GERARD’S SHARE

So the old Baron slept in the church-yard under the shadow of the “Devil’s Doll,” which he himself had erected on the grave of his children. Opposite, outside the chancel-wall, shone dully the great slab which marked the entrance to the family vault, heavy with the single name “De Horst.” The word suggested a “dÉpendance” of the Manor-house; hither came for more permanent residence the successive sojourners at the larger hostel. It was the widow who, waking from her lethargy, had demanded separate sepulture for her dear, dead lord, to Otto’s tacitly disapprobatory regret.

She had summoned her elder son into the dusk of her silenced chamber, and speaking softly from amid the solemn blankness of her loss, “I want your father to lie in the sunshine,” she said, “and I wish them to make the—the—in such a manner that every possible sunbeam shall fall straight across it.”

Then, before Otto’s unspoken demur: “He always had a horror of the vault; he never would enter it once during his whole lifetime. And, Otto, all his life long he detested cold. In the end it has killed him.” She began to cry. Her children had found her greatly changed, quite broken down and feeble.

“CÉcile cannot even take comfort by contemplating the beauties of adversity,” said Freule van Borck, crossly. “Surely she might understand, in the midst of her legitimate tears, that sorrow is a great educator. She perversely persists in eluding the blessings.” The Freule did not understand that her sister’s soul was a plant of God’s conservatory, a blossom which could only drop off before the east wind.

Work had to be done, however, and some one must do it. Otto soon recognized, with anticipated acquiescence, that his father’s affairs had been left in utter confusion. The confusion, however, was of the orderly kind. There had been a certain amount of method in the Baron’s madness; only, unfortunately, there had been a good deal more madness in his method. He had evidently entertained to the full an honest gentleman’s distrust of all commercial and industrial undertakings, and had added thereto a contempt for all usury and money-lending. To paper investments he would have nothing to say. Every penny he possessed he had sunk in land or curios.

Also he had made a will, an unwise thing for any man to do. In that entanglement of spoliation which we have glorified by the beautiful name of “jurisprudence,” any personal effort towards equity is only another welcome knot to the lawyer’s hand.

The Baron’s will disinherited his younger and favorite son so far as Dutch law permits parents to disinherit, which means that Gerard would be entitled to exactly one-third of the property as against two-thirds for Otto. Furthermore, the testator expressed a hope that his wife would allow all her claims on his estate to be met by an equivalent transfer of art treasures, and that she would preserve these unsold.

The dead man’s object was plain enough; while unable to stint himself, he yet desired to achieve the retention, after his decease, of the status quo. That is not an easy thing in Holland, where modern law, following the Napoleonic precedent, aims at the destruction of hereditary wealth. The Baron openly avowed his intentions in the last sentence of his brief testament; “I hope,” he wrote, “that my children will always retain the Horst intact as I leave it. Otto must do this; I believe he has it in him. I have ultimately succeeded, after infinite pains, in restoring the whole property as it was at its largest in 1672. I trust that neither Otto nor Gerard will ever consent to part with a rood of it. They will rather suffer privation, as I have done.”

The Baron’s way of “restoring” had been a simple one. Whenever opportunity offered, he had bought such alienated lands as fell open, often paying a fancy price, the money for which he procured by mortgaging other property. Nominally, therefore, his landed estate was a very large one, much of it being encumbered, more depreciated. As for “suffering privation”—he had never bought a Corot.

Evidently he had distrusted Gerard, and felt confidence in intractable Otto. The strangest thing about it all was that he, with his fear of death, should ever have summoned up courage to make a will at all. To Otto this fact, more than anything else, revealed how intensely his seemingly shallow father must have loved the home of his race.

And the discovery brought them nearer now in their separation, the dead lord and the new one. Baron Theodore’s ambition was one such as this son could appreciate; the sudden self-reproach of undue contemptuousness caused Otto to veer round to the other extreme of veneration. He resolved, under this first impulse, that, come what may, his father’s decree should be to him a holy trust.

“Of course,” said the Dowager Baroness, relapsing immediately into her continuous mood of mournful indifference. But Gerard demurred.

“I must have my share in money,” said Gerard. “I can’t help myself. Besides, what did father mean? The property can’t be said to remain intact if one man owns two-thirds of it and another man the remaining third. Enough of the land must be sold to give me my share in cash.”

