ARRESTED

That evening some household duty called Ursula into the unused up-stairs corridor, which as a rule she avoided. And as she passed the “Death-rooms” she very nearly came into collision with Hephzibah, issuing from them, eyelids downcast.

Ursula felt that the woman had been watching her, as usual. And although, as a rule, she resisted the feeling, to-day, by a sudden impulse, she turned like a dog at bay.

“If it makes you uncomfortable, why do you come here at all?” she said.

“Why do you?” retorted the woman, adding “Mevrouw.”

“I never do; I was only passing,” said Ursula.

“Ah, you daren’t. But I must. I can’t help myself. I can’t rest down-stairs. I seem to hear it calling to me all the time. Mevrouw, it drags me up. There’s guilt in this house. It won’t sleep.”

Ursula leaned up against the wall and closed her eyes.

“Have you anything you wish to say to me, Hephzibah?” she replied. “If so, say it.”

The woman hesitated.

“No, I’ve nothing to say to you,” she began, slowly. “I suppose it’s true, Mevrouw, that the Jonker is coming home?”

“Of course it’s true.”

Hephzibah began moving away.

“If you go in there, Mevrouw,” she said, “perhaps you’ll hear it to-night. It’s groaning and gasping worse than ever to-night.”

She ran down the long passage.

“O Lord! O Lord, have mercy!” she murmured. “I’ve done what I could to make amends. I thought, after what I’d done, I should never hear it again. O Lord, I’m not a bad woman! There’s those sit in high places is a great deal worse than me.”

“The creature is crazy,” said Ursula, aloud, as she pushed open the door of the antechamber.

In the inner room all was dark and still. Ursula shut herself in, and sank down by the bed.

“Otto, I have done my best,” she said.

An immense weight of guilt lay upon her. Gerard was grievously wounded, was dying; perhaps already dead. Who could tell what was happening out yonder, in the fatal sun-blaze? Before a message could be flashed across the waters his body would already lie rotting in the red-hot ground. And his soul, for all she knew, might be standing, even now, by her side.

“Gerard, I have done it for the best,” she whispered.

But the words brought her no relief. She knew that if this man died his life would be required at her hands. And if he returned alive, yet broken in health, mutilated, crushed, she would have to confront him ever after, reading in every furrow of his forehead the charge against herself.

“I have done right,” she gasped. “I could not do otherwise. I have done right.”

And her thoughts went back to Otto, dying here, gasping out with every successive stifle his last, his only appeal. For a long time she knelt there, her face upon her hands.

“If only some one would answer!” she thought. “If only one of them would speak!”

The place was very silent. She could hear the dog Monk sniffing and vaguely whining beyond the outer door.

“If only Otto would answer me! If only he would release me! What am I that I must bear this weight single-handed? If only I knew—if only I knew!”

A great agony fell upon her, such as was strange to her strong and steadfast nature. She wrung her hands, and, prostrate against the oaken, empty bedstead, in impotent protest, she moaned softly through the darkness.

Suddenly some one—something—struck her through the darkness, heavily; she fell back, losing consciousness, across the floor.

When she opened her eyes they rested on Hephzibah. The waiting-woman knelt, with a crazed expression on her white face, peering close down upon Ursula, by the faint glimmer of a night-lamp on the floor. Ursula shuddered, and dropped her eyes again.

“Not dead!” exclaimed Hephzibah, in a distinctly disappointed tone.

This touch of involuntary humor restored the invalid. She tried to sit up, and lifted one hand to her hair, which seemed to have grown oppressively warm and unsettled. She brought away her fingers covered with blood.

“I am bleeding still,” she said. “What has happened, Hephzibah? Help me, please.”

The woman pointed impressively to a clumsy carved ornament lying near her, which had fallen from among several others placed on the rickety canopy of the bed.

“That struck you,” she said. “I thought it had killed you. ‘Judgment is mine,’ saith the Lord.”

Ursula staggered to her feet. She became conscious of the great dog standing close beside her—attentive, benevolent. His deep eyes met hers; they were overflowing with sympathy. Steadily gazing, he wagged his tail.

“Help me to my room,” commanded Ursula. “There is no necessity for saying anything more. Get me some water.” She gave her orders calmly, and the woman obeyed them. “Leave me,” said Ursula, at last, lying back on a sofa with a bandage over her brow.

