BROTHERLY HATE

The two brothers stood face to face by the stables. Otto, running round for Ursula’s carriage, after the brief interview with his parents, had almost knocked up against Gerard. He started back.

“Damn you!” said Gerard. He said the hideous words with deep conviction—almost conscientiously, as if acquitting himself of a painful duty. For the last quarter of an hour, ever since he had fled from the boudoir before the approach of the betrothed pair, Gerard had been striding hither and thither, like one possessed, in the close vicinity of the stables. He was hardly aware what he said or thought. Otto had shot Beauty; Otto had estranged Helena, actuated not even by sneaking jealousy (as had first seemed probable), but by wanton ill-nature. He hated Otto. He would never look upon his hateful face again. He would hurry back to Drum.

Suddenly his elder brother stood before him, almost jostling him in a hasty recoil. All Gerard’s confusion of anger and sorrow cooled into one clear thunder-bolt.

“Damn you!” he said. There could be no doubt in his own heart or any other of his concentrated hate of the intruder. What says Tacitus? “With more than brotherly hate.” Tacitus read the inner souls of men.

From the moment when he fired the fatal shot, Otto had felt that he owed Gerard most humble and affectionate apology. Concerning the episode with Helena he was, of course, serenely ignorant. But his attitude had stiffened just now under the cruelly careless words which had fallen like a shadow across the home-bringing of the betrothed.

“Silence, Gerard,” he replied, haughtily. “No one can be more sorry than myself. If you will listen reasonably, I will try to explain—”

“No one more sorry than yourself!” burst in Gerard, his whole frame trembling with passion. “No one more sorry! You loved Beauty, I suppose? You loved Beauty better than anything else except—except—” He bit back the word “mother.” “You loved Beauty, and first drove her mad by your insane bungling, and then shot her!—shot her! Oh, my God!” The words choked him. Suddenly he grew white and calm. He advanced upon Otto.

“If only you were not my brother!” he said, in a whisper.

Otto met his anger-troubled gaze, unflinching.

“You are a first-rate shot,” continued Gerard, with bitter meaning. “Oh, a first-rate shot! Ursula was right. But I, too, can shoot straight.”

Then he broke off short, and struck his forehead, bewildered among the madness of his own conceptions.

“Leave me to myself,” he gasped. “Only leave me. Go back to Helena—or Ursula—which is it? Tell Ursula also. Be sure and tell Ursula everything about me. Go and be happy, you and your charming—”

“Not a word more,” interrupted Otto, forewarned by the other’s tone. “I am very sorry, Gerard, and willing to make every allowance. But I will not hear a word against my future wife.”

Gerard rushed away.

“Why not, after all?” he asked himself. Brothers had met before in honorable combat alone beneath the moonlight shadows of Rhenish castle walls. He laughed aloud, and when the coachman’s dog ran out, barking, to greet him, he kicked the brute away.

Ursula could not but notice Otto’s silence—nay, more, his depression—as they drove back again to the Parsonage. She explained it by the Baroness’s reception of the engagement. For not even the most laborious amiability could make the two women misunderstand each other.

“Otto, I hope,” stammered the girl, with sudden heart-sinking, as they paused under the little veranda, “oh, I hope you will never repent.”

He hesitated, and, with human inconsistency, she resented the momentary delay in his denial.

“No, I shall never repent,” he replied, “unless—”

He checked himself; he was going to say she must make up her mind to leave Horstwyk, but he realized the unfairness of too precipitate appeal.

“Unless?” she repeated, looking into his eyes.

“We will talk about it some other day,” he answered, hastily. “For the moment you and I are simply happy; let that suffice us. I am proud of you, my darling, and it seems too good, you caring for an old fellow like me.”

He kissed her, and she blushed, half unwilling, under the unwonted familiarity from a man she barely knew. Love and marriage seemed so strange to her—not unpleasant, but so strange.

She watched him down the road, and her eyes grew misty. “Unless?” she softly repeated to herself. Then she went and found her father in his study.

“Papa,” she said, “you are sure that Otto loves me?”

“Why else should he ask you to marry him?” retorted the DominÉ, turning abruptly in his round desk-chair.

“Yes, that is true,” replied Ursula, humbly. “But they cannot say the same of me.”

“How? What?” queried the DominÉ, with troubled eyebrows.

She turned full to the light.

“Papa,” she said, impetuously, “it’s not that I want to be Baroness van Helmont. I’m sure, I’m sure it’s not.”

The DominÉ struck his hand on the table before him.

“No, indeed,” he cried, in a loud voice. “Who says that? Who dares to say that?”

Ursula sighed wearily.

“Oh, no one does,” she answered. “Never mind. Life is very complicated. I wish one always knew exactly what was right.”

“One always does,” said the simple-thoughted DominÉ.

“Obey marching orders. Forward. Do the nearest duty at once, and with all your might.”

Ursula sighed again, still more wearily, and, going out into the passage, happed upon her aunt. Miss Mopius passed on her way to the store-cupboard, her joined hands overweighted with eggs. At sight of her successful rival she started, and one of the eggs flopped down on the stones in slimy collapse.

