FREULE LOUISA

In the gray loneliness of Ursula’s married life there was, however, very little solitude. The house contained too many various elements for that. And county society, which was plentiful, took a great interest in her on account of the romance of her courtship. By the coincidence of the old Baron’s immediately subsequent death, she had come face to face with her whole circle of acquaintance, during the days of her dÉbut at the Manor-house, through the medium of that most trying of social functions, the visit of condolence. All these people knew her from her birth; many of them called her by her Christian name; it seemed to her, and to them, that she was masquerading. She was nobody’s cousin.

And the Matres Familias who looked regretfully at Otto—there were many such—could hardly be expected to look benignly on Ursula. But they all patronized her most amiably, and patted her on the back, and showed that they were trying to “make her feel quite like one of us.” And Ursula, who could not be unnatural, nevertheless strove hard to be natural—if any one fathoms what is meant by that combination of miseries! The whole lot of them studied her attitude, and compared her with what she was before her marriage, and endeavored to accentuate a difference. One dear old lady told her kindly “that she really did very well.” Another took her aside: “Do not be self-conscious, dear Ursula,” she said. “Just be yourself, my dear, just as you were formerly. We like you best like that.” Surely, there was no cause for the historic Lady Burleigh to “take on” so; before her marriage she had not resided in Stamford-town.

The Dowager-Baroness was far too well-bred to mortify her young rival intentionally; she was far too well-bred not to do so daily without intention. The DominÉ’s daughter must now take precedence? Impossible. Mevrouw van Helmont retained her seat at the head of her table. The servants came to Mevrouw for orders; not that Ursula cared at all about this, or wished in any way to domineer, but her clear nature shrank from the discomfort of hourly confusion. “Oh, what does it matter!” thought Otto, harassed by the real troubles of his own administration. His wife did not complain to him. She retired to the big drawing-room, with empty hands, and found solace for hours at her beloved piano. It was a superb Steinway grand of the old Baron’s buying, very different from the little cottage instrument at the Parsonage. For years it had been the object of Ursula’s secret envy, and now it was the one acquisition she heartily rejoiced in among all the grandeurs of the great house which were not even hers.

“Does Ursula always play the piano?” asked the Dowager, wearily, when her son came in to visit her. “Did she never do anything else in her old home?”

“She is such a first-rate musician, mamma,” apologized Otto. “That requires a great deal of constant practice.”

“I suppose so. In my day nobody was a first-rate musician, except the professionals.”

“So much has changed,” said Otto, patiently.

“Perhaps.” The Dowager was making a spring-coat for Plush, what the French call a demi-saison; she laid down the sky-blue scrap upon her heavy crape. “Still, Otto, I wish things could be arranged a little differently. Does it not strike you as rather incongruous, with an eye to the servants and the tradespeople, that this house of mourning should resound with dance-music from daybreak to dark?”

Otto went to his wife. “I like the playing very much indeed,” he said. “But a little solemn music would make a delightful change. Do you always prefer dances, Ursula?”

“This is a scherzo, Otto, out of one of Beethoven’s symphonies.”

“Is it? I wish it sounded a little less—gay.”

Ursula struck the piano a violent crash, and then ostentatiously dragged, banging through the same composer’s “Marche FunÈbre.” Towards the end she looked up defiantly at her husband standing in the embrasure of a window with folded arms. Suddenly she broke away from the music, and threw herself on his breast.

“I am sorry,” she said.

The Freule van Borck was the member of the household—an unimportant member—who took most interest in the new-comer. Otto’s fondness seemed devoid of investigation, like his mother’s apathy, but Aunt Louisa looked upon the fresh factor in her old maid’s life of fuss-filled monotony as a worthy subject of scientific experiment. Was Ursula—or was she not—quelqu’un? That, said the Freule van Borck, is the question.

Louisa van Borck had created for herself a peculiar position in her sister’s family. Some twenty years ago her tiresome existence with her old father in the Hague had come suddenly to an end through the conclusive collapse of Mynheer van Borck’s financial operations. He was about seventy at the time, and she thirty-eight. She had never wanted to marry, nor had she ever had an opportunity of wanting. Her ambition had always been to live with herself, occupying, enlarging, and fully inhabiting her own little entity, as few of us find time to do. That nothing much came of it was hardly her fault. She had a lot of little fads and fancies with which she dressed up her soul for want of better furniture.

