MY LADY NOBODY

A Novel

BY

MAARTEN MAARTENS

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

1895

Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Dedication

God’s Angel of Human Love sat alone in the garden of lilies. Her arms hung listless among the blooms she had gathered into her lap. For her eyes—sole mirrors of the Inapproachable Presence—were gazing steadfastly down upon the darkness, deep down where the black bar of sorrow strikes across the wide radiance of eternity, down on the sin-laden star that still hastens athwart the shadow. A single teardrop stole out upon her cheek, and, falling, crept away into a milk-white chalice. Suddenly, with a movement of ineffable pity, she flung forth all the flowers upon her lap, into the world below.

Into my bosom, O Beloved, is fallen the flower with the tear at its heart. Unto thee, O fair among God’s flowers, white among his angels, strong among his saints, unto thee, with the thorn in thy side, and the star on thy forehead, unto thee do I dedicate this ray from a life of which thou art the light.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]

MY LADY NOBODY

Part 1.—CHAPTER I

URSULA

It was a white-hot July morning. Long ago the impatient earth had cast aside her thin veil of summer twilight; already she lay, a Danae, in exultant swoon beneath the golden sun. Yet the bridegroom had barely leaped forth to the conquest; his rath kisses were still drinking the pearly freshness from the dawn, while the loud birds filled the resonant heavens with the tumult of their bridal song.

It was still so early, and already so immovably warm; all wide earth and deep sky agasp in the naked blaze. Ursula drew forward her broad-brimmed straw hat, where she stood picking pease among the tall lines of pale-green, blossom-speckled tangle.

“Oof!” she said. Not as your burly farmer says it, but with the prettiest little high-pitched echo of the louder note. And she buried her soft brown cheeks in the cool moisture of her half-filled basket. Then she gravely resumed her work, and a great, big, booming bumblebee, which had thought to play hide and seek with Ursula’s nose, sailed away in disgust that on such a sun-soaked morning any of God’s creatures should bend to toil in his sight.

Ursula Rovers was not one of those who serve their Maker with dancing and a shout. Yet she sang to herself, very sedately, as she broke off each bursting pod, amid the fiercer jubilation of the passion-drunk blackbirds and finches,

[2]

The prim vegetable garden, with its ranks of gay salads and pompous cabbages, lay serenely roasting, as vegetable gardens delight to do, in unabated verdure. About Ursula’s corner the lattice-work of creepers put forth some faint attempt at a stunted shadow. Dominé Rovers came down the walk, his coat-flaps brushing the currant-bushes.

“Ursula!”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Come in and shell your pease, while I recite you my sermon.”

“But I must pick them first, father!”

“True. What I love best in you, Ursula, is that you are as logical as if you were not a woman.”

The pastor drew nearer to the scaffolding of greenery, and strove vainly to shelter his tall figure in its shade. He was a spare, soldierly-looking man, with an honest complexion and silvery hair. You knew he had a very gentle countenance until you gave him cause to turn a wrathful look upon you.

“I might as well begin at once,” he said, and, proud though she was of her father’s preaching, the girl’s soul rose in momentary protest on behalf of the birds and flowers. “I have chosen a text for to-morrow, Ursula, which has troubled my thoughts all through the week. All through the week, I couldn’t understand it. And when I came to look it out, it wasn’t there at all.”

Ursula’s dutiful lips said, “I see.”

[3]

“I imagined the verse to be as follows: ‘Flee from youthful lusts that war against the soul.’ But I see the word used is ‘Abstain.’ I could not believe it of St. Peter that he would have instructed any man to run away in battle. You will find the ‘flee’ in Timothy, my dear, but the connection is not the same.”

Dominé Rovers paused and stood tenderly watching his natty daughter in her cool print dress. Suddenly he burst out quite impetuously, “Resist! Resist! That is the true Bible language. Resist the devil. Resist temptation. And so I shall tell them to-morrow morning. ‘Dearly beloved,’ I shall say, ‘life is a—’”

“War,” cried Ursula, facing round. A bold blackbird had alighted on one of the stakes, and sang loudly of peace and good-will.