“I can understand your exultation, Ursula,” said Miss Mopius, all a-quiver, “but don’t sneer at me like that. I won’t stand it. Some day, perhaps, you also will know the curse of Eve.”

Ursula, in the cruelty of her youth and beauty, barely pitied her aunt.

“What was the curse of Eve?” she inquired.

“Adam,” retorted Miss Mopius, and dropped another egg.

“I’ll wipe up the mess,” said Ursula, sweetly.

Miss Mopius beat a hasty retreat. She spent the rest of the afternoon diluting one solitary globule of a patent medicine through a series of thirteen brimming decanters of water. A tumbler from the first decanter was poured into the second, and so on through the lot. The thirteenth solution, said the advertisement, was the most “potent.” Miss Mopius believed the advertisement. The magnificent name of the small globule had an ever-recurring charm for her. It was called “Sympathetico Lob.” “Lob,” especially, struck her as so delightfully mysterious. And it cured dizziness, palpitation, bad taste in the mouth, liver complaint, rheumatism, St. Vitus’ dance, stitch in the side, and heartburn, besides being highly recommended for cases of agitation, nervous depression, sudden bereavement, and disappointed love. Miss Mopius found it very helpful. She sat in her darkened room, amid the falling twilight, sipping.

That evening there was consternation in the big drawing-room at the Horst. It spread itself like a great mist between the occupants of the apartment, and prevented their looking into each other’s eyes. The oppression had begun round Gerard’s vacant chair at the dinner-table; it now deepened about the Baroness, where she sat apart from the rest, straightened among the soft silks of her causeuse. In the lap of her pearl gray evening-dress lay a crumpled white scrap from Gerard:

Father and elder son stood with downcast lids, watching each other through inner eyes. The Freule laid down her newspaper.

“He will think twice,” she said, sharply. “Gerard is not the kind of man to desert the fleshpots of Egypt because Moses has come with a plague or two.”

The Baron’s gloomy face rippled over with sudden sunshine.

“That’s just like you, Louisa,” he cried, “to select the most unfortunate simile in a hundred thousand. The worst of all Moses’s plagues was the removal of the eldest son!” He laughed, looking for the first time at his heir. “I am speaking from Gerard’s point of view,” he added. “Of course, of course, from Gerard’s point of view.” And he laughed again, but half-way the laugh died down into a pathetic little murmur. “It is exceedingly annoying,” he said, plaintively. “And I who detest unpleasantness! We have never had any unpleasantness before.”

“He means it,” interposed the Baroness, in a dull tone. “I know he means it, because of the little hook to the ‘G.’ When Gerard makes that, he is in earnest. It corresponds to a jerk in his voice. None of you understand Gerard. He is so good-natured; you fancy he is all sunshine and no fire.”

“Deplorable!” exclaimed the Baron, stopping, helpless, in the middle of the room. “And incomprehensible. All about a horse. We will buy Louisa’s present, the sooner the better, and send it to bring him back.”

“Ah! but is it all about a horse?” asked the Freule’s high-pitched voice. Once more she emerged from behind her newspaper, her own particular newspapers, the Victory! It would be difficult to say what the Victory wanted to conquer; but you received a general impression from its pages that in this world the battle was always to the strong.

“Ah! but is it all about a horse?” asked the Freule, amid a darkening silence. “Or could Otto tell more if he would? You consider me none too sharp-sighted, my dear brother and sister; but it strikes me you are blind not to perceive that you would have had a daughter-in-law Ursula anyway, whether your eldest had come back or not, eh?” She shot out this last interjection at her nephew, rising, meanwhile, all in one piece, with an abrupt sweep back of her stand-up silk.

Otto was horrified by the sudden condensation of the amorphous suspicions afloat in his brain. Could it be possible that he had ousted a rival? Certainly, Gerard’s fury seemed in excess of the injury to which he owned. For the first time, in the elder brother’s heart also, dislike and distrust joined hands.

“Just so,” said the Freule van Borck, across his irritable uncertainty. She nodded to the others provokingly, and walked out upon the terrace. Otto followed her.

“Aunt Louisa,” he began, “I think you are mistaken.”

“Yes, Otto,” she answered. “Of course you do now. But you didn’t when I first spoke, you see. Let me give you a bit of advice. Eh?”

“Well?” The young man’s voice was not inviting.

“Don’t go back to Java with your wife, as I dare say you want to do. Stop here and fight it out. Ursula’ll fight it out. I don’t give twopence for a married woman who can’t live in the same house with her former lover. Of course they were lovers. I’ve seen it these half a dozen years. Never mind. She was too good for Gerard. There!” She smiled a complimentary smile to her brawny nephew; she liked his brownness and bigness, and straight, square strength.

Otto crept away.

“To-morrow I shall speak about going away,” he said to himself. “To-morrow, not to-night. The DominÉ must listen to reason. The shadow of Cain lies between Gerard and me.”