“None of the land can be sold,” replied Otto. He wore his dogged face. The two brothers were together by the library table. In the distant bay-window of the smoking-room Aunt Louisa had fallen asleep over a book.

“Keep the land, if you like, or know how. I don’t mind as long as I get my money. You are executor, Otto; pay me my share.”

“Do you wish,” asked the young Baron, just a trifle dramatically, “to ignore our dead father’s commands?”

“No, indeed. No more than you,” replied Gerard, with honest disdain. The tinge of melodrama irritated him. The unfairness of his treatment irritated him. But the inherent absurdity of the testamentary instructions was what tormented him most.

“Father’s wish was to let me have as little as possible,” he continued. “So be it. But your wish is evidently to let me have nothing at all.” Both of them waited a moment, in bitterness.

“And”—Gerard ground his heel energetically. “I’m not going to stand that.” Then he said, in quite a different tone, “Simply, to begin with, because I can’t.”

“Of course you have debts,” said Otto, sitting down by the writing-table.

“Of course,” repeated Gerard, with a pardonable sneer at his immaculate brother. “But it’s not that, all the same—at least, not so much.”

He paced half-way down the room and back again. Suddenly both brothers heard the ticking of the clock.

“You wrong me, Otto, as usual,” said Gerard, in a broken voice. “I am as anxious as you are to do whatever’s right. But I can’t help myself. I may as well make a clean breast of it. I must have the money. You’ll think me an unmitigated fool, but, then, you think that already.”

He hesitated a moment; Otto did not move.

“Two years ago,” Gerard went on, huskily, “I became surety for a chum of mine—never mind his name; he’s dead, poor chap—and I’ve got to pay.”

“Surety! Surety!” stammered Otto. “How? What? What kind of surety?”

“It was a debt of honor, between gentlemen. And I’ve got to pay.”

“Of course—a card debt. I understood as much,” said Otto, self-righteously.

“It was not my card debt,” retorted Gerard, feeling his wrongs more acutely than ever, for, as we are aware, he was not a gambler. “It happened playing with strangers, and quite unexpectedly it grew into an enormous sum. For him, next morning, it meant pay or shoot yourself. He wanted it to mean ‘Shoot yourself,’ but I stopped that just in time and made it mean ‘pay—some day or other.’ So pay we must. The responsibility is mine.”

He stopped, staring with solemn eyes, back through the misty past, into what had been, till now, the most dramatic occurrence of his life. He remembered his awakening, the day after the gambling-bout, to the troubled consciousness that he must hurry at once to his friend. He remembered the room as he burst into it: the table with the despondent figure sitting there, the pistol waiting, ready loaded. These things were sacred; he was not going to speak of them to Otto.

“I cannot understand any human being accepting your security;” the elder brother’s tone was sceptical to a degree of provocation. “But, at any rate, the other man and his people must pay.”

“He is dead,” repeated Gerard, gently. “Had he lived, he would have been perfectly well able to do so; we both knew that, or I don’t think he would ever have allowed me to incur the risk. It wasn’t much of a risk, as I told him at the time. He was sole heir to a stingy old aunt; he died before her, and all her money’s gone to charities. So you see I’m fully liable. It’s exceedingly unfortunate, but it can’t be helped.”

“Even admitting all this,” began Otto, feeling his unwilling way, “you are not really liable. The law does not recognize gambling liabilities. They are not recoverable.” He stumbled over his sentences, thinking aloud.

“Law!” exclaimed Gerard. “Law! I was thinking of the other extreme—honor.”

“And you were a minor at the time, besides. Neither legally, nor should I say morally, responsible. It must been an act of madness.” He gazed in front of him, troubled, questioning, full of incertitude.

“I thought you understood,” said Gerard, haughtily, “that it was an affair between gentlemen. It has nothing to do with moral or legal responsibility.” He stood still. “I bound myself to meet this claim, if able, when called upon. The trust is a sacred one. By accepting it I saved my dead friend’s life.” Even amid the deep seriousness of his mood he smiled at the Irishism, just as his father would have done. “I am not going to desert him now.”