“Don’t interrupt me, child”—the Dominé’s eyes grew vexed—“I know I have said it before; they cannot hear the truth too often. Life is a battle, dearly beloved. Against the city of Mansoul all the powers of evil band themselves together. But in the vanguard march ever the lusts of the flesh. You cannot escape the conflict. And therefore”—the speaker lifted an energetic arm—“remember what said the Corinthians—the grandsires of St. Paul’s Corinthians—to the Spartans, their allies, ‘He that, for love of pleasure, shrinks from battle, will most swiftly be deprived of those very delights which caused him to abstain.’ My subject divides itself—Ursula, you are not attending—into seven natural parts: the enemy, the weapons, the—”

Nobody listened. All God’s creation, busy with its individual loves and pleasures, luxuriously lapped in the sensuous sunlight and rejoicing in universal allurement, was twittering and fluttering and blushing and blooming in clouds of perfume and pollen. The great All-father smiled down upon his manifold children—and shrivelled them up.

Ursula was not listening. Her father was a dear, dear man, but she had heard it all so often before! And fortune had pity upon her and upon the sleepily staring marigolds, and created a diversion ere the sermon was ten sentences old.

Shrill shrieks of childish protest under punishment arose from beyond the garden-wall. The pastor of an unruly flock immediately ran to peer over the bushes. And Ursula followed more slowly, flitting into the full morning glow.

Out on the gleaming high-road a peasant-woman was belaboring an eight-year-old urchin in a whirlwind of dust.[4] “I’ll teach you to use bad words,” she was screaming. “Damn me, I can’t make out, for the life o’ me, what taught the child to swear!”

Ursula, leaning one round arm on the top of the garden-wall, turned spontaneously to her father, all her serious young face a swift ripple of fun; but the Dominé counted not a pennyworth of humor among his many militant virtues. He pressed his thin lips tight, under his Wellington nose. He was not going to reprove a mother in the presence of her son.

“Discipline first,” said the Dominé. “One thing I note gratefully, Ursula, that the wretched habit of swearing is now confined to the lower classes in this country. In my time even gentlemen would swear—”

A dog-cart had turned the sharp angle at the back, where the road breaks off to the Manor-house. In the dust and the skirmish it pulled up with a jerk, and a clear voice was heard crying,

“Confound you! Get out of the way, can’t you? Scuffling in the middle of the road!”

The dog-cart was a very smart dog-cart, and the mare was a high-stepping mare. She fretted under the sudden restraint, amid an appetizing jingle and smell and glitter of harness. There was not so much promiscuous dust but that the speaker could instantaneously perceive the two heads over the low brown wall.

He lifted his cap. “Good-morning, Dominé! Good-morning, Ursula!” he said, with nonchalance. “Awfully hot already, isn’t it?”

The Dominé raised a flashing eye. The woman and boy had slipped away. “Gerard,” said the Dominé, “why do you swear at our people? How often must I remind you of our joint responsibility? We must lead them to what is right; I by my precept, you by your example.”

“Oh, Dominé, I’ll exchange, if you’re agreeable,” retorted the young man, with a quick smile. The Dominé looked away.

“You are going to the station to fetch your brother, Gerard?” interposed Ursula, carelessly cracking the pods in her basket.

[5]“Yes, at your service,” replied the young man, as he loosened the reins.

“How strange it will be for you to meet Mynheer Otto again after all these years!”

Gerard turned quickly from his prancing steed. “Are you going to call Otto ‘Mynheer’?” he asked.

She blushed with annoyance, in an overflow of innocent confusion.

“Oh, very well,” he went on. “Only, of course, you will have to call me Mynheer Gerard.”

He raced off, laughing. “I know you,” she stammered; but the words were lost in the dog-cart’s departing rattle. She appealed to her father in dismay. “Why, father,” she cried, “I have known Gerard all my life!”

Together they stood watching the dust-enfolded vehicle disappear into the far blue sunshine. Its occupant was young, light-hearted, and handsome. Evidently a cavalry officer: you could see that by the way in which his tweeds and he conjoined without combining.

[6]

CHAPTER II

THE DOMINÉ

“Let us go in to breakfast,” said the Dominé. Father and daughter passed up between the stiff stalks of the gooseberry-bushes, among the sallow, swollen fruit. Both of them walked with a straight step, the figure erect, and a little self-reliant.

The pastor fell back a few paces with meditative gaze. He was wont to rejoice tremulously in Ursula’s physical health, in the easy carriage of the head, the light swing of the hips. He rejoiced in the clear brown of her complexion and the calm depth of her brave brown eyes. No weak woman in blood or brain, this stately, strong-limbed maiden. He thanked God mournfully, ever reminiscent of the pervading sorrow of his life, the loss of the frail young creature who had dropped by the road-side wellnigh twenty years ago.