As soon as she was alone she got up, still dizzy, and rang the bell.

“The brougham,” she said to the man.

He hesitated, in doubt if he could possibly have heard aright.

“The brougham,” she repeated. “Tell Piet to get it ready as soon as possible. I am going far.”

“Your nobleness is not hurt?” he stammered.

“No, no. Be quick.” She hastily found a hat and mantle—she had recently laid aside her mourning—and then waited till the carriage was announced.

“To the notary,” she said. “Tell Mevrouw that I shall not be back till late.”

Mynheer Noks lived some way out, on the farther side of Horstwyk. The coachman, unaccustomed to any sudden orders, whipped up his horse in surly surprise, and reflected on the chances of meeting the steam-tram.

His mistress did not think of the steam-tram to-day, often as she recalled, in passing it, her wild drive with Otto, and Beauty’s cruel death. To-day she sat motionless in the little close carriage, watching the lamps go flashing across the road-side trees in a weary monotony of change.

“If it had killed me!” that was all her thought. She had never realized till this moment the possibility of immediate death. There would always be time, she had reasoned, for final arrangements, death-bed scenes. People did not die without an illness, however sudden. Besides, when she had risen from the long prostration of her early widowhood, “God has not permitted me to die,” she had said. “He knew I had a mission to fulfil.”

And now—supposing she had never regained consciousness?

She saw the lights of Horstwyk pass by, and wondered if she should never reach the notary’s, and reproached herself for her foolishness.

“The notary is in?” she asked, eagerly, at his door.

Yes, the notary was in. He was entertaining some friends at dinner. Ursula drew back. “Show me into an office, or some such place,” she said. The notary, convivial in dress and appearance, came to her in a little chilly back room, full of inkstains and dusty deeds.

“Nothing is wrong, I hope,” he began; then, noticing the queer bandage under Ursula’s dark-red bonnet, “You have had an accident?”

“No,” replied Ursula. “Mynheer Noks, I am sorry to disturb you just now, but I can’t wait. If I were to die to-night, who would be my heir?”

“That depends upon whether you have made a will,” replied the notary.

“I have not made a will.”

“In that case your father is your natural heir.”

“So I thought. Then, notary, I must request you—I am very sorry to trouble you—but I must request you to make my will to-night.”

“My dear lady, certainly. I presume you have brought your written instructions? Leave them with me, and to-morrow I will bring up a draft which we can talk over together.” Ursula stopped him by a gesture.

“I must have the document signed and sealed,” she said, “with its full legal value, to-night.”

The notary stared at her; then he looked ruefully down at his resplendent, though already much crumpled, dress-shirt.

“I can’t help it,” continued Ursula, desperately. “It will only take you a moment—”

“Only a moment! Dear madame, documents of such importance—”

“Yes, only a moment. Just two sentences. That is all.”

The notary sat down with a sigh, and drew forward a sheet of paper. “You wish to say?” he asked, and shivered—twice. The first shiver was real, the second ostentatious.

The second caused Ursula to disbelieve both.

“Only this: if I die without other arrangements—”

“Pardon me. I must already interrupt you. You cannot die ‘with other arrangements’—the expression is exceedingly faulty—if you make a will.”

“I can alter it, surely!” exclaimed Ursula.

“Only by another will.” The notary sighed and looked at the clock. Quarter-past ten.

“Very well. I wish everything I possess to pass unconditionally to my brother-in-law, the Baron van Helmont.”

The notary gave a visible start, and pricked his pen into the great sheet of paper. He nodded his head with complacent approval.

“Should he be dead,” continued Ursula, “I wish it to belong to his cousin, the Jonker Theodore. That is all.”

“Quite so,” said the notary. “Quite right. And now, Mevrouw, I have only one objection.”

“No objection,” interrupted Ursula, vehemently. “There is none. Surely you have understood me?”

“I have understood you, but the objection remains. The thing can’t be done. That is all.”

Ursula started up.

“Can’t be done!” she cried. “I am the best judge, Mynheer Noks, of what I choose to do with my own. I understand your being vexed at my disturbing your party; but if you refuse to draw up my will as I desire, I shall drive on till the horse drops, in search of another attorney.” She trembled from head to foot.

