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!”