BARON VAN HELMONT

So Otto and Ursula were married with all the customary paraphernalia of vulgar exposure—paraphernalia which cause a sensible man to resolve, as he runs the gantlet on his way back from the pillory, that the first time in his case shall certainly be the last. Theirs was as quiet a wedding as unselfish people can get—which means that it was not a quiet wedding.

Their honeymoon trip was but an introduction to the longer journey; at Genoa the big Java steamship would meet them; meanwhile, creeping down the Riviera, they lingered for a fortnight in that Paradise of Snobbery, Cannes. Cannes is a beautiful garden, planted with princes; what more can be desired by the millionaire, or by the numerous curs to whom the far scent of the millionaire is as sausage on the breeze? Other towns contain elements manifold, paltry and noble; exquisite, sun-wrapped Cannes has nothing but the worship of gold by glitter, and the worship of glitter by gold.

The young couple, therefore, passed through it unperceived. It was only natural that they should appear in the “Strangers’ List” as Monsieur et Madame de Holmani. They held out their hands to nobody, and nobody held out his hands to them, a kind of negative Ishmaelism, which has its advantages, even outside a honeymoon.

To Ursula, crossing simultaneously the frontiers of Holland, home, and maidenhood, this fortnight never assumed the cool colors of reality. Before it could do that it was over. She was back at Horstwyk again, like an awakened dreamer in the dusk of a troubled morning.

While the trip lasted—on the Paris Boulevards, among the orange-groves of La Croisette—the farewell peep of home hung heavy before her eyes. She seemed to see them all photographed on the steps of the Manor-house—the Baroness, firm set and still, the Baron coughing and sneezing, not from emotion, but from the sudden effects of a violent cold which should have kept him away from the ceremony. And her father, his one arm drawn tight across the “Legion” on his breast, his eyes fixed not on his daughter’s last appeal for a farewell benison, but on some far beyond of sunlight after storm.

The thought of Otto blended with the thought of her father, and over these, which were her thoughts of love, lay ever the thought of separation. Sadness is not a good beginning for a young wife who “respects and admires.” The Sabines, under similar circumstances, actually consented to live with their parents-in-law.

“Yes, it is very beautiful,” she said, looking across the bay to the blue-black of the sunset Esterel. They were on the terrace of their hotel at Californie. “Oh yes, it is very beautiful,” she said. She spoke with that admission which is a protest. There are times when we think that nature, like some women, would be all the better for a little less flamboyant beauty, and a little more homeliness.

“Java is far more beautiful still,” said Otto, encouragingly. “There is nothing in all Europe to compare with Batavia.”

And then, for the twentieth time, Ursula resolutely enjoyed these anticipated glories of the Indies, for the soreness and the separation were in her own soul, deep down.

Had Otto been more of a Mopius, he would never have guessed at their existence. Hearts like Ursula’s understand that a woman weds her husband’s life.

Nor can it be denied that the novelty of the prospect, by its very terror, attracted and pleasantly excited her. Still, unfortunately, by nature she was stay-at-home and cat-like. Besides, she had not left her father to himself, but to Aunt Josine.

So while she was telling herself how unearthly must be a scene that was even more beautiful than this stage effect of palm-trees and white buildings against the blue Mediterranean flare, even while she was schooling herself to this idea, her whole life suddenly changed with the fall of a curtain. The play stopped at the very opening, and the audience went home again. All the worry and the expectation and the screwing-up had been superfluous. How many of us discover that, even when the lights go out at the conclusion of the fifth act, instead of in the middle of the first.

“Poor people are not poor in India; that is one great advantage,” Otto was saying. “There is always plenty of space about one, in house and garden, and even the mendicant, if a white, drives a trap. But I don’t suppose there really are any white beggars. You will see how comfortable we shall be in the great veranda of evenings, with all the pretty things around us, while I sit telling you how sugar prices are going up. Ursula, it will be delightful to think we are working for the dear old place at home, which is yours too now, and must never belong to any one but a Helmont.” His face grew square as he sat staring at the black ridge of distant mountains, and then, suddenly, with a man’s embarrassment, “There’s the little steamer,” he said, lightly, “coming back from the LÉrins.”