“Gerard, God knows I don’t want you to do anything ungentlemanly,” cried Otto, despairingly. “I am only thinking. Let me think. You say the sum is an enormous one. What do you call enormous?” His voice trembled with apprehension.

“It’s ninety thousand florins, if you want to know,” replied Gerard, in a moody murmur. The sombre room grew very silent. Outside the window nearest them a sparrow was pecking, pertly, at the sill.

“I thought so,” said Otto, scornfully, “I thought you had ruined yourself; it seemed so natural. I understood it at once, and that made me look round for the tiniest loophole of possible escape. Gerard, it seems to me you have but the choice of dishonors. Against the memory of your friend I pit that of your father. You cannot possibly do justice to both.” He was desperate, feeling the hopelessness of compromise.

“The will is absurd!” burst out Gerard—“absurd! He cannot have meant it absolutely, only as far as was practicable. Do you really want to make out that he intended both of us to starve, in the midst of our acres of corn-fields? I won’t believe it; and if he did, why, poor father must have been under some momentary delusion! Wills are always taken to be binding so far as circumstances will allow. Our father meant us not to sell more of the land than was absolutely necessary. He meant us—”

Otto faced round. “I understand perfectly what our father meant,” he said, and there was a roll of suppressed thunder through his patient words. “To me his aspirations do not seem unreasonable or absurd. They are my own.”

“I dare say,” cried Gerard. “You are the lord of the Horst, and the larger the property is, the pleasanter for you!”

“Gerard, you may accuse me of the most sordid—”

“I accuse you of nothing. Pray let us have no recriminations; we do not understand each other well enough for anything of that kind. All I say is this, and I shall stick to it—I must have my share in ready money. Can’t you see I must? If I were to go to the other fellow—the fellow that won—and say, ‘My father won’t have any of the land sold,’ he’d think I was shirking, after all these years. Imagine that! He’d think I was shirking! The time would have come for me to decide between ‘paying or shooting.’ Otto, if father were alive, he’d understand that better than you do. Oh, I wish I could explain it to him; he’d want only half a word. He’d be the first to say, ‘Settle the matter at once.’” The young man was violently agitated. He tried vainly to steady his features. He had loved his father with ready, easy affection. It was a cruel wound to him to bear the appearance of showing less filial piety than Otto!

“Ninety thousand florins,” repeated the elder brother, as if not heeding the other’s passion. “You were mad. You never could have raised the money till father’s death. What a speculation!”

“Who knows,” replied Gerard, stung to the quick. “At this moment, but for you, the sum might have seemed to me a trifle. Do not you, of all persons, reproach me with my poverty. I should have been a rich man at this moment but for you.”

“But for me?” exclaimed Otto, in blank amazement.

“Yes, but for you,” Gerard continued, wildly. “It was you who told Ursula about Adeline, as if any man ever betrayed another, even his enemy, to a woman! But your ideas about honor and dishonor, which you bring forward so frequently, are certainly not mine.” Gerard stopped, eying his brother curiously. “Is it possible you don’t know,” he said, “that Ursula told Helena?”

“As you allude to the disgraceful story yourself,” replied Otto, in a dull voice, “I may as well assure you that I have never spoken of it to any one. Ursula knows nothing about it. Nor am I to blame if Helena does.”

However Gerard might have misunderstood his brother, he implicitly believed him. All his anger turned against the woman who had ruined his matrimonial prospects, while herself grabbing, by any means, even including advertisement, at the first husband she could catch.

“Then it was Ursula, and Ursula alone,” he said, “who would not let me marry Helena.” He forcibly curbed himself on the brink of accusation, true to the chivalry he had just enunciated; but his brow grew dark with meaning. And, seeking sudden relief in permissible insult, “My Lady Nobody!” he cried, with an impudent laugh.

Otto rose. “Our discussion ends here,” he said. “Leave the room. I will get you the money somehow.”

He sank back a moment later, listening to Gerard’s retreating footsteps. Gerard, then, had been about to marry Helena, and Ursula had told Helena something which had prevented the match. It must have been something very serious indeed.

He shook off the thought. How should he meet his brother’s claim. It is easy enough to say, “I shall pay.”