But the lawyer was also exceedingly angry. He had always, since Otto’s death, disliked and distrusted “My Lady.”

“You may drive to Drum, if you wish to,” he replied, “but you won’t find a lawyer who can alter the law. No, Mevrouw, nor can I, even though you disturb my party to get it done. Be sure that I’d draw up a deed of gift, if you chose, this minute; but the law’s stronger than you or I. And as long as your father lives he must come into half of your property.”

“My father!” repeated Ursula. “Do you mean that I cannot disinherit him?”

“You cannot. If you happen to die before him, half of your possessions must pass to him. That is the law of the land; and, as I remarked, the law is stronger than you or I.”

“It is stronger than justice,” said Ursula.

The notary shrugged his shoulders.

“The case is altogether exceptional,” he answered. Again he shivered, and looked at the clock. “So I suppose we may as well leave the will-making to a more convenient occasion,” he added, half rising.

“No,” replied Ursula, with an imperious movement; “make it at once, if you please, just as I said. Never mind its being illegal. You will be law, and my father justice.”

“It is exceedingly incorrect,” said the notary.

“A great race like that of the Van Helmonts cannot let itself be tied down by every paltry police regulation,” replied Ursula, proudly. How often had she said so to herself, remembering her first experience of Gerard’s hauteur at the railway station, hammering the thought firmly into her “bourgeois” heart: the high-born are a law unto themselves! So Gerard had understood, so Otto, and so she herself.

“Write it down,” she said, “and leave the rest to us.”

“Now, at once?”

She clinched her hands to avoid stamping forth her impatience.

“Now, at once,” she said.

“But there must be witnesses, Mevrouw.”

“Must there? Well, there are the servants, if some one can hold the horse, and—” She stopped.

“Witnesses,” she repeated. “You mean people who must learn what I have just told you? Oh, but that is infamous! No, no! Do you hear? I will not have it. I don’t care for your infamous laws. What I have said is between you and me. As long as I live no ‘witnesses’ shall know it.”

“You wish to make a secret will,” replied the lawyer, coldly. “Well, there is no objection to that. I will write it out for you, and you can copy and seal it. Then I draw up a deed of deposit, and the witnesses only witness that deed. But all this will take time. My guests will be thinking of departing. My wife—”

“Draw up a form,” exclaimed Ursula; “I will copy it to-night. My father and Gerard will respect my plainly stated wishes, even if—something were to happen to-night.”

Her voice dropped.

The notary glanced sideways, as he wrote, at the tall figure pacing restlessly to and fro. She was not natural, not herself; and herself, in his eyes, was strange enough for anything. That bandage! How had she come by so sudden a wound? What was the meaning of this unseemly hurry? He wondered uneasily whether this strange woman was minded to make away with herself. He resolved to do what he could to prevent it—a Christian duty, if rather an unwilling one.

“Here is the paper,” he said, rising. “Nothing more can, with decency, be done to-night. It has, you will understand, not the slightest legal value.”

“Give it me,” she replied; “I shall expect you to-morrow morning with your clerks. Thank you; I am sorry I was obliged to disturb you. Mynheer Noks. Can I pass out unobserved?”

He unlocked the office entrance for her, holding up the oil-lamp. Under the little portico she looked back.

“I do believe,” she said, “you think I am going to kill myself.”

“Mevrouw!” he stammered, horrified, over the wine-stain on his shirt-front—“Mevrouw!”

“Set your mind at rest, my good notary. Only fools think they can kill themselves. God has not made life quite so easy as that.”

The carriage-lights came twisting round to the little side gate. As the footman held open the door there was a glitter of polished glass and a cosey vision of shaded silk.

“Come to-morrow morning early,” said Ursula, with her foot on the step, “and you shall have one of my poor father-in-law’s regalias.”

As soon as she knew herself to be out of sight she pulled the check-string and ordered the coachman to drive to the Parsonage.

“There goes eleven o’clock,” said Piet to his companion. “One would think there was truth in what people say.”

“What do people say?” asked the footman.

“Why, that Mevrouw likes being out by herself of nights. At the tavern they were calling her ‘night-bird.’”