The hotel concierge was going his round on the terrace, leisurely seeking out an occasional lounger in the still, perfume-laden sunset, and distributing a bundle of letters. They watched him coming towards them, from their seat by the balustrade, between two bowls of geranium.

“C’est tout,” he said, holding out one letter.

“It’s too bad of them not to write!” exclaimed Ursula, as everybody always does on the useless, idle Riviera.

Otto was looking at the envelope, holding it across his outstretched palm, between middle finger and thumb. It was addressed in his Aunt Louisa’s handwriting to “Otto, Baron van Helmont.”

“Well?” said Ursula, with the impatience of the non-recipient.

But Otto, Baron van Helmont, sat staring at the superscription. The first bell for the table d’hÔte broke loose, with a sudden continuous clang. Ursula rose. “I’m going up-stairs for a minute,” she began. “If it isn’t from home, I suppose it’s of no importance.”

Otto shook himself.

“Wait,” he said, and broke the seal.

The note was brief enough. “Dear Otto,—Your father died this morning at half-past five, from pneumonia. You know he was ailing when you left, but the lungs were attacked only two days ago. We are expecting you back. Your mother is very unhappy. Aunt Louisa.—P. S. Your mother asked me to telegraph, but I consider it better to write.”

Even by the road-side of our selfish daily wanderings we cannot hear the voice of death calling a stranger from his field-work without mentally crossing ourselves, suddenly shocked and sobered. What, then, if he enter the court-yard of our hearts? Although, perhaps, he pause before the inner door, every chamber, in the horror of his presence, becomes to us as the innermost.

Ursula and Otto looked at each other with solemn eyes, speaking little. The Riviera evening fell suddenly, with its wiping-out of warmth, like the transition of a Turkish bath. The whole gray seaboard lay bleak and chill in a shudder of autumnal decay.

“Aunt Louisa,” said Otto, presently, “has a prejudice against telegrams, chiefly, I fancy, on account of the expense.”

Ursula was angry with the Freule van Borck. “She might have prepared you a little,” said Ursula.

“Oh, that is her way. ‘Simple and strong,’ you know. But you are mistaken. She did prepare me.” He held out the envelope to his wife.

Ursula blushed scarlet. There seemed to her in this brutal fact something strangely painful and insulting both to them and to the dead. She could not meet her husband’s gaze. She shivered. “Let us go in, Otto,” she said, softly.

As they walked across the terrace he murmured aloud, “‘Your mother is very unhappy.’ Ursula,” he added, “this alters everything. We must go back to-morrow as early as we can.”

“Yes,” she answered, unemotionally, “I understand.”

He did not say anything more till they had reached their own room. Then, as he struck a light in the dark, he began, with averted face, looming large against the shadows:

“You will like that, at least, among all the sorrow—the going back!”

She tried to answer him, not knowing what, and unexpectedly burst into tears.

Well, it’s a good thing that women can weep. Their feelings are often too complicated for words. The woman who knows herself incapable of tears is surely one-third inarticulate. But, alas, that the act of weeping should be so positively ugly! From a purely Æsthetic point of view there is nothing more regrettable in connection with the Fall of Man.

No further news from home reached the young Baron and Baroness during their hurried flight northward. They themselves were quite incapable of fathoming, even from the most materialistic point of view, the magnitude of the change which had come over their prospects. Otto trembled to think in what condition he might find his father’s affairs. Only, he felt certain that the Indian plan would have to be definitely abandoned on account of the estates at home.

The DominÉ met the pair at the little Horstwyk station, and as Ursula put her arm round her father’s neck, she dimly realized that selfishness is man’s sole virtue, as, in fact, it is his only vice.

She could realize it all the more in the shuttered mansion, which seemed to lie as a waste round that one locked door of the widow’s boudoir. In the dining-hall, surrounded by candles, stood the coffin, awaiting the heir. All the house and the village and their surroundings seemed full of a subdued eagerness to bury the past and welcome the present. The library table was covered with carefully addressed letters and cards.

Gerard was absent. Only the Freule van Borck came forward, with hushed step, to greet them in the gray loneliness of the flowerless hall.

“My dears,” she said, sententiously, “you might have spared yourselves the shame of running away.”