Why not sell a large part of the land, which, after all, was Gerard’s and not his? Let Gerard do what he liked with his own. Theoretically, that was plain enough. But when it came to deciding what to abandon—and a good deal would have to go—common sense began to look strangely impossible in the new Baron’s eyes. He could not cut up the property. He wished his father had not made him executor.

He judged his young brother not only harshly, but unfairly. He could feel nothing for the generous impulse which had brought down upon itself such magnificent ruin. Most of us imagine we recognize virtue when we see it; in reality we only recognize our own peculiar form.

“There is no money,” said Otto, fiercely, and he groaned aloud.

Aunt Louisa came gliding in through the open smoking-room door. Her features were sharper than ever in her smooth black dress.

“That is a very bad story, indeed, about Adeline,” she said, speaking in a series of bites. Otto looked up interrogatively.

“Oh, of course I know all about it,” continued the Freule, who had known nothing up to this hour. “Adeline is an actress, or singer, or something low. Nevertheless, I think Helena van Trossart has behaved like a fool. A strong woman lives down all her husband’s love-stories.” She blinked her eyes. “Any woman can manage any man,” she said. “I never considered the game worth playing”—which was true.

“But it’s best to know about these things beforehand,” she went on. “That’s why I told you about Ursula and Gerard. Afterwards they come as an unpleasant surprise, while, before marriage, one simply laughs at them. Helena ought to have thanked Ursula for frankly confessing to a passing flirtation with Gerard. Instead of that, she goes and breaks off her engagement. Inane! We can’t all marry first affections, as your poor mother thinks she did. But Helena van Trossart was always a poor, weak, fanciful creature.”

“It is not that,” thought Otto. “Women never object to a prior flirtation.” He looked up again, dumbly, to see whether his aunt would continue to use her gimlet.

“However, there’s no help for it now,” cried the Freule Louisa, changing her tone. “The marriage would have been the best thing for all parties, and that’s why it’s not to take place. So don’t let’s talk of it. But the money must be found at once. So let’s talk of that.”

“It can’t be found,” muttered Otto, wishing his aunt wouldn’t interfere, and very angry with her for eavesdropping.

“‘Can’t’ is a man’s word,” replied the Freule van Borck. “Your poor father used to say it whenever he didn’t want to do anything. You say it when you want to do anything very much. The symptoms are different, but the disease is the same—masculine incapacity. A woman says, ‘I will.’”

“Then I wish some woman would say it,” retorted Otto.

His aunt smiled. “You are so literal,” she said. “You never can enjoy the plastic beauty of a theory. And, Otto, in one thing I entirely disagree with you. Gerard’s action was a great one. However unfortunate for us, it deserves our abstract admiration. Yes, I know what you are going to say; but you are wrong. Few natures in our little world are capable of such splendid recklessness. I, for one, applaud it—from a distance. Imagine, in this nineteenth century, a man who will sacrifice his all for a friend!”

“He hasn’t ruined you, Aunt Louisa,” said Otto.

“I am not worth ruining,” she answered, quickly, meekly. “But, Otto, I was coming to that. I am poor, as you know—very poor.” She grew suddenly nervous and sat down, trembling, in a big leathern chair. “But I have this advantage over you rich people, that my money is where I can get at it, in the funds. I’m not going to give it to Gerard,” she said, racing off sharp and fast. Her cheeks grew pink. She was exceedingly frightened, as many women are whenever they allude to finance. “I couldn’t do that and starve, now could I? But I’ll lend it to you on the property, Otto, to pay him off. You’ll fasten it on the property and give me a pawn-ticket, won’t you? And I’ll let you have it on easy terms, because I admire Gerard’s action and—and yours also. I’m proud of my nephews.” She paused, out of breath, and aimlessly stroked her dress.

“Thank you,” said Otto, with his reflective reserve. But the fervor of his tone quite satisfied Aunt Louisa.

“Yes,” she went on, preparing to hurry away. “The estate must be kept together. I insist upon that. For I can’t have other people intruding upon my Bilberry Walk, and that would be the first to go. But, Otto, you must let me have some interest, or else I shouldn’t be able to pay you my ‘keep.’” Thereupon the Freule departed, fluttered with the consciousness of a heroic atmosphere all round and but little discomfort to herself. She had, indeed, behaved bravely, for scraping was the sole diversion of her life, and she imagined somehow that a mortgage at four per cent. was a very great sacrifice indeed. In common with many people who greatly admire great deeds, she liked to do her own great deeds small.