“I know what they used to call her,” grinned the fresh-faced young footman. “It used to be Baroness Nobody.”

“Oh, every one knows that. But hold your tongue. The Jonker Gerard never would allow a whisper on the box. He seemed to hear you in the middle of the night.”

“The Jonker Gerard was a real gentleman,” replied the footman, crossing his arms.

Ursula, as the carriage neared her old home, looked out anxiously, seeking for the light above the hall-door. It was gone; yet she knew her father to be in the habit of sitting up late. She lifted the carriage-clock to the ray from one of the lanterns: a quarter-past eleven.

“Let me out,” she said; “I will go round to the back.”

For a moment she stood, in the chill night, by the study window, listening. She knew perfectly well that she was acting foolishly; but that seemed no reason for leaving off.

“I must do it to-night,” she said; “I cannot sleep until it is done.”

She knocked at the window, timidly, terrified at the prospect of meeting with no response. The soughing of the trees struck cold upon her heart.

“Father!” she cried, with a sudden note of pain. “Father! Father!”

Somebody moved inside, and soon the heavy shutters, falling back, revealed the DominÉ’s mildly astonished face against the large French window.

Ursula brushed past him and threw herself into the faded old leather chair. She looked up into his questioning eyes for one long moment; then, as the home-feel of it all came over her—the room, the books, the loving countenance—she dropped forward on her hands and broke into convulsive weeping.

“Don’t be frightened,” she stammered between her sobs. “Nothing has happened. It’s only—only—” She wept on silently. Presently she dried her eyes. “It’s only—nothing,” she said, smiling. “I am stupid. I have come to you for courage, Captain, as when I was a little girl.”

The DominÉ laid his single hand upon his daughter’s head, and under his gaze she found it very difficult to keep to her brave resolve.

“No, no, you must scold me,” she said. “That is not the way.”

“You do the scolding yourself, child. It is only fair that one of us should attempt the comforting. Have you hurt your forehead?”

“Yes,” replied Ursula, quickly. “It is not much, but it has upset me. It has upset me, you see.”

“Ursula, Ursula, when a woman like you finds cause for tears, a bodily pain comes almost like a diversion. Dear child, I know your path is far from smooth. Sometimes I wonder whether we did right. It seems to me as if, with you, it would have been ‘No crown, no cross.’”

“You ought to be proud of my career,” said Ursula, still resolutely smiling.

“And, I know, the home-cross is the worst cross,” continued the DominÉ, as his eyes involuntarily wandered to a simpering portrait of Josine upon his writing-table. “Attack is not so hard, as all young soldiers soon find out. It is standing patient under fire.”

“You pity me. You encourage me,” said Ursula, with sudden vehemence. “You think I am not to blame. But if I were to blame for my misfortunes? If I were wrong? If I had brought them on myself?” She looked up anxiously.

“I should pity you all the more.”

“Father”—Ursula rose—“do you think I could ever become a criminal?”

“Let him that standeth,” replied the DominÉ, “take heed lest he fall.”

“And if he be fallen already?”

“There is no better posture for prayer.”

The little room, so warm, so anheimelnd, grew very still. At that moment, perhaps, Ursula would have confessed everything.

But before she could utter another word the door was thrown violently open, and Miss Mopius, in a red flannel bed-gown and nightcap, rushed over the threshold with a recklessness which entangled her in the DominÉ’s paper-basket, and precipitated her, a brilliant bundle of color, on the hearth-rug.

“I wish you would knock!” cried the DominÉ, irrational from sheer annoyance. Ursula had started back into the shade, and her aunt did not at first perceive her.

“Roderigue,” gasped Miss Mopius, “there are thieves in the house!”

Burglary was Miss Mopius’s most persistent bugbear.

“What? Again?” said the DominÉ.

“Hush. Not so loud. This time I distinctly heard them.”

“You always do,” interrupted the DominÉ, who was an angel, but angry.

“At the window just under me, as I awoke from a restless sleep, I heard them, Roderigue. And I saw them. I saw two figures stealthily creeping. Ah!” Miss Mopius, who had hissed out all this from the landing, now clutched her brother-in-law’s arm. “We shall be murdered,” she sobbed. “Shut the door, Roderigue; lock it. I don’t know how I ever managed to summon up courage to come down.”

