THE COUNSELLOR

As she emerged into the avenue Ursula noticed a figure in front of her which she immediately recognized. It was walking at a deliberate pace, a valise and an overcoat thrown over one arm. The dog gave the alarm, and the figure looked round.

“Why did you not telegraph for the carriage?” thought Ursula.

The young man waited; his fresh-colored face shone out in the all-pervading gloom.

Ursula wondered, as she drew nearer, what deliverance she expected from this pink-eyed little innocent. He looked like a solemn peach. How could she broach her unusual subject? Visible shyness was not one of her qualities; but she smiled rather foolishly as she walked, thought Theodore Helmont, and, for so recent a widow, improperly.

“You have come up on foot from the station?” she cried. “I wish we had known. Why didn’t you telegraph?”

“Telegrams are expensive,” replied the young man.

This sounded promising.

“I only got my leave this morning,” he continued. “I couldn’t let you know, so I simply came.”

“Ah, you had to get leave?” said Ursula, her conscience smiting her.

“Yes; government officials always must. Most people must who work for their bread. I am a post-office clerk.”

“I know, I know,” answered Ursula, hastily. “Of course I know, Cousin Helmont. Please put down your bag; it will be quite safe. I will send one of the laborers to fetch it.”

“I can easily carry it myself,” he said, more courteously; “I always do.” And, although this time he said nothing about expenditure, she felt that he considered the tip.

After that the conversation lagged. Presently the young man said, with much timidity:

“There is one thing I should greatly like, if you would be so very kind. My mother is exceedingly anxious about railway travelling of any sort, and she made me promise to let her know at once of my safe arrival. They couldn’t telegraph at the station. Would there be a possibility, perhaps, of forwarding a message?”

“Oh, certainly,” replied Ursula, demurely. “But—you know—telegrams are expensive.”

Theodore’s pure eyes grew troubled.

“The matter is altogether different,” he said. “Perhaps, if you will allow me to explain—”

Ursula burst out laughing.

“Certainly not,” she exclaimed. “What do you take me for? Of course, I perfectly understand. The boy shall get ready at once.”

Theodore looked straight in front of him.

“I only wanted to say,” he went on, doggedly, “that my mother’s anxiety is not irrational. She is quite unaccustomed to travelling herself, and we have never been parted before.”

Ursula stood still on the Manor-house steps. “Never been parted before!” she exclaimed. “Woe is me, what have I done?”

Theodore blushed in fresh waves of crimson. “Now you are laughing at me,” he said, and his tone was distinctly annoyed. “You mustn’t laugh at me. I am not at all accustomed to the society of ladies, and if you laugh at me we shall not be able to get on.”

“No—no, I really meant it,” Ursula hastened to say. “I honestly fear I have been exceedingly inconsiderate. I wish that your mother had accompanied you.” (“Oh dear, no,” she reflected; “there the expense comes in again!”) “But you must not say you are unaccustomed to the society of ladies—”

“My mother is not a lady like you,” he remarked, quickly.

“I am Ursula Rovers,” she replied—“the pastor’s daughter. I remember Mevrouw van Helmont very well.”

In the solitude of her dressing-room she wondered what would be the next development of her devotion to Otto’s memory, and chid herself for the ungracious thought. Then she went down to luncheon, expecting to find her guest in a corner of the library turning over picture-books. That was the only pose in which his former visit had left him photographed on her brain.

To her astonishment, she heard him in earnest discussion with Aunt Louisa. “My dear Ursula,” cried the latter lady, running forward, “your cousin Van Helmont is a most interesting young man. I have been telling him about European manners, and he most sagaciously remarks that the best of manners is to have none. How delightfully true!”

The subject of this outspoken eulogy did not seem at all abashed by it; probably he was accustomed to his mother’s estimation of her only son.

“Pardon me,” he calmly protested; “I was saying that I had read that observation somewhere. I am not prepared to maintain that it is absolutely correct.”

“Oh, what does it matter whose it is,” cried the Freule. “Everything we say must have had its origin with some one, so everything is really original. Now that never struck me before. How new!”

“Yes,” replied Ursula. “Will you have a rissole?”

“Thank you, my dear. One more, please. Thank you. Personally, what I most reprobate is the walking in line, like ducks. ‘Do as others do.’ The Bible says, ‘Do as you would be done by’—a very different thing. I hope, Mynheer Helmont, that you are unconventional, as I know your father was.”

“I do not remember my father well,” answered Theodore, pondering whether he could not get away that night.

“Oh, I never met him,” said Louisa, just as the old Baroness entered. The poor old lady, who would have said ‘J’ai failli attendre’ in palmier days, now accorded all precedence to her literary labors.

“My dear,” continued the Freule, addressing her, “this young man is exceedingly interesting. I had forgotten him, but now I remember I thought so the last time he was here. The best thing is to have no manners. Now doesn’t he put that well?”

“I dare say he finds it convenient,” responded the Dowager. “How do you do, Mynheer Helmont? I am very glad to see you. I wish you would tell me when your father died?”

