CORONETS AND CROSSES

Meanwhile, untouched by the bustle and slush of the market-town, or the still greater turmoil and filth of its more distant metropolis, the little village and wide demesne of Horstwyk lay serene under their mantle of unsullied snow. Surely each additional myriad of inhabitants deepens the vulgarity of their place of abode, as when ink-drops fall measured into a glass of pure water. The country has its full share of vices—every anchorite’s cave has that. The country has snobbishness, perhaps, more than the town. But it has not vulgarity.

Snobbishness, be it observed, is by no means a marked characteristic of the Dutch. There was little of that element in the heart-felt and healthy veneration which the surrounding countryside offered as natural tribute to the lord of the manor. The lord was a legitimate and very actual centre of interest for miles around, radiating wisely diversified influence to all parts of the horizon. Can any thoughtful man dispute that God had willed it so? The pursuit of rank is one thing. Of that the Horstwykers knew very little. The perception of proportion is another; it is still existent, though moribund, because the masses confuse it with humility, or, still more blunderingly, with humiliation. The Horstwykers were not humble—the Dutch peasant is not—but they were self-respecting. It is the man who dearly loves a lord, and can’t get near enough, that wants to see him hung up on a lantern-post.

To many hundreds of simple souls the reigning Baron van Helmont was the one visible manifestation of human greatness.

The Divine is intangible, and, at any rate, non-comparable. The gleam of the Horst through its ancestral trees was a daily reminder of Rule.

The change, therefore, in the King one feels—whom we all have, even Emperors—convulsed the whole community, at first, with much more than curiosity. The old Baron had lolled on the throne for so many easy years. The old Baron had never lifted his sceptre. All his influence—great as it was—had been automatic.

Everybody liked him, for he had never, by doing anything, given cause for offence. And everybody liked Gerard, destined, by the very insouciance of his open-handed condescension, to conquer all simple hearts. This new lord was an unknown quantity. Men lifted their heads, expectant, not decided as yet in what direction to shake them.

Ursula, of course, they all knew from her infancy, but as one more or less of themselves. She had lived rather a sequestered life, keeping much to herself and to her father; yet they had always benignly approved of the parson’s daughter, chiefly on account of her absolute freedom from all forms of assumption and self-assertion, such as clerical womankind too often affects. But, as Baroness van Helmont, her character seemed out of drawing. It must readjust itself to their ideas, if such a thing were ever possible. On the whole, the peasantry of the countryside did not approve of Baron Otto’s choice; there was something incongruous in this too human link between earth and heaven. Pharaoh should marry his sister, not his kitchen-maid.

Even the DominÉ had felt this, though he knew himself to be a gentleman. Perhaps on that account.

Pharaoh, settling himself in his unaccustomed seat, might well have wished for a Joseph. His predecessor’s years had been years of fatness, agricultural prosperity, but there had been no storing in granaries to stint the full-bellied kine. There had been plentitude everywhere, and plenteous hunger. The hunger remained. Pharaoh resolved to be his own Joseph, but, face to face with famine, Joseph comes too late.

By the united assistance of the two old ladies Gerard’s claim had been met. The Freule van Borck had been very particular about the legal part and the mortgage, holding long consultations with her notary. In all business matters women, starting from the conviction that their defencelessness is sure to be imposed upon, insist on driving bargains of granitic hardness. When four per cent. represents a fair rate of interest, a woman demands six, ultimately resigning herself to accepting five, because a woman, you know, can’t hold out against men, as she querulously tells you ever afterwards. The notary was compelled to restrain the Freule’s fervor of self-sacrificial money-getting. As the weeks crept on she became more and more resolved to assist her nephew advantageously. And, when everything had at last been arranged, the estate was left saddled with a heavy annual payment it could barely sustain.

“Never mind,” said Otto, looking round on the costly treasures he mightn’t sell and didn’t want. That had become the brave refrain of his resolve. “Never mind,” and then he set his teeth hard. It was very different from the tout s’arrange of his race.

He steeled himself, doggedly, and a little dogmatically, to “putting things right.” That process, of course, annoys the numerous persons who don’t care to be told that things were wrong before. Besides, no adjustment is possible—especially not a rectilinear one—without knocks and shoves in all directions.

First and foremost, Otto had to do battle with his mother. The widow resented as an insult the suggestion that anything could need alteration.