“We must go and live with the Van Helmonts,” Louisa had said to her protesting parent. “It is unavoidable.”

“But, Louisa, your money, your share of your mother’s money—”

“Cannot support us both. Besides, I don’t intend to die in a workhouse.”

So the old gentleman had to turn his back upon the sweets of the “Residency,” and die away into the wilderness. Of course, the Van Helmont’s made room for their relatives. “So that’s settled,” said the lord of the Horst. Tout s’arrange. But grandpapa’s brain soon got clogged, in the still country atmosphere, from inertia and want of winding up. For many years his body vegetated in an upper room, with an attendant and a box full of toys. Nobody objected to him, nor was any one ever unkind. Besides, he had still his pension of four hundred a year, which made a welcome addition to the family revenues. Yet it was he they regretted mildly when he died.

Freule Louisa could not honestly be accused of unthriftiness. “I know nothing about money matters,” she was wont to exclaim, with pink-spotted agitation. “You mustn’t talk to me about money. I haven’t got any to spend.” Nobody knew how much of her private fortune was still in her possession, or how much she had possibly lost by investments. “You will see,” Baron Theodore had always prophesied, “Louisa will die a pauper.” His wife doubted it.

She had insisted upon making an arrangement with her relations which was especially antipathetic to their temperament. She paid a “pension” price for herself and maid of so much per diem, with deduction of one-half for board during absences of at least a week. In addition to this, she paid for the use of the carriage each time she drove out, according to a scale of her own careful concocting. So much per hour, so much per horse, so much if nobody else went with her. The whole thing was just like a hotel bill, and she enjoyed it immensely. “I am not going to sacrifice my independence,” she said. The Baron, of course, considered the business “disgusting”; but he never pushed his objections beyond a certain limit of opposing vehemence. He simply refused to have anything to do with the Freule’s laborious computations, and the Baroness was obliged to receive and receipt the monthly payments, which would sometimes remain on a side-table for days. Once or twice a dishonest servant took a gold piece without any one being the wiser.

The Freule did not approve of her sister’s domestics. Her own maid was perfection: angular (like herself), middle-aged, cross-eyed, cross-grained, and crossed in love (so she sometimes told Louisa), one of those bony asperities whose every word, like their every contact, cuts. The name this person gloried in was Hephzibah, and she belonged to a religious sect which was supposed to embrace exclusively the elect, although these, in the opinion of each individual member, were represented by a minority numbering one.

Nobody in the house knew half as much about himself or about any other member of the family as Hephzibah. Her mind was a daily chronicle up to date, with all the back numbers neatly filed. Fortunately, her exceeding taciturnity limited the circulation.

“Hephzibah, I am watching my niece,” the Freule remarked from time to time. “She has an interesting part to play in the comedy of life.”

“Yes, Freule,” replied Hephzibah, who thought life was a tragedy.

“Will she rise to the height of her position? I love my sister and I love Gerard, but I should like to see Otto conquer them both, and Ursula conquer all three.”

“Yes, Freule,” said Hephzibah. She hated the young Baroness, for Ursula had attempted to show kindness to Louisa, whose forlorn inanity called for pity. The Freule’s sharp eyes were far-sighted and weak; she liked being read to for hours together, and she frequently complained of her maid’s incapacity for pronouncing or punctuating anything, even Dutch.

“I will read French to you with pleasure, Aunt Louisa,” said Ursula.

“Oh no, my dear, no.” The Freule took her aside in great agitation. “I could not be so inconsiderate to Hephzibah, I could not. Oh no.”

Still, in a hundred small ways, too wearisome to relate, Ursula filled up her time with attentions to the little old maid. It was a relief to find some one she could do something for. She learned a lot of Rossini’s opera airs on purpose, because the Freule had stated that she “adored Rossini.”

“Otto,” said the Freule one morning, “I should like to speak to you.”

He stopped, with his hand on the door-knob.

“Yes?” he answered, his thoughts intent on the morning’s disagreeable work.

“Otto, I have considered, and”—the Freule fidgeted—“under present circumstances I should wish to—pay seven florins more per week for my board.” The Freule gasped.

“Why?” asked the Dowager, sharply, from the top of the breakfast-table.

“Don’t interfere, CÉcile. I see in the paper that prices everywhere are being raised.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Otto, turning away.

