that you are unconventional, as I
know your father was.”
“I do not remember my father well,” answered Theodore, pondering
whether he could not get away that night.
“Oh, I never _met_ him,” said Louisa, just as the old Baroness
entered. The poor old lady, who would have said ‘J’ai failli
attendre’ in palmier days, now accorded all precedence to her
literary labors.
“My dear,” continued the Freule, addressing her, “this young man is
exceedingly interesting. I had forgotten him, but now I remember I
thought so the last time he was here. The best thing is to have no
manners. Now doesn’t he put that well?”
“I dare say he finds it convenient,” responded the Dowager. “How
do you do, Mynheer Helmont? I am very glad to see you. I wish you
would tell me when your father died?”
“It is seventeen years ago,” replied Helmont, wonderingly.
“Quite impossible. I feel sure you are more than sixteen.”
“I am twenty-four, but--”
“Mamma means ‘married,’ I believe,” suggested Ursula, gently.
“‘Married,’ that was what I said,” declared the Dowager, sharply.
“Ursula, my soup is cold again. Manners or no manners, young
man, you shouldn’t make fun of a woman old enough to be your
grandmother.”
“I disapprove of such early marriages!” exclaimed the Freule.
Ursula’s eyes and Theodore’s met. She burst out laughing, but he
looked uncomfortably grave. “After luncheon,” she said, “I must
take you round, Mynheer Helmont. It is no use showing you the
stables; we have only three horses left, and they are of the kind
that would better do their work unseen.”
He followed her obediently when they rose from table, and she
pretended to take an interest in the small sights she had to offer
her guest. The same can hardly be asserted of Theodore. He was
painfully silent while she “made conversation,” wondering all the
time in what way she should broach the one subject she cared to
speak about.
In this, however, he hastened to her assistance, for his patience
came to an end, while hers still hung on a thread. They were
standing in the palm-house, when he suddenly looked up at her--he
had some little height to look up--and asked,
“What did you want me for, please?”
She had been laughing about some of the gardener’s queer names for
the roses; her voice suddenly changed, and everything but pain died
out of it.
“I believe we are ruined,” she said, facing him, “and Otto made me
promise, if ever I wanted advice, I would appeal to you.”
He seemed still to listen, plucking at the nearest leaves, for a
moment after she had finished. Then he said, as if speaking to
himself,
“Well, I’m very glad, at any rate, that I didn’t ask a holiday for
nothing at all.” He glanced up at her anxious face. “Holidays are
very rare with us, you know,” he added, apologetically. “I couldn’t
soon get leave again.”
“Yet I don’t suppose you can help us,” continued Ursula,
relentlessly. “Nobody can.”
“When people get down as low as that,” replied the young clerk,
frigidly, “they can usually help themselves. I presume that,
however much money you may happen to possess, you want more. That,
I believe, is what people of your class call ‘being ruined.’”
She felt that he wronged her the more by this constant distinction,
after what she had said on the Manor-house steps. “I possess no
money at all,” she said, wroth with herself for the helpless
confession. “And in about a week’s time I must have three thousand
florins.”
“In other words,” he answered, with an angry wave of his short arm
round the greenhouse, “you _must_ spend thirty thousand florins
with an income of twenty-seven. Other people have an income of one
thousand, and spent _that_.”
“No,” she replied, “it is not that. We will say no more about it.
Come, let us walk on.”
“Pardon me. It takes one person to start a subject, but two to drop
it. Will you permit me to express myself plainly?”
“Oh, certainly. Dear me, Mynheer van Helmont, I had understood you
to say you were shy?”
“Again I beg your pardon. I can understand fun, and I can
understand earnest; but which is it to be?”
“I apprehend you. You do not recognize humor outside the comic
papers. You are like my father. _I_ laugh most at the dentist’s. It
is to be earnest, please.”
“The house is crowded with treasures. Sell one or two.”
“I cannot; they belong to my mother-in-law.”
“Do away with a carriage you can’t pay for, and go on foot.”
“I cannot. I keep a sort of boarding-house, and my two boarders pay
for the carriage, not I.”
“Eat dry bread instead of hot lunch.”
“And drive away the boarders! There, you see, I answer plainly,
too. Do you really imagine that if I could have solved my
difficulties by merely eating dry bread I would have troubled you,
a comparative stranger, to come all the way from Bois-le-Duc?”
“I don’t know. The women of ’93 could be guillotined, and willing,
but they couldn’t eat dry bread.”
However, his tone was gentler, and his manner less assured.
“Now will you let me, as we return to the house, explain how
matters really stand?” she said. He nodded silently, and under
the bare, sky-piercing oaks she softly told him the long story of
her father-in-law’s slow purchase and last testament, of Otto’s
life-work and dying charge, of her struggle to continue what they
had begun in expectation of better times. He listened, his boy-face
puckered up.
“It is your name, too,” she said, in conclusion, “your race, your
blood.” And she measured the little plebeian beside her.
“Yes,” he said.
“There it lies. And each rood that belonged to a Van Helmont four
hundred years ago belongs to a Van Helmont now.”
“It belongs to _you_,” he replied, quickly. “And afterwards?”
She faltered.
“It will never pass from my keeping till it passes to a Van
Helmont,” she said, “so help me God!”
In that moment even he could not press the point.
“You must give me time,” he said; “I have three days’ leave. Do
not let us mention the subject again till the day after to-morrow.
Meantime, I will have a look round and try to discover if you can
keep on, supposing the three thousand are found.”
“Thank you. But do you know about land?” She was just a little bit
piqued. “I assure you I am very slowly learning.”
“Oh, I know. My mother is a farmer’s daughter. I have always been
about with my uncle. If mother had given me my choice, I should
have been a common farmer myself.”
“A Van Helmont!”
“Pooh! That’s what mother said!”