It was that affliction which had made a cleric of Captain Roderick Rovers. By nature he was a soldier, recklessly brave and almost devil-may-care. A man who thought straight, if not far, and struck straight in the front. He had escaped from the inertia of the long Batavian peace to the red-hot tumult of Algerian desert war, and had come back, early bronzed and silvered, plus the Legion of Honor and minus an arm. He had married a pure white clinging thing, like a lily, that twined every tendril round his sturdy support, and then dropped from the stem. She was a good woman. To him she had come as a revelation. “I have fought the good fight,” she had whispered in dying. He, with the medals on his breast and the memory of not a few killed and wounded—could he have said as much face to face with death?

He began to comprehend something of that battle which is[7] not to the strong. On their wedding-day the bride had given her soldier-husband Bunyan’s Holy War—a Dutch translation—substituting it on his table for the weather-beaten little Thucydides which had been his companion in all his campaigns. He had demanded back the Greek historian. He now took up the spiritual conflict, and fought the powers of darkness, as he had ever met an enemy, at arm’s-length.

His mutilation having incapacitated him from active service, he took orders, henceforth to do battle with his country’s inmost foes in the heart of every parishioner. The old militant spirit flamed in him still, and he led his slow flock like a regiment under the banner of the great Captain. On the high days of the Church he wore his Cross of the Legion in the pulpit. His clerical superiors had objected: he dared them to object. It was gained, he said, like their reverend titles, in honorable war.

He had cherished the solitary treasure of his heart, but his care had been free from coddling; he had even combated the enervating influence of his sister-in-law, who kept house for him. “Coolness and cold water” was one of his maxims in any sudden emergency; late into the autumn you could have seen the gaunt father and the little solemn-featured girl wending their way towards the river for a swim. The bathless villagers watched and wondered. They judged the good man to be a little daft, no doubt, but they loved his cheery helpfulness. Dozing on the battle-field, they caught, between two yawns, the stir of his réveillé, and its clarion note passed like a breeze through the foulness of their sleeping-ditch.

Then they turned in the trenches and fell asleep again.

Ursula learned early that life was no dream-garden. “Duty, like a stern preceptor,” often pushed himself unpleasantly to the fore in her young existence and extinguished the sunlight, provoking thunder-storms. Not that these were by any means the rule; her father loved her too tenderly for that; he kissed her leisurely upon the forehead. “Be sober,” he said, “be vigilant.” Her aunt gave her sweets.

Yet Ursula, from a two-year-old baby, loved her father best. Even when, once, he chastised her because she had told a lie.

[8]

“Gerard will be late for the train,” said the pastor. “Headlong, as usual. Either he will get there too late or he will drive too fast.”

“He will drive too fast,” replied Ursula, quietly. “Tell me, father, about this elder brother of his. How strange it will seem! A new son at the house whom nobody knows. I wish he were not coming.”

“I have told you before, Ursula, but women are so resolutely curious. A man’s curiosity is impulse, a woman’s is method. Besides, you remember him yourself; he was here twelve years ago.”

“I don’t remember much, only a quiet, kind-looking gentleman who seemed afraid of children. What had he been doing in Germany, Captain?”

“Earning his daily bread, no more and no less.”

“And what has he been doing these twelve years in Java?”

“Earning his daily bread, not less, but no more.”

“I know,” mused Ursula, with feminine inconsistency. “It seems so ridiculous, a Van Helmont earning his living.”

But this was a red rag to a bull. “It is never ridiculous!” cried the pastor. “Give us this day our daily bread; that means: we would accept it, Lord, from no other hands than Thine!”

“As manna?” queried Ursula.

“No, child, as the harvest of toil. By-the-bye”—the old man stood still on the veranda steps, his limp sleeve hanging against his long black coat—“it is a strange coincidence, my preaching to-morrow’s sermon, and Otto coming home to-day. The Sabbath before he first started for Germany I preached on resisting the devil.”

Ursula smiled, a harmless little smile, all to herself.

“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” continued the Dominé, thoughtfully watching a wheeling swallow. “Do you know, Ursula, why Otto van Helmont went away?”

“No,” she responded, quickly inquisitive. “Tell me why.”

“I suppose you think it was some love-story?”

“No,” she said again.[9] “Why should I think? I don’t know.”

“You are not like other girls, Ursula. Most women think everything is a love-story. Come, let us go in.”