“Things have always been like that in your father’s time,” she said over and over again. “And, Otto, I cannot understand all this talk of yours about income and expenditure. Of course, people have income and expenditure. Surely your father must have had them, too; but he never worried about them as you do.”

Otto knew this. It had been a favorite maxim of his father’s—not, perhaps, an altogether incorrect one—that only small incomes need balance to a hair. “Rich men,” the Baron used to say, “have other resources besides their revenues.”

“But your father always told me that you were a bad manager because over-anxious to be a good one,” the Dowager would murmur, querulously. “The excellence of management, he always said, was moderation, and, dear me, Otto, you manage more in a month than your father in all his lifetime. But you don’t sell the art collections, mind. They belong to me. Your father always said you would sell them.”

She even insisted on finishing the costly decoration of the west room, to Otto’s bitter annoyance. “Would you leave it unfinished?” she asked, with a flash of her old bright spirit. It was almost fortunate for Otto that she had never completely recovered from the shock of her husband’s death. For hours she would sit, silent and motionless, in the boudoir she had filled with his portraits from all parts of the house. And when the Baron entered, she would quote his father at him.

“I will spend less than my income,” repeated Otto, grinding his heel into the carpet. It sounds easy in a big house, but, in fact, it is easier in a small one. He retrenched, and made the whole family most increasingly uncomfortable. When, at last, he extinguished the great, wasteful fire in the hall, there was a palace revolution. The butler gave notice. “For I’m too old,” he informed Mynheer the Baron, letting him have a bit of his mind, “to expose my life at my age in them draughty passages.”

“Very well, go,” said Otto, fiercely. But he didn’t like it. The man had been with them for years. The Dowager-Baroness cried at thought of his leaving. All the servants looked sullen and demonstratively blue-nosed. For weeks the new master had been causing them successive annoyance. Some kind of chivalry taught him to screen his young wife.

“Let me do it, dear,” pleaded Ursula, when Otto complained that he must speak to the cook. “Surely that is my department.”

“Oh yes, it is,” he said, looking out of the window. “Oh yes.”

“Well, then, what has she done? She seems to me a nice, pleasant-spoken person.”

“Oh, they are all that,” cried Otto, facing round, with sudden eloquence. “They are all nice, all pleasant-spoken! My father’s people always were. Imagine, Ursula, that this woman, whom mamma has had in her service for fifteen years, daily—mind you, daily—writes down a pound of meat more than the butcher brings, and divides the profits with him!”

“How can she?” objected Ursula, who had not yet got accustomed to a household in which such things were possible, and even proper.

“How? Don’t ask me how. I suppose she calls it ‘perquisites.’ I met an English marquess once, who told me that in his father’s time the annual beer-bill had touched two thousand pounds. His was three hundred. It’s all a question of authorizing theft by silence. Keep your fingers off the tap. That’s all.” He laughed.

“I’ll weigh the meat to-morrow myself,” cried Ursula, rising already to do it. “That will stop them at once. We weigh it at home; that’s to say, Aunt Mopius often does. And I’ve had to scold Oskamp’s boy before. I should never have thought it of Oskamp. I suppose, Otto, your mother never weighs the meat?”

Otto smiled.

“So that will be all right. Don’t worry, dear, I’ll see to it myself.”

“No, I think you had better not,” reasoned Otto, gravely. “I—I think I had better do it. My mother, you see, Ursula, will take anything of that kind more easily from me.”

He hurt her cruelly, for it was by no means the first time she had thus been checked in the well-meant endeavor to assume her legitimate duties. She turned away in silence, and took up some needle-work.

Somehow he realized, helplessly, that things were again uncomfortable. “My dear child,” he explained, “it is only because I am anxious to shield you.”

But she stopped him.

“I don’t want to be shielded,” she said, quickly; “at least, not always.”

And she beat back her emotion, looking away, with trembling lip.

He stood, uncertain, gazing at her, and his eyes grew half-reproachful.

“Oh, of course, you don’t understand!” she exclaimed, unwillingly reading his thoughts. “You have married a plaything, Otto. You cannot comprehend my wanting to be a wife.”

“My dear child”—he began.

He too constantly called her that. She detested the name. She knew well enough how much he was her elder.

“I am not a child,” she cried, passionately. “I am a woman, and your wife.”