At any rate, Otto felt immensely relieved for the moment by the certainty that the money would be forthcoming. He went in search of Ursula, whom he found playing on a sofa with his father’s great smooth St. Bernard. Ursula’s opening days were long in this new home of which she had become the mistress. Everything was as yet in the listless uncertainty of a not-disorganized transition. The Dowager Baroness had nowise resigned the keys, while occupying herself with nothing in the privacy of her own bereavement.

“Dearest,” said Otto, “why did you not tell me about Helena and Gerard?”

Ursula blushed.

“Because it was a secret,” she replied, hotly. “I told nobody, Otto.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody but my father. Has Gerard spoken of it? How much has he told you?”

She looked at him anxiously, scarlet with the soilure of Gerard’s sin.

He misread her distress.

“Oh, very little,” he said. “Make yourself easy. I don’t want to know any more.”

She sprang forward to him, the great dog entangled in her skirts.

“Otto,” she said, pleadingly, “you’ll let by-gones be by-gones, won’t you—now?”

She was thinking of the reconciliation between the brothers for which her whole heart yearned.

She frightened him.

“Yes,” he cried. “Yes, if Gerard goes away. That is all I demand. You must ask Gerard to go away.”

“I?” She drew herself up. “No, indeed,” she said. “You are lord of the Horst. It is you who must forbid your brother the house, if you wish him to leave it.”

As he turned to go she ran after him, and laid her hand on his arm.

“Only don’t let it be for my sake, dear,” she pleaded, recalling Gerard’s initial insult, and continuous cold hostility, to herself. “Do not, I entreat you, let me be the cause of further discord between you. Gerard will forget the past, and I will ignore it. And even if do not, I am strong now, in your love, to face the future with confidence. Otto, I implore you, do not send him away for my sake.”

“Oh no, for my own,” exclaimed Otto, and broke away from her.

She came back to the dog, completely unconscious of all complications except the old quarrel between her husband and his brother.

It weighed upon her; she regretfully felt that she, in her innocence, was chiefly to blame for it. Gerard had deeply resented, and still continued to resent, the marriage of the head of the house to the parson’s daughter. Compared to this, the quarrel about the horse was only a passing cloud, and even that would not have arisen but for her. Men of the world, she felt bitterly, could desert Adelines, but they could not marry Ursulas. It is true; more than that—only she did not know it—men of the world can offer to marry Adeline, and never forgive their brother for marrying Ursula. We can do all that, we men. It is our privilege, because we are thinking creatures.

Just now, Ursula felt that her only duty in the great house was to comfort the dog. Monk was an institution at the Manor; he had been that ever since the old Baron had brought him back from the desolate monastery which is all sunshine within, and all snow without. By this time surely he had forgotten his native Alpine frosts—if dogs ever forget—among the mists of Holland. He had basked for years in the master’s smile, unassuming, as no man would ever have remained, under the dignified repose of his assured position. All the household had honored Monk; many with time-service only. This he had understood; he had loved his master alone. He knew that the Baroness endured him; perhaps there was a little jealousy between the two. And on the day of the old man’s death he had wandered about, disconsolate, gradually beginning to realize a change. Ursula found him a forsaken favorite, not mourning his fall—again, how unhuman!—but his friend. She looked into his big soft eyes, and the hunger died out of them. Immediately the two understood each other, forever. “I accept of you in my empty heart,” said Monk.

In the old Baroness’s boudoir the fat ball of white silk on its crimson cushion opened one eye with lazy discontent and scowled across at its mistress. It was disgusted with the selfish irregularity of its meals. The little old woman in the easy-chair near the autumn fire did not even notice it, in spite of the oft-repeated sighs by which it strove to attract attention. Occasionally slow tears would now roll down the widow’s sunken pink-and-white cheeks, and glitter amid the jewels of her folded hands. She had reached that milder stage when we begin to feel our sorrow. Oh, God, that in this world of agony, men should find cause to be thankful for consciousness of pain!

“Plush” considered the state of affairs most disgracefully disagreeable.