“But he is quite old now?” she persisted, with her hand on his arm.

“He is what children call old. I believe he is seventeen years older than Gerard. I have always liked Otto exceedingly, little as I know of him. He is a true, simple-hearted gentleman, is Otto.”

“I don’t doubt it,” replied the girl, with a shade of petulance; “but it will be so awkward, a stranger at the house!”

“I wish you would close the veranda door, Roderigue,” said a querulous voice from inside. “You are letting in all the heat.”

The occupant of the room came forward, a little yellow lady, with red ringlets, in a red wrapper. This was Miss Mopius, the Dominé’s sister-in-law, and an invalid.

“I had kept down the temperature so beautifully,” she complained, during the performance of the usual perfunctory pecks. “What’s the use of my scolding the servant if she sees that you don’t care? Look at the thermometer, Ursula; it was under 65°.”

Ursula obediently reported that it was now nearing 67°.

“You see,” said Miss Mopius. She said nothing else, but the words dragged down upon the little room a fearful weight of guilty silence, from which Ursula fled to wash her hands.

As the girl was coming down-stairs again, she heard the rumble of returning wheels. She could not resist a swift run to the veranda, where she had abandoned her basket. As she caught it up the dog-cart came flying past. The two brothers were in it now. The elder turned sideways, started, hesitated, took off his hat. Ursula remained watching them, a symphony in yellow and brown, with the marigolds at her feet in a lake of golden orange, and the pink-tipped honeysuckle all around her, against the staring sunflowers loud and bold.

[10]

CHAPTER III

HOME

“Who is that yellow-frock among the yellow flowers?” asked Otto van Helmont. “But, of course, I can guess,” he added, immediately. “That was the parsonage we just passed. The ‘nut-brown maid’ must be Ursula Rovers.”

“Ursula? Was she there still?” replied Gerard, flicking a fly from the horse’s flank. “She seems to live in the garden. Doesn’t care tuppence about her complexion.”

“She is very remarkably beautiful.”

“Do you think so? I never noticed. You see, I have known her all my life. She is just the parson’s daughter. I suppose she reminds you of your own Javanese.”

Otto flushed, and the two drove on, side by side, in silence. They were very unlike to look at; there must have been, as Dominé Rovers had said, from fifteen to twenty years’ interval between them. The young man was spruce and slender, carelessly elegant in appearance and attitude, the elder brother, the planter, sat square and stalwart, with ruddy skin and tawny beard. He was coming home for rest, weary of the jaded splendor of the tropics. As they drove on, he turned right and left, with eager, misty eyes. The salute of the passing peasants delighted him; he watched, in quiet ecstasy, their long-drawn glances of inquiry or semi-acknowledgment. This was better than the humbly crouching savages under the cocoa-trees. This was recognition; this was home.

The avenue was home, the white house behind the trees was home, and the clasp of his mother’s arms—no, that was home. Never mind, for one moment, the rest.

“You have gray hairs here and there, Otto,” said the Baroness[11] van Helmont, fondly. “I never knew I was an old woman before.”

Otto’s father bent down quickly and kissed her slender hand.

“My dear, you will never grow old,” he said. “You belong to the things of beauty, and you remember what the English poet said of them.”

The little porcelain lady laughed among the laces of her morning-gown.

“Yes, but the French poet said just the reverse, and in matters of beauty the Frenchman is the better judge.”

“Well, let Otto be umpire. He is best able to decide. Otto, do you find that your mother has grown a day older since you left?”

The old Baron looked towards his big son with what, on his easy features, was almost an anxious expression.

“Yes, she is older,” said Otto.

The Baroness laughed again.

“My dear,” she said, “he is as impossible as ever. Leave him. He, at least, has not changed.”

Mynheer van Helmont dropped his eyelids with a quick movement of vexation, and walked from the room.

Mother and son were left together. They went into the Baroness’s little turret-chamber, a rounded bonbonnière, all pale flowered silk and Dresden china, with a long window overlooking the park.

“Sit down, child,” said the Baroness. “Are you glad to be home again?”

A lump in the strong man’s throat prevented immediate reply. Presently he took his mother’s jewelled fingers in his own. “And what have you been doing all this time?” he said.

“Doing? But, my dear, we have been living. What else should we do? It is you who have shot the tigers. Nothing has happened here.”

“Grandpa is dead,” said Otto, meditatively.

[12]