“Yes,” he replied, sternly, reading discontent in her pent-up vehemence, and perhaps a little assumption; “you are now the Baroness van Helmont.”

“I am not. I am not!” she cried, recklessly, and dropped her work in her agitation. “I mean I am not that only. I am sick of merely being that. I am your wife, Otto. I have a right to be recognized as such.”

Otto paced down the large room and up again.

“I am sorry,” he said, stiffly, “that you consider yourself slighted by any one, but I cannot ask my mother to leave the house. There are difficulties, of course, in your position. I am the first to admit them. We all have difficulties. Often they are unavoidable. Yours seem so to me.”

She looked at him, her brown eyes dilated with horror; then suddenly, very sweetly, her tenderness flowed across them.

“Oh, Otto,” she said, softly, “why do we so constantly misunderstand each other? It is you by whom I want to be recognized as your wife—nobody else!”

Then he caught her to his breast, and kissed her seriously, as they kiss who love deeply, but apart.

“I want to take my share of your work,” she continued, caressingly, “and, especially, my share of your worry. I am so tired, Otto, of sitting in the big drawing-room. To you, at least, I want not to be ‘My Lady Nobody.’ I didn’t marry you for that.”

“What did you marry me for,” he questioned, playfully.

“Certainly not for that,” she replied, gravely, and the answer fell cold on his heart, for all that it left unsaid. A moment afterwards she added, “Of course, because I love you.” She thoughtfully spoke her conscientious verity; but love is quicker than thought.

He left her, with a kind little pat of encouragement, and she sank down beside the dog, hiding her sunny brown head in the softly responsive fur. She could feel Monk’s great heart beating gravely. The room was very large and empty, the house was very large.

Yes, though he did not realize it, Otto van Helmont had married his wife for her face—a sweet apparition, bright and fresh among the home-flowers, a suggestion of the dear fatherland, a dream of wholesome Dutch girlhood. He had married for that most unsatisfactory of all reasons: “because he had fallen in love.” Not even a fortnight—be it remembered—had elapsed between his first sight of Ursula and their engagement. A man must either know his wife before he learns to love her, or else he must never need to love her, or else he will certainly never learn to know her. That last eventuality, the rarest, is surely the most desirable, but only if the love be mutual, and exceedingly great.

Otto, then, had never penetrated into a character whose reserve was so like his own that he could not understand it. He loved his young wife, and kissed her; and he fancied, like so many men, that his consciousness of loving her was sufficient for all her wants. As for her position in the house, in the family, if it was uncomfortable, could he help that? Was not he himself weighed down by his difficulties, his responsibilities, the worry of universal deepening displeasure? What were the pinpricks she complained of compared to his wounds? Her mamma-in-law was inconsiderate; his mother was unkind. Her dependants were not always courteous, his own people hardened their countenances against him. He could not help thinking that much of her petulant soreness—well, she was young—was provoked by mortification because of the scant dignity or authority her sudden elevation had brought her. Had she not said to him, “I will not be My Lady Nobody; at least, let me not be it to you?”

She was annoyed, then, at being it to him, and to all. The combination vexed her. She had hoped, as My Lady, to be Somebody indeed.

He sighed from irritation. It was not his fault. Yet he was a little disappointed in Ursula. He had thought hers was an essentially gentle nature, unassuming, unaspiring. Even not desiring to meddle and share in her husband’s affairs, because that, for a young girl, is impossible. A thoroughly womanly woman, who cried out in horror at thought of men’s work, such as sheep-slaughtering, or of men’s play, such as a fox-hunt; a woman who could be tacitly brave, on occasion, able to endure though unable to act. Thus had she revealed herself to him in the week of his swift immersion, his model woman, in a word. That is the worst of tumbling into love. You marry your model woman and have to live with your wife. Now, Ursula was far superior to Otto’s ideal. There is nothing more hopeless in human relationships.

He turned impatiently from himself and went down to the room where his bailiff was waiting. All that morning he had been weighed down by the prospect of this interview. No, he was not the man, in his gentleness of heart, to “set things right.”

“You can do as you like,” he cried, starting up from the other’s excuses and tergiversations. “You can go or you can stay. But never again, if I live”—his heart throbbed wildly as he bent that cruel, hated look of his on the sullen retainer—“never again, by God, shall you charge one and eight for a laborer’s wages while paying him one and five!”