She gave a shrill scream as something moved behind her. Ursula stepped forward.

“Fear sees every danger double,” said the DominÉ, with a smile to his daughter. “Go up-stairs again, Josine, and take some of your Lob.”

“Ursula!” cried Miss Mopius, in a fury—“Ursula, if I die, my blood will be on your head! I was ill enough, Heaven knows, this evening, and now I shall have a sleepless night.” She put her hand to her side. “Ah!” she said. “Ah!” Her face was deadly pale. “It is not enough that I devote my whole life to your poor old father, while you—live in luxury and pomp.”

“I am very sorry,” answered Ursula, lamely. “You have dropped all the Sympathetico on the carpet.”

It was too true, and this misfortune annihilated Josine. In her hand she held the bottle, from which the stopper had escaped as she fell.

“I had forgotten it,” she said. “I had to take some before venturing down. Now I sha’n’t get a wink of sleep. But I shouldn’t have got that, anyhow.” She shuffled towards the door. “Roderigue, would you mind watching me up the stairs? I certainly saw two men. But, of course, it is very dark. Is Ursula going to stay all night?” Up-stairs, at her bedroom door, she turned. “Nothing wrong, I suppose, at the Horst?”

“No,” called back the DominÉ from the hall.

“Of course not—only mad pranks. Ursula’s behavior is criminal.”

The DominÉ’s thoughts lingered over this last word as he returned to his daughter. “She did not even observe your bandage!” he said.

“The room is dark,” replied Ursula. “I am going now, but I just wanted to ask you this. I came to ask it. By-the-bye, Captain, did you know that if I were to die you would succeed to the Horst and the Manor of Horstwyk?”

“Yes, I knew,” replied the DominÉ, gravely. “But you are young, and I am old.”

“Captain, dear, if ever you own the Horst, I want you to give it to Gerard.”

“Yes,” replied the DominÉ, more gravely still.

“You will, won’t you?”

“Let me ask you another question: Why don’t you give it to Gerard, then?”

She faced him. “Because I can’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me, father. It isn’t mine to give.”

“Ursula, that would be exactly my standpoint. Property is never ours; we are God’s stewards. And if I became owner of this great estate—God forbid, child, God forbid!—I should hardly deem it right to disannul my responsibilities by abandoning them to another man.”

“You think the property is better in other hands?” cried Ursula, eagerly.

“I do not wish to say that of Gerard,” replied the DominÉ, gently. “Responsibility changes character; even the reckless Alcibiades felt as much. Still, I cannot help observing, Ursula, in what a marvellous, I might well say miraculous, manner the estate has passed away from Gerard, to fall into your hands. Surely, if ever man can trace Divine interference, it is here. No, Ursula, inexplicable as the course of events would be to me, I see God’s action in them too plainly to venture on resistance. Never should I dare, child, to return the estate to Gerard. God, in prolonging your child’s frail life for those few minutes, God himself took it from him.”

Ursula fell back to the door. “And afterwards?” she stammered. “Afterwards?”

“The afterwards is God’s. It is only when every soldier plays general that God’s war goes wrong. But, dear girl, you are young; I am old; we are all, young and old, in His hands.”

“Let me go away, father,” gasped Ursula, putting out her hands as if to keep him from her. “It is near midnight. I must go home. The servants won’t understand.”

He led her to the carriage, out into the night wind again.

“Obey orders,” he said, softly. “It’s so magnificently simple—like Balaclava. Says the private: The general may be wrong, but I, if I obey, must be right. And our General cannot be wrong.” He leaned over the door of the brougham in closing it. “Be of good courage,” he whispered. “I have overcome the world.”

She caught at his hand and kissed it in the presence of her sleepily staring footman. Then she sank back among the cushions as the brougham rolled away.

“Divine interference,” she murmured—“Divine interference. Oh, my God! my God!”

The DominÉ stood watching her away into the darkness.

“Ursula and Gerard!” he reflected. “Had Gerard but acted differently! How I wish it could have been! For to human perceptions the estate seems rightfully his. I trust I have entirely forgiven Otto the wrong he did my child!”

He had done so, fully; but a doubt of the fulness was one of his most constant troubles.