“Well, I intend to do it, so now you know. And, CÉcile, you need not make any difference.”

“Difference?”

“Yes, in the menus.”

“I should think not, indeed,” exclaimed the Dowager.

How difficult is the path of virtue made for most of us by our relations. During the whole of the Freule van Borck’s terrestrial pilgrimage she never committed another action worthy to rank with this voluntary conquest of her ruling passion. Yet nobody understood it.

“Van Helmont of the Horst,” she said to herself, “shall remain Van Helmont of the Horst.” And she deducted the thirty pounds from her already meagre charities.

No one at the Manor-house had ever been prodigal in almsgiving. The old Baron had reckoned the poor a public nuisance; the Baroness provided them with systematically indiscriminate pennies; Gerard flung away an occasional hap-hazard shilling. And the new lord was by no means generally generous. He had very definite ideas on the subject. Charitable help must be strictly limited to the “deserving poor,” whatever that may mean—only the deserving, and all the deserving. The word was his shibboleth. On paper it looks exceedingly well.

Also, he never gave money where he could give work, and he never gave work where he could give advice as to work elsewhere. He was forty when enabled and called upon to put into practice his carefully elaborated theories regarding pauperism. All the paupers of the neighborhood, to a man, resented a charity which had lost the charm of the happy-go-lucky. But to no one came more bitter disappointment than to Ursula, o’er the sun of whose crescent benevolence her husband’s theories spread in tranquil clouds.

How often had she not pictured to her father the wide use she would make of an expanded scope and increasing opportunities! Shall we venture to say that the constant thought had been a comfort, or at least an encouragement, through the months of her love-making? She had always worked fairly hard, with her limited means, in her father’s parish, nothing exaggerating, and setting nobody down in malice.

“And you will find sympathetic support in your husband,” declared the DominÉ. “I know that he suffers greatly under his father’s bright indifference”—the DominÉ sighed—“for instance as regards the Hemel.”

The Hemel—so it is still inappropriately called; the word means “Heaven”—was at that time a small hamlet outside the DominÉ’s jurisdiction which had long been notorious in the whole province for the wild and profligate character of its consanguineous population. The people were mostly Roman Catholics, but, even had this not been the case, their pastor would hardly have paid them much attention. He was a very different man from Roderick Rovers. “The poor ye have always with you,” he repeated. And to his colleague he would have said, “Hands off!” Ursula rejoiced to realize her new position as lady of the Hemel as well as of the Horst. Oh, the cruel disappointment of discovering that the poor of the Hemel were not deserving. They were everything and anything but that.

“Be just before you are generous,” said Otto. “First, we must pay our way, dear Ursula, and that, in a landed proprietor’s life, includes an immense amount of unconscious, and even unintentional, philanthropy. What we have left we will gladly give away, but let us be careful to confine ourselves to worthy recipients of our bounty.”

Never mind, there is plenty of good to be done, as Ursula knew, without almsgiving.

“I wish you would not go to the Hemel,” pleaded Otto in the face of her efforts; “you would do me a great favor, Ursula. Mother has so many causes of complaint against me already, and she is dreadfully afraid of infection. Besides, it is altogether useless. They only make a fool of you. Nothing good ever came, or can come, from that horrible place.”

So life flowed on at the Horst, for its chatelaine, in a narrow little stream, over rocks, amid a vast splendor of scenery. The Baron, her husband, working day and night in the almost hopeless effort to make both ends meet, waxed sombre and careworn beneath the ever-increasing dislike of his numerous dependants. Towards his wife he was always affectionate, closing the door to his heart-chamber of torture and seeking relaxation as from a beautiful plaything. And Gerard, except for the briefest of visits, remained at Drum.

When the Stork, some twelve months after the old Baron’s death, tapped at Ursula’s window, her life was no longer empty. Suddenly the Baby filled it to overflowing. Every one manifested an absorbing interest in the Baby, as was his due, even the Freule Louisa, for babies, surely, are vast potentialities. Miss Mopius forgot her slumbering grievances and rubbed the Baby’s back with fluid electricity. The DominÉ christened his grandchild, wearing his Legion of Honor, as he had done at Ursula’s wedding. But the Dowager Baroness very nearly refused to be present at the ceremony, for the heir of the house received the single name of Otto.