“It is seventeen years ago,” replied Helmont, wonderingly.

“Quite impossible. I feel sure you are more than sixteen.”

“I am twenty-four, but—”

“Mamma means ‘married,’ I believe,” suggested Ursula, gently.

“‘Married,’ that was what I said,” declared the Dowager, sharply. “Ursula, my soup is cold again. Manners or no manners, young man, you shouldn’t make fun of a woman old enough to be your grandmother.”

“I disapprove of such early marriages!” exclaimed the Freule. Ursula’s eyes and Theodore’s met. She burst out laughing, but he looked uncomfortably grave. “After luncheon,” she said, “I must take you round, Mynheer Helmont. It is no use showing you the stables; we have only three horses left, and they are of the kind that would better do their work unseen.”

He followed her obediently when they rose from table, and she pretended to take an interest in the small sights she had to offer her guest. The same can hardly be asserted of Theodore. He was painfully silent while she “made conversation,” wondering all the time in what way she should broach the one subject she cared to speak about.

In this, however, he hastened to her assistance, for his patience came to an end, while hers still hung on a thread. They were standing in the palm-house, when he suddenly looked up at her—he had some little height to look up—and asked,

“What did you want me for, please?”

She had been laughing about some of the gardener’s queer names for the roses; her voice suddenly changed, and everything but pain died out of it.

“I believe we are ruined,” she said, facing him, “and Otto made me promise, if ever I wanted advice, I would appeal to you.”

He seemed still to listen, plucking at the nearest leaves, for a moment after she had finished. Then he said, as if speaking to himself,

“Well, I’m very glad, at any rate, that I didn’t ask a holiday for nothing at all.” He glanced up at her anxious face. “Holidays are very rare with us, you know,” he added, apologetically. “I couldn’t soon get leave again.”

“Yet I don’t suppose you can help us,” continued Ursula, relentlessly. “Nobody can.”

“When people get down as low as that,” replied the young clerk, frigidly, “they can usually help themselves. I presume that, however much money you may happen to possess, you want more. That, I believe, is what people of your class call ‘being ruined.’”

She felt that he wronged her the more by this constant distinction, after what she had said on the Manor-house steps. “I possess no money at all,” she said, wroth with herself for the helpless confession. “And in about a week’s time I must have three thousand florins.”

“In other words,” he answered, with an angry wave of his short arm round the greenhouse, “you must spend thirty thousand florins with an income of twenty-seven. Other people have an income of one thousand, and spent that.”

“No,” she replied, “it is not that. We will say no more about it. Come, let us walk on.”

“Pardon me. It takes one person to start a subject, but two to drop it. Will you permit me to express myself plainly?”

“Oh, certainly. Dear me, Mynheer van Helmont, I had understood you to say you were shy?”

“Again I beg your pardon. I can understand fun, and I can understand earnest; but which is it to be?”

“I apprehend you. You do not recognize humor outside the comic papers. You are like my father. I laugh most at the dentist’s. It is to be earnest, please.”

“The house is crowded with treasures. Sell one or two.”

“I cannot; they belong to my mother-in-law.”

“Do away with a carriage you can’t pay for, and go on foot.”

“I cannot. I keep a sort of boarding-house, and my two boarders pay for the carriage, not I.”

“Eat dry bread instead of hot lunch.”

“And drive away the boarders! There, you see, I answer plainly, too. Do you really imagine that if I could have solved my difficulties by merely eating dry bread I would have troubled you, a comparative stranger, to come all the way from Bois-le-Duc?”

“I don’t know. The women of ’93 could be guillotined, and willing, but they couldn’t eat dry bread.”

However, his tone was gentler, and his manner less assured.

“Now will you let me, as we return to the house, explain how matters really stand?” she said. He nodded silently, and under the bare, sky-piercing oaks she softly told him the long story of her father-in-law’s slow purchase and last testament, of Otto’s life-work and dying charge, of her struggle to continue what they had begun in expectation of better times. He listened, his boy-face puckered up.

“It is your name, too,” she said, in conclusion, “your race, your blood.” And she measured the little plebeian beside her.

“Yes,” he said.

“There it lies. And each rood that belonged to a Van Helmont four hundred years ago belongs to a Van Helmont now.”

“It belongs to you,” he replied, quickly. “And afterwards?”

She faltered.

“It will never pass from my keeping till it passes to a Van Helmont,” she said, “so help me God!”

In that moment even he could not press the point.

“You must give me time,” he said; “I have three days’ leave. Do not let us mention the subject again till the day after to-morrow. Meantime, I will have a look round and try to discover if you can keep on, supposing the three thousand are found.”

“Thank you. But do you know about land?” She was just a little bit piqued. “I assure you I am very slowly learning.”

“Oh, I know. My mother is a farmer’s daughter. I have always been about with my uncle. If mother had given me my choice, I should have been a common farmer myself.”

“A Van Helmont!”

“Pooh! That’s what mother said!”